00:00:11.000And you can thank Turning Point USA for that.
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00:00:48.000I want to thank those of you that support our program, the Charlie Kirk Show, where you allow us to do two podcasts today, sometimes even more.
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00:03:47.000And thank you to Town Circle for setting this up.
00:03:51.000So I'm a democratic socialist because I don't think anybody deserves to have less power or a dramatically worse life because of factors that are outside of their control.
00:04:05.000Concretely, I think it's obscene that we have an economic system where workers at Amazon warehouses skip bathroom breaks because they're worried about falling behind in their quotas and their boss literally owns his own spaceship.
00:04:19.000Now, we can argue about what a fairer society would look like.
00:04:24.000I can contrast what I would see as utopia with what you would, and I'm always up for that kind of thing.
00:04:29.000I'm sure we'll get into some of it later.
00:04:31.000But what I really like to start out with is not so much that end point as the baby steps towards justice that we could take right now.
00:04:40.000Things like raising taxes on rich people to pay for social programs that would benefit the rest of us.
00:04:46.000Things like raising the minimum wage for the working poor.
00:04:50.000Things like making it easier for ordinary people to organize unions so they can have at least a little bit of a say at what happens in the workplaces where they spend half their waking lives.
00:05:01.000And I got to say, what always confuses me about you, Charlie, is that I see you say that you're not like an old style kind of corporate Republican in the Reagan, Bush, William F. Buckley kind of mold.
00:05:13.000And certainly the politicians you seem to be most enthusiastic about, people like Donald Trump or JD Vance now, make a big deal saying they're populists, they really want to help like struggling people in the heartland.
00:05:25.000And if that's true, I don't really get why you don't support any of those things that I just mentioned.
00:05:35.000First of all, thank you for being here.
00:05:36.000And if we want to spend an extended period of time bashing Jeff Bezos, I'm all for that.
00:05:41.000I think it's actually going to be really fun.
00:05:42.000So let me just first kind of tell you what I believe and why we believe it.
00:05:45.000It's kind of framed as conservative populism.
00:05:48.000Put simply, we believe in the natural law.
00:05:50.000We believe, as the Declaration of Independence says, the laws of nature are nature's God.
00:05:54.000We believe in limitations on human beings, and we should believe there are limitations on power, both government power and, yes, of course, corporate power, as Barry Goldwater said in the 1960s.
00:06:05.000We also believe America is strongest when families are flourishing, when there's a strong moral center, when middle-class work is respected and appreciated.
00:06:15.000And the populist component to this is we need to be aware of what's happening around us, see when core institutions are failing, like the family, which has been failing over the last 60 years in America, which can be attributed to many different things.
00:06:31.000I would attribute it to the rise of an aggressive social welfare state and an overindulgence in neoliberalism, that we must be willing to do something about it when the family starts to disintegrate, when our nation starts to fall apart, when our borders remain wide open.
00:06:47.000And so we pair those two things together, conservative populism.
00:06:50.000And the kind of philosophical basis for a lot of this is the willingness to act with prudence and wisdom to try and fix things that matter, things that objectively matter.
00:07:03.000And I've been really looking forward to this discussion.
00:07:05.000I think, I hope it's more of a discussion than a debate because we will disagree on plenty.
00:07:09.000But when you talk about a untouchable oligarchy, I completely agree.
00:07:13.000I think that there is an untouchable oligarchy in this country, both corporate and governmental, scientific and technological, that is crushing the everyday common man.
00:07:22.000Where I think we're going to disagree is that I think the end goal, the thing that we must strive to, is family formation, family protection, and that strong moral center.
00:07:34.000And conservative populism is a resurgence of focusing on these things and developing solutions to hopefully fix it.
00:07:53.000I think that absolutely, you know, I think oftentimes actually people get the relationship between these things really wrong and they'll think, well, the more you think that human nature is good and cooperative, you know, the more, you know, you might think that a fairer society is possible.
00:08:11.000And the more you think that human nature is flawed and selfish and cruel, then the more, you know, you should think that, hey, we might as well just stick with free market capitalism.
00:08:23.000I think that the more you worry that given too much power over another, you know, one person over another, that person is going to treat the other the way that Walmart treats its employees, the way that Harvey Weinstein treated aspiring actresses, the more you're worried about that, the more you should want power to be distributed as evenly as at all possible.
00:08:45.000And that's really why I'm a democratic socialist, that I think whether you're talking about Russia under Stalin or Amazon under our mutual friend Jeff Bezos, then any time you have one person having way too much power over another without democratic accountability, I think you're going to get really bad abuses.
00:09:06.000Where I think we'll disagree, though, is the means of which we can represent individual people against oppressors or people that have power.
00:09:24.000There are jerks and dirtbags like Jeff Bezos that tend to con the system, not pay taxes, not treat their workers.
00:09:31.000And one of the reasons why this has become an emphasis, I think, of conservatives is we're willing to use prudence in a non-dogmatic way and say, wait a second, if we're trying to conserve something that is eternal and beautiful and true, is it a good thing that this kind of, let's just use Bezos again, $200 billion of net worth while the average American family is struggling to pay off student loan debt or financial debt.
00:09:54.000Where I think we're going to explore, I can't do this in the remaining 20 seconds I have though, is true decentralization must happen in a way that is consistent with both reigning in the administrative state and reigning in the technological and corporate power sources in our country.
00:10:11.000And the ultimate form of decentralization is the family.
00:10:22.000So I guess when you talk about the family, sure, absolutely.
00:10:27.000If people, you know, social institutions are making it harder to keep families together, that's a bad thing.
00:10:34.000I think that, you know, I would point to the financial pressures that, you know, that people are often under as a huge source of problems within families, as a huge reason for relationships and marriages failing.
00:10:50.000And that's something that I think would be helped by doing things like changing labor laws to make it easier to organize unions so people would be getting better wages and have more job stability, less of what employers like to call flexibility and everybody else calls precarity.
00:11:06.000And so that might be one place to start exploring this is, I mean, maybe you'll surprise me here, right?
00:11:23.000No, I just want to take any of your time.
00:11:25.000So I want to get into the union argument.
00:11:27.000I want to get into the minimum wage argument.
00:11:28.000I want to get into the healthcare argument.
00:11:30.000And I'm glad for you to say, and I really want to zero in on this, that family formation is a good thing because that is something that is debated amongst some Democrat socialist circles.
00:11:42.000And once we kind of get into the back and forth, I want to ask you about that because certain activist organizations tend to disagree.
00:11:48.000Some activist organizations will call the family oppressive, patriarchal, where I believe the family is beautiful and the ultimate social bedrock institution.
00:11:56.000And every single statistic shows that when families are flourishing, divorce rates remain low, which they aren't currently, that crime goes down and literacy goes up and communities flourish.
00:12:07.000And I think one thing we can agree on, and you said it a little bit differently than I would, I think it's wrong when corporations are making families choose between spending another 10 hours at some soulless job or spending a weekend with your kids.
00:12:21.000I think the priority should be through our public policy and our laws should always be toward the development of children and families getting stronger.
00:12:29.000Well, I think that if you want to have a traditional family, absolutely, you should be able to do that.
00:12:36.000You talked about activist organizations.
00:12:38.000I think that I would point to like, you know, the Working Families Party in New York, for example, as an activist organization that clearly has no problem with families.
00:12:51.000Of course, if you want to live some other way, that's great true.
00:12:55.000I think in a pluralistic society, I think everybody should be able to strive for their vision of the good life, and everybody should be free to live in the way that they want to be free.
00:13:08.000And I think that this is one of the biggest problems.
00:13:11.000You know, when we talk about things like healthcare, oftentimes people on my side will emphasize the fact that life expectancy is higher in places like Canada, the UK, where they have socialized health care and infant mortality.
00:13:24.000And you want to talk about families, you know, people's babies are less likely to die in places like Canada, the UK than in the United States.
00:13:31.000And mortality amenable to healthcare, which is a stats nerd way of saying that you're less likely to die from treatable diseases is lower in those places.
00:13:41.000And I think all those are true and important, but I don't think it's the most important thing because most of us are not on the verge of dying most of the time.
00:13:48.000Most of us are not worried that our babies are going to die most of the time.
00:13:53.000The biggest way, I think, that not providing everybody with health care is a right affects the lives of most people is that it makes us less free.
00:14:02.000Because people are a lot less likely to leave jobs that they hate if they're worried about, will I still have health insurance?
00:14:09.000Will my family still have health insurance?
00:14:11.000People stay in those jobs and don't pursue their dreams all the time because of that.
00:14:16.000There are people, you know, I think people who are in good families and they want to keep them together, absolutely, they should be able to do that.
00:14:22.000But there are also people who stay in bad or even abusive marriages because they cannot afford to lose their spousal health insurance.
00:14:30.000And so I think that we get, we're not only happier and we not only live longer, but I think we're also freer if we take care of those things.
00:14:40.000And what you're articulating before we get into the back and forth here is what Lyndon Baines-Johnson would call freedom from necessity, which is something I take exception with.
00:14:49.000I do not believe the state should play an interventionist role in saying that it is the role of government to say that you should be free from wants or necessity.
00:15:00.000I would argue that through a natural rights compact that you should be free to pursue virtue.
00:15:05.000That's not to say you shouldn't have a social safety net, which far too often becomes a hammock at a social safety net.
00:15:10.000But I think the design of government and the state, which is really what we're debating here, right?
00:15:14.000What is the role of public policy should be supporting things that are objectively good for people, for children, for the nation, and for the country.
00:15:23.000And so I'm happy to go into the kind of three categories that are common points of Democrat socialists next, healthcare, union membership, and kind of the development of unions.
00:15:56.000So I think that all of the things that I want, you know, I do not think exist together right now in the world.
00:16:04.000But if you want to talk about places where a lot of the policy goals that I'd support, you know, have been implemented.
00:16:11.000I certainly don't think they're fully socialist societies by any stretch of the imagination.
00:16:16.000But I think a lot of it has been implemented.
00:16:18.000I would talk about the places you'd expect me to talk about.
00:16:21.000Your Sweden's, your Finlands, your Denmarks, your Norways.
