Unify Action - July 21, 2026


He Thought Sweden Proved His Point — You Won't Believe This Conversation


Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

217.55

Word count

2,457

Sentence count

18


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 I don't think socialism would work if it was imported into Canada and the US.
00:00:03.120 Maybe you could say socialism is a scam, like again I wouldn't say it's a scam,
00:00:06.800 but then I would say that the other models are equally a scam.
00:00:10.960 So socialism is a scam. I would say to that, I would say it depends on
00:00:15.600 the ends you're trying to produce in your society. So with America under like the neoliberal
00:00:20.320 conception, obviously you're trying to pursue more innovation, you know, like profits, wealth
00:00:26.560 to your society whereas in a socialistic uh framework like the sort of scandinavian framework
00:00:31.320 it's much to do with social justice and equality so again it really depends on what you're trying
00:00:35.100 to achieve um and so therefore it's not really a scam but it's just a different way of doing
00:00:38.800 things and as a result you need to have a completely different social structure for it
00:00:41.900 to work so it wouldn't really it wouldn't really work in america and i would actually argue the
00:00:45.960 opposite and i would say the american model is a scam in a lot of ways because you know you're
00:00:51.060 able to keep the profits but as soon as you have a crisis for example 2008 all of a sudden you
00:00:54.980 socialize the losses so then why is it only at the point when the rich lose out that all of a
00:00:59.680 sudden socialism is the way forward in which we therefore have huge government intervention
00:01:03.000 to get ourselves out of this kind of mess so i haven't personally done a lot of research on the
00:01:07.740 2008 crisis but i have looked at the dirty 30s and the crisis that led into that and i would say
00:01:15.080 yes that was a little bit of capitalist failings but we've had we've had we had a lot of crashes
00:01:22.400 before then right and we were able to easily work ourselves out of that but but that was always
00:01:27.240 through government intervention so even in the 1930s you had in the 30s you did at the time who
00:01:31.920 was exactly the same way pump loads of money into these failing businesses which is socialistic in
00:01:36.380 its very nature yes and that actually made it worse we had a huge amount of inflation people
00:01:41.360 could not get jobs the whole idea and it's keynesian economics at its core yeah is that
00:01:47.260 they wanted to have this balance wheel that okay the economy is not doing what it should
00:01:51.720 So we're just going to put this huge amount of government spending into the economy.
00:01:55.220 Well, it was to increase the aggregate demand.
00:01:56.480 Yes, that's what they thought.
00:01:58.120 But all it did was inflation.
00:01:59.500 So stimulus is also a form of socialism because it's government intervention in order to put money into people's pockets
00:02:03.660 to basically get the train running again of the sort of neoliberal capitalist way.
00:02:09.400 Right, but it didn't work.
00:02:09.840 So you're using socialism as a way to basically forward neoliberalism.
00:02:15.160 And so to say socialism is a scam is not necessarily true.
00:02:17.580 socialism is the way that is is underlying the way that the american model even works
00:02:22.020 except you're cutting out the bottom level from ever having any benefits of socialism
00:02:25.940 right okay so um to go back to the dirty 30s so the reason it was so bad it wasn't all that bad
00:02:32.120 in the 1929 1930 but then in the early 30s roosevelt decided okay we're going to do these
00:02:37.360 huge government programs we're going to start flooding that money into the economy and things
00:02:41.860 actually got worse job losses were worse people could afford less and it just got worse when
00:02:47.540 we pumped that huge amount of money and they thought that it would stimulate the economy
00:02:51.020 but it actually only caused inflation right so the inflation was worse than the actual depression
00:02:57.040 that was originally there and it was actually going to work its way out of the depression on
00:03:01.340 its own without government intervention but because we interfered the federal reserve just
00:03:05.800 hit huge huge failures huge mistakes and it got worse and worse and that's why it dragged on so
00:03:12.380 long okay but what's that got to do with the socialism as a scam well that was government
00:03:17.260 intervention that was government trying to be not necessarily not necessarily that like so like
00:03:22.620 i want to now know what your pitch is like why is like what is your definition of socialism okay
00:03:26.400 it is the public ownership of the means of production that's communism it's also socialism
00:03:33.320 you have you have ownership of chief industry in socialism not major industry yes socialism you
00:03:40.200 can have like the scandinavian framework where you do have public ownership but there's much
