Heated Debate On Capitalism with America’s Most Prominent Marxist Economist - Richard Wolff

robin hood's merry band of men he was taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor that was his specialty was it really the rich he was taking money from or was he taking money from the government who was taxing people too much our economic systems are set up like that to make a minority rich and a majority poor but if 500 000 people in america can make a million dollars don't you think one million people can make a million dollars no you don't believe that no not for one minute there's a reason that bezos is the richest man in the world and the walmart family is the richest in the world amazon doesn't have competition tell me one thing that's overpriced on amazon they want profit because that's their reward i get that you want to paint me as an advocate of the government i'm not thank god man because we're on the same page who's against rich people bernie i'll freaking vote for this guy suppose we had here come a different economic arrangement you know who writes the laws in this country it's the lobbyist blaming the government is an american pastime it's more popular than baseball [Music] valuetainment giving values contagious this world are entrepreneurs we gain no value to haters how they run homie look what i become i'm the one [Music] so my guest today is richard wolf he's written over 12 books he's got a new one that comes out i will put the link below he was a he is a professor and has taught economics at the university of massachusetts amherst he's taught economics at yale city university new york university of utah university paris he got his bachelor's uh magna [ __ ] laude in history from harvard in 1963 masters from stanford phd from yale and uh he has an issue with those who love capitalism so i figured we bring him on and see if we can have a friendly debate here about capitalism and socialism so richard thanks for being a guest on valuetainment it's my pleasure thanks for inviting me so richard i mean short name for richard is rich why does rich hate rich people what is it with you rich i'm trying to figure you out actually i don't hate rich people some of my best friends are rich people if you know if you go to harvard and yale you're surrounded by rich people even if i didn't want to have them as friends i would have had a little choice in those places no it's for me the problem is not the individual the problem is the system and so i i don't hate rich people at all i feel kind of sad for them because they've worked many cases quite hard to get to be rich imagining that that's what life is about and then they get very disappointed along the way and after three martinis they tell me all about so you you think they're working too hard and they're not enjoying life and because of that you know they would be much happier if they work less that's what you think among other things yeah i think they'd be happier if not only if they worked less but if the kind of work they did and the kind of relationships they have with other people in that work were different they'd be an awful lot happier and i'm that's not just my opinion that's what they've told me so so let me ask you this a lot of times in life like for myself obviously we were just talking about the painting behind me many times when you go back and you see somebody how they form their opinions there is a certain trail on how to get to it right how did you get to the opinions and beliefs that you have today if you can go back and talk about i was raised in a family here's my mom and dad this is what happened to me at this age i kind of want to know the underlying motivation that led you to believe in what you believe in today well sure i can give you some of the milestones at least as best i've been able to make make them out um i grew up i was born in ohio in the midwest my father worked in a steel factory in youngstown ohio but when i was five years old that we moved east and we settled in a suburb of new york city called new rochelle you may know it and it was a commuter town my father took the train into new york city every day uh worked like uh really hard in the city came home in the evening most of the people in new rochelle were commuters um like him and so the train took about 35 minutes to get from new rochelle into grand central station and when i went with my father and very important we would pass on this train through harlem that part of new york city and you know looking like as a youngster looking out the window it was very easy for me to see two things one the people whose apartments by the way were often no more than four five six feet from where the train passed um i could see into their apartments because that's where the level of the train was and i could see two things one that they were very poor and number two that they were black uh these were very clear signs even a little kid could figure that out and so i asked my father what what is that why are those people living like that and my father who was mostly a distant father and didn't give me all that much time somehow felt that this was an important question and gave me a level of attention and concern that i'm sure was the most valuable thing about all of this but he also explained to me that we live in a society which is fundamentally unfair to an awful lot of people and for example those poor people living crowded in those uh not real nice looking apartments those are among the kinds of people that are not well treated not given a fair shake in life um and i listen to him the way a child does about you know i went with him fairly often he did take me how old were you at that time when he told you this i'm curious i i would say i was probably nine ten years of age very interesting yeah and you know i i think i half understood what he was talking about i loved the attention and so you know the way children do the next time we went into new york i made sure at around the same time to ask a variation of the same question so that we would have this conversation which i very much enjoyed and then you know as i grew older i began to get interested in basically understanding you know the basic questions came to me why are some nations rich and other ones poor why are some people rich and others poor why is the quality of life so different new rochelle is a suburb that has very poor and very rich people and a good number in between so i was constantly reinforced in asking that kind of question now your your pops uh uh who was your dad's inspiration like if i were to ask who was your dad's favorite president would he would you say fdr would you say who who was he who was somebody that he admired and he liked um i'm trying to think i think the first person in this country he was an immigrant let me let me go back i was born in the united states got it neither my father nor my mother were my father was french and my mother was german so i grew up speaking french and german i only learned english when they put me in the kindergarten and i had to speak it uh so the first person my father i remember speaking highly of was franklin delano roosevelt that person loomed large as a political leader who my father felt gave a damn about the average person did a lot of things to help people in a very hard time the great depression um and i remember hearing him talk very glowingly about fdr now when you when you think about that when you say fdr so for you you've had your belief system since you were nine years old it's not like you're somebody where you say i used to be a republican my parents were republicans and i decided i realized that's not the way to go so i went and studied and then i became a socialist because i met a professor you had this belief system for 60 some years you've had it for a long time i've had the belief system for a long time but i've also entertained other belief systems partly again my father and my mother were very open-minded they did not want me to be a parrot they did not want me to parrot even their perspectives so in my home there hangs a photograph of my first political act which is standing at the commuter train station in new rochelle new york holding a sign that read i like ike which was actually eisenhower in the republican race for president and you know i had no problem doing that with my friends and my parents they did ask me questions why i was doing it but i told them why and that was my business to determine so they've been very good about that i i've never felt and i did the same with my two kids uh it's not my job to shape your political ideas i'm sure some of that happens no matter what we do just sure of course but otherwise um i don't think that's appropriate any more than telling you what religious uh affiliation you ought to have or anything like that do your kids have the same political beliefs as you i don't know if they're the same in in the way america works they'd be left of center but they're not the same they're not they're not as left as you may be but they're left off center