Rev Left Radio - Capitalism vs. Freedom: Confronting Right Libertarianism

Episode Date: July 2, 2018

Rob Larson is a professor of economics and a libertarian socialist. He joins Brett to discuss his new book: Capitalism Vs. Freedom: The Toll Road to Serfdom.  Buy the book here: http://www.zero-books.net/books/capitalism-freedom Outro Music: Venture Capitalist by Feudalism. Listen to and support their music here: https://feudalism.bandcamp.com -------------------- Support Revolutionary Left Radio and get exclusive bonus content here: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio Follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio Intro Music by The String-Bo String Duo. You can listen and support their music here: https://tsbsd.bandcamp.com/track/red-black This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, and the Omaha GDC. Check out Nebraska IWW's new website here: https://www.nebraskaiww.org

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and liberate the proletarianist mind. Five for the working class. Five for equality. Fight against the right free to fascist ideology. Took it in and turn it up loud. Revolutionary Left Radio starts now. Hello everyone and welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host, Anne Comrade Brett O'Shea,

and today we have on Rob Larson, the author of Capitalism v. Freedom, The Toll Road to Surfdom. This is a new book being released through zero books. When is this book going to be released, Rob? Actually, this book came out last Friday, the 29th, so it's available. Perfect. So, yeah, the book is available.

And what we're going to do in this episode is kind of go through some of the main arguments and let people get a feel for it in hopes that anybody that's really entertained or engaged by this conversation can go out, find that book and read deeper into this wonderful work of economy, really. You know, it's a book from an economist taking on the libertarian capitalist arguments on that basis. So I'm really excited for this conversation. Why don't you go ahead and say a little bit about yourself and a little bit about your background for anybody who doesn't know who you already are? Yeah, right on. So I'm Rob Larson. I teach economics at Tacoma Community College. I've been teaching 12 odd years or something like that. And this is my new book out. Yeah, capitalism versus freedom, the toll road to serfdom. I'm very excited about this. Getting some fun reviews and people seem to be getting a kick out of it. So that's good. Before this, I had a book in 2012, Bleak Economics, which people may have seen, the heartwarming introduction to financial catastrophe. the jobs crisis and environmental destruction that was the book what made you want to write this book uh well you know when you're uh coming up as a young student you know or anywhere near a college campus or really if you're just engaged in an economic argument to this day if you're arguing with a

conservative very commonly they're responsible be to say read one of these couple of books that are considered very seminal on the right. And one of those is Milton Friedman's famous book from the 60s, Capitalism and Freedom. And another one, of course, is Frederick Hayek's book, The Road to Serfdom. They're both written, you know, against big government policies and in favor of capitalism. So my book is capitalism versus freedom, the toll road to serfdom. And I'm kind of focusing it on those books because they're so ubiquitous. If you're a young business undergrad you'll be given one of those books to turn you into a conservative so you can focus on being a business person and investing and not caring about what you're destroying the process and those

books if you read them they're these are considered seminal books they're not strong very little in the way of good arguments so i wanted to write something approaching a definitive take down of those books and by god i think i did it absolutely yeah and i really i really appreciated that as somebody who really cut his teeth debating libertarians in my late teens and early 20s politically, these works and these thinkers, Milton Friedman and Frederick Hayek and their respective works was something that was constantly brought up and constantly shoved in my face and constantly a source of debate. So I really like the way that you inverted that reference to your book, took two huge works from the libertarian right and inverted them to form a critique. So that's really cool.

Let's go ahead and talk about, because I know you opened the book with a discussion on freedom. And in bourgeois culture, the culture that we live in and that we're inculcated with, the terms freedom and liberty, they've always been used as like ideological bludgeon's. And this stems from the prominent bourgeois revolutions of the past in the U.S. and France and beyond where the terms were mainstays of sloganeering and propaganda. And it just kind of stuck around. And today, they really want to use these terms as if they're synonymous with capitalism. So in light of this history, and before we get into some of the critiques of this idea,

what is the capitalist conception of freedom and liberty and what are the differences between positive freedom and negative freedom? Yeah, right on. So, I mean, obviously there's a lot of views of all this. One of the sort of classic mainline Western traditions of freedom comes out of John Mill and then goes through figures like Isaiah, Berlin, and others. And in that tradition, I mean, there's a lot of detail, but one sort of broad distinction that gets drawn

is between, yeah, what you said, what they call negative, and positive freedom. So negative freedom is conceived to be freedom from, they sometimes say. So an individual's freedom from being pushed around or told what to do by some big institution, like a king or a government or whatever. So that's negative freedom, your freedom to be free from big people pushing you around. Then, alternatively, we can conceive of positive freedom, they say, and positive freedom represents your freedom to do different things. So your freedom to, for example, consume a proportionate share of your country's national economic production. That would be a freedom too. And also like why it's like the freedom to speak freely

and so on. And so these are sort of the two broad conceptions of freedom. And there's, if you look at the record, there's a lot of different views of this. And many philosophers contemporary philosophers don't really take this distinction that seriously. Others do, but make different things of it. But the basic version that we see traditionally is the claim that capitalism provides negative freedom. It gives you freedom from big institutions telling you what to do because, as Milton Friedman will tell you, you're free to choose in the marketplace, right? The government doesn't tell you what to buy or where to work. you are free to choose among a rich variety of options there.

That's the sort of traditional view. And then as far as positive freedom, that would be your freedom to do things, for example, have access to resources and capital in some kind of proportion. There, conservative economists tend to take the view that that's abusing the idea of freedom and it removes incentives to work and the course of doing that, it creates government authoritarianism and so on. So the basic claim that, for example, Freedman makes in capitalism and freedom itself, she says capitalism provides negative freedom, and that is the freedom that is best for society. Positive freedom creates too much government or removes incentives to work and has other issues. And I think we're going to get into the dichotomy between government equals authoritarianism and the market equals freedom in a bit. But I kind of want to go a little further with this notion of positive versus negative. In my opinion, I think one of the best sort of encapsulation.

of the concept of negative freedom is something that we're all very, very familiar with, and that is the Gatson flag. That's the don't tread on me flag. Yeah, I think that is really like, it's used by the right, almost exclusively in our culture, but it's really the idea of negative freedom kind of stems from bourgeois individualism, this conception that the individual is the primary unit of concern, and what we should be focused on is how to keep other people off of that individual's back, whereas a positive notion of freedom and maybe even a socialist conception of freedom and rights in the positive sense would be like, you know, the right to housing, to education, to health care, etc. Do you agree with that? That's definitely the picture that you're going to get from these, from the Friedman Knight or Hayek literature that we're looking at here.