00:16:23.000Now, these are complicated societies that there are right-wing parties win elections sometimes too, and they do things that I don't like.
00:16:30.000But I think that these are places, broadly speaking, where a lot has been done to take certain things, like healthcare, for example, outside of the market so that people have that kind of freedom that I'm talking about, that they're not tied to jobs that they hate because they're worried that they and their families' basic needs aren't going to be taken care of if they don't stay in that subservient relationship.
00:16:58.000And you talked earlier about how you want the state to support things that are objectively good.
00:17:04.000It seems to me that living longer is objectively good.
00:17:09.000Having lower infant mortality is objectively good.
00:17:12.000And I would also say that having greater freedom to live your life how you want and not being tied to a particular job, I think that's also objectively good.
00:17:26.000So Denmark doesn't have a minimum wage.
00:17:29.000Well, but you got to do the other half of that, that they don't have a minimum wage, but they have vastly more favorable terrain for unions than the United States does.
00:17:39.000And so a lot of the wage floor is enforced that way.
00:17:41.000It's still not just they get whatever the market says they get.
00:17:44.000No, but no government-mandated minimum wage.
00:17:46.000What I find interesting, and there are some aspects of the Scandinavian countries appeal to me.
00:17:53.000According to the World Economic Freedom Index, every country outside of Norway is more economically free than the United States.
00:18:01.000And so is that something that would interest you?
00:18:04.000If economic freedom is the definition of your view, then I think that what I mean by economic freedom and what they mean by economic freedom are going to be very different.
00:18:14.000I think oftentimes if you look at the methodology of those lists, it's very unclear.
00:18:18.000Like you'll get like the Cato Institute or whoever in some cases will do these lists where they rank places by freedom.
00:18:24.000And it's like, you know, the things that the things that they get points for, the things they don't get points for, abortion doesn't matter, whether you can have raw milk matters, you know, I think are at least unclear to me.
00:18:36.000But I think this is the bigger philosophical thing.
00:18:39.000Like let's just do this rather than getting into the nitty-gritty about the lists.
00:18:42.000I think that what those guys mean by economic freedom is how much business owners are free to conduct their business however they want, you know, without interference by the state.
00:18:54.000What I would mean by freedom in an economic context is the right of ordinary people to live the kinds of lives that they want to live and not be under the thumb to the extent that people are in the United States of whatever some corporation wants to make them do.
00:19:11.000And so just to clarify this, though, about some of the Scandinavian countries, they went through massive deregulation in the 1980s, right?
00:19:48.000So I think that saying that there's that, hey, here is this center-right kind of prime minister who says, no, no, no, no, these social gains have nothing to do with socialism.
00:20:03.000And you say, oh, well, he says it, right?
00:20:05.000So therefore, he must be speaking for Denmark as a whole, the Danish hive mind, I think is approximately equivalent to if the only two, you know, if you were from Denmark and the only two Americans you'd ever talk to were Bernie Sanders and me, and you said, well, here's what they say about what America is all about.
00:20:23.000Here's what they say about Social Security or the post office.
00:20:29.000I think if you look at how long socialist parties were in power in Denmark and how many of those programs came about under them, I would not say that these are societies that have achieved socialism.
00:20:40.000We could certainly talk about what that would mean to me.
00:20:43.000But I would say that these are societies where socialist parties allied with strong unions have brought about really beneficial social reforms as an effort to move farther in that direction.
00:21:02.000Because I think the biggest reason is that they have done something that I'm sure that you wouldn't support, which is nationalize their oil industry.
00:21:27.000I mean, look, I think ultimately we probably are better off transitioning to other energy sources.
00:21:32.000But if we're going to use oil, I would much rather that that oil be in the hands of the people, that it fund generous social programs like a Norway.
00:21:40.000And I often do kind of get a sense when conservatives say this.
00:21:43.000It's like, oh, well, there's really nothing socialist about it.
00:21:46.000They've just nationalized the oil industry and used the proceeds to fund all of these social programs.
00:21:52.000I mean, if that's not socialist, can we at least have that not socialist thing?
00:22:06.000And I just pinpoint it in particular because there tends to be this anti-fossil fuel development movement.
00:22:12.000It's something Norway and the United States have in common, is that we have a lot of oil.
00:22:16.000Now, if you want to, again, I know you've said you don't want to do this.
00:22:20.000Well, of course, I think the private ownership of minerals is a strategic advantage for the United States.
00:22:24.000But let me ask you about what I think is one of the reasons why I think the Scandinavian country's pursuit of egalitarianism looks good on paper.
00:22:34.000Now, this has changed in recent years because of a lot of the Syrian refugee crisis and more kind of left-wing governments taking over Sweden in particular.
00:22:42.000But Norway, for example, takes in about 70 immigrants a day, even with their more relaxed policies.
00:22:48.000America, much bigger country, albeit 2,740 legal immigrants, about 5,000 if you include the people going across the southern border.
00:22:58.000Do you, as being a Democrat socialist, do you support closed borders and strict immigration?
00:23:07.000One is that I think that all of the economic data that I've seen says that having more immigrants actually increases the amount of wealth that society has to go around.
00:23:19.000And the second is I would ask what the alternatives are, right?
00:23:24.000So we can do, you know, like those families that you talk about, right?
00:23:29.000You know, we can, you know, we can do things like separating, you know, separating families.
00:23:34.000We can do things like raiding churches To drag out immigrants.
00:23:40.000But I think we would really, really, really have to step up that by a factor of 100 to actually get rid of all the undocumented immigrants in the country.
00:23:52.000Whereas I think a much better solution, if what you're worried about is, hey, here are people coming in who, yeah, they definitely contribute to economic growth, but here are people coming in who are willing to work for low wages or whatever.
00:24:05.000I think a much better solution to that problem is for those people to have a pathway to citizenship so that they're not afraid to do things like join unions or they're not afraid to do things like take their employers to court when they violate labor laws.
00:24:21.000I think that's a much better solution to that problem than the sort of heavy-handed police state kinds of tactics, which I think would be the only way that you're actually going to resolve the status quo in the other direction.
00:24:35.000One of the things I like about Norway that you just said you don't like is to become a Norwegian citizen, you must speak the native language.
00:24:42.000You must have citizenship by birth is not applicable.
00:24:44.000And you must have lived in Norway for at least eight out of the past 11 years.
00:24:48.000And so maybe you can help clarify this for me, because the mascot you're wearing on your shirt has changed on this, whereas I would understand the position you're espousing more if you said, hey, we're going to close off the borders.
00:25:01.000We're going to take care of our fellow countrymen.
00:25:04.000We are going to reject these globalist institutions because Bernie Sanders used to say that.
00:25:08.000In 2013, Bernie Sanders said, it does not make sense to me to bring hundreds of thousands of those workers into this country to work for minimum wage and compete with American kids.
00:25:17.000Bernie Sanders said in 2007, six years prior, if poverty is increasing and if wages are going down, I don't know why we need millions of people to be coming into this country as guest workers.
00:25:28.000Well, I think that the main thing that changed is that the context of both of those quotes that you just read was not about whether there should be a pathway to citizenship.
00:25:38.000It was about the Bush administration's interest in 2007 and then later revivals of it in 2013, attempts to create a guest worker program, which I think you rightly compared to legalized slavery.
00:25:50.000A lot of immigrant rights groups were actually against those proposals for the same reasons because those are things that instead of giving people the rights of Americans so that they aren't afraid to do things like organize unions, those are things that would essentially just legalize the status quo.
00:26:05.000This is a second tier of workers who are not going to have those citizenship rights, who it's much easier to, you know, who you can kick out of the country if their employer decides they don't like them anymore.
00:26:17.000And I think that that is a completely different thing.
00:26:20.000I think it could also, so I think in that case, I think there's less of a contradiction there than you think.
00:26:25.000But hey, look, Bernie said, this isn't on my shirt because I think that the man is infallible.
00:26:32.000I could rattle off a list of things that he's gotten wrong over the years.
00:26:35.000But the reason he is, is that I think he's been the most important champion of doing things like raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, like giver to everybody health care, ending the wars, et cetera, that would actually really materially benefit the majority of the population.
00:26:53.000And I guess I really struggle when I hear conservatives being interested in the welfare of the working class, suddenly when it's this issue of competition from low-wage workers, which is a question of pitting some workers over other workers, but when it's a question of doing things that would benefit workers in general, like raising the minimum wage, like giving everybody health care, then suddenly it seems to be a different story.
00:27:17.000Suddenly it seems to be that this is too interventionist.
00:27:21.000I mean, kicking immigrants out seems like a big expansion of state power to me, too.
00:27:25.000Well, I want a small yet strong government, strong in what it does, and foreign citizens, not foreign citizens, sure, or illegals in the country, should be deported, should be taken out.
00:27:34.000And I think there's a cultural aspect to it that deep down you agree with, and that's what Norway gets right.
00:27:38.000They realize if you don't speak the language, you don't have a shared culture, then there's something that all of a sudden makes it less like a nation and more like a colony or more like a temporary place for corporations to make money.
00:28:09.000Another study from just Target, just because Target raised their wages abruptly in 2019, shows that workers say their hours were cut, leaving them struggling.
00:28:24.000The first couple first, because in Seattle, there have been a bunch of different studies, including one from UC Berkeley, I know, that have, I don't know which one was published by Jeff Bezos' newspaper that you're referring to there.
00:28:38.000But there was another study from UC Berkeley say that actually it had no effect on the employment rate in the restaurant industry and it achieved its goals.
00:28:46.000I know if you look at the Congressional Budget Office, which oftentimes people with your position love to cite, they said that if you raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and by the way, I thought it was interesting that you said abrupt because I'm interested in whether you'd be okay with it if you did it slowly.
00:29:02.000I think moderately kept up with inflation done prudently, especially as we're about to have a mass inflation.
00:29:09.000I think that coupled with a workers' tax cut and other pro-growth policies wouldn't be the worst thing for the economy.
00:29:19.000You know, like you still say the purchasing power of low-wage workers should be what it is now.
00:29:24.000And I would say that if you want to run this argument that, well, it's actually going to hurt, you know, that's actually going to hurt workers more than help them.