they're left of center my son much less left my daughter uh closer to me how old were you the first time you read communist manifesto uh 16 or 17. so did a school teacher give it or did your pops or mom say read the book my my father told me this is an important book for you to read given your interests giving your questions given our conversations um you know here here you're getting something that is very european for someone who's been through the european schooling uh the american system was a continuing shock yeah fact that i would give an example when i was young uh my f when i went to high school ninth grade the first time the way high school is set up in in new york state my father asked me about my classes in latin and greek so i answered my father there are no classes in latin and greek in my high school he didn't believe me he said oh you must be mistaken the next day he went into the school with me barged right into the principal's office he was polite and all that but he said look i want to talk to you about latin and greek and the principal was very nice guy the principal he brought me in there so i of course had to be witness to all this uh the principal said we have never taught greek in this high school or at least in the years i've been the principal uh and we don't teach latin unless four or more parents or four or more sets of parents were to demand it if or more four or more if four or more want it we will get a part-time teacher to offer it my father then went around found another three parents and i learned latin in school but in a class of four students wow because there were that only that many parents i mean my father stopped when he got four but that's how i learned my father was always of the opinion that what was offered to and expected of american high school students was a scandal it was not serious he for example he gave me plato and aristotle to read he gave me saint augustine and thomas aquinas we're not counting that it had nothing to do with that but if he felt that an educated human being needs exposure to these great works and he was aghast that the high school made no effort now let me ask you how old were you the first time you read wealth of nations or atlas shrug that was college that we were in three or four years later um i read adam smith basically because i had a class a freshman class at harvard that gave me you know a few selected readings i don't know 30 40 pages worth of it i found that so intriguing and so interesting because it was my question why are some nate you know why are wealthy the wealth of nations why do some have it some don't it was a book that entranced me i liked it i learned from it i've had respect for that work all my life as and right to this moment uh so that's when i encountered that and so so when you read wealth of nations and you read the uh uh atlas shrug by iran both times when you were in college did you at that point start debating the teacher did you kind of start defending uh more philosophies that were more uh from the altruism more from the karl marx side or were you were you a debate guy from the moment you started reading these books or was it more just like oh wow interesting let me see what this is about no i think i was more of a debater type i wanted to to fight but to be real honest with you and i'm assuming that's what you want um my teachers could not or would not answer more and more of my questions as i became a sophomore and a junior senior in college and i could tell because these were sometimes teachers i liked sometimes teachers i didn't like on a personal level but i could see that they couldn't answer my questions either because they didn't know what it was i was asking or they knew but it was frightening or scaring them to go into it i could tell in some cases which of those it was in others i just guessed but the level of discomfort that my questions would provoke made me back off just as a i didn't want to make these people's lives unpleasant as i say some of these were teachers i liked and i learned from yeah i didn't want to be a pain in their rear end but i could see that my questions put them in a very uncomfortable place so what i did was i didn't pursue it i would ask a question i tried to make it word it in a way that wasn't confrontational and then when i got a very dissatisfying answer or no answer at all yeah i would literally and i mean this i would run to the library at the end of the class bury myself in the library the way few other students did and read myself silly trying to work out what a good answer to that question would have been that the teacher was unable or unwilling to do so the opposite answer of yours not your answers so meaning the answer to the question you were asking as if if the teacher was to answer a question that they didn't have you'd go try to find the answer that they should have given that's right okay exactly what i tried to do but to be fair i mean i don't want to be you know misspeak here there were also cases where um the teacher did give me an answer or kind of dismissed my question that got me even more upset and then i went to the library to reinforce my sense that i had a point to make here i had a there was some validity to what i was saying and then i would learn that i was wrong in some areas right in others but you know you get better educated if you're driven like that if something is really important to you you kind of read the article or you read the book in a different way uh from what you do if it's just an assignment in a course you're an april first baby i mean it makes sense you know as an april fools my dad is april 10th and uh my former c.o.o was april the 12th and my best friend from the army is april 9. you guys are wired in a very interesting way i hire april babies because i love them you know it's interesting you say that when i was a kid in iran my mom and dad would put me in a bible study in christian sunday school and i would always get kicked out of sunday school and because i would ask the weird questions i said god loves us so much why do we get bombed why do we how many people died you know they had a hard time with me they would say sir you got to keep your son out of this because he's confusing the other kids so i was an atheist for 25 years of my life but let's let's go back to a part that you brought up you said your dad was a distant father meaning he did his best but he was a heart you know he was a hard worker so when you did drive up to harlem with them you use that as an opportunity to ask more questions looking back did you in did a part of your motivation come from a place where you read a book and you said you know what if my dad didn't have to work as hard as he did i probably would have been able to spend more time with him did you ever process it that way or no yes i did i was i was aware um i was aware i don't remember whether this happened to me this recognition that you point to in college or in graduate school but one or the other i had a very very clear sense and i became a little bit psychologically self-aware i should put in parentheses my wife is a psychotherapist and my daughter is also a psychotherapist beautiful so i am surrounded by i've been tutored in psychological understanding for many many years by two people who are very close to me but in any case yes i had a sense that my father uh as an immigrant here in the united states had had to work very very hard all of his education in europe all of his connections all of that was gone all of that was left behind when he came here he really had to start from nothing uh he worked his rear end off i do believe not to be dramatic that the heart attack that finally killed him was not unconnected to the anxieties of making it here to the insufficiency of money so yes i had a personal way of feeling that this system had not treated my father or my mother um very well we were always as a family grateful that they could leave europe and survive and come here and my parents had an appreciation for the united states because it had saved them the way many others in their family had not been saved but having said that and not denying it the level of education and the level of work imposed on people to even scratch out a basic living i think it killed him and i think it harmed him and it made him less productive to this country than he could have been if he were not treated the way he had been how old were you when he passed away let me see he died in 19 31. you oh you were 31 so you were young when you passed away yes way early okay i can i can see how that can be a painful experience but let me ask you this would you consider yourself a hardworking man would you say you're a hard-working person yes i am referred to by most of the people who know me as a workaholic so if you're a workaholic maybe because your father sounds like my father okay my dad uh in iran ran a manufacture he ran up he ran nivea and max factor i don't know if you're familiar with those two you don't look like somebody that puts makeup on every day but