That's pretty well summarized. And indeed, the basic, I mean, you know, we can dig into this. But yeah, the basic picture is exactly what you just described. Yeah. So, like, if there's a big. authority bothering an individual, it must be government because the market is free and anyone can start a business so you can shop anywhere and work anywhere. So how could you ever be coerced or have your negative freedom violated in the marketplace or capitalism because it's such a rich, free environment? Whereas the government is this big evil foreign entity and we have no control over it and any move it makes cannot possibly be based on consent.

And yeah, also kind of in the background there is the other thing you referred to. The idea, like, there is no, like, social or collective questions. There are no questions like that to be considered. Even though, of course, if the astronomers told us tomorrow that, oh, shit, there's a meteor about to hit the Earth. We're all going to be killed. Everyone will be thinking, I certainly hope the collectivist governments can shoot rockets at it and save us or something. Right. So people will give it up where there's a war or an existential threat like that.

But that is the basic picture. Day today, we're just trying to keep the individual free of the government and therefore free completely. Yeah, there may be some neoliberal hardliners that turn to Elon Musk or Neil de Gras Tyson to shoot that asteroid down, but I think they would be in the minority. Exactly. That's reaching further and further. Yeah, one thing I always notice when you're ever engaging with libertarians is that even the crimes or the failures of capitalism or the economic system, they will squirm and do amazing backbending tricks to somehow put the blame not only partially on the government, but solely on the government. It's almost like they can't contend with

the failures and, you know, imperfections of capitalism and always need to shift the blame over to the government for whatever the problem is. Oh, yeah, that is very, very true. And if you do, in fact, argue with these guys, especially publicly, you know, where there are stakes and people don't want to be seen to be climbing down from a position or losing face, there is no limit to the bizarre contortions, yeah, that they will work themselves into. And these guys have plenty of mockery for, you know, the sad exercises of the Soviet propaganda artists who had to make everything that the Russian tyranny did look good. Man, they're every, anybody who defends a system of power, like libertarians, does some horrible, similar moves to that. And yeah, you'll say,

well, look how this food market works. We produce, we overproduce food. We purposefully spend money wasting it. Well, they'll say, well, the government subsidizes farmers to produce that extra food and it distorts the marketplace like yeah but prior to that policy we still had this waste and starving people problem but that's exactly true if there's any as what will what they'll do is find any government policy relevance to whatever issue you're looking at and they'll say there see governments involved so the entire thing is tainted if the government wasn't involved issuing stamps or whatever it is then this market would work perfectly and this is the kind of thing that happens when you argue with people uh men who have no intellectual standards right right not only

is all of that absolutely true, but also the origination of capitalism and markets rooted in, as they were, like, enclosures of the commons over the years. It was like an authoritarian, almost state or feudal apparatus had to put into motion the very sorts of enclosures that can make capitalism possible in the future. Do you agree with that? How do you think about the legacy and the origination of capital versus how libertarians like to think of it ideally? Yeah, that's interesting case because not just the very original archetypal enclosure movements, of course, in Britain and then Western Europe that sort of originated, yeah, the private markets for agricultural goods and as a side effect created a rootless, displaced workforce to go work in the Hellish-Dikensian Industrial Revolution. Like, that's, it speaks to the fact that from its earliest days, I mean, capitalism has been based on coercion and stripping people of either of the forms of freedom. I should be clear, that is the thesis of my book, which is that despite what Friedman and

others claim, capitalism doesn't provide either of these forms of freedom, and they are both valuable. So if you look back at the enclosure history, you see that very clearly, and I would say up to today, and many Marxists will tell you that enclosure movements happen over time. That's certainly the case right now. We can talk about this more, but lately I'm looking a lot at the Silicon Valley firms, and enclosure is where their tech platforms come from, that make them super, super, powerful over our economy and somewhat monopolistic.

I mean, there's legitimate private sector work in an adaptation. But if you look at the technological record of research, the large majority of that work was done by our parents' generation scientists and paid for by our parents' generation of taxes in the National Institutes of Research, you know, in the university system and the Pentagon's research arm and in Europe. And so that's a very legitimate way to, I think it's legitimate to call that a wave of enclosure. We've taken those technologies and put those in the hands of various rich billionaire douchebags who had little to no role in their origination, but now are these incredibly powerful new

figures and a new wave of capitalist ruling class. So that enclosure movement rolls on and whatever the public can develop or whatever the world can provide, capitalists can enclose. And of course, I mean, that's going to have real ramifications for freedom. And that's what we look at here. Right, absolutely. Now, I want to get into talking about how the left uses these terms, liberty and freedom, but before we do, and I should have asked this up front, but just out of curiosity, I know you're

influenced by my Marxism to some extent, but you're not a Marxist. How do you identify politically? What left tendency or tradition do you come out of and identify with? That's interesting question, actually, man. Yeah. I myself don't really rush to put myself in a slot among socialists. I see myself as a social. and in this it might be relevant to mention here you know like my background kind of is in the sciences my undergraduate degree was in biology actually but what are you going to do with that you know it's a worthless degree like some other figures I end up going into the social sciences once I found out a little bit how global food markets really work I kind of shifted my research interest there

and when you come out of the sciences like there's at least you know in the hard sciences themselves there's not much of a tendency to put yourself in schools in any kind of formal way like you made you know any field has new areas you're trying to figure out and you know areas that are controversial among the specialists and people are on different sides of those issues pretty seldom do they go so far as to even give those sides like names let alone capitalize them or feel like they owe a lot to a particular founding figure even though that may be true and so to me putting yourself like, I'm in the group that says this, you know, I'm a Georgist or a Marxist or, you know, the huge variety in the social sciences of those schools of thought. Now, I should

