Niall Ferguson | Socialism doesn't work

because socialism in middle America is an obscene word I mean you may be able to say socialism on the campus at Boston University where a OSI apparently learnt economics I mean I like teasing my colleagues at Boston University's like she's one of yours really so so you can say oh why I'm a socialist delivery goes oh that is so woke have another latte but you don't anywhere inland and say the word socialism they like did you just say socialism so so the fact that they're having to endorse all this stuff I mean it's just it's just insane that the longest suicide note in history up until this point was the Labour Party manifesto of 83 they have come up with a longer suicide note it's the green new deal so yeah great carry on good luck good luck with this in 2020 let's take that something that's very important to you now you and I both we have children on one step ahead of you I've got grandchildren as well I decided to have my own grandchildren cut out the middleman so I 16 month old son and I told my eldest is 25 you're off duty no rush I have I have this grand told thing already done well but both in Britain and America you're sort of seeing this attraction the young people who feel that their futures are being blighted 92% of young Australians don't think they'll have the same economic opportunities as their parents hadn't it's largely because of stagnant ways is rising asset prices you know for young people trying to buy their first residence in this country it's a horrendous problem so that's a playing out here as it is in America they're attracted superficially to these sorts of simplistic solutions which ultimately must work against their very interests can we just tease out I mean plainly a economic growths are very strong in America at the moment all their debts exploding now to go the Green New Deal would stall the growth presumably and push the debts through the roof as if it wasn't already the biggest losers would be our children and grandchildren they're the ones who are left with its if you like a breaking of the contract as Edmund Burke put between put it I think between you know the living that yet to be born and those who have gone before us I'm really exercised and I think you are too and motivated by this need to ensure that young people actually understand what baby boomers may be doing to them with ideas which sound good like free education or you know solving a climate change problem but doing it in ways that actually will crippled their opportunities later on what do we do about it how do we lead those youngsters a right that they will be worse off than their parents if those policies are pursued it's kind of guaranteed I think that the young they're idealistic it it looks grim but how do we get out of them and many of the solutions that are being put up but simply going to make it grimmer the challenge here is that firstly we don't really teach young people about socialism so if you actually knew anything about the history of socialism which been tried in many different countries in many different ways and it's always failed then you'd be unlikely to think it would be a good idea there's a lot of confusion around what this word socialism means and it turns out when you actually quiz people that they're really just talking about Sweden and the welfare state and what they really mean is we'd quite like to have more redistributed progressive taxation and my response that we'd like to have a different system of single-payer health care and my response to that is well that's not actually socialism because those policies were devised by Christian Democrats as well as Social Democrats after World War two to prevent socialism from happening so if that's what you were in favor of then don't call it socialism because that's a catagory era because socialism is about the state controlling the means of production and that state control designed to prevent free enterprise has been a disastrous failure wherever it's been tried because it is a recipe for corruption and economic failure and if you don't believe me Venezuela is kind of that way so please can we try to just have a little bit of conceptual clarity here point to young people have not been well educated about fiscal policy in its distributional implications in the great degeneration I made the point that if young people understood their own self-interest in the United States they would all have been fans of Paul Ryan's roadmap for entitlement reform which never happened because entitlement reform was scrapped as an idea by Donald Trump but entitlement reform is is crucial because the main reason the federal debt is growing in extra Blee each year is that there are a whole bunch of unfunded liabilities and Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid that we don't have any way of affording and the problem gets bigger with every passing year the losers from these fiscal policies are clearly younger voters and and the unborn Larry Kotlikoff ironically at Boston University and professor of economics at Boston University she must have taken none of his courses that's the only explanation because Larry Kotlikoff has argued for years that there's this massive generational imbalance and that what current policy does is to transfer resources from the young and the unborn to baby boomers and seniors in massive generational inequity that as you rightly say Jon violates Burke's contract between the generations they ought to be right-wing they should be campaigning for entitlement reform they should be campaigning for the kind of policies that would bring the debt under control so there is what used to be called false consciousness at work here ironically many young voters are lured into siding with the very interest groups that have their interests least at heart eg public sector unions now public sector unions in most developed countries are villains of the peace who want to create you huge liabilities in the form of pensions for their members to be funded by future generations of workers but young people will be for some reason duped into aligning themselves with those very interests that have their in their interest least to art so we've had a double failure of education and I'm an education person I've been a professor most of my career trying to teach young people I've totally failed total and abject failure I fail to communicate to more than that must be a handful of people the socialism doesn't work and communism is a total disaster which I mean it's just the extreme form and I've failed to communicate to more than a very small number of people that the way that public finance works is deeply against the interests of young people and so I've kind of concluded that the teaching doesn't work it's more than the handful of young people here tonight you're convinced by what he's saying it's not because you took my classes if you've come round to this vantage point so we have a problem and it's probably not that surprising because if let's face it I'm rather an unusual figure in the academic world most universities are not teaching people what socialism is really like and most universities are not teaching people to think about public finance in a rational way because most universities are staffed by liberals progressives and socialists and there are no conservatives left pretty much so we can't be surprised if the young are wandering around with stars in their eyes about about redistribute of policies and cancelling student loans and free this and free that I mean that's we educated them to think that way thank you for watching this episode we appreciate your support if you value vital conversations like this one be sure to subscribe to the channel there and also click the notification bell to stay up to date with new releases [Music]

Channel: John Anderson

Views: 51,569

Rating: 4.7988949 out of 5

Keywords: Niall Ferguson, Socialism, John Anderson

Id: ZN_BRKY2dL4

Length: 8min 47sec (527 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 16 2020