no but i'm familiar with those brands so my dad ran max factor nivea and iran in u.s money he was making you know like comparable to a hundred thousand dollars a month in iran and then he went from iran when the war happened he died six weeks later we escaped my mother and i and my sister we went to germany lived at a refugee camp and then we came out here he had heart attacks after heart attacks and he worked at a 99 cent store for 15 years in inglewood california okay right right and you know how it is a father-son relationship it sounds like you love your father as well i had a very good very tilted he's still alive got the knock on what is still with us here uh one of the things that i saw if my dad was born here my dad would have been a very very successful man but sometimes one of the best things he did is bringing me here so maybe your dad's example to you is why you ended up becoming who you are today you know by having that work ethic being passed down to you where you alone yeah where you're just his legacy is continuing through you yep and i think that that's something that happened long ago and happens on very deep levels that you're only barely aware of and that you certainly cannot control or at least i can't sure but i'm not upset about it i really like my father and i'm grateful for all the things that he that he did for me so so now let's go into philosophy this was very helpful because this kind of gave me an idea about your background parents and and the viewer can also get an idea about where you're at and how you came to conclusions so so you say why the question why are some people i've asked this question myself when i was a kid but you you brought it up already three times now so why don't we start there why are some people rich and some people poor according to you well because our systems our economic systems are set up like that there is no way that a capitalist system of the sort we have uh could have any other outcome than to make a minority rich and a majority poor i mean it's a little bit like sort of understanding the the history of economic systems the major three economic systems over the last i don't know several thousand years at least i'm talking now you know western europe north america and so on um the major three were slavery feudalism and then capitalism um and there's something all three of them have in common a small number of people sit at the top of this society in slavery it's the master in feudalism it's the lord and in capitalism it's the employer and a vast majority of people are in the other position they're the serf or the slave or the employee and it shouldn't surprise you that if you look at slavery the masters are rich and powerful and the slaves by and large are not and if you look at feudalism the lords are rich and powerful and by and large the serfs are not and we live in a capitalist system where by and large the employers do really well relatively and the employees well i'll be nice not so much and in order for us not to have the split between rich and poor whether it's on the level of a of a region or a nation or or inside a small community we would have to confront whether the effort to overcome the the gap between rich and poor is a reasonable objective if you abstract from the economic system that basically produces those things that's why i said at the beginning when you asked me the question i hate rich people no i know they end up like people like me who come from modest circumstances very hard not to conclude as you go through life okay i see now that there are rich people and poor people and it isn't hard for me to tell you which i'd rather be i'd rather be there than over there but the problem is there aren't enough there's for everybody who feels that way to get to that point and it's a very sad reality that is hard for people to come to terms with which is why people like ayn rand can be popular because she presents an idea that suggests oh we could all do this uh and you don't believe that not for one month gosh richard come on okay so let's let's talk about a couple things here that you brought up and i've watched i've watched your debates i've watched your uh uh different things that you've done so you said slavery feudalism and capitalism okay so slavery and feudalism versus capitalism slavery and feudalism have one uh uh underlying uh uh difference between capitalism because in feudalism and slavery you don't have a choice there are no choices you know they tell you what to do and you better do it in capitalism they tell you what to do and you have a choice you can say screw you i'm leaving you i resign you know a lot of times people think a uh just because somebody is a ceo there's such a powerful incredible life that they live and they'll never get fired but the truth of the matter is ceos get more get fired more often than employees do because every time an employee leaves a guy or a ceo to another company and takes the trade secrets that's a form of being fired every time a client leaves it's a form of being fired so you cannot say feudalism and slavery and compare it to capitalism that's pretty uh you're you know today a lot of millennials would say richard you're reaching that's what they would say to you well let me respond okay you remember the story of robin hood okay yes i do i've watched it many times okay uh let me remind you robin hood's merry band of men in the woods those were runaway serfs turns out serfs had a choice they could stay underneath the lord on the feudal manner where they were probably born or they could try to break away from that situation they could run into the forest and join up with robin hood they could get beyond the reach of the lord whose reach was usually quite limited they could set themselves out to then become what were called free peasants or yeoman or small farmers there were in fact all kinds of options that they had they were risky but you know leaving your job as a capitalist economy that's risky too in fact having a job in capitalism is risky right now we've got 35 million people who just got fired it turns out employment is risky slaves also by the way ran away slaves also made revolts slaves also carved out for themselves much better conditions than they had been born into through a variety of mechanisms the portrayal of all of them as unfree which is the way the literature does it and capitalism as free strikes me as an extraordinary reach since the vast majority of people who are employed by a capitalist an employer either live with that or they're free to quit in which case their basic option is to go be an employee of somebody else as an employer which is not quite the escape you might want to recommend it's a choice but it's not a choice to escape the system because you really can't do that in most cases and if you were to suggest that a an employee can go out and start his own business most of them really can't and many of those who do end up in a situation that many small business men and women will tell you about which is they work harder than the people who are employees and look longingly at the possibility of going back to be an employee because however ugly and unpleasant it was working for yourself can be even worse so now let's you you touch on a lot of things so let me take them one at a time i took notes i'm taking notes here so you're the professor i'm the student i'm taking notes all right so let's talk about robinhood so robin hood was taking money from who and giving it to who he was taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor that was he that was his specialty but he was was he was it really the rich he was taking money from or was he taking money from the government who was taxing people too much richard you got to tell the true story of robin hood in iran i watched it a few hundred times so he wasn't taking money from the rich he was taking money from the government that are so noble they want to do such good things for the people and he was giving it to the people maybe you and i read all the mr robin hood's story a little bit i watch it in farsi maybe the translation was incorrect i don't know i don't know either but here's the way i read it yeah he was against the government because he saw the government as in the clutches of the rich and so for him whether he stole from a rich traveler going through the forest or he had pitched battles with the sheriff of nottingham if you remember his arch enemy for him the distinction between the rich people and the politicians those rich people had in their pocket was a difference he didn't care much about he would take from either one of them or both of them and give to the people that they together were putting on the short end of the state yeah i don't if you're if you're asking about some of the so again it goes back to the taxation they were taxing the hell out of the people the government was these noble people that eventually a greedy person comes and abused power but if there's one part that i get from robin hood is the following you do need uh laws and