00:29:31.000I don't think the studies do show that.
00:29:36.000I mean, like, I understand what you say, that the studies, the studies show, some of the studies show that minimum wage increases lead to increased unemployment.
00:29:44.000That's the big claim that's usually made.
00:29:46.000Sometimes people will also say that it leads to a reduction in hours, but the big one is usually increased unemployment.
00:29:55.000First of all, the effect of minimum wage increases on employment is like the most studied thing in empirical economics in the last several decades.
00:30:04.000And there are studies you can find that say yes.
00:30:07.000There are a lot of studies that you can find that say no.
00:30:09.000And a word I almost never hear from people who say that it's going to lead to unemployment increases is meta-study, right?
00:30:17.000In other words, if you look at a bunch of studies over time and see like, you know, since you can have, you know, very small sample sizes and, you know, and making big conclusions from very small sample sizes is generally, and then like making a big deal about them in the press.
00:30:34.000That's how people end up believing that plants can think and coffee cures cancer, you know, that they looked at like some study with some super small sample size.
00:30:41.000But when you do the meta-study of a bunch of different studies, most of those show no.
00:30:47.000But let's say for the sake of argument, yes.
00:30:49.000Let's say that it does lead to some unemployment increase.
00:30:52.000Because you agree, certain studies do show that.
00:30:55.000I think most of them, and especially meta-studies over time, say no, but sure, let's say yes.
00:31:00.000So if yes, would that mean that it was going to hurt workers more than help them?
00:31:04.000Well, we could look at like the Congressional Budget Office, what they said in 2019, which was that two-thirds confidence that you'd have a range of unemployment effects somewhere in between zero and 3.7 million.
00:31:21.000And most likely they said 1.3 million people would lose their jobs.
00:31:28.000But they also said that 27 million people would keep the jobs that they have right now and be paid more and would have more purchasing power.
00:31:39.000And so we say, okay, we have 27 million people who are being lifted out of poverty by this.
00:31:44.000We have 1.3 billion people out of jobs.
00:31:47.000Now, even if there was nothing that you could do about that, I'd still say that treated this as a knockdown.
00:31:52.000Well, this is going to help poor people, working poor people more than it's hurt them more than it's going to help them.
00:31:58.000But also, I don't think we have to accept that those 1.3 million people, if that's the true estimate, have to be permanently out of the job.
00:32:05.000We could have public works programs that could employ those 1.3 million people, give them dignified public sector jobs.
00:32:15.000And if you don't think that there's plenty of work for those 1.3 million people to do in terms of federal public works, trust me, I could give you a long list of things that could be doing.
00:32:24.000Let me build out the study and then I want to ask you a question.
00:32:26.000So low-wage workers on average now clock 9% fewer hours, earn $125 less each month.
00:33:03.000Well, I think that, first of all, the first question you'd have to ask is what's the money that's going to be generated by that for those workers?
00:33:09.000Then the second question that you want to ask is what's going to be lost on the other end in terms of services if that's cut.
00:33:16.000And I think that paying people a higher minimum wage, having those 27 million people get a living wage income.
00:33:24.000I can give them a 7% wage increase tomorrow.
00:33:45.000I could name a whole litany of departments I think I would cut to try to pay for it.
00:33:49.000But let's pretend that it's paid for, like everything Washington, D.C. says.
00:33:53.000Yes, if you could cut workers' wages and not workers wages, this is the same thing.
00:33:58.000The taxes on workers' wages, if you could cut that and on the other end, there would be absolutely no loss in anything that's a beneficial thing that's going to make workers' lives better, then sure, why not?
00:34:11.000But I think you should still raise, I think you should still raise the minimum wage because I think, again, having those 27 million people now having a living wage, having the ripple effects for lots of people who are already making more than minimum wage, it's going to increase their wages.
00:34:28.000And then 1.3 million people need new jobs.
00:34:49.000Without having to abruptly raise the minimum wage.
00:34:51.000And the reason was, let me just finish, is an emphasis on entrepreneurship is this is an indicator that I don't hear talked about a lot, which is how many new businesses are being started.
00:35:00.000And when you raise the minimum wage, it's harder for the deli owner, the dry cleaner to enter into the market because all of a sudden the labor pool is like, man, $15 an hour, I could barely pay to keep the lights on.
00:35:11.000So if we want new business, and you agree, entrepreneurship is a good thing, right?
00:35:15.000I think it's good to have new businesses.
00:35:16.000I'd like more of them to be organized as worker cooperatives.
00:35:19.000We're going to talk about unions in the United States.
00:35:58.000But employment increases give workers more bargaining power in the labor market, and that's a good thing.
00:36:04.000But that's not really this new emphasis on entrepreneurship that Trump was doing.
00:36:08.000If you look at all the employment figures, whether you're looking at the overall civilian employment rate in the United States or whether you're breaking it down, black, white, Hispanic, whatever, all of those, you see the same trend, which is that in 2009, at the beginning of the Obama presidency, when the effects of the 2008 crash were really coming in, all of those were way up here.
00:36:35.000You have 10% unemployment over the course of the eight years of Obama.
00:36:40.000It goes from 10% to 4.7% overall civilian unemployment.
00:36:45.000And then sure, under the four years of Trump, we'll give him a pass for the COVID part, but under those years of Trump, then you go from 4.7 to 3.5.
00:36:57.000So that is a continuation at an overall slower rate, but a continuation of what had happened before.
00:37:04.000And the reason I'm bringing that up is not that I'm a big Obama guy.
00:37:33.000But I do want to finish the point because I think it's an important one, right?
00:37:37.000That it's not that I think Obama is great.
00:37:39.000It's that I think that if you're going to say the populist thing about Trump economics, even though this is a guy who appointed hardcore union busters to the National Labor Relations Board, this is a guy who tried to throw millions of people off of health care in terms of going against the Medicaid expansion.
00:38:02.000This is a guy who tried to make it a lot harder to qualify for food aid for those families you talked about.
00:38:07.000That the big populist thing is that he oversaw economic growth and hence job growth.
00:38:12.000Well, hey, if that's enough to be a populist, Barack Obama was a better populist than he was.
00:38:17.000And Bill Clinton was a big populist because he oversaw lots of economic what I am saying, though, is that it's mischaracterized that the people that you say you care about, the lower workers, actually did really well under those four years.
00:38:29.000I think Trump could have been more conservative, more populist in certain things.
00:38:32.000And just to clarify on the food stamp issue, millions of people got off of food stamps under Trump voluntarily because their wages went up.
00:38:40.000But I don't want to get too bogged down.
00:38:42.000I really don't want to get too bogged down on the street.
00:38:44.000Yeah, you had that extra one percentage change of unemployment going down, which is a continuation of previous trends.
00:38:51.000So let me kind of ask you more broadly.
00:38:53.000I guess we could go into some of these other aspects of the pressure.
00:38:55.000I have a question I'd love to ask you in a minute, by the way, but go for it.
00:38:58.000Yeah, you're free to do that too, by the way.
00:39:04.000Do I trust the government to to tell me the truth, to do things that, no, the government, by and large, that I think that those millionaires and billionaires, the guy in the shirt likes to talk about, exert vastly too much influence.
00:39:25.000But here's where I think people often go wrong from that true premise that the government is untrustworthy.
00:39:31.000I think premise is fine, but the conclusion, therefore we should have less government in the sense of we should have less expansive social services.
00:39:41.000We shouldn't give everybody health care.
00:39:43.000I think that that's a fundamental confusion because I think that there's a difference between talking about what the government can do to you.
00:39:52.000And there we're talking about police, ICE, you know, the expansion of the national security state and what the government has a legal obligation to do for you in terms of supporting what I would see as fundamental human rights like health care and education.
00:40:09.000Let me tell you where I think there's a flaw in this.
00:40:12.000And I really want you to talk about this.
00:40:20.000So then you get the CDC, you get the NIH, you get unregulated agencies that you as being someone who focuses on democracy, focuses on the power of the people.
00:40:28.000Where is the check and balance against the CDC, the NIH, HHS?
00:40:32.000For every government program, you need hundreds of thousands of desk workers, which is where the word bureaucrat comes from in French.
00:40:39.000So you say you don't trust the government, yet you support expanding the social services, which will then necessarily expand government.
00:40:46.000Why do you want to expand something you don't trust?
00:40:48.000Well, first of all, congratulations on the French vocabulary.
00:42:12.000That means-tested programs give power to bureaucrats.
00:42:16.000When you say you have to jump through all these poops to qualify for something, and there's some bureaucrat who gets to decide whether you get it or not, bureaucrats have more power.
00:42:26.000Whereas when you say this is a legal right that every single person has as a citizen, no Canadian is having a bureaucrat decide whether they qualify for health care.
00:42:36.000Or in Finland, you talked about all of the policies that, you know, in Norway that you thought would be an issue for me.
00:42:45.000Okay, I don't think it's because of this, but in Finland, where they don't even have private schools, and certainly you have a right to higher education as a citizen the way that the way that you have historically in lots of countries.
00:44:50.000If you're talking about administrative state bureaucracy, well, your example is Medicaid, which is a means-tested program.
00:44:58.000And even at that, even despite the means testing, which is the part that gives the bureaucrats their power, which is also the part I'm objecting to, even despite that, we're talking about bureaucracies.
00:45:09.000As I think you mentioned earlier, the government has no monopoly of bureaucracy.
00:45:12.000There's plenty of bureaucracies in the private sector.
00:45:16.000And if you want to know which programs have the smallest overhead, right?
00:45:22.000Even Medicaid, even despite the means testing, Medicaid, Medicare, all of those have much smaller administrative overhead than any of the private insurance companies because the private insurance companies, one, they have to plan out their strategy for competing with each other.
00:45:37.000And two, the private insurance companies have a vast bureaucracy that is dedicated to finding ways to deny people's claims because they've always got one eye on the bottom line for shareholders.
00:45:51.000And one question I'm very curious about, by the way, is, you know, you object for all of these reasons.
00:46:01.000You think it's too much administrative state to just providing everybody with health care.
00:46:05.000These are all elements of the critique.