say, I am not trying to be holier than now here. I owe an enormous debt to Marxist writers and thinkers that I could never repay. And of course, to figures across the ideological spectrum. Just for me, I kind of like to be independent, at least in my mind. I'm sure I would say in terms of what I want for institutional change, I'd be closer to a liberty. socialist type, you know. But I love the democratic socialist figures of today, like Ocasio and Sanders. I feel like those are really useful too. So I'm not sure exactly where that puts me. No, yeah, but I really like that because on this show, we honestly, we go out of our way to have a spectrum of people on the left to articulate ideas and defend them. And we're not

at all sectarian because we think like we all have something to learn from one another. Anarchists can learn from Marxists, Marxists can learn from libertarian socialists, etc., etc. Even if you don't ultimately side with them on their tendency or their exact ideas for this or that, you still benefit from understanding where they're coming from and learning that perspective. And I think that's one of our primary goals here at Rev Left Radio. But speaking of that, I want to get into, like I said, I hinted at a little bit before, about how the left uses these terms, because today, like in the past, the terms freedom and liberty, they're employed by neoliberal, libertarians, conservatives, and as of late, even by reactionaries and neo-Nazis, I mean, these people are calling their, their

where they're doing Sieghale salutes and carrying Nazi flags, they're calling them freedom of speech rallies. And this is all in defense of the status quo and the hierarchies of class, race, and gender, nationality, which it implies. In relation to this reality, speaking as a Marxist myself, many Marxists are wary of these terms, and we tend to kind of shy away from using them at times, precisely because they're situated in such an ideologically toxic way in our culture. Libertarian, socialists, and anarchists, to their credit, perhaps, tend to not have as much of a hang-up about these terms as some Marxists tend to. The term libertarian also shares a similar place in our society. So given this context on the left, how do you think leftists should think about and employ these terms? And what is the more robust definition of freedom that you think revolutionaries all across the left spectrum should push? Well, right on.

Well, obviously, I think that we should not give up the stated goals of freedom and liberty just because a bunch of awful dicks with terrible policies are trying to. and have succeeded at taking over it and using it for so long. I mean, and that's a very legitimate point. I was just reading a blog recently about arguing that we shouldn't as leftists promote freedom or have it as one of our main goals because it's such a brand of the right. And I mean, there is a very legitimate argument there. They have a lot of practice making it sound like they're pro-freedom,

and a lot of people have that sort of association. Obviously, I don't think that's the case. I think that equality is sort of seen, like that's the classic cliché. political science take, right, is that the right is more interested in freedom and the left's more interested in equality. I mean, I think that's a, you know, goofy, bourgeois denial of the real legitimate material conflicts here. But, like, that is the case that that's how it's seen. And equality is an incredibly noble and crucial essential goal. I mean, some of our great modern social movements, like the civil rights movements and movements for transgender recognition, like those

things are about equality. And obviously, that's incredibly positive and those things are, you know, worth our support. But there's a limit to how much, I think, for many people at least, that equality is a big motivator or a big inspiring goal, especially among people like me who have a lot of layers of white male middle class privilege. They're like, oh, great, other people are going to be more equal. Oh, so I'm just losing privilege. I mean, we should accept that. Like, that's something that let me be clear, should happen. But if we want to move people to where they're willing to look at perhaps changing our economic system and seeing its problems more realistically. I think we dare not surrender that battleground of what freedom is to the right.

Like that's just insane to me. I'm amazed that this is still something people argue for and I've been debating it with people lately. As far as your second question, like what form of freedom would make more sense for a, as it were, radical to support, you know, we want one. I think we want one that gives us more freedom, more of the positive. and negative forms of freedom. I think this is achievable. If we have an economy that we control where we don't have the ability of general motors

to close down a plant and maroon a region of workers and we don't have the power of Facebook to decide that they're going to share all of our personal naked photos with whichever corporations give them money. Like those are real power. Those are real infringements on our negative freedom.

And we should have the freedom to do things. We should have the right to a share of the national economy, which has a lot of implications for equality. And we should have more ability, we should have more freedom to control and to have a share when we work in the control and the decision makings of that economic entity. So, I mean, obviously, this is broad strokes, but I think that's the freedom we should want. We should want an expanded realm of personal liberty. And to do that, obviously, I think we're going to obviously be having to move on from giant, unaccountable, semi-monopolistic, towering, capitalist empires. Right. Yeah, exactly. And I completely agree. And perhaps it was somewhat unfair of me to kind of make that false dichotomy of Marxists think this and other people think this, because

there's a long tradition in Marxist history where various Marxists have stood up and defended the concept of freedom and pushed back on bourgeois conceptions of liberty, etc. But a part of me also understands that these words are super loaded in our society and they're difficult to wrestle with. but I think, you know, that's precisely our task is language is a battleground. And if we cede this territory to our political enemies, you know, we only end up hurting ourselves. When we push back, even if it's only partially successful, we're still helping people reconceptualize their ideas of what freedom actually means and expanding the political imagination because freedom means like freedom to self-actualize, you know, freedom to fully become who you can

possibly be, and that requires a level of access to resources and wealth in our society to allow you that free time and free energy to do those things. And also the false dichotomy that you pointed out, which is a great point about how they like to put equality versus freedom. It's like the right is about freedom and the left is about equality. In actuality, the two concepts are mutually entwined. You can't have freedom for large chunks of society in a society that is radically unequal where a huge percentage of us have to spend hours and hours a day slaving away for the, you know, luxuries and comforts of a smaller class of parasites at the top, you know? That makes sense, man. I mean, I think that's, I obviously think that's, that makes, it's very

reasonable. But I would add, too, just adding something to what you said earlier about how these words are loaded and how the way we communicate them is important. Like I will say that people across the radical spectrum from Marxists to anarchists. I mean, this is a major issue. We do not have a great history on the left of proselytizing our ideas very well. Yeah, right. We do do a lot of thoughtful, complicated thinking and trying to understand systems that the establishment sort of doesn't want recognized in their fullness maybe. That does, you know, demand a lot of our thinking. But what we haven't been great at, which the right has really been kicking our ass at, is explaining these ideas to audiences.

