The Charlie Kirk Show - DEBATE NIGHT: Charlie Kirk Vs. Atheist, Marxist Professor Ben Burgis

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, today on the Charlie Kirk show, my conversation, my debate with a Democrat socialist, Dr. Burgess.

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00:01:36.000 This conversation is with a college professor.

00:01:38.000 We talk about a lot of different things.

00:01:40.000 I think I did rather well.

00:01:41.000 There's a couple of moments where I think I could have done better, but overall, I give myself a pretty good grade.

00:01:46.000 In fact, I think it was a very intellectual debate and fair debate.

00:01:49.000 It does not get nasty.

00:01:50.000 Out of all the debates we've done recently, this is the most, let's say, respectful.

00:01:55.000 I think both sides have been, unlike the circus that we had with the pro-abortion comedian a couple weeks ago.

00:02:02.000 He says very good things about the post office.

00:02:04.000 Kind of laughable.

00:02:05.000 We talk about God.

00:02:06.000 We talk about religion.

00:02:07.000 We talk about morality.

00:02:08.000 We talk about human nature.

00:02:10.000 It's a constructive debate.

00:02:12.000 I would love your thoughts from the debate.

00:02:14.000 I didn't want to interrupt him at some times, but I think it went very well.

00:02:17.000 I think it was illuminating about our differences and our potential similarities.

00:02:21.000 Again, thank you, thank you, thank you for supporting us at charliekirk.com/slash support.

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00:02:29.000 Freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:02:31.000 That's freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:02:34.000 Turning point USA, AmericaFest, December 18, 19, 2021.

00:02:38.000 And thank you again for supporting us at charliekirk.com/slash support.

00:02:42.000 My debate with a Democrat socialist post office-loving, pretty nice person, actually, I have to say.

00:02:47.000 He was a decent person.

00:02:48.000 Buckle up. 0.96

00:02:49.000 Here we go.

00:02:50.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:02:52.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

00:02:54.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:02:58.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:03:01.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:03:02.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:03:03.000 His spirit is love of this country.

00:03:05.000 He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.

00:03:10.000 Turning point USA. 0.65

00:03:11.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

00:03:20.000 That's why we are here.

00:03:24.000 With us tonight is Ben or Dr. Burgess or Ben Burgess, however you want to say it.

00:03:29.000 We're going to be debating, and we'll see where it leads us, Democrat socialism versus conservative populism.

00:03:35.000 Super thrilled that Ben is here tonight to have this discussion.

00:03:39.000 It'll start with some opening statements, and then we'll take it from there.

00:03:42.000 The two minutes is yours, Dr. Burgess.

00:03:46.000 Thank you, Mr. Kirk.

00:03:47.000 And thank you to Town Circle for setting this up.

00:03:51.000 So 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.

00:04:01.000 So that's the first part.

00:04:02.000 That's the philosophical basis.

00:04:05.000 Concretely, 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.

00:04:19.000 Now, we can argue about what a fairer society would look like.

00:04:24.000 I can contrast what I would see as utopia with what you would, and I'm always up for that kind of thing.

00:04:29.000 I'm sure we'll get into some of it later.

00:04:31.000 But 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.

00:04:40.000 Things like raising taxes on rich people to pay for social programs that would benefit the rest of us.

00:04:46.000 Things like raising the minimum wage for the working poor.

00:04:50.000 Things 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.

00:05:01.000 And 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.

00:05:13.000 And 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.

00:05:25.000 And if that's true, I don't really get why you don't support any of those things that I just mentioned.

00:05:31.000 It's almost exactly two minutes.

00:05:31.000 Well, very good.

00:05:33.000 So I'll respond.

00:05:35.000 First of all, thank you for being here.

00:05:36.000 And if we want to spend an extended period of time bashing Jeff Bezos, I'm all for that.

00:05:41.000 I think it's actually going to be really fun.

00:05:42.000 So let me just first kind of tell you what I believe and why we believe it.

00:05:45.000 It's kind of framed as conservative populism.

00:05:48.000 Put simply, we believe in the natural law.

00:05:50.000 We believe, as the Declaration of Independence says, the laws of nature are nature's God.

00:05:54.000 We 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.

00:06:05.000 We also believe America is strongest when families are flourishing, when there's a strong moral center, when middle-class work is respected and appreciated.

00:06:15.000 And 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.

00:06:31.000 I 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.

00:06:47.000 And so we pair those two things together, conservative populism.

00:06:50.000 And 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.

00:07:03.000 And I've been really looking forward to this discussion.

00:07:05.000 I think, I hope it's more of a discussion than a debate because we will disagree on plenty.

00:07:09.000 But when you talk about a untouchable oligarchy, I completely agree.

00:07:13.000 I think that there is an untouchable oligarchy in this country, both corporate and governmental, scientific and technological, that is crushing the everyday common man.

00:07:22.000 Where 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.

00:07:34.000 And conservative populism is a resurgence of focusing on these things and developing solutions to hopefully fix it.

00:07:43.000 All right.

00:07:44.000 Well, I guess what I would say is when you talk about limited power, right?

00:07:51.000 I get that.

00:07:52.000 That makes sense to me.

00:07:53.000 I 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.

00:08:11.000 And 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.

00:08:22.000 But I think the opposite is true.

00:08:23.000 I 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.

00:08:45.000 And 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.

00:09:05.000 So I think that's helpful.

00:09:06.000 Where I think we'll disagree, though, is the means of which we can represent individual people against oppressors or people that have power.

00:09:14.000 This is why I tend to defend markets.

00:09:17.000 And I want to be very clear.

00:09:18.000 Markets are a tool, something we set up to hopefully help human beings.

00:09:22.000 There are externalities. 0.99

00:09:24.000 There are jerks and dirtbags like Jeff Bezos that tend to con the system, not pay taxes, not treat their workers. 0.97

00:09:31.000 And 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. 0.98

00:09:54.000 Where 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.

00:10:11.000 And the ultimate form of decentralization is the family.

00:10:14.000 Strong families, strong households.

00:10:20.000 All right.

00:10:22.000 So I guess when you talk about the family, sure, absolutely.

00:10:27.000 If people, you know, social institutions are making it harder to keep families together, that's a bad thing.

00:10:34.000 I 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.

00:10:50.000 And 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.

00:11:06.000 And so that might be one place to start exploring this is, I mean, maybe you'll surprise me here, right?

00:11:15.000 But I do not think we disagree.

00:11:17.000 We agree on that.

00:11:19.000 So, yeah, just am I good to respond?

00:11:22.000 Yeah, okay, good.

00:11:23.000 No, I just want to take any of your time.

00:11:25.000 So I want to get into the union argument.

00:11:27.000 I want to get into the minimum wage argument.

00:11:28.000 I want to get into the healthcare argument.

00:11:30.000 And 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.

00:11:42.000 And once we kind of get into the back and forth, I want to ask you about that because certain activist organizations tend to disagree.

00:11:48.000 Some activist organizations will call the family oppressive, patriarchal, where I believe the family is beautiful and the ultimate social bedrock institution.

00:11:56.000 And 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.

00:12:07.000 And 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.

00:12:21.000 I think the priority should be through our public policy and our laws should always be toward the development of children and families getting stronger.

00:12:29.000 Well, I think that if you want to have a traditional family, absolutely, you should be able to do that.

00:12:36.000 You talked about activist organizations.

00:12:38.000 I 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.

00:12:51.000 Of course, if you want to live some other way, that's great true.

00:12:55.000 I 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.

00:13:08.000 And I think that this is one of the biggest problems.

00:13:11.000 You 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.

00:13:24.000 And 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.

00:13:31.000 And 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.

00:13:41.000 And 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.

00:13:48.000 Most of us are not worried that our babies are going to die most of the time.

00:13:53.000 The 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.

00:14:02.000 Because people are a lot less likely to leave jobs that they hate if they're worried about, will I still have health insurance?

00:14:09.000 Will my family still have health insurance?

00:14:11.000 People stay in those jobs and don't pursue their dreams all the time because of that.

00:14:16.000 There 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.

00:14:22.000 But there are also people who stay in bad or even abusive marriages because they cannot afford to lose their spousal health insurance.

00:14:30.000 And 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.

00:14:38.000 So that's an interesting point.

00:14:40.000 And 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.

00:14:49.000 I 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.

00:15:00.000 I would argue that through a natural rights compact that you should be free to pursue virtue.

00:15:05.000 That's not to say you shouldn't have a social safety net, which far too often becomes a hammock at a social safety net.

00:15:10.000 But I think the design of government and the state, which is really what we're debating here, right?

00:15:14.000 What 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.

00:15:23.000 And 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.

00:15:33.000 All right, no more rules.

00:15:34.000 We can interrupt each other.

00:15:36.000 It's totally voluntary, unlike socialism.

00:15:38.000 I'm kidding.

00:15:39.000 That's my first socialist joke tonight.

00:15:41.000 So let me ask, so I want to ask you just kind of generally about Democrat socialism.

00:15:47.000 Let's do it.

00:15:48.000 Where would you point to as one, two, or three examples that you think are the best embodiment of the worldview that you hold?

00:15:56.000 Yeah.

00:15:56.000 So I think that all of the things that I want, you know, I do not think exist together right now in the world.

00:16:04.000 But if you want to talk about places where a lot of the policy goals that I'd support, you know, have been implemented.

00:16:11.000 I certainly don't think they're fully socialist societies by any stretch of the imagination.

00:16:16.000 But I think a lot of it has been implemented.

00:16:18.000 I would talk about the places you'd expect me to talk about.

00:16:21.000 Your Sweden's, your Finlands, your Denmarks, your Norways.

00:16:23.000 Now, these are complicated societies that there are right-wing parties win elections sometimes too, and they do things that I don't like.

00:16:30.000 But 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.

00:16:58.000 And you talked earlier about how you want the state to support things that are objectively good.

00:17:04.000 It seems to me that living longer is objectively good.

00:17:09.000 Having lower infant mortality is objectively good.

00:17:12.000 And 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.

00:17:20.000 So job mobility is interesting.

00:17:21.000 I want to get into that.

00:17:22.000 So I'm not stunned you mentioned the Scandinavian countries.

00:17:25.000 Sure, yes.

00:17:26.000 So Denmark doesn't have a minimum wage.

00:17:29.000 Well, 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.

00:17:39.000 And so a lot of the wage floor is enforced that way.

00:17:41.000 It's still not just they get whatever the market says they get.

00:17:44.000 No, but no government-mandated minimum wage.

00:17:46.000 What I find interesting, and there are some aspects of the Scandinavian countries appeal to me.

00:17:52.000 Sure.

00:17:53.000 According to the World Economic Freedom Index, every country outside of Norway is more economically free than the United States.

00:18:01.000 And so is that something that would interest you?

00:18:04.000 If 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.

00:18:14.000 I think oftentimes if you look at the methodology of those lists, it's very unclear.

00:18:18.000 Like you'll get like the Cato Institute or whoever in some cases will do these lists where they rank places by freedom.

00:18:24.000 And 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.

00:18:36.000 But I think this is the bigger philosophical thing.

00:18:39.000 Sure, right?

00:18:39.000 Like let's just do this rather than getting into the nitty-gritty about the lists.

00:18:42.000 I 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.

00:18:54.000 What 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.

00:19:11.000 And so just to clarify this, though, about some of the Scandinavian countries, they went through massive deregulation in the 1980s, right?

00:19:11.000 Right.

00:19:20.000 Many of these Scandinavian countries did, including Denmark.

00:19:23.000 Denmark has actually come out and has said, stop calling us socialist.

00:19:26.000 We are not socialist.

00:19:27.000 You've seen that quote.

00:19:28.000 Well, I have seen it.

00:19:30.000 But I would like to say something about this.

00:19:34.000 And people can check out.

00:19:35.000 I actually wrote something about this last summer for Arc Digital Media.

00:19:38.000 I think I read it.

00:19:39.000 Okay, well, there you go.

00:19:41.000 I know where you're going before you say that.

00:19:42.000 All right, well, beautiful.

00:19:43.000 Which audience doesn't know.

00:19:44.000 Hopefully, though, there are people who are watching who don't know.

00:19:47.000 So let's say it anyway.

00:19:48.000 So 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.

00:20:03.000 And you say, oh, well, he says it, right?

00:20:05.000 So 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.

00:20:23.000 Here's what they say about Social Security or the post office.

00:20:27.000 This is the American point of view.

00:20:29.000 I 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.

00:20:40.000 We could certainly talk about what that would mean to me.

00:20:43.000 But 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.

00:20:54.000 So let's talk about Norway.

00:20:55.000 A country that I'm familiar with, you're familiar with.

00:20:55.000 Sure.

00:20:58.000 Very wealthy country.

00:20:59.000 Yeah.

00:21:00.000 Why?

00:21:02.000 Because 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.