00:03:44.040 much more progressive taxes where basically the point of socialism is that you're enabling rich
00:03:49.220 people can be rich but you're not neglecting those people at the bottom so i feel like you
00:03:52.880 guys have social security is actually a form of socialism yeah so socialism is like public
00:03:57.040 ownership of the means of production and also wealth redistribution from the rich to the poor
00:04:00.560 that is basically that's its core that's its dictionary definition but it doesn't necessarily
00:04:04.280 mean public ownership of other means well it is part of it so like nationalized industry like
00:04:09.980 nationalized oil and oh like the car industry auto moves like like be a tenant yeah so and
00:04:15.720 in socialism i guess you can have some amount of private ownership of individual property
00:04:20.700 whereas in communism everything is collective that's like the chief difference so what's the
00:04:24.840 scam so the scam is that it doesn't work we try the socialist policies like socialism
00:04:29.420 look at scandinavia finland is the happiest country in the world statistically you've also
00:04:33.680 got the best education system you've got some much higher tiers of general welfare for these
00:04:38.240 people so where's what's the scam it does work it's not social it's a capitalist welfare state
00:04:44.600 that's socialism welfare isn't necessarily socialism essentially is capitalism but with
00:04:51.420 more emphasis on social justice no it's a capitalist welfare state so all their money
00:04:57.140 that's like another word for it that's another way no like even they themselves claim that they
00:05:01.660 are capitalist welfare states right so their party is called like the social the social party of
00:05:06.160 denmark is it they describe themselves as socialist maybe but their their tax system is
00:05:11.340 very it's actually less progressive than canada or the united states right so their tax burden
00:05:15.960 falls on the middle and lower classes and we claim that oh yes no this is a high trust society so
00:05:20.600 actually the rich people do pay their fair parent they do they either share but a lot of it falls
00:05:26.480 on the middle of lower classes as well like much of their then you have the same in america when
00:05:30.720 it comes to tax loopholes and stuff if you look at the breakdown of the tax intake of america it's
00:05:35.020 actually again the middle and lower classes that are actually mostly shouldering that burden
00:05:38.180 well the top 10 percent in the united states pays about 45 percent of the income tax but it should
00:05:44.360 be much higher well in denmark sweden finland the top quarter top 26 percent pay exactly 26 percent
00:05:52.440 of the income tax right so much of their taxation system actually falls on consumption taxes so
00:05:58.680 sales tax is like 100 tax on vehicles or something like that but what do you mean by it doesn't work
00:06:03.980 i mean like if you again look at scandinavia what what about it doesn't work you have a very healthy
00:06:08.240 and functional society well it's it was socialist it was much more socialist than it is now right
00:06:13.920 so in the 70s let's just take sweden so in the 70s they were like hey um let's implement socialism
00:06:20.100 we got all this fast like they were like the seventh wealthiest country in the world or
00:06:23.700 something like that let's let's implement socialism let's take all that money from the rich
00:06:27.080 inheritance taxes wealth taxes let's take it all and huge taxes on the rich give it to the poor
00:06:32.640 welfare programs everything else and they didn't add a single job to their economy for 20 years
00:06:37.920 right so for 20 years they didn't add a single job to their private sector there was growth in
00:06:45.180 the public sector but you need a private sector to fund the public sector right either you don't
00:06:50.000 have that tax revenue right so you need something to grow so things stagnated and in 1990 they had
00:06:56.900 a huge economic crash like in a lot of the scandinavian countries that yeah you did but
00:07:01.520 that was also partly stoked by the push for neoliberalism you had the same in the asian
00:07:05.200 the asian crisis in 1997 was actually to do with wall street and the way that they funded these
00:07:09.340 things then they basically produced a debt trap which then caused that crisis in which you were
00:07:13.120 then able to basically put in the politicians that you wanted i don't know a lot about that example
00:07:17.380 um but they they were not resilient economies at that time so sweden for like a brief period of
00:07:25.700 time they had like interest rates like 500 or something like that 5 000 because they wanted
00:07:30.680 to stop money was leaving the country and they needed to stop it so they they put huge like
00:07:36.120 taxes on that eventually they had to they had like a fixed exchange rate and they had to just leave
00:07:39.980 that so because of that economic crash they realized okay we need to walk something back