you do need lawyers if you look at china back in 1984 china only had four law schools you know the whole milton friedman argument when he says you don't really need laws and you know just kind of leave it alone that argument is not going to work 100 you need you need law and you need lawyers right they had four law schools in 1984 and only 2 000 lawyers and china had to make sure they get lost or else the powerful businesses without some sort of regulation and laws would abuse other people so that part absolutely i agree because today you're seeing a lot of that taking place in many industries whoever can get the best lobbyists that can pay the most money to people that they can control and campaign with they can pass a lot of the laws but when you say the rich and the poor i uh i sometimes wonder what direction you go from there as far as the the you know uh uh the the people that are employees who cannot be rich you're saying poor people cannot be rich rich do you know how many people last year filed their taxes that they made a million dollars how many people in america do you think filed taxes that they made a million dollars what do you think that number is income what do you think i'm actually curious to know what you think good question no statistic in my head comes to my mind but it's from the irs it's a government organization that you trust yes no no listen you want to paint me as an advocate of the government i'm not that's not i i don't trust the government i don't see the government as an immigration thank god man because we're on the same page there that's good to hear okay but how many highly classified half a million dollars i don't know what a number is i actually am curious on what you think so you and i are having a drink together i don't know if you drink we're having coffee hot chocolate we're having a beer and you're talking we're shooting the you know what and i say richard how many people last you made a million dollars in taxes what would you say four million four million people you said made a million dollars yeah so the way you did the math was 330 million you did one percent little over one percent of the 330 million half of them can't work because they're kids or they're older so working employees we have 100 we have 150 million people in america that actually work uh and out of 150 million that work one percent makes around 460. one percent makes 460. if you know how they see you in the one percent you make 460. 500 000 people last year filed in their income taxes that they made over a million dollars 500 000 it's not like it's only 18 people it's not like it's only 62 000 people it's 500 000 people last year made a million dollars in america if you and i were talking and you were to say i climbed mount everest and i'm the only one that did it after 65 years old you're the only one i'd be like oh my i could never do it i have a hard time sometimes climbing my office here you know three stories i'm going crazy you climb mount everest that's impossible i get that argument that not everybody can climb mount everest but if richard 500 000 people in america can make a million dollars don't you think one million people can make a million dollars don't you think more people can make a million dollars no you don't believe that no not from one minute seriously yeah what's your argument how do you argue that part though so 500 000 richard made a million dollars last year that's a lot of people right but in order for there to be 500 000 people who make a million then there have to be an awful lot of people who make very little which we've always had capitalism has always produced and reproduced vast numbers of poor people as a system it is very efficient in reproducing vast poverty it might be nice to focus on the rich at the other end but they are relatively small in number compared to those who really are having a hard time and you could i suppose blame it on the individual that would be very convenient for those who are rich because then they could claim oh it's because of me rather than a system that assigns these roles but you know the master knew that the reason he was a master was because his father and mother were masters and the slave understood that he was you're saying in the world of business or you're saying the master who owned slaves the master who owned slaves okay and the slave understood he was a slave mostly because his mother and father were slaves and that's how the system reproduced the people and at the top of capitalism there is a relatively small class i went to school with him for 10 years i really do know them pretty well and a good number of them are my friends to this day but that's a self-reproducing group that does let others in from time to time you got to stop hanging around with harvard yale and stanford people you got to get out and go to glendale community college you you got to get out and go to some regular people like us who are not at your level of brilliance and intelligence and your peers at harvard you got to come and hang out with us a little bit you've been hanging around with too many elitists and powerful people richard some of the small people no that was over when i was you know when i got my phd at yale they always looked at me uh as somebody who must have been dropped on the floor by his mother at an inopportune moment when he was a baby because he went in this other direction you're not supposed to go to become a critic of capitalism if you go to harvard stanford and yale if you're not familiar let me assure you that my teachers with very very few exceptions were cheerleaders for capitalism every time here is this what year is this what year is this i i i entered harvard in 1959 and i finished my education at yale in 1970. that makes sense a lot has changed in 50 years but i've been a professor at those and other universities ever since and in my humble opinion nothing has changed it is the same today i go around the country i speak every year in i don't know 20 25 college and university settings from state schools and community colleges all up to private universities and the the combination of ignorance there's no nice way to say this the combination of ignorance about capitalism and socialism and all these kinds of questions and the company the combination of that ignorance for many and a kind of weird confidence in a point of view for which they have no support at all teaches me since these are perfectly nice and intelligent people that this remains a taboo topic for most kids they do not as they go through college whether it's community college or university they are not exposed they can't be to anybody who takes this stuff the critique of capitalism seriously they're just not given the opportunity by the way half the time they invite me it's precisely to kind of open a little space in a curriculum that would otherwise not touch it i don't know about that i think the last i went to uh harvard uh uh for a opm program meaning an owner president management program it's like a three-week program you go to and you have to do a certain amount of dollars per year to qualify for it so i went to it and it was the time where trump and hillary were debating okay right and so in one of the halls that says we're opening up the debate teachers showed up professors showed up everybody showed up and i think i'll just go in there and i'll sit in the corner just to watch to see what happens richard 100 of people hate it passionately your favorite person in the world that you have a painting on the wall right next to you president trump they hate it they hated president trump and they were all like bowing down to how amazing you know hillary clinton was i'm talking five six hundred people i'm just like sitting there watching i'm like wow this is pretty this is a guy that voted for clinton and this is a guy that voted on the left and the right and he's a registered independent today so i'm watching these guys i'm like wow this is pretty wild so now when i hire people and then they come from schools they come out of ucla if they come out of harvard if they come out of uh uh berkeley's obviously you know where berkeley's at if you if they come a lot of these schools even yale your your the reason why a sanders was able to get as much traction as he did as a byproduct of the last 30 years socialism is getting a a a lot of uh through education and school and a lot of socialists are able to pass their agenda to kids and kids are thinking about it you're seeing that it's not like i'm the first person that's telling you this so well stop patrick i don't agree with that you don't agree with the fact that the spirit of socialism is in universities today absolutely let me explain to you what i mean first of all i don't like hillary clinton i would have i would not have bowed down to hillary clinton then i wouldn't do it now she is for me the other side of the same coin that mr trump is on the other side of and i don't want that coin neither the one side nor the other a socialist perspective as far as i understand it