00:46:07.000Providing people with health care is a human right so that you can have like what people I know in the UK always tell me, which is, hey, would I, you know, when whatever, my mom got cancer, when whatever the situation is, people will say, the only person I ever talked about this was with a doctor, which is very different from Americans' experience with healthcare.
00:46:25.000If you're going to object to that on the grounds that that's too much big government, I am really curious whether you'd say the same thing for like fire services.
00:46:36.000Like, would you be okay with it if we didn't have public fire services?
00:46:43.000The government exists, as it says in the preamble of the Constitution, amongst many other things, to secure the blessings of liberty, to ensure domestic tranquility.
00:46:50.000And Hamilton said it best that you need a nimble yet effective federal government, good at what it does, but not overreaching.
00:46:56.000And that's the whole idea of conservative populism is within this constitutional republic framework.
00:47:00.000I'm a big fan of firefighters, police officers.
00:47:05.000I'm a big fan of all these sort of things.
00:47:07.000But when all of a sudden I believe you get outside of the constitutional limits, is where you birth this fourth branch of government.
00:47:13.000And our mutual hatred of Woodrow Wilson is a perfect example of this because he really believed the state, this is a Hegelian idea, will usher in that utopia, that the state is God, that through the mechanisms of the state, we will be able to turn the chapter and with it, remake man.
00:47:28.000He wasn't the only person that believed that FDR did.
00:47:32.000Where we as conservatives and conservative populists say, hold on a second, that is not what the state is there to do for.
00:47:37.000Let me just say one last thing, which is that the state is there to preserve the natural law with prudence and wisdom to hopefully develop families and foster children, not to try to remake human beings.
00:47:47.000When it comes to health care, not only do I have a moral complaint that it's not the role of government, it's also not good at doing it.
00:47:54.000And it also hurts the everyday common man.
00:47:57.000I don't think either of those things are true.
00:47:59.000But I have a moral argument, and I also have utilitarian arguments.
00:48:01.000I just want to make sure that's the problem.
00:48:02.000Let's start with the moral argument because I am very unclear on this.
00:48:06.000Because why is it that having public firefighters or public police is not overreached, but having public health care is?
00:48:14.000Why would it be objectionable if instead of having public fire services that everybody gets to use, you had everybody just having to have private fire insurance?
00:48:24.000And if you had a better private fire insurance plan, they'd probably put out your fire faster.
00:48:30.000Or maybe we had public fire insurance, but only for people, the poorest people or the oldest people, which would be the exact equivalent for health care, or the same thing for policing, the equivalent for security insurance.
00:48:43.000Because all of these things seem very similar to me because having your house burned down, being victimized by a crime, or needing chemotherapy, those are all cases where your life and limb is in danger.
00:48:56.000Like these seem pretty parallel to me.
00:48:58.000What do you see as the big disanalogy?
00:49:00.000So the first problem is mostly local, police and fire, so therefore it's more accountable.
00:49:05.000So the dollars don't go to some sort of albatross to the kingdom of Washington, D.C., of unelected, unknown, kind of just unchecked bureaucrats.
00:49:35.000Where I start to all of a sudden say timeout, no-go, no-fly zone, is where I hear people like Bernie Sanders, and I'm paraphrasing, who want to get rid of private insurance as we know it.
00:50:10.000Do I think that a government-run system of health care that will be more similar to how the IRS or how the Postal Service works, that's somehow going to be the solution to that?
00:51:00.000Well, you need to talk to more people because like the post office is an amazing institution and it should be massively expanded.
00:51:06.000In fact, one of the best things I think they have in some of those Scandinavian countries is postal banking, which if we did that, Bernie Sanders' proposal would immediately put out of business all the payday loan vampires that prey on unbanked people, would create millions of new, good, unionized jobs.
00:51:31.000The post office lost hundreds of thousands of packages and was six months late.
00:51:35.000That's who you want to run our health care system?
00:51:37.000I think that, well, first of all, I think that if you actually have a fair look at the numbers, I think the Postal Service does do a really good job.
00:51:48.000I think that oftentimes when people say no, they are not using the same metrics to evaluate it, they'd use to evaluate everything else.
00:51:57.000But if you want to know something that would be very much like what Medicare for All would be like if we had it in the United States, then I'd say looking at delivery of packages is probably not what you want to do.
00:52:06.000What you probably want to look at is countries like Canada, where they already have Medicare for All, Great Britain, where they've gone further.
00:52:18.000Well, okay, but those are places where people live longer, where fewer of their babies die, where the rate of mortality of medical to health care is way better.
00:52:55.000Trust me, the city of Chicago can be equally, if not more corrupt than the Kingdom of Washington, D.C. Is it going to be more corrupt than the private insurance companies?
00:53:07.000And I really want to make sure we're doing that.
00:53:09.000That locally is generally better, but I'm not going to die on the Cook County as a greater case.
00:53:15.000This does go back to what you said earlier, though, when I asked you about fire protection, because you said, well, the difference is that nobody could be turned out for the hospital.
00:53:34.000That is a good government intervention to stop the private sector from doing what it would otherwise do and did otherwise do before that law was passed.
00:53:42.000But also, I would say, do the equivalent for the fire services, that the only people who get it without having to pay at the point of service are the poorest people, are the oldest people.
00:53:56.000Everybody else has to rely on private fire insurance, which varies wildly in quality.
00:54:03.000And if you don't have private fire insurance, you're not poor enough to qualify for the means-tested bureaucrat-enabling system for poor people, and you're not old enough for the other one, and you end up having to have the fire department come and save you anyway, then you have a giant bill that's going to bankrupt you.
00:54:21.000Do you think that sounds like a fair system?
00:54:39.000I have no sort of interest to exercise or eat well.
00:54:43.000Why all of a sudden should that person be put into the same exact level of care of someone that has saved money and taken care of their health?
00:54:52.000Why should someone who's 800 pounds overweight be given in this sort of realm?
00:54:57.000Why should human agency and choice have zero emphasis on what you're what you're describing?
00:55:02.000The only difference between that and what already exists in the United States is that we would have to add, and they're rich enough that they can afford really high-quality medical care.
00:55:14.000Right now, somebody who's 800 pounds, who doesn't watch their diet, who chain smokes, et cetera.
00:55:25.000You think that's not actually given a preference?
00:55:27.000Well, here's what I'm saying: that I think the system that we have right now, somebody who checks every single one of those boxes, but is rich enough to afford the best medical care skips in line ahead of the person who takes care of their health, exercises every day, doesn't smoke, eats well, but lost their job or just is cobbling together four part-time jobs like so many Americans are and thus doesn't have employees.
00:56:38.000Because what I said is that I don't want some people to have dramatically worse lives than others because of factors outside of their control.
00:56:49.000If we lived in a world where all economic inequality was due to thrift versus indolence or laziness versus industriousness, I would have much less objection to this stuff that I do in the world where we actually live,
00:57:05.000where somebody who saved up their whole lives, but then they have unexpected medical expenses that bankrupt them, which happens all the time, that they have, you know, is going to get worse health care than somebody who has never saved at all.
00:57:25.000But as somebody like, you know, if somebody like if Hunter Biden had some massive medical bill tomorrow.
00:57:33.000He would probably have, I mean, yeah, considering his lifestyle.
00:57:38.000So if Hunter Biden had that huge medical bill tomorrow, then he would get in line ahead of people for multiple reasons, both access to power and also money.
00:58:05.000When you go to the hospital or you go to buy insurance, they don't ask you, did this money come from being thrifty and saving your whole life?
01:00:08.000Let me tell you, I say, I guess, conditionally, if all of a sudden there would be a comparable piece of legislation alongside of it that would actually value and prioritize things I cared about.
01:00:17.000If it was just to raise his taxes to go into the current albatross of the administrative state, I'd rather have him buy spaceships than give money to founders.
01:00:24.000But if it was earmarked for a housing for homeless veterans and you would say yes to the money.
01:00:29.000The answer is yes, because I think Jeff Bezos from it from a million years ago.
01:01:03.000My view of Karl Marx is pretty positive.
01:01:08.000I think that you can certainly find things like anybody who's writing the mid-19th century that, you know, if there's nothing that you think he's wrong about 100, you know, whatever, 150 years later, then like something has gone very wrong, right?
01:01:23.000You know, there should be ways that you can say, no, this part no longer makes sense.
01:01:55.000I think there's a big difference there.
01:01:56.000He was the head of the young Hegelians.
01:01:59.000Well, he started out as a Hegelian, and then he rejected it in favor of what in some ways structurally is similar, but in some ways is the opposite because it's based on materialism.
01:02:11.000But here's what I do think when we talk about Marx, because I think that there's an interesting thing that happens here.
01:02:16.000That when people talk about Marx, they tend to say, well, any dictator who existed in the 20th century who claimed to be inspired by Marx, people who were born decades after he died, that discredits everything that Marx said.
01:02:32.000But then when we're talking about a philosopher like John Locke, who a lot of...
01:02:40.000But then like John Locke, you know, the man both philosophically justified and was personally involved in the slave trade, given his role, you know, formulating the Constitution of the South Carolina colony, the man philosophically justified the genocidal dispossession of Native Americans.
01:03:01.000Because like his view is they don't really have property rights because they're not using the land properly.
01:03:09.000And so they haven't mixed their labor with it in the right way to establish a right to it.
01:03:14.000Whereas not only did Marx never not praise any dictatorships that were alive, you know, when he was alive, his model for what he thought a transition to socialism would look like was the Paris Commune, which was ultra-democratic.
01:03:27.000And the only head of state anywhere in the world who he liked enough to send a friendly telegram to was the democratically elected Abraham Lincoln, who he liked for anti-slavery reasons.
01:03:36.000So there's a lot of things I want to get into.
01:04:27.000I think the only really honest thing you can say about it is what David Humbes says in his essay on the afterlife when he says that it would be really hard to sort out who deserved to go to heaven and who goes to hell because most of us float somewhere between vice and virtue.
01:04:40.000But what I think is that almost everybody gets the relationship between the human nature issue and the capitalism and socialism issue exactly wrong.