00:21:09.000 You mean used fossil fuels?

00:21:11.000 Not keep it in the ground like Bernie Sanders would be.

00:21:13.000 Bernie Sanders has tweeted, we need to keep all fossil fuels in the ground.

00:21:17.000 But Norway's built a trillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund after.

00:21:20.000 Okay.

00:21:21.000 So would you support that?

00:21:23.000 Nationalization? 0.59

00:21:24.000 No, but it's better than keeping it in the ground.

00:21:26.000 Okay.

00:21:27.000 I mean, look, I think ultimately we probably are better off transitioning to other energy sources.

00:21:32.000 But 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.

00:21:40.000 And I often do kind of get a sense when conservatives say this.

00:21:43.000 It's like, oh, well, there's really nothing socialist about it.

00:21:46.000 They've just nationalized the oil industry and used the proceeds to fund all of these social programs.

00:21:52.000 I mean, if that's not socialist, can we at least have that not socialist thing?

00:21:55.000 That sounds nice to me.

00:21:56.000 Let me clarify: is that if there is wealth to be redistributed, there must be wealth to be redistributed.

00:22:01.000 And Norway has the advantage of having some of the most strategic oil reserves in the country.

00:22:01.000 Sure.

00:22:06.000 And I just pinpoint it in particular because there tends to be this anti-fossil fuel development movement.

00:22:12.000 It's something Norway and the United States have in common, is that we have a lot of oil.

00:22:16.000 Now, if you want to, again, I know you've said you don't want to do this.

00:22:20.000 Well, of course, I think the private ownership of minerals is a strategic advantage for the United States.

00:22:24.000 But 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.

00:22:33.000 And this is strict immigration.

00:22:34.000 Now, 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.

00:22:42.000 But Norway, for example, takes in about 70 immigrants a day, even with their more relaxed policies.

00:22:48.000 America, much bigger country, albeit 2,740 legal immigrants, about 5,000 if you include the people going across the southern border.

00:22:58.000 Do you, as being a Democrat socialist, do you support closed borders and strict immigration?

00:23:04.000 No, I don't, and I'll tell you why.

00:23:05.000 So two reasons.

00:23:07.000 One 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.

00:23:19.000 And the second is I would ask what the alternatives are, right?

00:23:24.000 So we can do, you know, like those families that you talk about, right?

00:23:29.000 You know, we can, you know, we can do things like separating, you know, separating families.

00:23:34.000 We can do things like raiding churches To drag out immigrants. 1.00

00:23:40.000 But 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. 1.00

00:23:52.000 Whereas 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.

00:24:05.000 I 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.

00:24:21.000 I 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.

00:24:35.000 One 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. 0.63

00:24:40.000 It's a non-negotiable.

00:24:42.000 You must have citizenship by birth is not applicable. 0.76

00:24:44.000 And you must have lived in Norway for at least eight out of the past 11 years.

00:24:48.000 And 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.

00:25:01.000 We're going to take care of our fellow countrymen.

00:25:04.000 We are going to reject these globalist institutions because Bernie Sanders used to say that.

00:25:08.000 In 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.

00:25:17.000 Bernie 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.

00:25:27.000 What changed?

00:25:28.000 Well, 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.

00:25:36.000 It was about exactly the opposite.

00:25:38.000 It 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. 0.91

00:25:50.000 A 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.

00:26:05.000 This 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.

00:26:17.000 And I think that that is a completely different thing.

00:26:20.000 I think it could also, so I think in that case, I think there's less of a contradiction there than you think.

00:26:25.000 But hey, look, Bernie said, this isn't on my shirt because I think that the man is infallible.

00:26:32.000 I could rattle off a list of things that he's gotten wrong over the years.

00:26:35.000 But 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.

00:26:53.000 And 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.

00:27:17.000 Suddenly it seems to be that this is too interventionist.

00:27:19.000 This is too administrative state.

00:27:21.000 I mean, kicking immigrants out seems like a big expansion of state power to me, too. 0.65

00:27:25.000 Well, 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. 1.00

00:27:34.000 And I think there's a cultural aspect to it that deep down you agree with, and that's what Norway gets right. 0.98

00:27:38.000 They 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.

00:27:49.000 Let's talk about the minimum wage.

00:27:51.000 The reason why I don't want abrupt, quick, let's say increases the minimum wage is actually hurts workers.

00:27:56.000 Washington Post, a very credible news study on Seattle's $15 minimum wage, says the following.

00:28:03.000 Workers have seen cut payrolls, they've been put off hiring, reducing hours, or letting their workers go.

00:28:08.000 That is Seattle.

00:28:09.000 Another study from just Target, just because Target raised their wages abruptly in 2019, shows that workers say their hours were cut, leaving them struggling.

00:28:18.000 Another one.

00:28:18.000 Okay, so I wouldn't go through them.

00:28:21.000 Let's pause and do the first question.

00:28:22.000 Seattle, the same thing.

00:28:24.000 The 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.

00:28:36.000 I'm no fan of the Washington Post.

00:28:38.000 But 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.

00:28:46.000 I 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.

00:29:02.000 I think moderately kept up with inflation done prudently, especially as we're about to have a mass inflation.

00:29:09.000 I think that coupled with a workers' tax cut and other pro-growth policies wouldn't be the worst thing for the economy.

00:29:15.000 No.

00:29:16.000 I think that's a moderate economic position.

00:29:17.000 But keeping up with inflation, right?

00:29:19.000 You know, like you still say the purchasing power of low-wage workers should be what it is now.

00:29:24.000 And 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.

00:29:31.000 I don't think the studies do show that.

00:29:31.000 The studies show that it has.

00:29:33.000 Well, so here's what I said.

00:29:33.000 So here's what I think.

00:29:36.000 I 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.

00:29:44.000 That's the big claim that's usually made.

00:29:46.000 Sometimes people will also say that it leads to a reduction in hours, but the big one is usually increased unemployment.

00:29:53.000 And so I'd say two things about this.

00:29:55.000 First of all, the effect of minimum wage increases on employment is like the most studied thing in empirical economics in the last several decades.

00:30:04.000 And there are studies you can find that say yes.

00:30:07.000 There are a lot of studies that you can find that say no.

00:30:09.000 And a word I almost never hear from people who say that it's going to lead to unemployment increases is meta-study, right?

00:30:17.000 In 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.

00:30:34.000 That'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.

00:30:41.000 But when you do the meta-study of a bunch of different studies, most of those show no.

00:30:47.000 But let's say for the sake of argument, yes.

00:30:49.000 Let's say that it does lead to some unemployment increase.

00:30:52.000 Because you agree, certain studies do show that.

00:30:54.000 Yes, certain studies do show that.

00:30:55.000 I think most of them, and especially meta-studies over time, say no, but sure, let's say yes.

00:31:00.000 So if yes, would that mean that it was going to hurt workers more than help them?

00:31:04.000 Well, 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.

00:31:21.000 And most likely they said 1.3 million people would lose their jobs.

00:31:25.000 No, that's bad.

00:31:26.000 I don't want 1.3 billion people to lose their jobs.

00:31:27.000 That's a lot of jobs.

00:31:28.000 But 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.

00:31:39.000 And so we say, okay, we have 27 million people who are being lifted out of poverty by this.

00:31:44.000 We have 1.3 billion people out of jobs.

00:31:47.000 Now, even if there was nothing that you could do about that, I'd still say that treated this as a knockdown.

00:31:52.000 Well, this is going to help poor people, working poor people more than it's hurt them more than it's going to help them.

00:31:57.000 I don't think makes sense.

00:31:58.000 But 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.

00:32:05.000 We could have public works programs that could employ those 1.3 million people, give them dignified public sector jobs.

00:32:15.000 And 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.

00:32:24.000 Let me build out the study and then I want to ask you a question.

00:32:26.000 So low-wage workers on average now clock 9% fewer hours, earn $125 less each month.

00:32:31.000 That's Seattle.

00:32:32.000 There's another one, New York City businesses struggle to keep up after a minimum wage increase.

00:32:37.000 Would you support eliminating the FICA contribution for workers?

00:32:40.000 That's a 7% tax on wages before we even talked about raising the minimum wage.

00:32:45.000 Well, I'd like to talk about raising the minimum wage with no preconditions, but why not the workers' tax cut?

00:32:50.000 That's what I always don't understand because we tax workers at 7%.

00:32:54.000 7% of our workers here lose their paycheck as half of their FICA contribution.

00:32:59.000 I never hear that from workers' rights advocates.

00:33:02.000 Why?

00:33:03.000 Well, 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?

00:33:09.000 Then 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.

00:33:16.000 And I think that paying people a higher minimum wage, having those 27 million people get a living wage income.

00:33:24.000 I can give them a 7% wage increase tomorrow.

00:33:26.000 And what?

00:33:27.000 It's called cutting the FICA tax.

00:33:29.000 Every working person deserves 7% of their wages that are currently being taken by them by the government.

00:33:34.000 Why don't you instantaneously agree?

00:33:36.000 So what are you going to, well, because I know what the other shoe is that's going to drop there.

00:33:36.000 Agree.

00:33:41.000 What are you going to cut to pay for that tax?

00:33:44.000 Okay, so there's plenty.

00:33:45.000 I could name a whole litany of departments I think I would cut to try to pay for it.

00:33:49.000 But let's pretend that it's paid for, like everything Washington, D.C. says.

00:33:53.000 Yes, if you could cut workers' wages and not workers wages, this is the same thing.

00:33:58.000 The 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?

00:34:11.000 But 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.

00:34:28.000 And then 1.3 million people need new jobs.

00:34:32.000 Trust me, we can take care of that.

00:34:33.000 So you're obviously no fan of President Trump or his administration.

00:34:37.000 During his presidency, the bottom 10% of workers actually had an income grow faster than the top 10% of workers.

00:34:43.000 And so what we saw was a real blue-collar boom over the prior administration.

00:34:48.000 I mean, I think what we...

00:34:49.000 Without having to abruptly raise the minimum wage.

00:34:51.000 And 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.

00:35:00.000 And 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.

00:35:11.000 So if we want new business, and you agree, entrepreneurship is a good thing, right?

00:35:15.000 I think it's good to have new businesses.

00:35:16.000 I'd like more of them to be organized as worker cooperatives.

00:35:19.000 We're going to talk about unions in the United States.

00:35:20.000 We can get into that.

00:35:21.000 I want to get deep into unions.

00:35:23.000 But I do just want to say on what you're claiming about the Trump economy, because I think this is an important point, right?

00:35:28.000 So, yes, sure.

00:35:31.000 What explains those numbers that you just mentioned?

00:35:33.000 You'd say it's a new emphasis on entrepreneurship.

00:35:35.000 I'd say it's too much.

00:35:36.000 I could go through other things.

00:35:38.000 It's including an energy renovation.

00:35:39.000 But I think the primary things are two things.

00:35:42.000 One, that quite a few states during that time period actually did raise their minimum wage, and I think that had a big effect on that.

00:35:48.000 Two, sure, that employment increases give workers more bargaining power, which a lot of conservatives now object to.

00:35:56.000 They say, oh, nobody wants to work.

00:35:58.000 But employment increases give workers more bargaining power in the labor market, and that's a good thing.

00:36:04.000 But that's not really this new emphasis on entrepreneurship that Trump was doing.

00:36:08.000 If 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.

00:36:35.000 You have 10% unemployment over the course of the eight years of Obama.

00:36:40.000 It goes from 10% to 4.7% overall civilian unemployment.

00:36:45.000 And 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.

00:36:57.000 So that is a continuation at an overall slower rate, but a continuation of what had happened before.

00:37:04.000 And the reason I'm bringing that up is not that I'm a big Obama guy.

00:37:07.000 I mean, look.

00:37:08.000 No, I know you're not.

00:37:09.000 As you know, I'm a Bernie Sanders would be a good start guy.

00:37:12.000 And I want to get into that.

00:37:12.000 But...

00:37:13.000 Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

00:37:14.000 Because I think you are cleverly cloaking your radicalism in three issues that are agreement.

00:37:20.000 I don't.

00:37:21.000 We're going to keep it.

00:37:22.000 I don't think so.

00:37:23.000 I think I front-loaded the radicalism and said these would be baby steps in the right direction.

00:37:26.000 And I'm very confused about how you could be a populist without supporting those babies.

00:37:30.000 We're all Hegelians now, I suppose.

00:37:33.000 But I do want to finish the point because I think it's an important one, right?

00:37:37.000 That it's not that I think Obama is great.

00:37:39.000 It'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.

00:38:02.000 This is a guy who tried to make it a lot harder to qualify for food aid for those families you talked about.

00:38:07.000 That the big populist thing is that he oversaw economic growth and hence job growth.

00:38:12.000 Well, hey, if that's enough to be a populist, Barack Obama was a better populist than he was.