00:07:44.880 something is not working here so they privatized like a quarter of their welfare programs they
00:07:49.460 walked back on a lot of welfare programs and they reprivatized a lot of their industries that they
00:07:55.040 had taken hold of so things are actually going well in sweden and finland denmark wherever because
00:08:00.540 they realize that they went slightly more capitalistic but they are still i would say
00:08:04.720 socialist in the way that the emphasis again is on social justice and there's a much more
00:08:08.080 progressive tax system and that's kind of for me what socialism is i think you're equating it more
00:08:12.200 with a more communist way of looking at things when you know it's much more even baseline but
00:08:16.980 that's not necessarily the case with socialism you can still have rich and you can still have poor
00:08:20.340 in a in a in a sort of modern socialist like when you say it doesn't work yeah of course you need
00:08:26.080 the rich because you know they produce value to the economy and they produce consumption and
00:08:29.280 I guess but then what do you mean by like again scam is like I could say the same thing about
00:08:33.600 the Canadian and American model because again you have loads of things you have a full public
00:08:37.920 education system you basically commodified everything so that you've got huge inequality
00:08:42.000 so I would say that that's more of a scam per se it's more of a scam I would say we're actually
00:08:47.040 suffering from big governments like very over bloated government not effectively doing what
00:08:51.520 it should we have like Canada has serious taxes that's the lens of what you're looking at what
00:08:55.440 success is is success basically having yeah more unregulated markets that you've got more growing
00:09:00.880 gdp more like you know higher profits but then what is that at the expense of so if you're going
00:09:05.600 to have more regulated markets it's inevitable that you're going to have again more level like
00:09:08.960 higher levels of inequality and that's just like you know you could see that as a success because
00:09:13.120 you have more money but then that's only concentrated among a more select few whereas
00:09:17.440 you could say in socialism yeah maybe you don't get like you have a rising public sector but
00:09:21.920 you know a stagnant private sector but then you have much more evenness across the board you have
00:09:26.340 you know happier people so that's what i would say is is more important in a societal way
00:09:30.560 right i i personally wouldn't say that it's necessarily so much about the welfare
00:09:35.000 in in sweden and everywhere that that's why they're happy they have very high trust society
00:09:39.920 they have like strong marriages they're hard working even though they are technically socialist
00:09:44.160 and you can see that there is their high trust society is slowly breaking down as they they live
00:09:48.960 more under this sort of welfare system and they're accepting more like oh people can cheat or whatever
00:09:54.460 on these taxes and things but that's they have that high trust society which is not something
00:10:00.680 that we have in canada right so i don't think it would i don't think socialism would work if it was
00:10:04.720 imported into canada and the us and that was what my opening remarks when i said it's all to do with
00:10:08.500 the values of the society and the sort of structure within the government operations is it has to be
00:10:13.060 basically over a long period of time you have to have an agreement amongst the whole population of
00:10:17.260 why we're doing this, why do I pay this high show of tax, where does that go?
00:10:21.520 I've never been to Scandinavia, so this is everything I've read,
00:10:24.700 everything I've seen online.
00:10:26.420 But the taxes that they take, it seems that there's a lot more recognition
00:10:30.560 of where that goes, and you can really see that tangibly,
00:10:33.140 I think, in the quality of the schools.
00:10:34.660 Again, I've not been, but from what I hear,
00:10:36.560 you can see that in the quality of the general roads.
00:10:38.420 I mean, even driving here, there's potholes everywhere,
00:10:41.480 and people like homeless people.
00:10:44.020 Yeah, very, very poorly run.
00:10:46.420 so many socialists so maybe you could say socialism is a scam like again I wouldn't say it's a scam
00:10:51.500 but then I would say that the other models are equally a scam in terms of how you look at it
00:10:55.780 and that's it simply comes down to what you're trying to achieve as a society is the government
00:11:00.440 there to basically is the government there for the poorest or is the government there for the
00:11:03.880 richest and I would say socialism the government's there for the poorest at the expense of the rich
00:11:08.060 whereas governments in places like Canada and the US are the opposite they're there for the rich so
00:11:11.800 we can basically unregulate the markets you can learn loads of money um and that's at the expense
00:11:15.640 support.