01:05:06.000This gets back to the distinction between the things that government could do to you, like break up families and deport people, and the things that government is under a legal obligation to do for you.
01:05:18.000Do you really think that government has the ability to restrain itself from saying, you know, this is what I can do, what we can do for you?
01:05:26.000You think government can have this dividing line between benevolence and malevolence?
01:05:30.000You don't think the government could restrain itself?
01:05:31.000I thought you were all about limited government.
01:05:56.000So I think that might be the first thing.
01:05:57.000What I'm saying is once you introduce that power, it will be abused.
01:06:00.000Other than your hatred of Jeff Bezos and Hunter Biden, I think the first thing we've agreed on tonight is that we shouldn't have domestic spy agencies.
01:06:34.000Well, I don't think you should attack the Postal Service.
01:06:37.000I think that it's been a tremendous economic benefit to many millions of Americans.
01:06:43.000We don't have to have a stay bogged down on that.
01:06:46.000But I do think, but on the philosophical question, that's where you want to go.
01:06:49.000I think that the more you're worried that one person given too much power over another is going to treat that other like a little kid might treat a fly trapped in a jar, the more what you should want in both politics and the economy is to have power be spread as evenly as possible.
01:07:05.000So earlier, and I want to make sure I'm addressing this because I wouldn't want anybody to think I was avoiding the subject.
01:07:11.000Earlier you were saying that I was like hiding my radicalism by talking about the things that we could do immediately, which is, I've got to say, a little bit funny because I do spend a lot of time writing about the more radical long-term.
01:07:24.000Like banning private beaches and letting in the entire country of Afghanistan.
01:07:27.000Yeah, I think that the, well, first of all, I don't think the entire country of Afghanistan wants to come.
01:07:31.000I think a lot of the entire country of Afghanistan.
01:07:52.000I don't think I'm afraid to talk about it.
01:07:54.000But I think that when you talk about the really radical long-term goals, you say a lot of times you like to just talk about the value of markets.
01:08:07.000They have a, I think that if that if what you're concerned with is coordinating production of consumer goods with what people want, I think markets are good at that.
01:08:15.000I think that there's a difference between markets in consumer goods and the labor market.
01:08:23.000And I think the difference is that the labor market, you know, people's need for a job and people's need to keep the job they have is vastly less elastic than their need for a given consumer good because it's much harder for people to replace a job than to just start consuming one thing than another thing.
01:08:44.000And I think that the workplace is really a site of authoritarianism.
01:08:48.000And so, sure, do we need some markets?
01:08:51.000I think that there are domains in which we've proven empirically, like I would argue healthcare, we were going back and forth on that earlier, that taking those things out of the market could actually be much better.
01:09:03.000But are there domains you need markets in?
01:09:05.000I would say that for those domains that you need markets in, you can at least have those markets be worker-controlled firms.
01:09:14.000So I think that like if you look at Mondragon in Spain, you know, employ, you know, 80,000 people, extremely successful company, does lots of research and development stuff and is worker-owned.
01:09:29.000They're like the equivalent of a union contract, but with no separate boss on the other side of the bargaining table.
01:09:34.000And so if you say, should we have as a goal of government policy that the private sector be more like Mondragon or should it be more like Amazon or Walmart?
01:09:43.000I'd say it should be more like Mondragon.
01:09:45.000And one reason I think that is precisely that the more you worry that human nature is selfish and cruel, the less power you should want one person to have over another in the workplace or in society as a whole, which is why I want democracy in both cases.
01:10:00.000So first of all, we have, I understand the argument of employers, employers, employees owning companies.
01:10:37.000So the best way to distribute power evenly, in the opinion of a conservative, would be first and foremost to empower the family and to allow not just workers, but entrepreneurs to create new companies and allow workers to be able to have abundant choices in the workforce or in the workplace.
01:10:55.000The best competition, the best way to empower people is choice, is competition, is not to say that we are now going to mandate that you need some sort of labor designation on your board.
01:11:07.000I'll give you an example, which is that if you have a very specific skill and you work for Ford, right now, Ford Motor Company, you have to be unionized to work for the United Auto Workers, right?
01:11:18.000Whereas if you had more competition, then maybe there might be non-labor there.
01:11:23.000So this is what always confuses me about that point, because I hear conservatives saying this all the time, that if there's a union contract in place that says that to be hired for this job, you have to be a member of the union or really is usually you have to either be a member of the union or pay an agency fee, but whatever.
01:11:39.000We can just say be a member of the union.
01:11:41.000That if you have that, that this is an unfreedom, that workers are being forced to do something against their will.
01:11:47.000But what confuses me about that is that any condition for hiring, you could say, is forcing workers to do something against their will, because obviously there's this wildly unequal bargaining power.
01:11:58.000Workers need the job way more than a company usually.
01:12:01.000I think you're misrepresenting any given business.
01:12:04.000Any given worker, that's, by and large, it's much easier to replace a worker than it is for a worker to replace a job.
01:12:12.000And given that, sure, I agree that anytime you make something, you can only have this job or you can only keep this job if you do X, that's a case where you're limiting people's freedom.
01:12:23.000But if you really go with that principle, then that should go for everything at a job.
01:12:29.000And I would say out of all the things that people are forced to do for certain jobs, the one that's least objectionable is you have to have this thing that actually protects, makes it harder to fire you, that helps you keep more of the wealth you generate for the company in your pocket, that gives you some sort of say because you get to vote in a union contract.
01:12:50.000That's way less objectionable than all the other stuff you're forced to do to have a job.
01:13:32.000The word I used was authoritarianism, not exploitation, but I'd be happy to talk about it.
01:13:36.000But let's say, do you think that a majority of workers, to use your terms, are living under a workplace autocrat or form of such right now in America?
01:15:06.000Millions of people start new businesses every year in our country.
01:15:09.000That's completely consistent with this.
01:15:11.000The reason that most that people don't all have an equal ability to take the risk is that what would be risked is very different depending on your initial financial situation.
01:15:21.000No, but there's plenty of people that...
01:15:26.000Equal ability meaning this, meaning that do you have the freedom to do that?
01:15:30.000Do you have the willingness to lever yourself up, to go to the bank and say, you know what?
01:15:33.000I want to take out a second mortgage on my home, and I'm going to go start some sort of shoe company on the side of the street.
01:15:40.000But then all of a sudden you're saying that the five people that are working in that cobbler store are being oppressed by the guy that might have gone two years up paying himself just to be able to start that small business.
01:15:50.000And so here's where I'm starting to just like.
01:15:53.000So I wish you'd give a little more appreciation.
01:15:56.000I would like to separate a couple of issues.
01:15:59.000I would like to separate a couple issues here because I think a lot of different things are being run together.
01:16:03.000First of all, on the subject of whether everybody has the equal ability to take entrepreneurial risk, I think that it's really interesting that in your example, you said, oh, you can take out a second mortgage on your home.
01:16:18.000That you own a home and your finances are generally good enough that that would be approved, which obviously is a situation that tens of millions of Americans are not in.
01:16:31.000So I think we're coming to a good disagreement.
01:16:33.000But also, I would say that when you talk about entrepreneurial risk, you say, well, it's not reasonable to say that workplaces where the people who are making decisions don't have any sort of democratic accountability to the overall workforce, that that's not authoritarian because people, you know, in some cases, certainly not all cases, got in that position by taking entrepreneurial risk.
01:16:58.000I think that there are two different issues that are being conflated there, which is one, is it authoritarian, right?
01:17:03.000And that's just a question of what's the structure of the firm.
01:17:06.000And the second, is it a job voluntarily?
01:17:09.000They weren't stormed out of the house and put a gun to their head and say, now you must go work for Home Depot.
01:17:14.000They showed up and filled out a job application and wanted and hoped to get the job.
01:17:20.000So are there examples where that is the case where they're not going to be able to do that?
01:17:23.000I noticed that everything that you just said applies to agreeing to work at a company that's a closed shop.
01:17:29.000And so your contract specifies that you have to join the union.
01:17:32.000Nobody forced them at gunpoint to go apply for that job at a closed shop, that they could, if they want to find an open shop where they don't have to join a union, good luck to them.
01:17:43.000No, I agree with that, that you can go work for a non-union shop, but you cannot be a public sector teacher in the state of California without being part of the national education system.
01:17:53.000But you just said public sector teacher.
01:17:56.000You could be a private sector teacher.
01:18:59.000And they also have very strict immigration.
01:19:02.000Well, I don't think that's why, but I think that you have, but I think that you are going to get a better quality of education when people are less precarious, they can really commit to it.
01:19:13.000They have a, you know, they're getting paid more, so you're going to attract better applicants.
01:19:20.000And also, I think that the teachers count too.
01:19:22.000I think that teachers deserve to have those things, and I'm all in favor of it.
01:19:28.000But the larger point was if you're going to say that something isn't, something isn't unfree or autocratic forcing you at gunpoint to do it, then that should apply just as much to your objections to contracts that make people join unions.
01:19:45.000I'm going to talk about unions in circles, where I think if you want to join a union, fine, go ahead.
01:19:50.000Public sector unions are not given that sort of choice.
01:19:53.000And by the way, FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, warned us about public sector unions.
01:19:57.000He said all government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into public service.
01:20:05.000He warned about the public sector union differentiation between private sector union differentiation.
01:20:10.000But I want to zero in on this because I think we have a really interesting point philosophically.
01:20:14.000Do you think if someone takes a risk in America, they should be able to keep the reward?
01:20:22.000I mean, like the only way you could think entirely is if you were an anarchist and you didn't think that we should.
01:20:27.000But what are the limitations on that then?
01:20:29.000I mean, again, I think that the question that you want to ask, if the question is, is some transfer of wealth justified?
01:20:36.000Because I think that's the real question, right?
01:20:38.000When are transfers of wealth justified?
01:20:40.000You know, and it's, and I think that you need to go back to what are the principles that justify what you think a distribution of wealth in the first place should be.
01:20:50.000Now, you could think that whatever kind of distribution you get, letting the chips fall where they may in a free market, that that's what's justified.
01:21:00.000I think that the distribution of wealth that we have, and I think taxation and redistribution, even in the sort of market socialist system that I was advocated earlier, I think you'd still need those things.