00:38:17.000 And 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.

00:38:29.000 I think Trump could have been more conservative, more populist in certain things.

00:38:32.000 And just to clarify on the food stamp issue, millions of people got off of food stamps under Trump voluntarily because their wages went up.

00:38:40.000 But I don't want to get too bogged down.

00:38:42.000 I really don't want to get too bogged down on the street.

00:38:44.000 Yeah, you had that extra one percentage change of unemployment going down, which is a continuation of previous trends.

00:38:51.000 So let me kind of ask you more broadly.

00:38:53.000 I guess we could go into some of these other aspects of the pressure.

00:38:55.000 I have a question I'd love to ask you in a minute, by the way, but go for it.

00:38:58.000 Yeah, you're free to do that too, by the way.

00:39:00.000 Do you trust the government?

00:39:02.000 Do I trust the government?

00:39:04.000 Do 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.

00:39:25.000 But here's where I think people often go wrong from that true premise that the government is untrustworthy.

00:39:31.000 I think premise is fine, but the conclusion, therefore we should have less government in the sense of we should have less expansive social services.

00:39:41.000 We shouldn't give everybody health care.

00:39:43.000 I 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.

00:39:52.000 And 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.

00:40:09.000 Let me tell you where I think there's a flaw in this.

00:40:12.000 And I really want you to talk about this.

00:40:14.000 You say healthcare and education.

00:40:16.000 There must be bureaucrats to enforce these things. 1.00

00:40:18.000 You need the administrative state.

00:40:20.000 So 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.

00:40:28.000 Where is the check and balance against the CDC, the NIH, HHS?

00:40:32.000 For every government program, you need hundreds of thousands of desk workers, which is where the word bureaucrat comes from in French.

00:40:39.000 So you say you don't trust the government, yet you support expanding the social services, which will then necessarily expand government.

00:40:46.000 Why do you want to expand something you don't trust?

00:40:48.000 Well, first of all, congratulations on the French vocabulary.

00:40:50.000 I like it.

00:40:51.000 I have other words too.

00:40:52.000 We could opre no les deluge, which means after me the flood.

00:40:57.000 We could talk about all my favorite French terms if you'd like.

00:41:00.000 We could do a whole thing.

00:41:01.000 You write for the Jacobin magazine, for goodness sake, so we could exchange notes on Rochester and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

00:41:06.000 I've only read the confessions once.

00:41:08.000 Okay.

00:41:08.000 Go ahead.

00:41:09.000 Well, I'd be happy to do all of that, although my French is like Duolingo. 1.00

00:41:15.000 I can't do that much.

00:41:16.000 Endeavour to concept.

00:41:17.000 No, I'm done, I promise.

00:41:19.000 But I would say that if you don't want bureaucrats to have more power, if that's the big objection. 0.85

00:41:24.000 No, that's not.

00:41:24.000 That's part of the objection.

00:41:26.000 That's an element of it.

00:41:27.000 Sure.

00:41:27.000 So let's start with that element.

00:41:29.000 So if you don't want bureaucrats to have more power, then the thing that you should really object to, right?

00:41:34.000 Because you said earlier, you think we've got to have some kind of social safety net.

00:41:38.000 So we're agreeing that there are some social services programs.

00:41:42.000 We're arguing about how expansive they should be and how they should work.

00:41:46.000 Generous versus limited.

00:41:47.000 Sure.

00:41:47.000 Okay.

00:41:48.000 But this is the thing.

00:41:49.000 If you want those bureaucrats to have less power, you don't want limited. 0.98

00:41:52.000 That's the last thing that you want.

00:41:53.000 You want generous.

00:41:54.000 And here's why.

00:41:55.000 Here's why.

00:41:56.000 You're going to have to convince me.

00:41:57.000 I know.

00:41:58.000 Like, I really liked what you just did there.

00:42:00.000 Like, that was some good, you know.

00:42:04.000 So to restrain their power, you must give them a lot of power.

00:42:06.000 No, you're not giving them any power.

00:42:08.000 You're taking away their power.

00:42:09.000 It's a really simple argument.

00:42:10.000 Here's how it goes.

00:42:12.000 That means-tested programs give power to bureaucrats.

00:42:16.000 When 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.

00:42:26.000 Whereas 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.

00:42:36.000 Or in Finland, you talked about all of the policies that, you know, in Norway that you thought would be an issue for me.

00:42:42.000 Finland is the poorest.

00:42:45.000 Okay, 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.

00:43:02.000 And I think it's worked very well.

00:43:04.000 But when you have that, you don't have students jumping through financial aid, bureaucracy, hurdles.

00:43:12.000 And does this person qualify to get schooled?

00:43:14.000 Does that person qualify to school?

00:43:16.000 Where bureaucrats have the power to decide what's up? 0.91

00:43:19.000 Because that's the case where bureaucrats have power over you. 1.00

00:43:21.000 If everybody gets something as a right of citizenship, bureaucrats have no power in that circumstances.

00:43:26.000 But let me ask you something, though.

00:43:27.000 So you want Medicare for all.

00:43:29.000 Yet HHS is the largest civilian branch of our government.

00:43:33.000 So as we have expanded Medicare, as we have expanded Medicaid, it hasn't been means tested as you want.

00:43:39.000 We have hundreds of thousands of desk workers that are doing the means testing. 0.88

00:43:44.000 Are you qualified?

00:43:46.000 Medicare reimbursements.

00:43:47.000 And so even under your example, it's a good idea.

00:43:50.000 Well, but Medicaid.

00:43:51.000 It's hopefully idealistic.

00:43:52.000 The point is Medicaid is a means test.

00:43:54.000 You cannot have a generous social program without a massive bureaucratic and, dare I say, corrupt administrative state.

00:44:02.000 Woodrow Wilson would even say that.

00:44:03.000 Well, you need the administration.

00:44:05.000 You think I like Woodrow Wilson, the guy who's a college professor.

00:44:09.000 Okay, well, and a college president.

00:44:12.000 So he's kind of in your world.

00:44:13.000 Well, okay, trust me, neither of those things earn any points for me.

00:44:17.000 But I think that Woodrow Wilson is the guy who resegregated the federal bureaucracy after integrated.

00:44:28.000 He put Eugene Javi Debs in jail.

00:44:30.000 Nobody on the left is going to see Woodrow Wilson as a hero.

00:44:32.000 Liberals.

00:44:33.000 Nobody on the left.

00:44:34.000 But I was just going to say.

00:44:36.000 I know plenty of people that would, but that's fine.

00:44:38.000 I don't think you're going to find a lot of CR, LBJ, John Dewey, all these people believed in a strong administrative state.

00:44:45.000 Well, I mean, you're rattling off a bunch of liberals, but that's okay.

00:44:47.000 We don't need to argue about the historical figures.

00:44:49.000 Let's just say this.

00:44:50.000 If you're talking about administrative state bureaucracy, well, your example is Medicaid, which is a means-tested program.

00:44:58.000 And 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.

00:45:09.000 As I think you mentioned earlier, the government has no monopoly of bureaucracy.

00:45:12.000 There's plenty of bureaucracies in the private sector.

00:45:16.000 And if you want to know which programs have the smallest overhead, right?

00:45:22.000 Even 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.

00:45:37.000 And 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.

00:45:51.000 And one question I'm very curious about, by the way, is, you know, you object for all of these reasons.

00:45:59.000 You think it's too interventionist.

00:46:01.000 You think it's too much administrative state to just providing everybody with health care.

00:46:05.000 These are all elements of the critique.

00:46:07.000 Providing 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.

00:46:25.000 If 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.

00:46:36.000 Like, would you be okay with it if we didn't have public fire services?

00:46:40.000 Absolutely not.

00:46:41.000 As I said, small but strong.

00:46:42.000 Okay.

00:46:43.000 The 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.

00:46:50.000 And Hamilton said it best that you need a nimble yet effective federal government, good at what it does, but not overreaching.

00:46:56.000 And that's the whole idea of conservative populism is within this constitutional republic framework.

00:47:00.000 I'm a big fan of firefighters, police officers.

00:47:03.000 I'm a big fan of Border Patrol.

00:47:05.000 I'm a big fan of all these sort of things.

00:47:07.000 But when all of a sudden I believe you get outside of the constitutional limits, is where you birth this fourth branch of government.

00:47:13.000 And 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.

00:47:28.000 He wasn't the only person that believed that FDR did.

00:47:31.000 Lyndon Baines Johnson did as well.

00:47:32.000 Where we as conservatives and conservative populists say, hold on a second, that is not what the state is there to do for.

00:47:37.000 Let 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.

00:47:47.000 When 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.

00:47:54.000 And it also hurts the everyday common man.

00:47:56.000 So I have two.

00:47:57.000 I don't think either of those things are true.

00:47:59.000 But I have a moral argument, and I also have utilitarian arguments.

00:48:01.000 I just want to make sure that's the problem.

00:48:02.000 Let's start with the moral argument because I am very unclear on this.

00:48:06.000 Because why is it that having public firefighters or public police is not overreached, but having public health care is?

00:48:14.000 Why 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?

00:48:24.000 And if you had a better private fire insurance plan, they'd probably put out your fire faster.

00:48:30.000 Or 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.

00:48:43.000 Because 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.

00:48:56.000 Like these seem pretty parallel to me.

00:48:58.000 What do you see as the big disanalogy?

00:49:00.000 So the first problem is mostly local, police and fire, so therefore it's more accountable.

00:49:05.000 So 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.

00:49:12.000 That's number one.

00:49:12.000 Number two, we do have a system in the country, despite what you're saying, where if you need health care, you will be taken care of.

00:49:18.000 Is it broken?

00:49:19.000 Is it inadequate?

00:49:20.000 It's said though, right?

00:49:21.000 It's already, I'm saying it is illegal to deny someone service of care.

00:49:21.000 Hold on a second.

00:49:24.000 Illegal.

00:49:24.000 Now, do we have problems with our health care system?

00:49:26.000 Do you think if you could put me in a room and I could strike a huge bargain with you?

00:49:30.000 I think that there are elements of the German system that are admirable.

00:49:33.000 Where you have a public system and a private system.

00:49:33.000 I will say that.

00:49:35.000 Where 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.

00:49:45.000 That's a big mistake.

00:49:47.000 Here's how I think the biggest problem with health care is: it's not individualized.

00:49:50.000 It's way too bureaucratic, way too top-down.

00:49:53.000 And yes, we have pharmaceutical companies that are addicting people to drugs that they should not be addicted to.

00:49:59.000 We have a sick care problem in our country.

00:50:01.000 And I agree with a lot of people on the left with this on this.

00:50:04.000 Maybe we'll agree that we have an obesity problem.

00:50:06.000 We have a problem of how we get our food.

00:50:08.000 We have a corporate farming problem.

00:50:09.000 I agree with all those things.

00:50:10.000 Do 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?

00:50:20.000 Absolutely not.

00:50:22.000 The Postal Service is amazing, and I do not think that again.

00:50:26.000 The Postal Service is amazing.

00:50:28.000 It has been an engine of upward mobility.

00:50:30.000 It has been an engine of racial equality.

00:50:33.000 If you building the black middle class, massively an engine of that.

00:50:36.000 Have you ever been a postal service?

00:50:38.000 I have.

00:50:39.000 And the Postal Service will carry a letter from here to Alaska for no, not for the same price.

00:50:46.000 And they're certainly not going to serve.

00:50:47.000 You know it's going to get there.

00:50:48.000 No, I do not know that.

00:50:50.000 And it's certainly not going to do it.

00:50:51.000 It's never going to get there with as much service to out-of-the-way rural areas.

00:50:55.000 I got to give you credit.

00:50:56.000 Anything.

00:50:57.000 I've never heard anyone defend the postal.

00:50:59.000 Like it's cheap.

00:51:00.000 Well, you need to talk to more people because like the post office is an amazing institution and it should be massively expanded.

00:51:06.000 In 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.

00:51:26.000 Postal services.

00:51:27.000 So great.

00:51:28.000 But I do want to go back because I don't want this to get lost.

00:51:31.000 I don't want this to get lost.

00:51:31.000 The post office lost hundreds of thousands of packages and was six months late.

00:51:35.000 That's who you want to run our health care system? 1.00

00:51:37.000 I 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.

00:51:48.000 I think that oftentimes when people say no, they are not using the same metrics to evaluate it, they'd use to evaluate everything else.

00:51:57.000 But 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.

00:52:06.000 What you probably want to look at is countries like Canada, where they already have Medicare for All, Great Britain, where they've gone further.

00:52:14.000 And the hospitals are publicly owned.

00:52:18.000 Well, 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.

00:52:18.000 Let's talk about that.

00:52:31.000 Or look, you said you want it to be local, you know, that you don't like the fact.

00:52:35.000 Super localized.