that aren't already at least into politics in some way, let alone already on our side. And so that's why some recent changes in radical publishing, the emergence of Jacobin is very encouraging in that way because they're actively working hard on reaching out to people who aren't already in our cool revolutionary left club, you know? And Jacobin itself is good at that,

but their small ABCs are socialism book, and I am sure their upcoming documentary will be even better. And I would add to even more than Jackabad in this tradition, current affairs, that sort of libertarian, socialist, very slickly designed magazine and website, their articles have been criticized for being about simple subjects or, you know, almost being pedantic because they ask such basic questions, but they do it in a way that anybody, you know, my mother can pick this stuff up and read it and she didn't spend her life, you know, reading social sciences text, but she's able to immediately. understand it. And that's what we need on the left is people who are writing for an audience that's not already completely consumed with these subjects. And I've really tried to do that in the book. I feel like one thing I can say confidently about it is this is something that will be useful if you give it, if you put a copy in the hands of your uncle or whomever, because they won't be struggling to understand, you know, dialectic and bourgeois. Like it's terms that meet

the way they're at. Yeah, exactly. And you know, that's been true for me as well when I was like in my late teens, early 20s, looking for political alternatives. It wasn't like hardcore, like Marxist or anarchist, you know, jargony texts that I reached out to. It was like these simple books by authors I didn't even know that was just like the title of the book I think was like, what is socialism or whatever? And this is an attempt to break these ideas down and present them in ways that speak to non-politicized people.

And there's absolutely an important role for intellectuals and philosophers and economists to play with their jargon and their high-forms. and ideas, that's essential, their theories, etc. But there's also the role for the populizers, the people that go out into the streets and that can rile people up in speeches that can put these complicated concepts into more easily digestible sort of fragments of information. And I think that's obviously one thing we try to do in the podcast community on the left is do just that, is to kind of take these complex ideas and present them to working class people in a way that are easy to digest. And sometimes I fail to do that

properly, but sometimes I think I succeed. Yeah, it's easier said than done. Exactly. And yeah, and that leads nice into the next question, because you mentioned how there is a sort of the right-wing advantage in their ability to kind of get ideas across to non-politicized people. And I think part of that is because of the simplified sort of falsehoods that they present, whether it's on the fascist side where they're taking complex global capitalist failure,

and just pointing the anger of working and struggling or precarious people and pointing at like immigrants or people with different skin colors or different religion and saying, that's your problem, that's your problem. It's more visceral. It's not as intellectual. The left has a job to do there because we have to find ways of making a critique of literally global capitalism and hundreds of years of history into something that regular people can understand.

But with that in mind, proponents of capitalism, also like to simplify their political project in a really misleading but highly marketable way. They claim that the market is synonymous with freedom and that government is synonymous with repression and authoritarianism. Apologists for capital employ this simplistic dichotomy to great effect, especially in Western societies. So before we get into your rebuttal of that idea, can you kind of articulate this basic capitalist argument for us?

Yeah, it's sort of related back to what we referred to earlier, where the picture is, you know, We want a system that gives us freedom and liberty for all the legitimate reasons that everyone wants those, for their freedom to do what they want with their time and to grow into the person that they would like to be. So that's sort of the main goal that they put for. And then they'll say, well, government, even when we have a republic, like even when we have a somewhat democratic form of government, where we elect representatives, there's once that republic has made a policy, we all have to conform to the policy. So you may want one national defense plan and you want another one, well, we can debate it and then we can decide, but then we all have to accept which one is chosen. And this was something that Friedman refers to in his book. Whereas on the other hand, when I want to go get a pair of pants and you want to get a different pair of pants, well, we're free to choose our own pairs of pants. So it's better when we have these more choices in the market where we can each be satisfied separately than with public institutions or public solutions to problems.

Because there, even if we make the most popular choice, it still leaves a lot of people unable to make their own choice and have their own sovereignty in that way. So that's the beginning of it. And then what that means in general is that, yeah, as long as something is in the market, the libertarians are willing to consider that to be a free, a zone of free operation. So as soon as we privatize something there, it's free. And yeah, you get this very manichaean view where anything the government is authoritarian, even though we're admitting it's a republic, it's still. an intolerable tyranny, you know. And then in the marketplace, we're all free. So that means that this works fine as long as it's things like clothes, where we have relatively competitive markets with lots of alternatives to buy from. But once we look at the real economy, you know,

we have big economies of scale in the marketplace, as I talk about in the book, we only need so many major airlines out of a particular city or only so many companies making smartphones or making steel. And once that market is basically saturated, if you have a small number of firms, they get real market power. But as soon as we privatize something, regardless of how it goes,

we consider it to be free now. And Friedman, incidentally, who's far from the most extreme right-wing figure in my book, he even says, one point in capitalism and freedom, I don't have a book in front of me right now, so this is from memory. But he says something along the lines of,

what about those industries like utilities, which by their nature are more or less, less by definition, by necessity, monopolized, you know, because power or water companies have to get their good all the way to you for you to use it. It's not like a book where you can get it and drive it home. So there, we tend to have big regional monopolies in those kind of services. Friedman says even there an unregulated private monopoly is better than having the government do it.

Like he even is willing to kind of throw away his own premise by saying, okay, well, some industries, regardless of who does it, government or someone. else this is going to be a monopoly he says well it should be a private monopoly like with no accountability you're like unregulated he specifies that so it's amazing so obviously the what we're seeing here is that for these figures get it in the market we call that free regardless of what the real market structure may be but that's sort of the basic picture and you know we're all familiar with that from any time you've been stuck at a airport with fox news on or something you've probably heard this viewpoint before exactly yeah and they take it all the way to housing

to education, to health care. I mean, they very much believe in the idea that privatizing all of this, even absolute human necessities, is just the same as privatizing something for a relatively meaningless consumer good like genes. Indeed. Indeed. And, I mean, again,

what's their willing to count its private monopoly, just like the tyranny of Rockefeller and Carnegie, like, what's they willing to accept that, then, yes, sure, they don't care much about our public health needs and so on. Like, what's they've done that? that they're willing to accept quite a bit of human suffering that's avoidable, so no doubt. For sure, yeah.