01:21:10.000But I think that the distribution of wealth that's justified is the one that would emerge from a social contract that people would agree to under certain circumstances.
01:21:22.000So I guess it all comes down to numbers, I guess.
01:21:27.000Well, no, I mean, that's this isn't a claim about numbers.
01:21:30.000This is a claim about basic moral principles.
01:21:34.000I think that the question is, if you were the best version of something like contract theory, if you were behind John Rawls' veil of ignorance.
01:21:45.000I mean, of course you totally reject it.
01:21:47.000I'm happy to get into the Rawlsian theory of justice.
01:21:50.000I don't believe any of the things that you believed if you didn't reject it.
01:21:53.000But I actually, I'm going to ask you about the veil of ignorance.
01:21:56.000But if you're asking about what I think, I don't think that there's some magic number that, like, oh, you can tax up to this, you can't tax up to that.
01:22:04.000I think that if you want to know whether a tax system is just, generally a system of how property works is just, you should ask, if you knew that you had to live in the society, but you didn't know who you're going to be in the society, would you agree to it?
01:22:18.000And the same way that if you didn't know whether you're going to be black or white, you wouldn't agree to racial discrimination being part of the rules of your society.
01:22:25.000If you didn't know whether you're going to be born into a poor family or a rich one, if you didn't know whether you'd have the particular skills to help you climb up the educational or career ladders of the professional managerial class, if you didn't know any of those things, how would you want the rules of society to work?
01:22:41.000And I think that's going to be the answer that's going to tell you when redistribution of wealth is justified.
01:22:47.000I would want the rules of society to value action over favoritism, hard work over complacency, family creation over licentiousness, right?
01:23:15.000If you have a basic value to industriousness, if you have a basic objection to people getting things that you don't work for, here are two things that you should be against.
01:23:44.000Oh, no, no, no, You know, the straw man that people usually trot out at this point in the argument is they say, oh, when you say workers are creating wealth, you're saying that there's a one-to-one how hard you work, you know, to how much wealth is created.
01:23:58.000And of course, there are a million other factors that decide it.
01:24:01.000But everything that's being done, whether you're talking about ideas, which by the way, big companies, that's going to be workers in the R ⁇ D department, much more than CEOs in most of those cases, or whether you're talking about who is making the products, who is selling the products, those are the people who are creating it.
01:24:23.000And I would say, if you want to say that the only incentive that you can get, that you cannot have a thriving dynamic economy without people being able to leave billions of dollars to their descendants, then I would say that it's very confusing, first of all, that even within traditional capitalist companies, you have plenty of childless people who are motivated to do that.
01:24:46.000But secondly, that you have cases like Mondragon, that you have very economically effective worker cooperatives.
01:24:55.000Nobody is creating some giant pile of wealth that they'll be able to pass on to their descendants, but people are still motivated to work, and these companies could still be very successful.
01:25:08.000And look, you might be able to get me to agree on like 500 million, a billion.
01:25:12.000But again, the reason I wouldn't agree with it.
01:25:16.000But like, you should be able to pass it.
01:25:17.000But the reason I don't agree with it is that where is it going to go?
01:25:20.000To go find, but go fund some spy agency so that you could go spy on Americans through some private future.
01:25:27.000The point is that if you want to say abolish the spy agency, every time that there's this, like, would you raise tax to do this?
01:25:34.000The default answer is no, because we're funding every, like that money would then be transferred away from some private utility to something that I consider to be a government that is doing a lot of harm and very little good.
01:25:44.000And so, but I guess there's this question of wealth being created and we're kind of that's a really interesting objection.
01:25:51.000But if you would say, hey, it goes to charity instead of the IRS, then I might be able to agree at that, which is what we're doing at this debate, by the way, which goes that, you know, this is so great.
01:25:58.000I do have a question for you, actually, as a sidebar.
01:26:00.000Why is it when you challenge me to debate, why didn't you say that all the proceeds would go to the IRS and to a private charity?
01:26:30.000I do not think that private charity can be a substitute for collective government action.
01:26:36.000The empirical track record is very clear that you're not going to get private charity that's going to be as effective.
01:26:44.000So for example, and we also need to talk about what we mean by effective here, because this is a really crucial point.
01:26:50.000So there are a few different questions.
01:26:52.000One, are you going to get, like, is there some amount of private charity that you could give for medical expenses that's going to get you to a point where our rate of mortality amenable to health care is as low as it is in Canada or the UK?
01:27:08.000I think that the, I think we've got to run that experiment.
01:27:10.000Second point is part of what I mean by effective is giving people freedom and a dignified life in ways that they don't have if they're worried about quitting jobs they hate because they'll lose their health insurance or if they're doing things like starting GoFundMes to buy their insulin, which means that they have to craft, do you have enough of a tear jerker story that you'll stand out from the other 10,000 GoFundMes?
01:27:36.000I think people have far more dignity if they just get these things as rights just by virtue of being part of a society.
01:27:44.000Yeah, that's where we're going to totally disagree.
01:27:46.000Where that private charity not only involves themselves in the person life to hopefully be able to break them out of their economic circumstances, I would argue it's much more efficient in a variety of different ways.
01:28:01.000The $500 billion Americans give the charity every single year, I would argue, does a far better job of offering a social safety net than the multi-trillions of dollars that we spend on social welfare.
01:28:14.000How about the $500 billion we spend on charity?
01:28:17.000Take the part of it that's spent, for example, on health care and compare that to comparable, you know, economically comparable countries where health care is provided as a right to everybody outside of the market.
01:28:31.000America, where you have to, you know, if you don't have health insurance and you don't qualify, you know, for Medicaid or Medicare, you have to beg on GoFundMe or countries like Canada and the UK, which it seems like by all the obvious metrics, who lives longer, who has a lower rate of infant mortality, who has a lower rate of mortality amedable to health care, all of those obvious metrics, it seems like those government health care programs do way better.
01:28:57.000You won't hear me bragging on many aspects of the American healthcare system.
01:29:00.000Many of it is very cronyistic and corrupt, but to say we're not spending government money on it is just not.
01:29:05.000Well, did I say that we're not going to be able to do it?
01:29:14.000I think it would actually be vastly more efficient if you look at how much is being spent for what results.
01:29:21.000I don't think there's any question that Canada, the UK are getting way more bang for their buck in terms of government spending on healthcare.
01:29:36.000So where would medical innovation come from?
01:29:39.000Well, medical innovation would come from exactly where it comes from right now, which is mostly the public sector.
01:29:44.000If you look at pharmaceuticals, and this is really good, I really like this argument because this is something people often trot out in defense of private health insurance.
01:29:53.000Well, you need that, so you have these incentives to develop pharmaceuticals.
01:30:02.000You know, new molecular entities, you know, which are genuinely new drugs, not just you tweak it a little bit and you slap your corporate brand on it.
01:30:09.00075% of those are developed already in government-funded labs.
01:30:14.000I think this idea that there's a lot of private innovation in there, I think is at the very least wildly overstated.
01:30:22.000I think that you can absolutely have healthcare innovation without it being the case that within hospitals or when people need to pay for treatment, you have this element of private profit, which I think has been a disaster in the healthcare system.
01:30:37.000Do you think there's a reason why America has the highest quality health care?
01:30:41.000Not for the most amount of people, but the highest quality health care in the world?
01:30:51.000I mean, if something is that if you can skip to the head of the line by having enough money, then absolutely, you can get world-class health care.
01:31:04.000But the question I'm interested in is not, are well-off people who are really well-offed.
01:31:12.000Well, okay, but the question I'm interested in is not, are they going to have better health care than the average person in Canada or the UK?
01:31:21.000What I'm interested in is: is the average person in the United States going to have a better experience with the health care system and have better health care outcomes than those other systems deliver?
01:31:33.000The question is then, how do you get something that a few people have to have a lot of people have?
01:31:37.000More government intervention or market forces applied that allow things to be cheaper and faster delivered and better delivered.
01:31:44.000Market forces do a better job for that all the time.
01:31:46.000Whether it be in technology, I think that there's a structural reason why market forces are not going to be as effective in healthcare as they are going to be in many other areas.
01:31:56.000And that structural reason is not some special radical Marxist thing that I think.
01:32:01.000That structural reason is something that you'll find in your wildly pro-capitalist, neoclassical Econ 101 textbook, which is that supply and demand are going to do a much better job of shaping things in the direction of consumer preferences for things that are pretty elastic.
01:32:18.000You drive past one gas station, you see, ah, that looks a little bit too expensive.
01:32:23.000You drive a few blocks more, you get to another gas station.
01:32:26.000Those market forces are going to do a much better job of delivering for the consumer there than in cases like health insurance, which is wildly inelastic.
01:32:35.000For one thing, if you need heart surgery, you will pay any amount that is in your power to get it for the same reason that if we didn't have, I'm sorry, public fire services.
01:32:46.000It was just like in ancient Rome where like Crassus would go around with slaves with buckets of water and offer to buy people's homes for his prior service fan out.
01:32:58.000Yeah, people are going to sell for whatever price you're going to pay in those circumstances.
01:33:00.000People are going to pay whatever you're demanding to get heart surgery.
01:33:04.000And even when it comes to less dramatic uses of the health insurance system, like just let's say all you need from the healthcare system is once every 90 days, you need your doctor to sign off on some prescription you've been on for 10 years.
01:33:16.000It's still a giant stressful pain to switch providers that, you know, you'd have to find something.
01:33:23.000I'm not defending every detail of the American system.
01:33:26.000But the point isn't about the details.
01:33:27.000The point is that this is a structural reason that our demand for health care is way less elastic than our demand.
01:33:33.000I think there are other consumer American health care systems.
01:33:36.000Which means that market forces are going to be less than 100%.
01:33:41.000We have an oligarchy of the hospitals.
01:33:43.000We don't have health savings accounts in most states.
01:33:47.000We don't allow health insurance across state lines.
01:33:49.000Now, while I agree that there is this, that at times there can be externalities of where the profit motive is not a perfect fit, where it's like, oh, I want to go buy a t-shirt.