00:52:36.000 Sure, sure, local, great.

00:52:37.000 So if all the hospitals were municipally owned, you'd be cool with that?

00:52:42.000 All the hospitals, it would be, well, first of all, that's actually the case in a lot of places.

00:52:46.000 There's county-run hospitals all across the country.

00:52:48.000 I'm not denying their category.

00:52:50.000 That's calculated.

00:52:51.000 Okay.

00:52:52.000 So you wouldn't be okay with that.

00:52:53.000 So it really has nothing to do with centralization.

00:52:54.000 No, it does.

00:52:55.000 Trust 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?

00:53:04.000 I mean, that's a good question.

00:53:05.000 Okay, but you did also say, right?

00:53:07.000 And I really want to make sure we're doing that.

00:53:09.000 That locally is generally better, but I'm not going to die on the Cook County as a greater case.

00:53:15.000 This 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.

00:53:27.000 That is a law.

00:53:27.000 Yes, that is a law.

00:53:29.000 I'm glad that it's a law.

00:53:31.000 Okay, good.

00:53:31.000 I am too.

00:53:32.000 Wonderful.

00:53:33.000 We agree on that.

00:53:34.000 That 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.

00:53:42.000 But 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. 0.95

00:53:56.000 Everybody else has to rely on private fire insurance, which varies wildly in quality.

00:54:03.000 And 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.

00:54:21.000 Do you think that sounds like a fair system?

00:54:23.000 No.

00:54:24.000 So let me ask you a question.

00:54:25.000 So is that here's where, how do you define health care?

00:54:28.000 This is a very important question, right?

00:54:30.000 Because healthcare could be, hey, I just got a gunshot wound.

00:54:32.000 I need to be taken care of.

00:54:33.000 Absolutely.

00:54:35.000 Or healthcare could be, I'm 800 pounds overweight.

00:54:38.000 I'm eating terribly.

00:54:39.000 I have no sort of interest to exercise or eat well.

00:54:43.000 Why 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?

00:54:52.000 Why should someone who's 800 pounds overweight be given in this sort of realm?

00:54:57.000 Why should human agency and choice have zero emphasis on what you're what you're describing?

00:55:02.000 The 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.

00:55:14.000 Right now, somebody who's 800 pounds, who doesn't watch their diet, who chain smokes, et cetera.

00:55:21.000 Yes.

00:55:21.000 I agree.

00:55:21.000 But you could add chain smoking up.

00:55:23.000 Yeah, all those things, all those things.

00:55:23.000 But sure.

00:55:25.000 You think that's not actually given a preference?

00:55:27.000 Well, 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.

00:55:55.000 It's an interesting question.

00:55:56.000 So you believe just because you have better money, you shouldn't be able to have better stuff.

00:56:00.000 I believe.

00:56:01.000 Or more money, better stuff.

00:56:02.000 I believe that when it comes to something like health care, no.

00:56:06.000 That's a very broad job.

00:56:08.000 I do not believe that people should get life-saving services preferentially because of how much money they have.

00:56:16.000 So how much money they've saved.

00:56:18.000 How about someone saved their whole life and they said, in case there's a disaster, I'm going to put $500 away a month.

00:56:23.000 They get to age 45 and all of a sudden they realize that they have some sort of health complication.

00:56:27.000 They shouldn't be able to take advantage of the money they've saved for their entire life.

00:56:31.000 Well, this actually goes back to the very first thing that I said, like the opening couple of years.

00:56:36.000 What is justice, I guess?

00:56:37.000 That I said.

00:56:38.000 Because 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.

00:56:45.000 Now, if we control, though.

00:56:47.000 Well, if we live.

00:56:48.000 Like saving.

00:56:49.000 If 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,

00:57:05.000 where 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.

00:57:25.000 But as somebody like, you know, if somebody like if Hunter Biden had some massive medical bill tomorrow.

00:57:33.000 He would probably have, I mean, yeah, considering his lifestyle.

00:57:36.000 Sure, sure, right?

00:57:38.000 So 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.

00:57:49.000 Sure.

00:57:49.000 So that's a good example.

00:57:51.000 Those are both bad things, but they have largely unearned, and I agree.

00:57:55.000 Sure.

00:57:56.000 So, and I would say the same thing about the Walton children.

00:58:00.000 I would say the same thing about anybody who is inherited.

00:58:04.000 Money.

00:58:05.000 When 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?

00:58:13.000 Let me ask you a question.

00:58:14.000 Or did this money come from stock ownership?

00:58:16.000 Or did this money come from inheritance?

00:58:19.000 They just ask, do you have the money to afford it?

00:58:22.000 And that's part of markets, right?

00:58:23.000 Is that you're not able to make a moral claim for every dollar bill.

00:58:26.000 But generally, markets will go towards value and value creation.

00:58:29.000 I actually want to close this thought on one thing because it goes to your other thing that you're going to be doing.

00:58:34.000 Actually, can I, I mean, if you'll indulge me, could I ask you like a 30-second question?

00:58:38.000 Sure, because I really want to clarify.

00:58:40.000 I know we're coming up to it, but I'm so fascinated by this, right?

00:58:43.000 So we agree to.

00:58:44.000 It's not the firefighter thing again?

00:58:46.000 It's not the firefighter.

00:58:46.000 Okay.

00:58:47.000 Okay.

00:58:48.000 Although, you know, I think there's more to discuss.

00:58:50.000 I'm very anti-fire.

00:58:52.000 Well, that's good.

00:58:54.000 You should be equally anti-cancer.

00:58:56.000 And then just like we have fire departments, we should have that.

00:58:59.000 That's why I think people who eat well and don't smoke and make good decisions should be rewarded for human agency.

00:59:04.000 Yeah, which is not at all what we're doing.

00:59:05.000 Because the inverse of your statement, I just want to make sure this is clear.

00:59:08.000 The inverse is you say that people should not be penalized for factors outside of their control.

00:59:12.000 The inverse is that I think people should be rewarded for factors inside of their control.

00:59:16.000 Yeah, and most of what we've got for human action is not about rewards people for good choices.

00:59:24.000 Okay.

00:59:24.000 So here's what I wanted to ask.

00:59:26.000 Real, real true.

00:59:27.000 Sure, I promise.

00:59:28.000 So we established earlier how much we both liked Jeff Bezos.

00:59:32.000 Dislike best Jeff.

00:59:32.000 Yes.

00:59:33.000 You didn't ask me, should I raise his taxes?

00:59:35.000 Well, because this is why I'm curious about it.

00:59:37.000 Because I saw in 2019 with Kyle Kalinsky.

00:59:41.000 Yeah, and he asked you, would you be willing to raise Jeff Bezos' taxes by like 1% to provide housing for every single homeless veteran?

00:59:48.000 And your response at that time was that you'd hope he'd do it voluntarily.

00:59:52.000 And I think at this point, we've established that's not going to happen.

00:59:54.000 He'd prefer to buy a spaceship.

00:59:56.000 That's probably true.

00:59:57.000 Yeah.

00:59:58.000 So if you put a gun to my head, would I raise his taxes?

01:00:01.000 I mean, I guess if I was a representative, I guess, yes.

01:00:06.000 This is progress.

01:00:07.000 I'm so proud of you.

01:00:08.000 Let 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.

01:00:17.000 If 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.

01:00:24.000 But if it was earmarked for a housing for homeless veterans and you would say yes to the money.

01:00:29.000 The answer is yes, because I think Jeff Bezos from it from a million years ago.

01:00:32.000 This is such good progress.

01:00:33.000 But let me tell you why.

01:00:34.000 Let me clarify why.

01:00:35.000 Jeff Bezos games your favorite department, the Postal Service.

01:00:38.000 He games the corporate tax loophole system.

01:00:40.000 Jeff Bezos has a total disregard for what I consider to be the American way of life.

01:00:44.000 And he has this weird fascination of going into orbit.

01:00:46.000 And guess what?

01:00:47.000 I hope he stays there.

01:00:48.000 Okay.

01:00:49.000 Well, I congratulate you on this progress.

01:00:51.000 Well, I mean, you could call it progress.

01:00:52.000 You could also call it a commitment to prudence.

01:00:55.000 I want to ask you a question.

01:00:56.000 I will get back to the other question I want.

01:00:57.000 I want to ask you what, and I want to get more into philosophy here.

01:01:00.000 What's your view of Karl Marx?

01:01:03.000 My view of Karl Marx is pretty positive.

01:01:08.000 I 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?

01:01:23.000 You know, there should be ways that you can say, no, this part no longer makes sense.

01:01:27.000 You've got to rethink that.

01:01:29.000 I think you have to look at it all apart.

01:01:31.000 But I think that Karl Marx is a basically positive figure.

01:01:36.000 I think that the theory of history is mostly right.

01:01:39.000 And I also, so, yeah, I see you smiling.

01:01:41.000 Happy to get into it.

01:01:42.000 I'm happy to debate the Hegelian dialectic and the phenomenology of spirit.

01:01:47.000 Oh, okay.

01:01:48.000 No, not debate, but it's discussing.

01:01:49.000 Not where I thought this was going, but that's cool.

01:01:52.000 No, I mean, that's basically what you mean by the theory.

01:01:54.000 Well, I don't think it is.

01:01:55.000 I think there's a big difference there.

01:01:56.000 He was the head of the young Hegelians.

01:01:59.000 Well, 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.

01:02:11.000 But here's what I do think when we talk about Marx, because I think that there's an interesting thing that happens here.

01:02:16.000 That 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.

01:02:32.000 But then when we're talking about a philosopher like John Locke, who a lot of...

01:02:37.000 Love John Locke.

01:02:38.000 Yeah, right.

01:02:40.000 But 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. 0.52

01:02:58.000 That's a misinformation.

01:03:00.000 I think so, right?

01:03:01.000 Because like his view is they don't really have property rights because they're not using the land properly.

01:03:09.000 And so they haven't mixed their labor with it in the right way to establish a right to it.

01:03:14.000 Whereas 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.

01:03:27.000 And 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.

01:03:36.000 So there's a lot of things I want to get into.

01:03:38.000 So with the Paris Commune.

01:03:41.000 Yeah, sure.

01:03:42.000 Are you your favorable view of that?

01:03:44.000 You do write for the Jacobin magazine, so I imagine.

01:03:47.000 Do you think that I guess this is a question about human nature?

01:03:51.000 Do you take a Rassoian view of human nature?

01:03:51.000 Sure.

01:03:53.000 Do you think man is born free and remains the rest of his life in chains?

01:03:56.000 Or do you believe in tabula rasa, like the blank slate?

01:03:59.000 Or what is your view of human nature?

01:04:01.000 Because I think that's actually instructive.

01:04:01.000 Sure.

01:04:03.000 Sure, so we covered this a little bit earlier, but I'm happy to go back into it.

01:04:06.000 So I think that as far as human nature goes, are people fundamentally kind and decent and cooperative?

01:04:14.000 Are people fundamentally selfish and cruel?

01:04:18.000 I think that to fully answer that, you need to get really deep into evolutionary psychology and a lot of other things.

01:04:25.000 And the answer is incredibly murky.

01:04:27.000 I 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.

01:04:40.000 But what I think is that almost everybody gets the relationship between the human nature issue and the capitalism and socialism issue exactly wrong.

01:04:49.000 So tell me why.

01:04:52.000 You touched on this earlier.

01:04:53.000 I did touch on this earlier.

01:04:54.000 Okay, because if you have a Hobbesian view of human nature, you think that you should actually want big government.

01:04:58.000 I'm happy to get into it.

01:04:59.000 So I think that...

01:05:00.000 Which I guess which is what Hobbes believes.

01:05:02.000 Well, yes.

01:05:02.000 I certainly don't want big government in Hobbes' sense.

01:05:04.000 This gets back.

01:05:06.000 This 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.

01:05:18.000 Do 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?

01:05:26.000 You think government can have this dividing line between benevolence and malevolence?

01:05:30.000 You don't think the government could restrain itself?

01:05:31.000 I thought you were all about limited government.

01:05:33.000 Well, constitutionally, absolutely.

01:05:35.000 Okay, so you think the government could obey restraints about what it's supposed to do?

01:05:40.000 Only with the fierce limits of courts and not even establishing those departments in the first place.

01:05:46.000 The best way to limit government is to not create those departments or those means to do it.

01:05:50.000 Not have a spy agency domestically, for example.

01:05:53.000 Like, oh, we're only going to spy in a couple of years.

01:05:55.000 Well, okay.

01:05:56.000 So I think that might be the first thing.

01:05:57.000 What I'm saying is once you introduce that power, it will be abused.

01:06:00.000 Other 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.

01:06:10.000 But I think that if...

01:06:12.000 Including the Postal Service, which spies on our citizens.

01:06:14.000 Well, I think that the primary effect of the Postal Service.

