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 .

Is socialism a scam? Is it a good or bad thing? What are the benefits and drawbacks of socialism? Is it better than other economic and political models? Is socialism the way forward in the 21st century?

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.