01:34:02.000Where the charts and the graphs can't explain all of that.
01:34:05.000Generally, the best fit line, though, of market principles can help for the vast majority of things that are not in that 10% category of life-saving treatments.
01:34:13.000Because, and you know this, the vast majority of people going to the doctor are not like, I have a gunshot wound, I've leukemia.
01:34:20.000Well, I know, but market forces in those cases, you could agree, could be very, very instructive and very helpful.
01:34:26.000Well, I think empowering the consumer and price transparency and bringing down prices.
01:34:30.000So, I think that here are the things that we know.
01:34:33.000That as a matter of fact, market forces are right now, we could argue about the diagnosis, but right now, you know, they are creating lousy outcomes.
01:34:45.000But I would argue in the American healthcare system we hardly have market forces in most healthcare.
01:34:50.000Like, most hospitals are nonprofit government-run agencies.
01:34:55.000Like, when you say that, that they have all I can think is this sounds like nothing so much as some ultra-leftists saying, well, look, sure, Soviet economic planning had a lot of problems, but that's because it wasn't communist enough.
01:35:11.000Because if we look at the systems that actually exist, then the United States has one of the most marketized healthcare systems in the entire world.
01:35:19.000And certainly relative to developed rich countries, we have some of the worst outcomes.
01:35:25.000And if you want to say, well, if we made it even marketized, more marketized, we would actually have better outcomes than all of the systems that are socialized.
01:35:56.000They don't even know what price anything is.
01:35:58.000And so that's just an example of how hospitals and being kind of this oligopoly of nonprofit profit mixture, which is incredibly corrupt, that they are hiding behind this idea to not empower the consumer.
01:36:11.000What I'm saying, and I think there's some middle ground here, that we want to empower patients to know, like, wait a second, you're going to charge me $45 for a Tylenol?
01:36:30.000Put that alongside the progress of the business.
01:36:32.000Hunter Biden, Jeff Bezos, and price transparency, right?
01:36:35.000So I don't want to spend all of our time on that.
01:36:38.000But let me just say one of the things that we're going to do.
01:36:38.000There's so much more I want to get to that.
01:36:40.000Sure, but let me say one last thing about that.
01:36:42.000What would be even better than having transparency on what you're paying for things that you badly need, which doesn't have to be as dramatic as a gunshot would.
01:36:52.000Insulin is something that people badly need.
01:36:55.000Psychiatric medication is often something people badly need.
01:36:58.000And if they get off it without proper medical circumstances, that's going to be a disaster for them.
01:37:05.000That what would be even better than price transparency is not treating those things as commodities.
01:37:10.000And if we look at the systems in the world today, the ones that seem to do a lot better at the very least go much further.
01:37:49.000But the question is always, if there's a limit, what is the principle that you use to decide what would you say that is the youngest?
01:37:58.000And I would say that absolutely the worst way to do it is for it to be made not by doctors making decisions about, okay, what do we think is going to pay off realistically?
01:38:11.000How long can we keep this person alive versus any of those things?
01:38:15.000The worst way to do it is to ration it by money, which is what we do.
01:38:19.000So, what I think about Canadian waiting lines is there is some truth to it.
01:38:31.000But there are some things that you have longer waiting times for.
01:38:34.000But I think one, that part of the reason you have longer waiting times is that more people are in line.
01:38:40.000We don't exclude people from the line because they can't afford it.
01:38:44.000And I think as a matter of basic human rights, that's good not to exclude people from the line.
01:38:48.000And two, if the reason we're worried about it is because we think that people will die waiting, I think we can look at all those statistics comparatively between the United States and Canada.
01:38:57.000And I know a lot of people want to say that all of that's just lifestyle stuff.
01:39:02.000But I grew up right by the Canadian border in Michigan.
01:40:21.000So I think that I would say two things about that.
01:40:26.000So the first is that if you actually look at surveys of people, and sometimes defenders of private health insurance love to do that because they say, hey, look at these surveys where most people say they're happy with their health insurance.
01:40:38.000I think that's very unclear what that means.
01:40:40.000Or do you think, does that mean that you're happier with it than you would be with not having to pay for it and actually saving money like most people would with Medicare for All, even according to the Mercatus Institute?
01:40:49.000But like the people who are most likely to say that they're happy with it are seniors on Medicare and veterans and active duty military personnel who are the ones who are living under the British system.
01:41:00.000But are there cases where people have to wait way too long for certainly like psychiatric care for me?
01:41:08.000I'm not sure if that's the same thing.
01:41:11.000But I think that I think unfortunately there's a cycle sometimes where conservatives are successful in getting funding for things cut or certainly not increased the way it should be.
01:41:21.000And then they use the results of that to undermine it.
01:41:25.000But I think one big difference, if you accept for the sake of argument, that despite those surveys that I just gave, that overall it's way worse, then the question is, what's the difference between the NHS in Britain and the VA?
01:41:38.000And I think that the biggest difference, why the NHS has all these great outcomes, certainly compared to the U.S. healthcare system, I think the difference is that the NHS is for everybody.
01:41:48.000Only a small minority of Americans are veterans.
01:41:51.000So what goes on in the VA is not really something that's on most people's radar most of the time.
01:42:18.000But I think the question is, why, let's accept that, right?
01:42:23.000Like, I'm certainly not going to pretend like I have a bunch of stats that are memorized.
01:42:27.000Yeah, and even if Atlanta, the Emory Hospital is way better on county.
01:42:33.000And I could say for personal experience, it's just the Emory Hospital is far superior to just county.
01:42:37.000But here's what I think is the more relevant point of comparison.
01:42:40.000Not when it's a municipality which is often cash-starved in general, and it's going to be, I think, actually much less efficient than doing it.
01:42:53.000But why is it then that you think that in Britain or in some Scandinavian countries where most hospitals are publicly owned, their health care outcomes are so much better?
01:43:04.000I have my own personal opinions of it.
01:43:06.000Not every healthcare outcome is better.
01:43:08.000We have a higher cancer survivability rate for certain sort of treatments.
01:43:12.000We have a higher quality of care for certain people.
01:43:14.000There are some people that conjecture in the healthcare field, it could be because of many different underlying health conditions of how obese America is, where we are more obese than these other comparable countries, also our diet, nutrition.
01:43:27.000But it's going to be difficult to kind of pinpoint a cause.
01:43:30.000If your argument is it's because that they're run the government is running it, I reject the argument simply and totally because I know the government runs almost nothing efficiently and correctly.
01:43:39.000But I guess that's that's the crux of the argument that you're saying that seems to be that you're trying to sell me that in a multivariate analysis, you put all those other things aside.
01:43:47.000Oh, it's because some guys on government.
01:43:50.000We just went through a detailed detailed argument about why this is a more plausible explanation.
01:43:56.000Now, it's fine to be not convinced by that argument, but I think describing it as, oh, I'm just dismissing everything else rather than giving you reasons why those explanations make a lot less sense.
01:44:07.000I mean, what is the biggest difference between the U.S. and Canada?
01:44:10.000What's the biggest difference between the United States and the United Kingdom?
01:44:23.000Or actually, yeah, a little bit more, but if you look at it, I don't think it's dramatic enough to make this the big distinction.
01:44:31.000And also, I think the healthcare outcomes where you think they, you know, I mean, look, 36% obesity is worse than 30% obesity, but I don't think that's going to explain everything we're talking about.
01:44:49.000If you want to think, if I want to go to the final thing that we'll agree on with this, the biggest difference is I think the praying pharmaceutical companies in our country.
01:44:57.000Well, that is certainly one of the things.
01:44:59.000But let's put the hospital thing aside and delivery of care and all that stuff.
01:45:05.000I think pharmaceutical companies, and so I'm just going to say this because I think it actually is the best argument to say that market principles, and I would have made this argument if I were you, but you didn't.
01:45:17.000I would just say that if you're Pfizer, the money is in the middle of keeping someone not healed, but keeping back as an annuity to keep buying your drug, right?
01:45:26.000And this comes as someone who can't stand the major pharmaceutical companies that tries to be more homeopathic and kind of solutions and all of this, where, not conservatives don't talk about that enough.
01:45:36.000If there was a difference, I would say that AstraZeneca, I don't even know if AstraZeneca is an American company.
01:45:41.000But Johnson ⁇ Johnson, Pfizer, and BioINTEC, which was an originally Israeli company.
01:45:45.000Yeah, but those are the vaccine manufacturers.
01:45:49.000Which, by the way, is a perfect example of what I'm talking about with the pharmaceutical companies because most of that research was government-funded.
01:45:55.000Which might have had questionable outcomes.
01:46:21.000But again, I'm not a defense lawyer for the American healthcare system.
01:46:25.000Singapore's healthcare system is like Obamacare.
01:46:27.000But trying to convince the American public, what you're trying to do is say, hey, let's nationalize the hospitals, nationalize the private industry, private insurance, which is what you eventually want to get to do, is obviously done in a rival with me.
01:46:39.000And I think a majority of Americans, for a good reason.
01:46:41.000Sure, but what I was going to say was those metrics where you say that we do better are things that I think a big part of the reason that we're going to do better on those is those aren't about overall outcomes for everybody.
01:46:52.000They're about specific kinds of services that not everybody's going to get in the first place.
01:46:57.000And that goes back to what we were saying earlier: that sure, if you can afford it, absolutely.
01:47:03.000The final thing I'll say, because I want to get on these other topics, is we know how to get things cheaper and better, and that's usually market forces with some externalities being handled.
01:47:31.000But I think that's because it hurts the family.
01:47:35.000All right, so I want to get to this next thing because we can keep on going in circles about all this, which is: okay, this could go forever, and we'll wrap it up eventually, I promise.
01:47:50.000I mean, let me make sure I understand what you're asking.
01:47:53.000So when you say absolute truth, do you just mean that whether things in general about any subject are true or false?
01:48:03.000Yeah, I guess what I'm getting at, and I hate to use like the cliche word, is would you consider yourself a postmodernist, that truth is relative?
01:49:59.000So first thing is, could you elaborate a little bit on what you mean by that?