01:06:20.000 I don't think that's because you're too busy losing my mail.

01:06:24.000 Of the Postal Service.

01:06:26.000 I think that the Postal Service, given how cheaply people are.

01:06:32.000 I feel sorry if you meant.

01:06:33.000 You don't have to do that.

01:06:34.000 Well, I don't think you should attack the Postal Service.

01:06:37.000 I think that it's been a tremendous economic benefit to many millions of Americans.

01:06:43.000 We don't have to have a stay bogged down on that.

01:06:46.000 But I do think, but on the philosophical question, that's where you want to go.

01:06:49.000 I 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.

01:07:05.000 So earlier, and I want to make sure I'm addressing this because I wouldn't want anybody to think I was avoiding the subject.

01:07:11.000 Earlier 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.

01:07:24.000 Like banning private beaches and letting in the entire country of Afghanistan. 1.00

01:07:27.000 Yeah, I think that the, well, first of all, I don't think the entire country of Afghanistan wants to come. 1.00

01:07:31.000 I think a lot of the entire country of Afghanistan.

01:07:38.000 Supports the Taliban. 0.96

01:07:39.000 I think refugees fleeing from the crisis that we created absolutely should come in. 1.00

01:07:46.000 But yeah, I do write all the time about the radical stuff.

01:07:50.000 Those things are not uncontroversial.

01:07:52.000 I don't think I'm afraid to talk about it.

01:07:54.000 But 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.

01:08:04.000 Markets are good at some things.

01:08:04.000 And I do agree.

01:08:06.000 Good, we agree on that.

01:08:06.000 Yeah.

01:08:07.000 They 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.

01:08:15.000 I think that there's a difference between markets in consumer goods and the labor market.

01:08:23.000 And 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.

01:08:44.000 And I think that the workplace is really a site of authoritarianism.

01:08:48.000 And so, sure, do we need some markets?

01:08:51.000 Absolutely.

01:08:51.000 I 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.

01:09:03.000 But are there domains you need markets in?

01:09:05.000 I would say that for those domains that you need markets in, you can at least have those markets be worker-controlled firms.

01:09:05.000 Sure.

01:09:14.000 So 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.

01:09:26.000 People get to elect management.

01:09:27.000 People have operated agreements.

01:09:29.000 They're like the equivalent of a union contract, but with no separate boss on the other side of the bargaining table.

01:09:34.000 And 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?

01:09:43.000 I'd say it should be more like Mondragon.

01:09:45.000 And 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.

01:10:00.000 So first of all, we have, I understand the argument of employers, employers, employees owning companies.

01:10:05.000 We have that in America too.

01:10:07.000 Public grocery state chains is a great example in Florida.

01:10:11.000 That could still happen in a market.

01:10:13.000 But I guess this is, and you haven't taken a position on human nature, which I think is fine.

01:10:16.000 Well, I mean, I think I've taken a position, to be clear.

01:10:20.000 There's some ambiguity in this.

01:10:21.000 But my position is...

01:10:22.000 Because you said, if you believe this, then you're going to be able to do that.

01:10:24.000 My position is that human nature is a mess, that there's a lot of truth to both pessimistic people.

01:10:28.000 I think that's fair and that's more accounts.

01:10:31.000 But I also think that to the extent that you worry about the bad stuff, that gives you a reason to want to distribute power evenly.

01:10:36.000 Right.

01:10:37.000 So 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.

01:10:55.000 The 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.

01:11:06.000 That's been the opposite of choice.

01:11:07.000 I'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?

01:11:17.000 It's mandated.

01:11:18.000 Whereas if you had more competition, then maybe there might be non-labor there.

01:11:23.000 So 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.

01:11:39.000 We can just say be a member of the union.

01:11:41.000 That if you have that, that this is an unfreedom, that workers are being forced to do something against their will.

01:11:47.000 But 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.

01:11:58.000 Workers need the job way more than a company usually.

01:12:01.000 I think you're misrepresenting any given business.

01:12:04.000 Any 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.

01:12:04.000 I really do.

01:12:12.000 And 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.

01:12:23.000 But if you really go with that principle, then that should go for everything at a job.

01:12:29.000 And 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.

01:12:50.000 That's way less objectionable than all the other stuff you're forced to do to have a job.

01:12:54.000 Like what?

01:12:56.000 Like what?

01:12:56.000 Well, I mean, I think if you were...

01:12:58.000 Like not show up drunk.

01:13:00.000 No, I think we could agree that that one's reasonable.

01:13:03.000 And if that was the extent of workplace authoritarianism in the United States.

01:13:07.000 Hold on.

01:13:07.000 I really want to zero on this.

01:13:08.000 I'd be much less concerned about this.

01:13:09.000 I want to zero on this because.

01:13:10.000 I'm just concerned about it. 0.99

01:13:12.000 Well, I want to zero on this because I'll agree that there's some externalities and some jerks and some dirtbags. 0.98

01:13:16.000 Do you really believe, let's say a majority? 0.98

01:13:18.000 Sure.

01:13:18.000 A majority of workers are being exploited by their bosses and that the owners of production, you really think that in America?

01:13:25.000 What do you mean by exploited?

01:13:27.000 You used the word.

01:13:28.000 You said exploitation or workplace authoritarianism.

01:13:32.000 That is your term.

01:13:32.000 The word I used was authoritarianism, not exploitation, but I'd be happy to talk about it.

01:13:36.000 But 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?

01:13:45.000 Let's say a majority, 50 plus one.

01:13:47.000 Yeah, much more than that.

01:13:50.000 So we're going to definitely disagree on that.

01:13:53.000 Sure.

01:13:54.000 So if you're saying, do the vast majority of people who work for a living in the United States work at workplaces where...

01:14:02.000 They're living under some sort of tyranny without them realizing it?

01:14:05.000 So, okay, let's be clear about what we're talking about here.

01:14:08.000 So they have a, that the vast majority of workers go to work in workplaces where they don't get to make any sort of managerial decisions.

01:14:17.000 Those are made with it for them.

01:14:19.000 And why?

01:14:22.000 And let's be fair.

01:14:23.000 Why is it?

01:14:23.000 Because someone took a risk to start a company and those workers didn't.

01:14:27.000 Because they decided to go into their savings, to go to a bank, to take out a line of credit, to take a risk to start something new.

01:14:32.000 Do you think everybody has the equal ability to do that?

01:14:34.000 Of course not.

01:14:35.000 I mean, absolutely not.

01:14:36.000 Does everyone have an equal ability to go dunk a basketball or to become a decathlete?

01:14:40.000 Of course not.

01:14:41.000 I mean, does everyone have an equal ability to become a college professor?

01:14:44.000 Of course not.

01:14:45.000 Sure. 0.97

01:14:46.000 I mean, that's a silly argument. 0.83

01:14:47.000 But this is the point.

01:14:48.000 Are some people going to create better widgets and gizmos than somebody else's?

01:14:52.000 But what people do have an equal ability to do is they have an equal ability to take the risk.

01:14:56.000 There are plenty of people that couldn't split the atom that work extra hours.

01:15:01.000 That go into their settings account.

01:15:02.000 That's not going to equal ability to take the risk.

01:15:03.000 Hold on.

01:15:04.000 Why is that?

01:15:04.000 Why isn't that so important?

01:15:06.000 Millions of people start new businesses every year in our country.

01:15:09.000 That's completely consistent with this.

01:15:11.000 The 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.

01:15:21.000 No, but there's plenty of people that...

01:15:26.000 Equal ability meaning this, meaning that do you have the freedom to do that?

01:15:30.000 Do you have the willingness to lever yourself up, to go to the bank and say, you know what?

01:15:33.000 I 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.

01:15:39.000 But hold on.

01:15:40.000 But 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.

01:15:50.000 And so here's where I'm starting to just like.

01:15:53.000 So I wish you'd give a little more appreciation.

01:15:56.000 I would like to separate a couple of issues.

01:15:57.000 To how capital is deployed.

01:15:59.000 I would like to separate a couple issues here because I think a lot of different things are being run together.

01:16:03.000 First 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.

01:16:16.000 So what does that suggest?

01:16:18.000 That 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.

01:16:31.000 So I think we're coming to a good disagreement.

01:16:33.000 But 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.

01:16:58.000 I think that there are two different issues that are being conflated there, which is one, is it authoritarian, right?

01:17:03.000 And that's just a question of what's the structure of the firm.

01:17:06.000 And the second, is it a job voluntarily?

01:17:09.000 They weren't stormed out of the house and put a gun to their head and say, now you must go work for Home Depot.

01:17:14.000 They showed up and filled out a job application and wanted and hoped to get the job.

01:17:20.000 So are there examples where that is the case where they're not going to be able to do that?

01:17:23.000 I noticed that everything that you just said applies to agreeing to work at a company that's a closed shop.

01:17:29.000 And so your contract specifies that you have to join the union.

01:17:32.000 Nobody 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.

01:17:42.000 They could find it.

01:17:43.000 No, 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.

01:17:53.000 But you just said public sector teacher.

01:17:56.000 You could be a private sector teacher.

01:17:58.000 So how is it that?

01:17:59.000 I agree, but why should the taxpayer subsidize a union project?

01:18:02.000 Well, I think that what the taxpayers are subsidizing is, first of all, a better quality of education.

01:18:10.000 Do you think public schools are superior to private schools?

01:18:13.000 I think that Finland has some of the best schools.

01:18:15.000 You know, America.

01:18:16.000 You think public schools?

01:18:16.000 Well, no, no.

01:18:17.000 But I mean, like, Finland and America aren't like such radically different societies that what's going to happen.

01:18:22.000 Because they are 7 million people, one is going to be 335 people.

01:18:26.000 Okay, wait a second.

01:18:27.000 Why is it that what works at 7 million in this case is not going to work with the 300 and some million people?

01:18:33.000 I could name a lot of examples why.

01:18:35.000 Why?

01:18:36.000 First of all, we have way more different cultures.

01:18:39.000 We have a different state-based model.

01:18:41.000 And let me just say this one thing.

01:18:42.000 First of all, Sweden has full school choice, and one in five families in Sweden send their kids to private school.

01:18:47.000 So we could talk about Scandinavia as much as we want.

01:18:49.000 But anyway, let's go back to the other side.

01:18:53.000 But which country has better schools, Finland or Sweden?

01:18:55.000 Finland does.

01:18:56.000 And that's with no private schools.

01:18:59.000 And they also have very strict immigration.

01:19:02.000 Well, 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.

01:19:13.000 They have a, you know, they're getting paid more, so you're going to attract better applicants.

01:19:20.000 And also, I think that the teachers count too.

01:19:22.000 I think that teachers deserve to have those things, and I'm all in favor of it.

01:19:28.000 But 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.

01:19:44.000 So I want to go back.

01:19:45.000 I'm going to talk about unions in circles, where I think if you want to join a union, fine, go ahead.

01:19:50.000 Public sector unions are not given that sort of choice.

01:19:53.000 And by the way, FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, warned us about public sector unions.

01:19:57.000 He said all government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into public service.

01:20:05.000 He warned about the public sector union differentiation between private sector union differentiation.

01:20:10.000 But I want to zero in on this because I think we have a really interesting point philosophically.

01:20:14.000 Do you think if someone takes a risk in America, they should be able to keep the reward?

01:20:19.000 Not entirely, no.

01:20:21.000 I mean, you don't think entirely.

01:20:22.000 I mean, like the only way you could think entirely is if you were an anarchist and you didn't think that we should.

01:20:27.000 But what are the limitations on that then?

01:20:29.000 I mean, again, I think that the question that you want to ask, if the question is, is some transfer of wealth justified?

01:20:36.000 Because I think that's the real question, right?

01:20:38.000 When are transfers of wealth justified?

01:20:40.000 You 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.

01:20:50.000 Now, 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.

01:20:58.000 I don't think that.

01:21:00.000 I 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.

01:21:10.000 But 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.

01:21:22.000 So I guess it all comes down to numbers, I guess.

01:21:27.000 Well, no, I mean, that's this isn't a claim about numbers.

01:21:30.000 This is a claim about basic moral principles.

01:21:34.000 I 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.

01:21:43.000 Which I totally reject.

01:21:44.000 Sure, I'd be.

01:21:45.000 I mean, of course you totally reject it.

01:21:47.000 I'm happy to get into the Rawlsian theory of justice.

01:21:50.000 I don't believe any of the things that you believed if you didn't reject it.

01:21:53.000 But I actually, I'm going to ask you about the veil of ignorance.

01:21:56.000 But 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.

01:22:04.000 I 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?

01:22:18.000 And 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.

01:22:25.000 If 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?

01:22:41.000 And I think that's going to be the answer that's going to tell you when redistribution of wealth is justified.

01:22:47.000 I would want the rules of society to value action over favoritism, hard work over complacency, family creation over licentiousness, right?