I remember I called into a conservative talk radio program years, years ago, and the guy was a local guy, and he was just talking about universal health care, and he was just basically making the comparison. He was just outright saying, he's like, you have to get insurance for your car, and it's the same exact logic for health care. And I called in, and I was like, but your car is not your dying mother who has cancer. your car is not your child with leukemia like this is not a reasonable analogy and he really didn't really have much to say in response he just kind of you know hand ringed and walked around

the argument but even as a young guy i could see through the bullshit it's true like you know when you have a car you have you know i'm all about you know the argument for car insurance is better use as an analogy for why we should have gun control of course but sticking with it's interesting because yeah like what you know if you have a car or something like that you've insured. Like once it has, you know, if it breaks down and they say it's going to cost so much money to repair it, it'll cost almost as much as you buying a replacement car. You probably just buy the replacement car. There's no level of that with your family. Like, oh yeah, your mom had a stroke and helping her is going to be really expensive. You should just get a new mother. Like,

that's not, yeah, they're not good analogies. That's a very reasonable point. Yeah, but that's, yeah, that's the logic they're operating on. You said earlier that Milton Friedman was by no means one of the most extreme people you cover in your book. Could you just like kind of quickly, like who are some of the more extreme figures and how far do they take this logic? Oh, yeah, sure. Well, I mean, because I'm trying to really engage with rightest figures here, the first section of most of these book chapters is quoting the libertarian.

Like let them have their say, and what is their argument? Let's read their words. Let's actually be in good faith and do that, which no one does, of course. When you do that, though, you discover that, yes, on the right, some figures like Friedman and Hayek are considered to be, like, relatively mainstream or more centrist among conservative libertarian economists. No, not that centrist, you know, if you go to the, if you go to the Breitbart online bookstore, which I did, because I believe in sacrificing for other people. Massacism. I went there. And when you go, like, they have, no, you'll find Freeman and Hayek books.

So they're definitely in the modern rightest canon, for sure. But they're often seen to be not fully consistent. Like Friedman was willing to accept government because he realized that aerospace industry and now high-tech industry need the government to support their business models and to underwrite their research. And in reality, markets need public goods to function so we won't cut them all. We're not going to cut the courts. We still need to be able to lock up these unemployed people.

That's not a fully consistent libertarian approach. But there are figures like that, and they're usually, as a result, somewhat further right. So among the more conservative figures that I look at are a number of guys from the Austrian school, of course, because that's so identified thematically with libertarian policy positions. And so really the two further right or more pure libertarians I look at are von Mises and Murray Rothbar. those two figures even the most arch libertarians who think Ron Paul is to compromise

love those guys and if you take a look I mean the stuff they say it's just fascinating so like right here we have Ludwig von Mises who's considered the founder of the school talking about how the creative genius these are people usually in business

like Rockefeller who are far above the millions that come and pass away and they tower over them and that people scorn them for their beautiful creativity, but it's everything they do. If you look into these figures, Rothbard, and Ayn Rand

is very much like this, and she's much better known. Like, these people are basically fascists of capital. Like, they see, like, in her novels, and in the pictures that, like, von Mises, you know, describes, there, like, it's not just that they're CEOs who are in charge

of a big corporation. They're, like, the founders, and they created all the new technology or engineering that it's doing and they're very sexy and charismatic and any government or trade union figure who's against them is like fat or

bald and described that way at length you know they put these superhuman powers into these mega entrepreneur figures so they're never just rich CEOs who got put in charge of some big corporation you know like the guy in charge of Microsoft today

they're they did the creation like the CEOs are the supermen and i mean don't take my word for it take a look at some of the stuff that i've pulled out put in the book and you know i've got the source in there pull up the source any library will have these books and take a look like these people have what we would kind of recognize today as being weird messianic borderline fascist views of corporations and their amazing ruling class founders whereas of course in reality there's some douchebag CEO who is in the right place at the right time was more ruthless and more sycophantic and kissed the ass of his overlords and maybe we're there at a time where they could get advantage of some publicly researched technology.

But those are some of the more right-wing figures that appear in the book. Because I want every libertarian and conservative who reads my book to feel like they're getting their sect addressed. Right. Absolutely. Yeah. When you said the fascist of capital, I was literally jotting down Nietzsche and fascism, like this Uber-Mensch idea, and it's translated to the corporate CEO.

And Anne Rand's book, Atlas Shrug, the imagery that's supposed to conjure up in your mind is Atlas is like, you know, the mythological figure holding the world on his shoulders, and he shrugs being like he's going to let the burden of being, you know, the Uber Mench go if he doesn't get the respect he deserves sort of thing. So it really is, it really is fascist in nature. And I think we see this bleeding over of libertarianism and fascism when push comes to shove the last couple years of really heightened, intensified political conflict in this society has really shown, I think, the true colors of a huge proportion of so-called libertarians who immediately turn to the alt-right and fascism when, you know, when it gets a little uncomfortable for them

and their ideas aren't to the four as they are maybe in the 80s, 90s, or other 2000s, etc. Indeed, and it's painful, too, because they'll, you know, there's a lot of authoritarianism in that tradition, you know, these people may not realize. they're calling themselves libertarians, but what they're doing is covering, ultimately, for the power of the most powerful people on the earth, you know, the heads of the great concentrations of capital. I mean, say what you will for the president and the pope and the head of the Federal Reserve, but they have legally limited powers. And, you know, they're pushing it against them all the time, but it's, it's like they have specifics there. Wealth grows as, like, wealth grows with algebra. Like, it doesn't have a ceiling or limit to what it can do, except what we can briefly get done through anti-trial.

or labor laws. So absolutely. I mean, that's, it's such an authoritarian streak. It makes sense that it suddenly appears when they're under stress or when there's a surprising success from a Sanders-like figure that shows, oh, shit, there really is a reservoir of support for something beyond capitalism that will freak them out. And suddenly, yeah, all these people waving the guests and flag and saying they're against government, suddenly, well, but government, you'll lock up all these dirty radicals that want to take away my property, right? Okay, cool. Exactly. I've always said for years, when you push a libertarian down the stairs, they'll become a fascist before they hit the bottom. And we've seen it, we've seen that happen in the last few years.