uh has a you know finds that this distinction between those two of them minimal it's not zero but it's minimal and an excited supporter of either of them you would not find me to be now on the question of bernie and the interest in quote-unquote socialism i go all over the country i really do i interact with these people all the time and here's what i can tell you which may come from you may upset you i don't know they are not uh pro socialists whatever they say on their polls what they are is bitter and angry that what they took to be the promise of capitalism isn't available to them they are loaded up with debt going through their college the quality and quantity of jobs they can get with their ba is worse than it's ever been they were led to expect by their parents by their minister by the community they grew up in a a set of opportunities that are fast disappearing and they know it from talking to one another they feel to be blunt betrayed by capitalism that's what they're saying when they say well what's wrong with socialism because it really isn't that socialism has captured them or that they even know much about it it's just it's their way of giving their finger i agree with what's happening i actually agree with what you just said and i i totally agree with what you just said but this is the part i agree with let me explain so you said they they're it's not that you know how nowadays they say people don't vote for somebody they vote against somebody you've heard you've heard this before you're in time yes yes so they're bitter at capitalism okay so now go to capitalism so now the next question i'll be asking you is what what is the definition of capitalism to you because you went straight from capitalism to college debt that college debt is not capitalism college data is controlled by the government being able to push every debt through them to find a way to make more money college could be one-sixth double cost what it is today when you got a harvard uh university sitting on 40 billion dollars of endowment and they took a 8.55 million dollar check from the government just two months ago because of coronavirus and they're sitting on 40 billion colleges are more expensive because of government if you look at that uh debt is higher due to government they don't have to lower the interest rates the way they are to where it is today giving money away constantly to bail people out that's the government's ties that's not a capitalistic system a true capitalistic system is not the involvement of the government trying to bail out some of these too big to fail companies so i'm not coming from a place of let's go bail out another of these big companies and let's not prevent them from going out of business if they screw up they should go out of business but that's not capitalism that is a and i'll finish up and i'll give you uh turn it over to you that is a interpretation of these teachers who have jobs making 49 grand a year 62 000 a year 82 000 a year if they're professors or maybe higher ups private school most teachers you know don't make a lot of money they make thirty six thousand forty thousand i don't see teachers getting up saying capitalism's awesome guys i don't see that i see teachers for 16 years saying how bad capitalism is and how bad rich people are because they're not the happiest people in the world 16 years later these 22 year kids are like dude these rich people suck and capitalism sucks who's against rich people bernie i'll freaking vote for this guy that's how i see the processing taking place what do you think good i'm glad you put it that way so let me tell you how and why i disagree with uh with what you said um i find it somewhere between amusing and ironic that the defenders of capitalism have had to resort particularly in recent decades to what i take to be a hustle uh it's like selling you snake oil uh medicine that's going to cure you of everything here's the hustle here's the hospital when you when there's unemployment in this country it's because the employer has fired you when you lose your home it's because the bank or the lender has foreclosed on you uh so when you have a system that periodically every four to seven years has a crash uh in which millions of people are thrown out of work the instability of capitalism stupefying or it produces enormous inequality which these days is also stupefied you run the risk that people will in fact turn against the system that they've been told is what they are living in namely capitalism so it was a smart move hustler is a mixed thing good and bad it was a good hustle to say hey given our system it's going to piss off an awful lot of people we need to train those people to blame something other than the system and the target that was chosen and this is very old is the government so you have this phenomena in america unemployed people don't blame the employer who fired them they blame instead the government they find something that they can point to that the government is the bad guy lying behind and causing the nice employer to fire me or the nice banker to dispossess me of my home and destroy my family and all the rest of it this this remarkable and ain't rand is obviously with all of this this notion that the government is the bad guy which neatly avoids the question gee why would the government be the bad guy is that intrinsic to government some people say yes well historically they've been the bad guy historically and in the present i mean the blaming the government is an american pastime it's more popular than baseball i lived in iran we said it i lived in germany they said it the government historically has been the biggest bully in the world that is that is proven now careful it has been said by people who want the blame for a system failure not to go on the system no that's that's a bit of a hustle i would explain what the government does because of who controls the government who has the predominant influence governments do what they are pressed to do you know who writes the laws in this country it's the lobbyists and you know i hope you know that 90 percent of lobbyists come from capitalist enterprises nobody else can afford it you know the big donations come from the richest people who are enriched mostly by big business etc etc the government is the agent not of all of us but of those of us who have the ability to shape and influence what the government does blaming the government is very useful to get the a capitalist system off the hook but i don't take that seriously for me the government is another arm of the system the system works some of its magic through private enterprise and some of its magic through the government's shaping an interaction and for me that's what socialism one of its important insights is to understand that the pretense of the government as an independent actor in the society is mostly phony it's false it's not it's not what's going on and that the change therefore can never just be elect tweedle dumb or elect tweedle d clinton trump yes they're different but in many ways they're the same i don't know if you saw it a few years ago nancy pelosi was giving a talk somewhere in a college and a student a young man raised his hand and asked her about socialism and you could tell the video was right on her she was very perplexed and she looked at kind of befuddled took a few extra seconds and then looked at the young man perfectly nicely and said i really don't know what you're referring to we are all capitalists now i've seen that yeah perfect i couldn't have said it better myself that's exactly right capitalism has two political parties in the united what's your point though what's your point with that the point is that the government should not be made the fall guy it's not appropriate the government is not an independent not the fall guy it's not the fall guy that's not what i'm saying let me explain what i mean by beautiful by the way richard historically you cannot dispute the fact that government's not bullied people i mean you can't dispute that i understand today some people are massive corporations they can they can push people around they can censor people they can do a lot of things today and no one's disputing that part but but what i'm talking about is with what you're talking about uh you know uh the the power government pushes around and some things they do so earlier you said you're also not a government guy now you're saying it's an escape that the capitalists use to blame it all on government so let me ask you this question what is the only way i can have a monopoly with the help of who what is the only way i can have a monopoly can i have a monopoly all by myself is it possible for me to build the business and be the biggest and have a monopoly all by myself or do i need someone's help according to everything that the that the discipline of economics has ever argued the answer is for sure you can do it by yourself there's no way in the world i can do it by myself no way in the world i can let me explain to you why i cannot do by myself so