01:22:58.000 Liberty and the pursuit of virtue.

01:22:59.000 Those things are right and wrong regardless of what veil of ignorance, if I would be born in a lower class or a higher class. 0.79

01:23:05.000 Those things are objectively good.

01:23:07.000 And so to use Rawl's own thought experiment.

01:23:10.000 So you talked about, so you talked about hard work there.

01:23:13.000 So if you're industrious.

01:23:15.000 If 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.

01:23:24.000 Okay.

01:23:25.000 Inheritance and stock ownership.

01:23:26.000 So let's talk about both of them.

01:23:28.000 Stock ownership, you might be able to get me to agree.

01:23:30.000 Inheritance, I think, is really cliche.

01:23:32.000 Why do most people take big risks to create wealth?

01:23:35.000 Which also goes to this question, how is wealth created?

01:23:40.000 Wealth is created by workers. 0.88

01:23:43.000 Those are the ones who create.

01:23:44.000 Oh, 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.

01:23:58.000 And of course, there are a million other factors that decide it.

01:24:01.000 But 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.

01:24:23.000 And 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.

01:24:45.000 No, I think that's totally true.

01:24:46.000 But secondly, that you have cases like Mondragon, that you have very economically effective worker cooperatives.

01:24:55.000 Nobody 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.

01:25:08.000 And look, you might be able to get me to agree on like 500 million, a billion.

01:25:12.000 But again, the reason I wouldn't agree with it.

01:25:14.000 500 million, not like 5 million.

01:25:16.000 But like, you should be able to pass it.

01:25:17.000 But the reason I don't agree with it is that where is it going to go?

01:25:20.000 To go find, but go fund some spy agency so that you could go spy on Americans through some private future.

01:25:27.000 The 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?

01:25:34.000 The 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.

01:25:44.000 And so, but I guess there's this question of wealth being created and we're kind of that's a really interesting objection.

01:25:51.000 But 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.

01:25:58.000 I do have a question for you, actually, as a sidebar.

01:26:00.000 Why 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?

01:26:07.000 Well, I think that...

01:26:09.000 Does private charity do a better job?

01:26:11.000 No, I actually don't think that.

01:26:14.000 So, first of all, the reason the debate hosting website, the way that that works was already there.

01:26:22.000 I have nothing against private charity.

01:26:24.000 I am fine with doing that.

01:26:26.000 I obviously participated in doing that in this case.

01:26:29.000 Is it preferential to government?

01:26:30.000 I do not think that private charity can be a substitute for collective government action.

01:26:36.000 The empirical track record is very clear that you're not going to get private charity that's going to be as effective.

01:26:44.000 So for example, and we also need to talk about what we mean by effective here, because this is a really crucial point.

01:26:50.000 So there are a few different questions.

01:26:52.000 One, 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?

01:27:07.000 I don't think so.

01:27:08.000 I think that the, I think we've got to run that experiment.

01:27:10.000 Second 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?

01:27:34.000 I think people are far freer.

01:27:36.000 I think people have far more dignity if they just get these things as rights just by virtue of being part of a society.

01:27:44.000 Yeah, that's where we're going to totally disagree.

01:27:46.000 Where 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.

01:28:01.000 The $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.

01:28:13.000 In a variety of different ways.

01:28:14.000 How about the $500 billion we spend on charity?

01:28:17.000 Take 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.

01:28:29.000 Which one does a better job?

01:28:31.000 America, 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.

01:28:57.000 You won't hear me bragging on many aspects of the American healthcare system.

01:29:00.000 Many of it is very cronyistic and corrupt, but to say we're not spending government money on it is just not.

01:29:05.000 Well, did I say that we're not going to be able to do it?

01:29:06.000 No, but you're implying it.

01:29:07.000 I mean, we're spending it.

01:29:08.000 I mean, I don't think I said or implied.

01:29:10.000 Trillions and trillions of dollars we spend on government-run healthcare.

01:29:13.000 Sure.

01:29:14.000 I think it would actually be vastly more efficient if you look at how much is being spent for what results.

01:29:21.000 I 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.

01:29:27.000 So the UK has a total...

01:29:29.000 So you would have the government take over hospitals.

01:29:32.000 Yeah, ultimately, I think that would be better.

01:29:36.000 I don't think...

01:29:36.000 So where would medical innovation come from?

01:29:39.000 Well, medical innovation would come from exactly where it comes from right now, which is mostly the public sector.

01:29:44.000 If 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.

01:29:53.000 Well, you need that, so you have these incentives to develop pharmaceuticals.

01:29:58.000 If you look at NMEs.

01:30:00.000 Not just pharmaceuticals, treatments.

01:30:02.000 You 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.

01:30:09.000 75% of those are developed already in government-funded labs.

01:30:14.000 I think this idea that there's a lot of private innovation in there, I think is at the very least wildly overstated.

01:30:22.000 I 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.

01:30:37.000 Do you think there's a reason why America has the highest quality health care?

01:30:41.000 Not for the most amount of people, but the highest quality health care in the world?

01:30:45.000 Why do you think that is?

01:30:46.000 Well, I think that I think.

01:30:47.000 Because that is inarguable.

01:30:48.000 If you can afford it, it is the best health care on the planet.

01:30:51.000 Sure.

01:30:51.000 I 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.

01:31:04.000 But the question I'm interested in is not, are well-off people who are really well-offed.

01:31:10.000 It's a segue to my next question.

01:31:12.000 Well, 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?

01:31:21.000 What 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?

01:31:30.000 And that's just inarguable.

01:31:32.000 But they have better outcomes.

01:31:33.000 The question is then, how do you get something that a few people have to have a lot of people have?

01:31:37.000 More government intervention or market forces applied that allow things to be cheaper and faster delivered and better delivered.

01:31:44.000 Market forces do a better job for that all the time.

01:31:46.000 Whether 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.

01:31:56.000 And that structural reason is not some special radical Marxist thing that I think.

01:32:01.000 That 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.

01:32:18.000 You drive past one gas station, you see, ah, that looks a little bit too expensive.

01:32:23.000 You drive a few blocks more, you get to another gas station.

01:32:26.000 Those 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.

01:32:35.000 For 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.

01:32:46.000 It 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.

01:32:58.000 Yeah, people are going to sell for whatever price you're going to pay in those circumstances.

01:33:00.000 People are going to pay whatever you're demanding to get heart surgery.

01:33:04.000 And 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.

01:33:16.000 It's still a giant stressful pain to switch providers that, you know, you'd have to find something.

01:33:23.000 I'm not defending every detail of the American system.

01:33:26.000 But the point isn't about the details.

01:33:27.000 The point is that this is a structural reason that our demand for health care is way less elastic than our demand.

01:33:33.000 I think there are other consumer American health care systems.

01:33:36.000 Which means that market forces are going to be less than 100%.

01:33:38.000 It's hardly in the market, though.

01:33:39.000 We don't have price transparency.

01:33:41.000 We have an oligarchy of the hospitals. 0.59

01:33:43.000 We don't have health savings accounts in most states.

01:33:47.000 We don't allow health insurance across state lines.

01:33:49.000 Now, 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.

01:33:58.000 Like, okay, yeah, I have leukemia.

01:34:00.000 Like, that's not the same thing.

01:34:01.000 I get that.

01:34:02.000 Where the charts and the graphs can't explain all of that.

01:34:05.000 Generally, 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.

01:34:13.000 Because, and you know this, the vast majority of people going to the doctor are not like, I have a gunshot wound, I've leukemia.

01:34:17.000 Oh, absolutely.

01:34:18.000 Or cancer.

01:34:19.000 That's what I just said.

01:34:20.000 Well, I know, but market forces in those cases, you could agree, could be very, very instructive and very helpful.

01:34:26.000 Well, I think empowering the consumer and price transparency and bringing down prices.

01:34:30.000 So, I think that here are the things that we know.

01:34:33.000 That 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.

01:34:45.000 But I would argue in the American healthcare system we hardly have market forces in most healthcare.

01:34:50.000 Like, most hospitals are nonprofit government-run agencies.

01:34:53.000 This is what it sounds like to me.

01:34:55.000 Like, 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.

01:35:08.000 They still had money.

01:35:09.000 I'm arguing that.

01:35:11.000 Because 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.

01:35:19.000 And certainly relative to developed rich countries, we have some of the worst outcomes.

01:35:25.000 And 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.

01:35:35.000 I think that's a leap.

01:35:36.000 Let me give you a great example.

01:35:38.000 So you want to empower regular people, consumers.

01:35:40.000 Would you agree that there should be a federal law to mandate hospitals publicly publish their prices, price transparency?

01:35:48.000 Yeah, sure, I'm all for that.

01:35:49.000 Okay, that's a market fix.

01:35:51.000 We want people to have the information because what they have right now is they're driving down the street.

01:35:54.000 They don't even see the gas prices.

01:35:56.000 They don't even know what price anything is.

01:35:58.000 And 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.

01:36:11.000 What 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? 0.95

01:36:18.000 Like, that's dumb.

01:36:19.000 Yeah, I agree that price transparency would be better, but what would be even better? 0.97

01:36:23.000 And by the way, that's not every conservative agrees with me.

01:36:25.000 Some are like, they can do whatever they want. 0.93

01:36:26.000 I think that's silly.

01:36:27.000 Okay, well, that's good.

01:36:30.000 Put that alongside the progress of the business.

01:36:32.000 Hunter Biden, Jeff Bezos, and price transparency, right?

01:36:35.000 So I don't want to spend all of our time on that.

01:36:38.000 But let me just say one of the things that we're going to do.

01:36:38.000 There's so much more I want to get to that.

01:36:40.000 Sure, but let me say one last thing about that.

01:36:42.000 What 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.

01:36:52.000 Insulin is something that people badly need.

01:36:55.000 Psychiatric medication is often something people badly need.

01:36:58.000 And if they get off it without proper medical circumstances, that's going to be a disaster for them.

01:37:05.000 That what would be even better than price transparency is not treating those things as commodities.

01:37:10.000 And 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.

01:37:17.000 I'm not going to get into it.

01:37:18.000 I'm not going to get into waiting lines in Canada or any of that because some of that stuff is very happy to get into it.

01:37:24.000 Some of that is very much disputed.

01:37:25.000 And quite honestly, I'm not prepared to go into that as much.

01:37:29.000 So I just kind of want to.

01:37:30.000 Okay, I would say I'll let you have one comment on that because I'm not.

01:37:34.000 Sure, sure, sure.

01:37:35.000 One comment.

01:37:36.000 And I'll allow people to do their own research on Canadian waiting lines, but yes.

01:37:39.000 Sure.

01:37:40.000 I think that if you want to talk about Canadian waiting.

01:37:43.000 Healthcare rationing, because it's not unlimited, therefore you have to prioritize who gets it, right?

01:37:46.000 No healthcare system is unlimited.

01:37:49.000 But 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?

01:37:58.000 And 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?

01:38:11.000 How long can we keep this person alive versus any of those things?

01:38:15.000 The worst way to do it is to ration it by money, which is what we do.

01:38:19.000 So, what I think about Canadian waiting lines is there is some truth to it.

01:38:22.000 There are some things.

01:38:23.000 Thank you for saying you do.

01:38:24.000 Not everyone says that you do have longer wait times for I don't think it's as dramatic as people say it is.

01:38:29.000 You might be right.

01:38:30.000 I hear both of them.

01:38:31.000 But there are some things that you have longer waiting times for.

01:38:34.000 But I think one, that part of the reason you have longer waiting times is that more people are in line.

01:38:40.000 We don't exclude people from the line because they can't afford it.

01:38:44.000 And I think as a matter of basic human rights, that's good not to exclude people from the line.

01:38:48.000 And 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.

01:38:57.000 And I know a lot of people want to say that all of that's just lifestyle stuff.

01:39:02.000 But I grew up right by the Canadian border in Michigan.

01:39:05.000 All the Canadians I know.

01:39:07.000 In the Upper Peninsula?

01:39:08.000 No, in the Lower Peninsula, but I actually had to drive south to get to the nearest Canadian border, Detroit, Windsor.

01:39:14.000 Oh, wow.

01:39:14.000 Okay, you were near the Canadian border.

01:39:17.000 And all the Canadians I know love beer and hockey and Tim Horton's donuts.

01:39:21.000 I don't think that the reason that they have these better health care outcomes is that they're that much healthier than Americans.

01:39:27.000 And certainly, I think the infant mortality differences, the lifestyle of infants is very similar everywhere.

01:39:32.000 They just kind of lie there.

01:39:34.000 And you could say there are certain factors, parent behaviors that create differences there.

01:39:40.000 But I think even there, like way more Brits smoke than Americans.

01:39:43.000 The rate of drinking is higher.

01:39:46.000 That is definitely true.

01:39:47.000 I think that the and those are the things that are most immediately going to impact that.