But I want to move on to just the ways in which that dichotomy about government is synonymous with authoritarianism and markets are synonymous with freedom, how that kind of fails. And in your book, you outline the way in which power and authority and domination emanate from market capitalism in the institutions and sectors that capitalists want to pretend are synonymous with freedom and liberty. You talk about power over workers, power over the flow of information, the power over governmental policies and processes, and finally, even the power over future generations siphoned through environmental collapse. So let's take these one by one, if that's okay with you. Yeah, right on.

Yeah, first, in what ways does capitalism undermine freedom and promote authoritarianism in the workplace? Right on. Well, of course, there, it's relatively easy to see, right? You go to work, and your boss tells you what to do, and if you say you don't want to, you know, want to, they say, shut up and get out or do what I say. Like in the workplace, the authoritarianism is right out in the open. And everyone, you know, everyone who has a job complains about that. What they'll say, of course, is that yes, but you're free to go to a different workplace

or start your own business. And of course, a lot of the bodies are buried, right? The reality in markets, and when I teach microeconomics, we talk about this a lot, markets evolve over time, and sometimes they naturally monopolize themselves. Other times, they may remain richly competitive. And yeah, you can often have enough capital to start your own business or find another one to work for. But you cannot take that for granted.

Like many of our big industries today are tech industries that are borderline monopolies out of the box, as the economist of all people, once put it. And it's utterly, I mean, all it is, I say it somewhere in the book. The thing about libertarians is that it's amazing that their pants are in such good shape considering how much time they spend on their knees begging the question and just taking for granted that's a market's competitive go work for the next social media monopoly right you idiot many markets end up monopolies or at best oligopolis where you have two or three gigantic firms and maybe they collude maybe they compete by swamping our life with hideous advertising like what it is

is their big powerful institutions and within them the power is very clear and to the extent that there is a lot of concentration in the market, then their power will be very strong regardless of which one you work for. And again, this is something that I spent some time arguing in the book. There are legitimate reasons why markets concentrate and become monopolized. And I mean, this stuff is well enough known on the economics reading left, but I think it's better to look at it in reality. That's why I give you some examples of industries and why they got monopolized and how.

And again, libertarians, as long as there's some tax being collected, they'll say this is all because of government influence, but it is useful to remind them of the gilded age, the original American capitalist period, right, after the Civil War until the early 20th century. Then there's no progressive income tax. There's no labor unions to be questioning these firms. There's certainly nothing like aggressive environmental regulation or the like. And what do we get? Monoplies through the economy, steel, oil, banking, cigarettes.

okay so the reality there is yeah there's a lot of authoritarianism in the marketplace because firms have power and they're eager to gain market share and this is completely true today i'm talking about this in the work i'm writing now about silicon valley take like the original big tech monopoly billionaire bill gates who now people think is this sweet figure you know because he is old and he gives money to fight aids and made fun of don't trump last week and so on or last month whenever that was uh that's fine bill gates read any relatively sympathetic corporate history of his firm. And there's a few. If you read them, even his sympathetic biographers describe him as doing this, saying we've got to get rid of Novell or some other software competitor in the 90s. And he says that as he's slamming his fist into his hand. If that's not authoritarianism and power,

I don't know what is. This is the reality of capitalists like Rockefeller or Gates or plenty of others. Like we like to think that these guys will just compete and may the best man win. No, they're offended by the idea of someone contesting with them. This is pretty reliably present historically. So there's one piece of it. And then I'd say the other aspect, of course, of power in the marketplace since, as we've seen, you know, power we traditionally see as being somewhat antithetical to individual freedom in different ways. The other aspect is just concentration of wealth proper.

Wealth, you know, money itself. And people sometimes, I think, don't give quite enough thought to this. you know when you have if we're looking at positive freedom the freedom to do different things well plainly if you have a bigger budget every month then you have more positive freedom there's more things that you are free to

do with your gigantic capitalist fortune than a penniless slum dweller somewhere so there's that pit of it but the way that gets exercised is fascinating you know it comes about through a class system and if there's one thing that Americans just doggedly refuse

to recognize is that the reality of the class system and politicians can't say any phrase except the middle class but of course you know many of us have been leftists for many years we're aware that the middle class has been losing ground in terms of its wealth in terms of how much debt and income it gets and certainly in terms of its health care situation and indeed when we have these giant tax cuts to the wealthy they don't just ruin budgets that give the right an excuse to cut social support programs obviously not the military but it also puts more cash into their hands it's more power. Like, that's how the Koch brothers and the rest are so powerful now, is they have

gigantically increased fortunes compared to the start of this whole neoliberal tax-cutting era in the early 80s. Or what William F. Buckley, the great conservative intellectual, in some pieces of his work that I quote from National Review, he calls this era the age of freedmen because it was those libertarian policies, right, of reducing government, cutting taxes and spending, not realizing or not admitting to himself that this would mean so much more power within the market, within the social system as these people get incredibly rich and no longer have to pay anything like their share into the National Treasury. So I would say those are your two first things you need to look at is power in the marketplace. Well, how much wealth is concentrated

in the power that comes from that, which is real. And then how much market shares become concentrated too especially in our newly most important industries like big tech right exactly yeah great point and i just want to touch on two things really quick you said that two of the big arguments you'll be you'll be presented with if you sort of talk about these issues with the libertarian is you're choose to you're free to choose to work somewhere else and you should start your own business on the choice front you have to like as you were hinting towards you need to take into account the disparity and wealth and the fact that a rich man who has a lot of money versus a poor man who has little to no money, the rich man can leverage his wealth to coerce the poor man

into doing things that the poor man, if he was actually an equal in wealth and resources, would never agree to do. But under a coercive system where one person has a lot more power and a lot more wealth than one person has virtually none of it, you can get people to do a lot of things that they fucking hate just in virtue of that inequality. And on the second front, when they said, go out and start your own business, they know damn well and we know damn well that capitalism the way it's structured it depends on a huge class of workers that cannot possibly start their own business and even if they could the system

would not allow them to start their own businesses right like it it's premised on the idea that one class of a relatively small group of people should own massive amounts of wealth and resources and then the broad majority of us should have to work for them in order for them to profit and that's just to be able to get by paycheck to paycheck. So on both of those fronts, it's either disingenuous or it's ignorant, and sometimes I feel like they somehow managed to do both at the same time. Yeah, that's a good question. I was just to ask that, like, how much is honest in these libertarian works?