there's no i need a loss to be on my side because i need you who work for the state that your campaign's coming up to tell you i need you to make the barrier to enter very very tough and allow me to buy that company for 17 billion dollars to put my competition out of business for me to own a monopoly and without your approval i can't have a monopoly because with your approval if you follow the law i get stopped i can't make certain moves the only way you see monopolies is with the help of the government coming in and saying don't worry about it i'll help you out let's go make this monopoly happen or else it's not possible it's not possible to do so let me give you the counter argument we have two basic laws in the united states against monopoly okay right one is the sherman anthony you know the story okay those laws were fought for by the victims of monopolies that had come into power independent of governmental support the whole purpose of those laws was to not only prevent the government from helping monopolies but to put the government in the business of breaking up the monopolies that had formed on their own in economics here's how the logic works so if you look at the cost of producing a commodity over time the line the cost curve it's called in economics keeps going down it's basically the law of the larger the quantity of goods you produce the cheaper each unit costs you and that's kind of built into modern technology sure so if you have 500 firms competing each one trying to capture the market for whatever the one that gets the jump for whatever reason in step one to be able to sell more x's than the other guy will be able to produce at a lower cost eventually when you follow the logic there's one guy left the one who produced the largest amount therefore got it to the lowest cost could charge the lowest price and that would out compete all the others monopoly is the product of competition the irony of by the way this is in adam smith not just karl marx and others the logic of capitalism is a competitive system that destroys itself and that has in fact happened and led to the opposition of other companies and the public who don't want to be ripped off by this process can you can you elaborate and define destroys itself what does destroys itself mean like a company i'm competing and then i get too casual too lazy somebody else comes and destroys me is that what you're saying no no no no no this is a situation where uh there's 500 companies producing i don't know potato chips right and and one of them comes across a new kind of potato and it goes better so he can sell more potato chips than the next guy because he can sell 10 million bags instead of 2 million bags he can produce potato chips at less per bag than it costs the other guys who produce a smaller amount so because he can produce at a lower cost he drops the price that swings the demand over to his product and away from the others who can't afford to match him because they don't have the low cost since they don't have the big uh the big output eventually one guy is able to get the entire market and he will produce at the lowest possible price and the lowest possible cost the others go out of business because at the price he charges close to what his cost is they can't compete and so he's left all alone once that moment is reached once he has no more competitors then then he can begin to jack up the price because you don't have anywhere else give me one example give me one example of that today one example of that today why you want it today it's all through history no no give it to me today give me one example of that today microsoft microsoft amazon amazon doesn't have competition and amazon charges up prices what's expensive on amazon amazon has driven almost everybody out but what is expensive on amazon name me one thing that's overpriced on amazon richard your argument i want to give it to you give me one thing that's not my argument you said eventually they raised the price i'm just repeating what you said tell me one thing that's overpriced on amazon they're not they're not ready to at that point yet they're not the only deliverers that's just not possible though because right now amazon is scared shitless of walmart right shitless of walmart that's because capitalism works now my concern is the following my concern is bezos movie moves to dc he moves to dc that scares me he moves to dc he gets in the pocket of lobbyists i'm not sitting here you know oh my gosh dave facer's the greatest entrepreneur i'm not what i'm saying my concern is is his next move is to buy politicians to be able to bully the other guys that's my concern i'm not okay for that but you cannot tell me that the prices at walmart or amazon are so expensive that that doesn't make any sense because it's not true well i mean it depends what you mean by expensive but i would tell you that they also make very careful arrangements not to put each other in that competitive situation they're exactly aware of what i told you they're aware that this is a race to see who gets to be the one with the lowest cost and that whoever that is customer wins wait a minute that's the way the game is played and that's how you go out of business these companies then can get together when they've gone down from 50 or 500 to only six or seven and then they work out an arrangement the history of antitrust is the history of the government breaking in at those times because like with amazon and walmart there's a reason that that bezos is the richest man in the world and the walmart family is the richest in the world they have jacked up the prices above their oh my gosh because they had no competition the complete opposite argument the argument is john doe's market in toledo was selling milk for 459 walmart came in and says this guy is charging it for too much we'll sell it to you for 359 john had to lower to 349 to be able to compete it's the complete opposite argument there and that argument doesn't have weight behind it richard it does it's always been the history you lower the price you drive out your competitors and when you have reached down to three or four not one example of it today there's not one example of it today listen that's the history of the automobile but i'm telling you today you don't have one example of that today one we we had a dozen but it's overpriced what are you buying that's overpriced what are you buying that's overpriced everything you buy from amazon and walmart is priced higher than a competitive alternative wood pricing what are you talking about everything i buy on amazon is cheaper than the other places i buy that's why people are buying on amazon so if you would if you would have taken the argument the other way around that's where i get stuck so here's a suggestion for you to know that a capitalist gets stuck the part that i get stuck is if you say to me well what about poor bobby that runs a small market with seven employees and he can't afford to pay the minimum wage because when uh bernie sanders went up and said raise the minimum wage jeff bezos to 15 an hour and you know what jeff said oh thank you bernie you just put out 50 of my competition i will gladly raise it to 15 and are mr socialist thank you for eliminating my competition why because none of my competitors in toledo kansas can raise the minimum wage for 15 bucks an hour because it's impossible he officially put people out of business the argument that you could have made for me to say that makes sense is what is that joey do that runs a small market how do i help that guy out him and his wife have been running that business for six years now they're passing on to their kids that that's place has got my dad worked out of 99 cents or people would come they knew david i once gave a talk in front of a couple thousand people and i kept talking about my dad david and where do you where the 99 cent store was on inglewood and he says what does david look like i said like this he says i went to david every week it was an emotional moment for me because it's like they wanted to go to him there is an argument there but there is no argument on prices going up to the richard that argument doesn't have weight today i think it always did that's why we have not today sure it does it's the same argument that has existed all through the history not today though not today where today what is expensive today let's everything that you buy is expensive because you are now you're an economy that has been monopolized now for decades i don't know about monopolized i don't know about monopolized how many competitors to amazon do you think there are depends on what product you're talking about if you're talking about prime if you're talking about in general most people these days are buying online from a very small number of general providers yeah i like i said to you i am concerned about amazon moving to dc to hire the best lobbyists and pay them the best money to make it harder for small business owners to compete them with the help of the government but you're then just jumping