01:39:51.000 And then especially, I think the one you're going to have the hardest time explaining is mortality amenable to healthcare.

01:39:57.000 Yeah, let me just make my position clear.

01:39:59.000 Why I think some of your critiques are actually very valid and helpful.

01:40:02.000 Where you totally lose me is government takeover of hospitals.

01:40:06.000 And because let me ask you a question.

01:40:07.000 Okay, okay, could we at least do government takeover of insurance?

01:40:09.000 Well, let's just do hospitals because that really is the question, right?

01:40:12.000 Sure.

01:40:13.000 So let me just ask you a question because I didn't want to spend this much time on it, but now you've got me interested.

01:40:18.000 Do you think the VA works well?

01:40:21.000 So I think that I would say two things about that.

01:40:26.000 So 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.

01:40:38.000 I think that's very unclear what that means.

01:40:40.000 Or 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?

01:40:49.000 But 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.

01:41:00.000 But are there cases where people have to wait way too long for certainly like psychiatric care for me?

01:41:08.000 I'm not sure if that's the same thing.

01:41:10.000 The VA is a mess in a lot of surveys.

01:41:11.000 But 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.

01:41:21.000 And then they use the results of that to undermine it.

01:41:25.000 But 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?

01:41:38.000 And 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.

01:41:48.000 Only a small minority of Americans are veterans.

01:41:51.000 So what goes on in the VA is not really something that's on most people's radar most of the time.

01:41:56.000 Let me ask you another question.

01:41:57.000 So there's a lot less political incentive to care about.

01:41:59.000 Usually, typically, in urban areas, are the county-run hospitals the best?

01:42:04.000 I'm sure they're not.

01:42:05.000 They have a because I think that oftentimes they're severely underfunded, that it's certainly.

01:42:13.000 You get what I'm getting at here, though.

01:42:14.000 So I get what you're getting at.

01:42:17.000 Usually a disaster.

01:42:18.000 But I think the question is, why, let's accept that, right?

01:42:23.000 Like, I'm certainly not going to pretend like I have a bunch of stats that are memorized.

01:42:27.000 Yeah, and even if Atlanta, the Emory Hospital is way better on county.

01:42:33.000 And I could say for personal experience, it's just the Emory Hospital is far superior to just county.

01:42:37.000 But here's what I think is the more relevant point of comparison.

01:42:40.000 Not 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.

01:42:50.000 But they do receive a lot of funding.

01:42:53.000 But 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?

01:43:03.000 That's a very fair question.

01:43:04.000 I have my own personal opinions of it.

01:43:06.000 Not every healthcare outcome is better.

01:43:08.000 We have a higher cancer survivability rate for certain sort of treatments.

01:43:12.000 We have a higher quality of care for certain people.

01:43:14.000 There 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.

01:43:27.000 But it's going to be difficult to kind of pinpoint a cause.

01:43:30.000 If 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.

01:43:39.000 But 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.

01:43:47.000 Oh, it's because some guys on government.

01:43:49.000 I don't put all those things aside.

01:43:50.000 We just went through a detailed detailed argument about why this is a more plausible explanation.

01:43:56.000 Now, 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.

01:44:07.000 I mean, what is the biggest difference between the U.S. and Canada?

01:44:10.000 What's the biggest difference between the United States and the United Kingdom?

01:44:14.000 It's not that we're much healthier.

01:44:17.000 As you say, a lot of things that are relevant here, like drinking, are actually.

01:44:22.000 We are a little bit more obese.

01:44:23.000 Or 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.

01:44:31.000 And 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.

01:44:42.000 That's a big deal.

01:44:43.000 I mean, I am all in favor.

01:44:43.000 Sure.

01:44:46.000 And I will say this completely.

01:44:47.000 We can talk about what we're doing.

01:44:48.000 You'll agree with this.

01:44:49.000 If 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.

01:44:57.000 Well, that is certainly one of the things.

01:44:59.000 But let's put the hospital thing aside and delivery of care and all that stuff.

01:45:02.000 Well, I was just going to say that.

01:45:05.000 I 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.

01:45:14.000 That's okay.

01:45:15.000 Well, I mean, I don't know.

01:45:16.000 You kind of did.

01:45:17.000 I 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?

01:45:26.000 And 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.

01:45:36.000 If there was a difference, I would say that AstraZeneca, I don't even know if AstraZeneca is an American company.

01:45:41.000 But Johnson ⁇ Johnson, Pfizer, and BioINTEC, which was an originally Israeli company.

01:45:45.000 Yeah, but those are the vaccine manufacturers.

01:45:49.000 Which, 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.

01:45:55.000 Which might have had questionable outcomes.

01:45:57.000 We'll see.

01:45:58.000 So I guess we're not going to get into that.

01:46:00.000 That's too much fun for right now.

01:46:01.000 Let me ask you another question.

01:46:02.000 Well, the point I was trying to make, just for the record, is the outcomes where you say that the U.S. is bad.

01:46:08.000 And not every metric, but it's fair.

01:46:09.000 I'm not defending the U.S.

01:46:13.000 I understand you're not defending.

01:46:15.000 We can go to other places that have.

01:46:15.000 We can go to Singapore.

01:46:17.000 Singapore is much less free market than the U.S. system.

01:46:20.000 Decentralized.

01:46:20.000 Well, they're more economically free.

01:46:21.000 But again, I'm not a defense lawyer for the American healthcare system.

01:46:25.000 Singapore's healthcare system is like Obamacare.

01:46:27.000 But 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.

01:46:39.000 And I think a majority of Americans, for a good reason. 0.97

01:46:41.000 Sure, 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.

01:46:52.000 They're about specific kinds of services that not everybody's going to get in the first place.

01:46:57.000 And that goes back to what we were saying earlier: that sure, if you can afford it, absolutely.

01:47:02.000 So you have to stand there.

01:47:03.000 The 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.

01:47:11.000 So I'll give you one example.

01:47:12.000 I'm going to agree on Hunter Biden, Bezos, price transparency.

01:47:15.000 And I don't think pharmaceutical companies should be allowed to advertise.

01:47:18.000 I think it's the weirdest thing ever.

01:47:20.000 They're running.

01:47:21.000 Ask your doctor about this.

01:47:21.000 Like, if you need it, then your doctor should tell you about it.

01:47:24.000 You shouldn't be propagandized by the company.

01:47:26.000 If you're asking your doctor if this is right for you, that's a drug dealer, not a doctor.

01:47:30.000 I agree.

01:47:31.000 But I think that's because it hurts the family.

01:47:35.000 All 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.

01:47:44.000 Do you believe in absolute truth?

01:47:47.000 Sure.

01:47:48.000 Okay, just interesting.

01:47:50.000 I mean, let me make sure I understand what you're asking.

01:47:53.000 So when you say absolute truth, do you just mean that whether things in general about any subject are true or false?

01:48:03.000 Yeah, 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?

01:48:10.000 No, absolutely not.

01:48:11.000 So that's good.

01:48:12.000 Do you think that postmodernism and that kind of movement is harmful or helpful to the American left?

01:48:19.000 I think it's harmful.

01:48:20.000 I don't think that's a good idea.

01:48:21.000 I'll elaborate that.

01:48:21.000 That's interesting.

01:48:22.000 I don't think we should believe in alternative facts any more than anybody else should.

01:48:28.000 I think that what's true is I think that what's true, generally speaking, it depends a little bit, you know, what we're talking about.

01:48:38.000 And I'm not saying the only reason I'm saying like Newtonian physics, like force equals mass acceleration.

01:48:43.000 Sure.

01:48:43.000 Well, yeah, I mean, I mean, technically, Newtonian physics is a good enough approximation for like mid-sized dry goods.

01:48:51.000 The real stuff is like quantum physics, relative physics.

01:48:53.000 Of course, but you understand what I'm saying.

01:48:54.000 But I understand what you're saying.

01:48:55.000 And I agree, right?

01:48:56.000 Absolutely.

01:48:59.000 I think that truth is objective.

01:49:02.000 I think if you want to get into an argument about who in practice who has political power is actually denied that more than others.

01:49:11.000 Yeah, I don't think there'll actually be much fruit in that discussion.

01:49:14.000 Then we could get into it.

01:49:15.000 He said he said it.

01:49:16.000 But if your question is whether truth is objective, that I think it is, I did, if I could slip one in.

01:49:25.000 You can ask me questions.

01:49:27.000 It is a little bit, it's a little bit off the track of most of what we've been talking about, but I have been wondering about this, right?

01:49:33.000 Sure.

01:49:33.000 Because I have seen, you know, I have seen some of your previous debates, and something's come up at a couple of them.

01:49:45.000 It's not a politics question at all, at least directly.

01:49:47.000 Is it more metaphysics?

01:49:48.000 Yeah.

01:49:48.000 Okay, there you go.

01:49:49.000 It's more about a physical question.

01:49:51.000 I've seen you make this claim that you'll say things like, well, there's no social contract.

01:49:56.000 Our rights come from God.

01:49:59.000 So first thing is, could you elaborate a little bit on what you mean by that?

01:50:02.000 Yeah, 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.

01:50:22.000 So if something gave it to you, I assume that what you mean by something gave it to you.

01:50:26.000 I would believe an omniscient, omnipotent being, but I'm not proselytizing you to believe.

01:50:30.000 Well, no, no, I'm not, I don't think you are.

01:50:33.000 I mean, I was the one who brought it up.

01:50:34.000 I'm sure.

01:50:38.000 So if you know, because when you say that something gave it to you, you could read that at least two different ways.

01:50:44.000 So 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.

01:50:58.000 But of course, it's clearly not the case that God is like stopping China from putting dissidents in jail.

01:51:04.000 I assume what you mean is that we morally have a right to those things because God gave it to you.

01:51:13.000 That's correct.

01:51:14.000 But if you're asking, do I believe that in a God that can intervene supernaturally?

01:51:18.000 I do.

01:51:19.000 Sure, you can, but I'm able to.

01:51:20.000 And has.

01:51:21.000 But I'm happy to get into that.

01:51:23.000 Sure.

01:51:24.000 I don't think that would be.

01:51:24.000 No, fair enough, right?

01:51:26.000 I don't think that's actually relevant to the question.

01:51:28.000 Trust me, whatever else I am, I'm a huge philosophy nerd.

01:51:31.000 I'm always happy to talk about that.

01:51:33.000 But I have a question about Christopher Hitchens for you.

01:51:34.000 Sure, awesome.

01:51:35.000 Because I know you wrote a book on that.

01:51:36.000 I did.

01:51:37.000 Just finished a couple weeks ago.

01:51:38.000 But I'd like to, thank you.

01:51:40.000 But if you say that God is the moral, you know, is the reason why morally we should have these rights.

01:51:49.000 The unmoved movement.

01:51:51.000 That I don't understand how that's going to get around like the Euthyphro problem.

01:51:56.000 Like 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.

01:52:06.000 And 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.

01:52:11.000 So they're arguing about the definition of holiness, and Euthyphro says the holy is that which the gods love.

01:52:16.000 And Socrates asks him this simple question.

01:52:20.000 Do the gods love it because it is holy, or is it holy because the gods love it?

01:52:23.000 So 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?

01:52:38.000 Because if you say both, okay, well, that's a really interesting answer.

01:52:43.000 Never heard that one before.

01:52:44.000 I want to get into it.

01:52:45.000 But 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,

01:53:13.000 God thinks it would be unjust is a reason that's going to be just as available to the atheist or the agnostic. 0.96

01:53:18.000 Whereas 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. 0.94

01:53:38.000 Right.

01:53:38.000 So a lot to impact there.

01:53:40.000 I 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?

01:53:57.000 But also, because of divine revelation, we release, we realize what is morally just than unjust.

01:54:03.000 So, believing in the Christian God or the geo-Christian God, we would reject what the Taliban is doing for a variety of different reasons. 0.70

01:54:08.000 But I understand how you can say that through divine revelation, you can figure out what God thinks.

01:54:17.000 Sure.

01:54:17.000 Right.

01:54:17.000 And going off, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Augustine.

01:54:20.000 Well, I mean, this is, you know, we're talking about the Plato's objection to the world.

01:54:24.000 Yeah, I'm happy to go through Aristotle's ethics and metaphysics with you too.

01:54:27.000 Sure.

01:54:28.000 That sounds fun.

01:54:29.000 So 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.

01:54:41.000 I just want to show I'm understanding your question.

01:54:42.000 Just can you clarify it a little bit?

01:54:44.000 So 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?

01:54:55.000 Yes.

01:54:55.000 Or would it be unjust if we didn't?

01:54:57.000 Or is the only reason it would be unjust if we didn't have them because God doesn't want to?

01:55:00.000 The answer is both.

01:55:01.000 And 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.

01:55:08.000 But those are answers to the question of how you find out what God wants.