01:50:02.000Yeah, just as the founders did, as they said in the Declaration, the laws of nature and nature is God, where whether you believe it's an actual being of a triune God like I would, or kind of more of a deistic type God, that you have rights and something gave it to you, and that the social contract that we have recognizes a transcendent order.
01:50:22.000So if something gave it to you, I assume that what you mean by something gave it to you.
01:50:26.000I would believe an omniscient, omnipotent being, but I'm not proselytizing you to believe.
01:50:30.000Well, no, no, I'm not, I don't think you are.
01:50:33.000I mean, I was the one who brought it up.
01:50:38.000So if you know, because when you say that something gave it to you, you could read that at least two different ways.
01:50:44.000So one of them is, which, and I assume this is not what you think, but like, you know, one of them is that like literally in a cause and effect way, we have certain legal rights because of like the intervention of God.
01:50:58.000But of course, it's clearly not the case that God is like stopping China from putting dissidents in jail.
01:51:04.000I assume what you mean is that we morally have a right to those things because God gave it to you.
01:51:51.000That I don't understand how that's going to get around like the Euthyphro problem.
01:51:56.000Like if you say, okay, so Euthyphro, there's this dialogue written by Plato where Socrates is arguing with this ancient Greek holy man named Euthyphro, and they talk about the definition of holiness.
01:52:06.000And it's going to take just a second, but I promise I'm going to get through this quickly and we'll get to the point.
01:52:11.000So they're arguing about the definition of holiness, and Euthyphro says the holy is that which the gods love.
01:52:16.000And Socrates asks him this simple question.
01:52:20.000Do the gods love it because it is holy, or is it holy because the gods love it?
01:52:23.000So translate into what we're talking about here, the question would be, is it morally just that, you know, these rights be recognized because that's what God wants, or does God want it because it would be morally unjust to deny them?
01:52:38.000Because if you say both, okay, well, that's a really interesting answer.
01:52:45.000But just to just to finish up with what the problem is, if you say that God wants you to have those rights because it would be morally unjust to deny it to you, that that suggests that it's morally unjust for some reason other than God wanting it, and that the God part, at least on the moral question, is going to be sort of beside the point, that they have a, that like whatever the reason is why it would be,
01:53:13.000God thinks it would be unjust is a reason that's going to be just as available to the atheist or the agnostic.
01:53:18.000Whereas if you say it's morally unjust because God doesn't want it and God doesn't have some reason why it would be morally unjust, then it's just like lucky for us, I guess, that God wants us to have free speech and freedom of religion, equal rights for women, because he could just as easily want us to organize a society like the Taliban did.
01:53:40.000I would say both because through divine revelation and through reason, especially through many of the writings of the early church fathers, we believe in a metaphysical God that not just gave us the law and this interpretation of natural rights because he believes there's a certain way we should live, right?
01:53:57.000But also, because of divine revelation, we release, we realize what is morally just than unjust.
01:54:03.000So, believing in the Christian God or the geo-Christian God, we would reject what the Taliban is doing for a variety of different reasons.
01:54:08.000But I understand how you can say that through divine revelation, you can figure out what God thinks.
01:54:29.000So I think that I understand how you say through divine revelation, we find out what God thinks is just or unjust, but that's a slightly different question from what makes it just.
01:54:41.000I just want to show I'm understanding your question.
01:54:44.000So the question is: you know, the answer that you, the question you answer with both is: does God want us to have these rights because it would be unjust if we didn't have them?
01:55:01.000And the answer is in self-evident, is that you can find it both in the Word of God and through self-evident exploration of the natural world.
01:55:08.000But those are answers to the question of how you find out what God wants.
01:55:36.000We had a whole fun little thing last night.
01:55:38.000I have tremendous respect for Christian socialists like Cordell West or Dr. Martin Luther King.
01:55:44.000Well, definitely not going to find me as one of those.
01:55:46.000Or to pick a third example of a progressive Christian, just at random pick one out of the hat, my wife Jennifer, they have, I have tremendous respect for all of these people, but God wants us to live freely.
01:55:59.000So, okay, so if God wants us to live fruitfully, to flourish.
01:56:10.000So would it still, if the reason that God wants us to be fruitful, if the reason that God wants us to live flourishing lives, whatever, is because it's objectively good to live flourishing lives, this is, so it would still be, if hypothetically it turned out somehow, right, there was some magic way of checking this, right?
01:56:30.000That there wasn't a God, it would still be the case that it was objectively, morally good to be able to do it.
01:57:10.000So, because you say, like, you said two things here, and I'm not sure how long we would have sped at this, but just short, but you're saying two things.
01:57:22.000I just also realize that this is a little self-indulgent, that I was really curious about this thing that's a little off topic.
01:57:28.000I hope it's clarifying you, not confusing you.
01:57:30.000Okay, well, here's the part that I do still unfortunately find a little bit confusing.
01:57:34.000So you're saying two things about this, but I don't quite see how they fit together.
01:57:37.000One of them is that it would be objectively morally good for us to live flourishing lives whether God existed or not.
01:57:44.000than the other is that God grants us these rights in the sense that, you know, the reason why that God somehow is the reason why morally these are good, these are things that we should have a right to.
01:58:00.000So if there's someone right now in some country, island country, and they independently come to the conclusion in the natural law that they should marry and have children, not murder and not kill, regardless of them becoming in contact with the word of God or where that came from, they're going to live flourishing lives.
01:58:19.000So that's what we mean by the natural law.
01:58:21.000So don't know that someone in Papua New Guinea or in Paris will equally succeed if they do these things.
01:58:32.000But what you're talking about seems like, forgive me if this is a slightly pretentious way to put it, but it seems like what you're talking about isn't really metaphysics.
01:58:41.000In other words, what makes something true, right?
01:58:44.000What you're talking about is really epistemology, how we find out that it's true.
01:58:50.000Sure, but the question is just like, I understand that if God's granting us these rights is what makes it morally good for us to have these rights, then it can still be morally good for people to have these rights, even if they don't know about that, right?
01:59:06.000But that's a little bit of a different question from if it objectively weren't true that if it were objectively not true that God exists, would it still be the case that these would be morally good?
01:59:59.000But I think that the natural law is true because it's epistemologically correct, teleologically correct in our purpose and our driven, theologically correct and spiritually correct.
02:00:10.000Okay, but that still seems like we've traveled some distance from saying that God gave us these rights in the sense that the reason it's morally good that we have these rights is that God wants us to have them.
02:00:40.000And you can even think that the reason maybe there are certain natural facts about the way that people are such that certain things are good for us and help us live flourishing lives, and that the reason for those natural facts is that God created it that way.
02:00:55.000You can believe those two things while also believing that what makes it morally good that we do these things and live flourishing lives is both.
02:01:07.000It's both because God commanded it and because God created it and God ordained it, and also that it's good for human existence through the moral construct that we all simultaneously true.
02:01:20.000So, I mean, maybe this is another thing where I'm asking you to entertain something you don't want to entertain, but like.
02:02:30.000I think that it could be if there was an omniscient and omnipotent but morally bad reason being that created the universe, then I would have a self-interested reason.
02:02:43.000I would have a self-interested reason to go along with it the same way that if I was living under Stalin, I would have a self-interested reason to go along with what Stalin wanted, but that wouldn't mean I would have a moral.
02:02:52.000But under the Christian text and the Bible, there is not a commandment that is against what we would consider as moral in the Western tradition.
02:04:19.000How do you personally wrestle with and unpack the fine-tuning argument?
02:04:23.000Do you ever have doubts that there is a God?
02:04:28.000Honestly, I kind of wish that I could say yes because it makes me sound more reasonable.
02:04:36.000It sounds dogmatic if I said no, but honestly, I think no is the honest answer.
02:04:40.000I think that, so why the fine-tuning argument doesn't move me very much?
02:04:44.000Because it didn't move Hitchens, but it piqued his curiosity.
02:04:48.000I mean, I might even go along with the comparative claim that it might be better than the other arguments.
02:04:52.000But the reason that I find the fine-tuning argument unconvincing is that I don't think we can move backwards from it would be really improbable, like given a certain setup, this outcome would be really improbable.
02:05:07.000This outcome happened, therefore that setup is wrong.
02:05:10.000So just a small example that I think makes vivid why I don't find that plausible.
02:05:16.000If you shuffle a deck of 52 cards and you deal out the ace of spades, it's clearly a bad argument to say, well, if the person was cheating.
02:05:27.000Yeah, the deck has more than 52 cards, though.
02:05:30.000Because the probability of the fine tuning is a card.
02:05:33.000But I think the point of principle is that the same reason why it would be unreasonable to say, well, There's only a one in 52 chance that a fair shuffle would have gotten me this, and this happened, therefore it wasn't a fair shuffle, is that you could run that argument for any card, that it would be much more likely that if you had the dealer was cheating to give you the three of hearts, you get the three of hearts that if it was random.
02:05:55.000And I think that no matter how big you make the deck, the same point is going to apply.
02:05:59.000That if it's one out of 500 trillion or whatever, that the chance of this, well, sure.
02:06:07.000It's the fact that this outcome is the one that happens, you could say would be more likely if there was a being who wanted it to happen, but you could also say the same thing about all but one of the other 500 trillion.
02:06:19.000So let me ask you a question, like the minute in 10 seconds we have remaining, which is not that teleological argument.
02:06:48.000Because if you said teleological argument, we could get into why I don't think that works.
02:06:52.000But I think that the purpose of being, if you mean the moral purpose, you know, what makes it like morally good to live life in a certain way.
02:07:05.000We could certainly talk about what counts as personal virtue.
02:07:09.000We could certainly talk about what counts as moral justice.
02:07:12.000I think a good, thriving life is one where you can pursue what you regard as a good and fulfilling life, which I got to say, I think you're enabled to do if you have the kind of economic supports that make you not stay in jobs you hate, et cetera.
02:07:33.000I cannot resist throwing that in there.
02:08:06.000Christopher Hitchens, What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why Still Matters should be out in December.
02:08:11.000The show is called GTA, Give Them an Argument.
02:08:15.000And I guess the last thing I would just say is that I, as much as I do disagree with you about, I guess you just gave the list of exceptions.