into the story at a particular moment amazon understood first it has to destroy all the little department stores and everything that they've done just like walmart one as a deliverer the other one as a brick and mortar okay they did that over the last 40 years in cooperation with the people's republic of china for whom they became the mass distributor they took care of wiping out nine tenths of their competition now they have a de facto monopoly they want to and they can in many areas raise prices above cost because they have no competitor but there's let me finish there's a risk there's a risk that people like you and people like me become critics and that we can reach the victims who are overpaying with our criticism about their operating a monopoly they know that how do they deal with that by the washington post if you're jeffrey bezos put yourself in a position to shape the narrative so that you can now get the government to do what capitalists always want the government to do namely to reinforce to protect and to extend whatever their needs are and in this case it's the need to perpetuate a monopoly position they were able to uh you know acquire that's what they do i agree so then the core issue richard here becomes the issue that i'm that goes even deeper that i think about is the issue becomes our current election system and the model doesn't work if i can buy my congressman my senators my governors my politicians my presidents if i can buy them if i can buy them guess who controls them there's these big too big to fail companies that can go around and push their weight around they can control them you're saying not true no no i agree on i couldn't agree more so let me ask you this you're somebody that's well read you've been around you you have way more experience on this than me what is an alternative to the model that we have today where politicians can't be bought how do you fix that i'm curious well i think you have to change the system at the base you're not going to change it we've tried every reform imaginable those folks get around them they evade them they weaken them they repeal them for me the fundamental issue is the way we've organized the economy and that goes back to the beginning of our conversation factory if you have a small number of people who are employers grabbing all the profit into their hand and the vast majority of people are wage earners you've set yourself up to fail those minorities precisely because they are a minority employers are a small special interest minority group in our society they want profit because that's their reward i get that so they do what's useful to that never run a business have you ever ran a business yes but let me just finish so they buy politicians because that's part of what you do to be a successful capitalist suppose just to answer your question suppose the way business was organized wasn't hierarchical an owner a board of directors at the top a tiny group making all the basic decisions and telling the vast majority of employees where to stand where to sit when to come where to go and keeping the product of their labor at the end of the day if we didn't have that suppose we didn't have that bifurcation the employer and his group and the employees small group majority minority majority suppose we had here it comes a different economic arrangement let's call it for lack of better word economic democracy or let's call it worker co-op here's the way it works everybody in an enterprise is equal one person one vote we decide together what we're going to produce what technology we're going to use where we're going to produce and what we're going to do with the output no split between employer and employee because we the employees are collectively our own boss the desire of 95 of the small businesses i've ever spoken to is to be my own boss here's a way for the employees to run the business and guess what if the employees and the employers are the same people there isn't a split on what the government is supposed to do because if you lower your own wages to make more profits you're just moving your money from one pocket to the other it's an idiot's activity it is a no a new world which maybe can support a government that genuinely respects one person one vote instead of pretending to do that and you and i both know who controls the government who controls and buys the votes and all the rest you ever won the business before i've worked on several businesses i've started two or three i've been on boards of directors when you started those two or three what happened to your businesses someone out of business some survive the ones that survived how long did they survive they're still going some of them are 30 years old are they profitable or non-profitable well it depends on what you mean by profit but they had net revenue and that's how they survived how how dare you make profit you ought to be ashamed of yourself richard to be making profit how dare you make profit off of people's back how dare you run a profitable business oh you ought to be ashamed of yourself mr professor richard wolff that's how we started patrick i don't hate rich people i understand they're players in a system i'm a player in the system too i breathe the foul air i buy goods that are made in china with with the wrong conditions you know my sneakers are made by children in indonesia i get it i try to avoid patronizing them but yeah i don't see a problem with that that's why that's why i'm criticism of the system i don't want to be in it either but but what's wrong okay let me ask you a different question let me ask you a different question are you in your house are you in your uh at a different building in your house in my house who chose the paint uh on your wall who chose it my wife and i your wife and you okay who chose the the if i come to your house and i walk around the sofas and the couches who picked it who chose it both of you what did she pick and you didn't pick who's a better cook you or her i honestly i think me okay all good what's her name by the way harriet harriet hello harriet anyway so so you are a better cook than she is right well yeah because in my house where i grew up uh we couldn't go in the kitchen the kitchen was the kingdom of my mother and only she could do anything in there her husband my father couldn't get in there either she that was right i don't think that's fair i don't think that's simple either but you know what it does it makes the children like my sister and i very eager to be and work in the kids wow you just explain capitalism yeah you just explained capitalism you just explained the structure of corporation your mother was the chairman of the board in the kitchen and she told you guys you got to earn your way to get in the kitchen you worked your tail off to learn and now you're better cooked than herring it congratulations i wish she had done what you say i wish she had said you could earn your way but she was a real capitalist you weren't getting i love your mother mother no matter how hard you worked you weren't getting into the chosen circle and that is you're right that is capitalism you are as well though you are a capitalist because when you cook you said you're better cooked than your wife so if your wife says to you honey this not seven minutes put it for 20 minutes are you gonna listen to her well it depends if she has a good point to make i'd have to take it seriously but i would you could consider him who's the final decision maker of the food that you're gonna cook it's a consensus no it's not you're the chairman of the board of the force but my wife would enjoy this because she would recognize that your need for example to have somebody be the chairman that's your accommodation i understand that's how this system works but that's why i'm against i'm giving you a hard time but the point i'm trying to make is the fact that somebody needs to make the decision you know one night i rented out where were we were we in yucca valley i rented this house and we went out and and i said guys we got to come up with a coat of honor we're running the sales office and i said we got to come up with a code of honor on how we run this office so i read this place we go i'm hoping we're going to finish early so we can play some games we had foosball table pool table movies we go out there and we said we're going to come out with what's got to be written as a code okay we're going through this and all of a sudden one guy phillip he says what we have to use he says we have to use parliamentary law 100 of people have to agree on what the code's got to be and we're sitting i'm like okay let me allow them to make this decision for themselves so it's like a buy-in let me be a this incredibly incredible leader that brings everyone together do you know what time we went to sleep i'm not gonna say it i'm gonna let him tell you what mario what time do we go to sleep six in the morning okay six in the morning i had a movie for them to watch here's the point i'm trying to make from my experience from my