01:55:13.000 Yes.

01:55:14.000 But that's a little bit different from saying, why does God want that thing?

01:55:17.000 Oh, okay, good.

01:55:17.000 God wants us these things because He wants us to live fruitful and multiply, as He says in the scriptures.

01:55:22.000 God does not want us to live oppressively.

01:55:25.000 He doesn't want us to fail or to...

01:55:28.000 And my own biblical theological interpretation, which you can feel free to mock and dismiss.

01:55:32.000 But my answer.

01:55:34.000 Trust me, I'm not going to mock it.

01:55:36.000 We had a whole fun little thing last night.

01:55:38.000 I have tremendous respect for Christian socialists like Cordell West or Dr. Martin Luther King.

01:55:44.000 Well, definitely not going to find me as one of those.

01:55:46.000 Or 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.

01:55:59.000 So, okay, so if God wants us to live fruitfully, to flourish.

01:56:04.000 Be fruitful and multiply.

01:56:05.000 Sure.

01:56:06.000 So occupy till I come.

01:56:07.000 Be salt and light throughout every corner of the earth.

01:56:09.000 Okay.

01:56:10.000 So 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?

01:56:30.000 That there wasn't a God, it would still be the case that it was objectively, morally good to be able to do it.

01:56:35.000 That's correct.

01:56:35.000 Yes.

01:56:36.000 So God's law in our interpretation of natural rights is true regardless if you recognize it's granted by God or not.

01:56:44.000 So I'll give you an example, the Decalogue, right?

01:56:46.000 The Ten Commandments or the Ten Statements that were given to Moses.

01:56:50.000 If you follow those 10 things as an atheist or Christopher Hitchens fan, you're going to live a good life.

01:56:54.000 Not lying, not stealing, not murdering, honoring your parents, you're not committing adultery.

01:56:59.000 Those are things that are built into the natural law.

01:57:00.000 That's an easy 10 examples to give.

01:57:02.000 Now, but also those things are true if you recognize they're given to you by God, of which I believe.

01:57:07.000 So those are both independently true.

01:57:10.000 So, 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.

01:57:20.000 I hope you're enjoying this.

01:57:20.000 No, I am enjoying this.

01:57:22.000 I just also realize that this is a little self-indulgent, that I was really curious about this thing that's a little off topic.

01:57:28.000 I hope it's clarifying you, not confusing you.

01:57:30.000 Okay, well, here's the part that I do still unfortunately find a little bit confusing.

01:57:34.000 So you're saying two things about this, but I don't quite see how they fit together.

01:57:37.000 One of them is that it would be objectively morally good for us to live flourishing lives whether God existed or not.

01:57:44.000 than 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.

01:57:58.000 Yes, both of those things.

01:58:00.000 So 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.

01:58:19.000 So that's what we mean by the natural law.

01:58:21.000 So don't know that someone in Papua New Guinea or in Paris will equally succeed if they do these things.

01:58:26.000 Sure, I understand, but...

01:58:28.000 Maybe I'm not answering the question.

01:58:29.000 I'm not trying to dodge it.

01:58:30.000 Sure.

01:58:32.000 But 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.

01:58:41.000 In other words, what makes something true, right?

01:58:44.000 What you're talking about is really epistemology, how we find out that it's true.

01:58:48.000 I'm happy to go into the metaphysics.

01:58:50.000 Sure, 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?

01:59:03.000 I understand that part.

01:59:06.000 But 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?

01:59:18.000 God is.

01:59:19.000 I understand the question.

01:59:21.000 I reject the premise.

01:59:22.000 Well, I mean, I understand.

01:59:25.000 I understand you think that's not the case.

01:59:26.000 It's asking in like a hypothetical world if like there is no unmoved mover and like some create, you know, some creator.

01:59:32.000 Sure.

01:59:34.000 So I guess what you're saying is what I value as the natural law, if there was no natural lawgiver, would the natural law still be true?

01:59:42.000 To be consistent, I guess.

01:59:44.000 Okay.

01:59:45.000 Yes.

01:59:46.000 But I just reject the premise because you're asking me to believe something.

01:59:48.000 Oh, I'm not asking you to believe it.

01:59:50.000 Or to entertain something I so to answer your question, I guess, would the natural law be true if God did not write the natural law?

01:59:57.000 Yeah.

01:59:58.000 Okay.

01:59:59.000 But 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.

02:00:10.000 Okay, 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.

02:00:20.000 And I believe that is true.

02:00:23.000 Okay.

02:00:24.000 Because our existence is breathed into by a creator.

02:00:30.000 Sure, but I think you could think three things were all true.

02:00:34.000 One is that the reason we exist is because of God.

02:00:39.000 Yes.

02:00:40.000 And 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.

02:00:55.000 You 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.

02:01:04.000 Yeah, I said that.

02:01:05.000 Well, okay, but I don't understand.

02:01:07.000 It'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.

02:01:20.000 So, I mean, maybe this is another thing where I'm asking you to entertain something you don't want to entertain, but like.

02:01:25.000 If God was dead?

02:01:27.000 No, if God had commanded something different, would that thing therefore be good?

02:01:31.000 So it's a premise and a presupposition that...

02:01:35.000 Well, I understand you don't think that's like saying, is...

02:01:38.000 Actually, the Bible deals with this, right?

02:01:39.000 So the Bible deals with this in the story of Abraham and Isaac.

02:01:44.000 Or is it Isaac and Jacob when he brings up his son to sacrifice?

02:01:46.000 Yeah.

02:01:47.000 Abraham and Isaac, where God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his child.

02:01:50.000 Come on, Charlie.

02:01:51.000 I'm the atheist.

02:01:52.000 Yeah, exactly.

02:01:52.000 I wanted to make sure I was precise.

02:01:54.000 When God actually never commanded him to do that, it was a test of his faith, right?

02:01:59.000 At the very moment, he delivered a replacement sacrifice at the very least.

02:02:03.000 So this is a perfect example.

02:02:05.000 That's a question of obedience to God.

02:02:06.000 Do you do something that is against the moral law if God commands you to do it?

02:02:11.000 So you think that if hypothetically God had wanted him to go through with it, that the right thing to do would be to go through with it.

02:02:21.000 Yeah, if you believe in an omniscient, omnipotent, unmoved mover, but this text doesn't show that.

02:02:25.000 Yes.

02:02:25.000 I mean, the answer, even for an atheist, would be a yes, if you believe there was a God.

02:02:29.000 I don't think that follows.

02:02:30.000 I 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.

02:02:42.000 I think that's a fair thing to say.

02:02:43.000 I 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.

02:02:52.000 But 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.

02:03:01.000 Oh, I think.

02:03:02.000 And you would probably totally disagree.

02:03:03.000 Let me ask you a question about Christopher Hitchens.

02:03:05.000 Sure, let's say.

02:03:05.000 Okay, because we have five minutes left.

02:03:06.000 Sure, sure, sure.

02:03:07.000 I want to be respectful of it.

02:03:10.000 I am delighted to do five minutes of Hitchens.

02:03:12.000 Help me give the best argument.

02:03:15.000 Because what are your metaphysics?

02:03:16.000 Are you an atheist?

02:03:17.000 Yeah.

02:03:17.000 Okay.

02:03:18.000 Do you hope you're wrong?

02:03:20.000 Do I hope I'm wrong?

02:03:22.000 I hope it depends on what that would mean.

02:03:25.000 I mean, if...

02:03:26.000 Do you hope there's a God? 0.57

02:03:27.000 I certainly don't hope there's a God who's going to send me to hell for me to an atheist. 1.00

02:03:30.000 That wouldn't be a good outcome.

02:03:31.000 Do you want eternal life?

02:03:32.000 Do I depends what kind of eternal life is?

02:03:35.000 Like eternal bliss.

02:03:36.000 Eternal bliss, if that were.

02:03:38.000 Seeing your loved ones.

02:03:39.000 Sure, sure.

02:03:40.000 If that were on offer, I would take it.

02:03:42.000 I respect that answer because not every atheist answers that way.

02:03:45.000 Some atheists say no.

02:03:46.000 They want to be right more than what is good.

02:03:48.000 Sure.

02:03:49.000 There are a lot of things that standard theologically Orthodox Christians believe is God.

02:03:55.000 About God, I would not be happy to be true, but that one I would definitely be happy to trust.

02:03:59.000 Okay, an acceptance of a savior that could give you eternal life.

02:04:02.000 So the fine-tuning argument.

02:04:05.000 I don't think that's exactly what I said, but it's probably not worth doing.

02:04:08.000 The fine-tuning argument.

02:04:09.000 Fine-tuning, which is Christopher Hitchens said, is the best argument for those people that believe in a creator.

02:04:14.000 The fine-tuning argument is that we live in a planet that's perfectly positioned.

02:04:18.000 You could do better than I could.

02:04:19.000 How do you personally wrestle with and unpack the fine-tuning argument?

02:04:23.000 Do you ever have doubts that there is a God?

02:04:28.000 Honestly, I kind of wish that I could say yes because it makes me sound more reasonable.

02:04:36.000 It sounds dogmatic if I said no, but honestly, I think no is the honest answer.

02:04:40.000 I think that, so why the fine-tuning argument doesn't move me very much?

02:04:44.000 Because it didn't move Hitchens, but it piqued his curiosity.

02:04:48.000 I mean, I might even go along with the comparative claim that it might be better than the other arguments.

02:04:52.000 But 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.

02:05:07.000 This outcome happened, therefore that setup is wrong.

02:05:10.000 So just a small example that I think makes vivid why I don't find that plausible.

02:05:16.000 If 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.

02:05:27.000 Yeah, the deck has more than 52 cards, though.

02:05:29.000 They were doing sure.

02:05:30.000 Because the probability of the fine tuning is a card.

02:05:33.000 But 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.

02:05:55.000 And I think that no matter how big you make the deck, the same point is going to apply.

02:05:59.000 That if it's one out of 500 trillion or whatever, that the chance of this, well, sure.

02:06:07.000 It'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.

02:06:19.000 So let me ask you a question, like the minute in 10 seconds we have remaining, which is not that teleological argument.

02:06:25.000 What's the purpose of life?

02:06:27.000 So, okay.

02:06:28.000 So I think that that I definitely cannot do in 10 seconds, but if I could have like an extra 45 or so, I could take a run at it.

02:06:36.000 What is the purpose?

02:06:36.000 What is the telos?

02:06:37.000 What is the place you're aiming for?

02:06:39.000 So I think the teleological argument for the existence of God is a slightly different thing.

02:06:44.000 No, I'm just saying, what is your teleological being?

02:06:47.000 Okay, all right.

02:06:48.000 Because if you said teleological argument, we could get into why I don't think that works.

02:06:52.000 But 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.

02:07:05.000 We could certainly talk about what counts as personal virtue.

02:07:09.000 We could certainly talk about what counts as moral justice.

02:07:12.000 I 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.

02:07:33.000 I cannot resist throwing that in there.

02:07:35.000 That's okay.

02:07:36.000 I really enjoyed this.

02:07:37.000 Maybe we could do it again.

02:07:38.000 And it was fun to explore ideas everywhere from metaphysics to ethics to post office adoration.

02:07:46.000 Is that fair to say?

02:07:47.000 Defense?

02:07:48.000 Yes.

02:07:49.000 Strong, stronger.

02:07:50.000 We agreed on Hunter Biden.

02:07:52.000 Jeff Bezos, Price Transparency, and Pharmaceutical Commercials.

02:07:55.000 Besides that, it's a bunch of really good disagreements, but we have clarity in that agreement, which I hope we have more of.

02:08:01.000 Thank you.

02:08:01.000 Anything you want to plug in closing?

02:08:03.000 Your new book on Christopher Hitchens.

02:08:04.000 New book on Christopher Hitchens.

02:08:06.000 Christopher Hitchens, What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why Still Matters should be out in December.

02:08:11.000 The show is called GTA, Give Them an Argument.

02:08:15.000 And 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.

02:08:27.000 Metaphysics, the point of existence.

02:08:29.000 You know, eternity.

02:08:31.000 All of those things.

02:08:32.000 I really do appreciate the fact that you're willing to do this.

02:08:34.000 A lot of conservatives are not.

02:08:35.000 Hey, it was fun.

02:08:36.000 We're always, we want to have dialogue, which means through reason.

02:08:40.000 The original word.

02:08:41.000 Thank you, Ben.

02:08:41.000 I really appreciate it.

02:08:42.000 Thank you, Charlie.

02:08:42.000 Thanks.

02:08:45.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

02:08:46.000 Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.

02:08:49.000 God bless you guys.

02:08:50.000 Speak to you soon.

02:08:53.000 For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.

The Charlie Kirk Show - October 22, 2021

DEBATE NIGHT: Charlie Kirk Vs. Atheist, Marxist Professor Ben Burgis

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