I mean, I think it mostly is, you know, if these characters didn't have these kind of views or they weren't willing to develop them while they have expensive lunches with multi-people, they wouldn't have been the ones that got attention and got the big book deals. I mean, Ronald Reagan, you know, wrote a blurb for one of Friedman's books and taped an introduction to his PBS show. Like, that's, you know, that wouldn't happen if he was, you know, Galbraith, let alone Noot Tromsky. So, like, I think it's a real thing. Like, these characters are obsequious people who want to support powerful people and be seen as helping others know how good they are.

And every society has these awful obsequious ass-kissing intellectuals who, you know, discuss, you know, here's why the Soviet Union. You must invade Afghanistan. We have no, we must do it. And like what, you know, the Germans, every country has, every regime has horrible intellectuals that are willing to dream up some shaky justification for their horrible powerplay. So to me, I mean, I would say it's as simple as that, but that does also put figures like Friedman and Hayek in not good intellectual companies. Intellectual opportunism is what I would say.

Definitely. So let's move on to the next one then. in what ways does it undermine the freedom of information? You know, that's an interesting one, because that's, again, an area where conservatives and libertarians will say that markets do especially well is providing freedom of information. So, again, Hayek, in the part of the book where I just look at this subject, I pulled up some of his writing for the American Economic Review,

where he talks about markets as being like the single greatest machine at transmitting information that exists. And it's so great that people didn't even really, develop it themselves. Again, they always want to say markets are so natural, even though, again, when they're created, it's usually through some act of government violence, like enclosures or the, like, or coups in Chile, or whatever it might be. And he makes the point, Hayek claims that markets freely transmit information because everyone has the incentive to find out what's going on, and maybe there's way too many variables for them who keep track of, which is true.

Well, markets aggregate all that information into a price signal. We call that a signal. because it's just a, you know, like a pure technocratic indicator, and we just use that to learn about it. Well, if you could contemplate this, though, it's ridiculous. Like, prices sometimes are set by pure supply and demand, like, you know, in the textbooks that I use at my job, where they say that. But in many other markets, it's representation of the monopoly power levels of the people doing the buying and the selling.

So who would claim that when Amazon sells cloud computing power to the Pentagon, on, who's going to say that supply and demands dictating that price? Like, that is two huge global, powerful institutions, having an arm wrestling contest over exactly how much they're going to pay, and it's, you know, how much business they're going to get in the future. And what that means is that half the time price signals aren't signaling relative levels of scarcity and supply and demand, which, of course, is what Hayek is, again, utterly taking for granted as he writes this big, rhapsodic, unreadable paper about perfectly transparent markets

are. The reality is half the time what you're seeing with market prices is the result of some corporate dick measuring contest. And there's not much about real economic conditions reflected there except who is most powerful. And again, Friedman, and this might be him and his wife, Rose Friedman, who they co-wrote a number of their books, including Free to Choose. I forget exactly which one this was in. It's in the book. But they make the case that, yes, if there's monopoly, well, that's going to distort prices. But he says this. He says, but now market monopolies so unimportant that there's no longer much of an issue with monopolies affecting prices and he does mention one monopoly and its ability to warp prices and therefore this wonderful market information

and the example he gives is OPEC like even when he's briefly acknowledging the existence of monopoly and cartels it has to be government monot cartels in the numerous examples we've had and of course Freeman first wrote that book in the six You know, during the New Deal period in the golden age of antitrust. So actually, right when he was writing, you could make a case that that's true, but not because of some characteristic of markets, which is what he was supposed to be writing about. It was because of aggressive Justice Department antitrust enforcement, which is quite a market violation that they complain about continuously. So it's amazing to me, like even when they're willing to just briefly mention big problems that we all see in the real economy continuously, we laugh it off immediately. and certainly in this era we're living in now

of weaker antitrust enforcement and removing taxes and regulation which again remember William Buckley called this period the age of Friedman and I just want everyone to know that and to say that when they curse his name all the time it's amazing like because of his

policies we've seen a renaissance of merger activity over the last few decades that is fairly breathtaking and it's gone through a lot of changes over the years but my God Friedman these are the kind of claims that are really, again, make it difficult to take these figures seriously as real intellectual sometimes. But anyway, the point is all this, we're admitting that markets, they aren't necessarily

going to provide that freedom of flowing information as well as we sort of assume they will in Hayek's works as soon as there's any mergers and large agglomerations of power that can affect prices. So that's another aspect of freedom, I'd say, that's not quite as well treated by Marcus as we tend to assume. Absolutely. Just had a curiosity, do you think the legacy or the era of Friedman, as Buckley called it, is synonymous or at least heavily overlapping with what we know as neoliberalism, which started with, you know, ostensibly started with Reagan and Reaganomics and went through Clinton and Bush, et cetera, and it's kind of the predominant, you know, economic paradigm of our time. And in what ways do these things interact? Like, how do you parse out, you know,

this libertarianism and neoliberalism that we're living through now? which obviously involves, you know, the heavy-handed state, but also involves this sort of worshipping of market mechanisms in all cases. Yeah, you know, well, for me, I think the answer to the first part is definitely, yes. Like, what Buckley is describing with the age of Friedman essentially corresponds to what, you know, those of us who are into social analysis, yeah, call neoliberalism, you know, tax cutting, especially for wealthier populations, diminishing regulation. of different types, increased mobility of capital, all of these, you know, decreases in support for the labor movement.