experience my small 41 years of living from glendale community college guy okay i'm a guy that's a regular guy from my experience someone has to be in charge to make the decisions it's very challenging to put it a collective someone has to be a shot caller at the end and typically the most hated guy right now everybody's watching and talking about the michael jordan documentary the last dance you know who's getting the most criticism right now one guy michael jordan why because he was the shot caller and a lot of people don't like that but that's just kind of how things work when somebody leads so what are your thoughts i'll i'll let you kind of uh rebuttal to that long time ago we believed that in order for any society to exist and function there had to be the guy who makes the decision and we called him the king or the emperor or the czar or whatever yeah and then a time came in human history where the mass of us got sick and tired of being the subject having to live with the decisions made by this clown at the top or even worse by his you know son or daughter who gets to be the next clown at the top and so we said no more monarchy no more we were even mad occasionally and cut their heads off as in france with the guillotine right and people said you can't do that there has to be somebody at the top the one who talks to god or whatever they thought had to be and the rest of us look or our ancestors looked at them and said it doesn't have to be we could live in a society where we all have some say some input we don't have to have one person telling everybody else what to do and the irony i thought i like that i'm i'm glad that happened i support that i like democracy i support that as well what you just said okay so here comes the argument i don't like having the king who isn't allowed in public society to find his new place inside the enterprise where we allow him to function as the dictator who tells us whether we have the job or not whether we will work over here or over there who takes the fruit of our labor and decides where to sell it and what to do with the revenue why are we allowing kingdoms inside the enterprise when we have declared them unacceptable outside and yeah there'll be adjustments there were adjustments when you didn't have the king it took us a while to learn a little bit with all the imperfections of how to quote-unquote govern ourselves we will do the same inside the enterprise since it is my judgment and i'm running out of time here but it's my judgment that what socialism really is is not about the government that was 19th and 20th century socialism 21st century socialism it's about the enterprise it's about democratizing the enterprise getting rid of the kings that imagine themselves inside the enterprise and that kind of a socialism from the bottom up will be extremely attractive to the people who are discovering that capitalism has betrayed the hopes they had felt would be satisfied by capitalism but isn't anymore what you just described right there was china the last part of what we're doing right now is speed rounds i'm going to give you a name tell me the first thing that comes to your mind i'll give you a name tell me the first thing that comes to your mind jeff bezos uh obscenely wealthy person who is making individual decisions about tens of billions of dollars that were produced by the army of employees he has who ought to have some say as the rest of us do about what is done with that wealth it is obscene for one person to make those decisions that we all have to live with warren buffett same thing rockefeller same thing gates same thing carnegie same thing musk i don't know very much about musk soros soros pretty much the same thing karl marx one word insightful insightful okay trump the product of a system in deep trouble bernie sanders the same reagan a grade b actor who was a puppet for the interests that needed to have a puppet at that time obama a person who promised hope and change and delivered neither of them biden a very sad mistake ayn rand not a good novelist and an even worse social theorist gorbachev a sad character who tried to hold together a disintegrating system boris johnson a british trump lenin a brilliant strategist and tactician but who tried to make a transformation when the conditions to enable it to happen simply weren't there castro like lennon like lennon by the way who do you consider a great leader i'm curious like who to you is a great leader is there a name like somebody would say something nice about you seem too upset i want to finish it on a say something nice about somebody who do you like and you admire who do i like and who do i admire well let's go back to marx i learned a lot from marx i would have i was always amazed that having gone through the elite universities i went through harvard stanford and yale 10 years of my life in those institutions i should have been introduced to their work not not only marx of course but among many important thinkers of the last 2000 years you know and i mean i mean reading the bible and saint augustine and aristotle and marx instead because my teachers were afraid or caught up in the cold war they thought the important thing was to keep me as far away from this marx character as they could possibly do just a footnote in those 10 years i was never reque and i have a phd in economics i was never required to read one word of marx's criticism of capitalism that is a comment on a failed educational system uh and because i find marx's work so insightful not only not that marx didn't make mistakes of course he did etc etc but as thinkers go you could do a lot worse and with very few would you get as much powerful insight into society as you get from him so i'm an admirer and the only reason i accept the label marxist is not because i'm some blinded follower who's uncritical it's just i want to affirm what was denied to me by an educational system that wants to present itself as the best in the world and isn't even close uh richard well by the way i recommend communist manifesto to a lot of people i think when people read it they even become bigger capitalists that's the great thing so that's why i recommend them reading a book but uh richard where can people find you i know you got a podcast going on and if you want to tell us about your latest book before we wrap up right my latest book is an answer to millions of questions that are sent to us what is socialism inspire new generation in america who never learned what it was and are smart enough to realize that now that they're interested they would like to learn what exactly is it because it's not one thing it's their different interpretations the thing has changed over the last 100 years you need to learn it and i wrote a short book called understanding socialism to meet that demand i produce with a group a regular weekly radio and television program it's called economic update if you're interested in it you can find out where the radio and the tv carry it but every program uh is put up on youtube you just go to youtube slash democracy at work and that's where you'll find it the democracy at work refers to what we've finished up talking about converting the enterprise into a democratic institution instead of the hierarchical top down that it has been we're going to leave the link below both to your show as well as your book richard i have really enjoyed our conversation today thank you so much for being a guest on valuetainment my appreciation also for you really i appreciate that you do what you do that that you do it in the way you do and that we can have a conversation with and without agreement and that's what what real friendship and intellectual seriousness ought to be about i appreciate that thank you have a wonderful day you too you know a lot of people ask me questions they say pat how do you choose your guests how do you come up with your guests do you agree with every guest you choose obviously after today's guests and the last week's guests i had with slavoj who's a communist we don't agree philosophically but today's guess today's interview was one of my favorites i've ever done before i want to hear your thoughts comment below also if you watch this interview and you enjoyed it i have two other videos i want you to watch one of them is with the communist slavo zizek and the other one is a video i did 10 reasons why this guy i love capitalism if you've not seen it you got to watch it and if you've not subscribed to the channel please do so thanks for watching everybody take care bye [Music] you

Channel: Valuetainment

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Keywords: Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneur Motivation, Entrepreneur Advice, Startup Entrepreneurs, valuetainment, patrick bet david, Economist Blasts The Fed, Stimulus, Richard Wolff, Capitalism, Socialism, Competition, Economics, Economy, Heated Debate On Capitalism with America’s Most Prominent Marxist Economist - Richard Wolff

Id: wj-zFgxCUnY

Length: 81min 4sec (4864 seconds)

Published: Thu May 28 2020