I kind of like Agent Friedman more than neoliberalism because I think it puts the issue more on an economic thinker that we can understand. So I kind of just favor it for that reason. And also, too, you know, no one whose mainstream likes to use the term neoliberal. So I like this because this comes from the high priest of post-war conservatism himself, you know. Bill Buckley there. So most definitely I think those line up pretty tightly. Yeah, I think that's fascinating and a super interesting idea in a way to like use a synonym for neoliberalism depending on who you're talking to to make that sting a little bit more. Now I think the next one is about how capitalism exerts power over government. And I think most people, you know, understand that in lots of different

ways. So I kind of want to go on to this next one, which I think is slightly more interesting and perhaps slightly less understood, which is in what ways does contemporary capitalism exercise domination over future generations? Yeah, right on. So I think that makes sense. I agree that the power over politics thing is relatively well understood by people. I think that's fair. And in my book, I try to give some particularly useful examples because since people have

more awareness on this specific subject, you can be more detailed. And so we get some interesting episodes there, like when the corporate community created the Tea Party. And then a few years later, I had to start running candidates against the. the Tea Party because their libertarian rhetoric was carrying them away. But you can read about that in the book. So exactly, chapter four, we look at freedom of future generations. And this is something that if you look into it, there is almost no thought on this subject

or literature, apart from a few figures in the environmental movement, like it's rare. So what we're looking at here is, you know, we think about our environmental problems today, like we're polluting rivers or we're warming the climate gradually. Well, this has enormous implications for the freedom of future generations. And you can look at it, again, using both of those freedom concepts. So you can make a very strong case that a human who's born in the world should have the freedom to enjoy the basic natural processes of the world. It doesn't mean you should get to live in the nicest, most comfortable place or see every location maybe,

but it means you have a basic birthright to a world that you can live on and try to seek your fortune on. Even a lot of capitalists would agree with that, at least on that most emotional level. But also, too, I mean, these future generations will not be free from the implications of our behavior. And that includes the wealth that we're leaving them, which is what capitalists will point to when they occasionally feel like talking about environmental issues. But obviously, the huge legacy of destruction and diminishment that we're leaving. And so if we take a look, because our economic system is consuming resources faster than they can be naturally replenished and certainly producing waste, including climate-altering gases that are going into the environment faster that it can absorb them and process them in its own systems, it means that our decisions today are power plays over the future, and we know it. so for example in that chapter i cite our recent former state secretary rex tillerson uh that guy now people view him with sympathy because he's one of numerous people that our clown president has used as a shoe toy for a period before growing so that's interesting that that's his new last chapter but before that happened i put him in my book because of things he said as head of exon mobile which again is known for being the biggest of the post antitrust uh Rockefeller Standard Oil Empire, and for being the one that's been most antagonistic to dealing with climate change in the 80s, 90s, and Bush era,

they were the ones out of all the oil majors who were putting the most money into finding the odd engineer under Iraq who decided he was too smart for the rest of the global scientific consensus on climate change and shoving him in front of a national audience with a bunch of capital. So Exxon, I'm saying, has a particular debt to the world on this subject. Rex Tillerson, and again, I quote him in the book, you can take a look at it. He says a quote along the lines of, you know, he recognizing the climate and sea level rise are issues. And he says, it's an engineering problem. We've dealt with big problems in the past. We'll deal with this. Like he says, it's happening fine.

We'll deal with it. If that's not power, I don't know what it is, man. People need to say in the future, we'll just build walls along what had been our beaches to protect the big city. investments that we've made and we'll just have different amounts of clouds in the sky because we've decided to let the hydrosphere get altered through it's a very rapid and quick-changing morph like the ability to like lay down that sentence on all the future generations like that is one of the great darkest moments of power when those guys make investment decisions that then lead to those huge future ramifications so yeah in the book i just take in that chapter as a way

to give us just some way to focus this. I use the year 2100 as an example, you know, the end of this century, because a lot, if you read the scientific literature on the subject, and here is where I use my biology, undergrad degree, I guess. If you read the modern scientific research, you know, there's a strong tendency to look at, you know, use the turn of the century just as a natural milestone. And so if you look at scientific research on what is now being projected by scientists to be happening to the natural world around the end of this century, it's pretty,

twisted just in raw terms and certainly on its impacts on future generations and how much freedom they're going to have if they're constantly having to deal with chaos and a decreasing standard of living and just a inwardly upsetting warped environment because of our decisions 100 and 200 years ago that is real power mongering over them and so I just pull up a number of examples of what's expected but I mean some of it's stuff that you know your audience will be familiar with, like, higher than probably the IPCC anticipated sea level rise and temperature rise. But this ends up, like, really doing surprising things the scientists are saying.

And this is an area of active research every day. So for a while, it was thought that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and even the warmer temperatures would mean more higher crop yields in a lot of parts of the world. Well, we'll grow more food. Turns out that the heat stress and other environmental issues, like how much pollution we're putting in the air and shifting rainfall. patterns which are based on climate in large part are going to cause decreases in food production in major areas like China and again this is we're predicting this but it's the scientists who we

trust for everything else so it's worth taking them seriously but they anticipate things that like in the summer in areas like the persian gulf for example in the middle east it is very possible that those areas will become literally uninhabitable for humans and larger vertebrates by the end the century because of just serious piling on of heat in areas that already are prone to stronger heat waves and tough conditions in general and if you read through just a couple of articles about these you realize we do not know what the migration crisis is talk about Germany taking in a few million migrants and how that's rocking that country we have no idea what's coming as the legacy of the northern countries burning fossil fuels comes in over the next century well again there are

real implications for freedom here and economists again like to write off environmental issues as externalities or neighborhood effects or spillovers they have all these cutesy trite names for dismissing shit that let me tell you has scientists pulling their hair out these days and they talk about it in the literature so that's something i look at there i think there is and again no one as far as i know is really taking up this aspect of freedom and connecting it to the deteriorating natural systems that we've been taken for granted forever through history. But this is, I think, a real, I think there's a real connection to freedom there, and philosophers should think about it more, man.

Exactly. Perfectly said, it's extremely important. I'm always talking about just one small, I mean, not small, but just one effect of climate change is this mass migration, just a Syrian civil war and the migration that that's caused and the rise of fascism in European countries when those refugees, float over the borders seeking, you know, safety from chaos and war and depravity and poverty. I mean, the rise of fascism is just a tremor, it's just a sneak preview of what we're going to see when, you know, climate change fully blossoms and starts destroying coastal regions

and putting millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people on the move. And that not only is, you know, an environmentally chaotic environment for our children and their children, but it's inevitably going to lead to a politically chaotic environment for them, and they're going to have to deal with so much shit that right now we think things are bad and they are. But imagine what our kids and their kids are going to have to deal with if we don't act and we don't act soon. And it's scary.

And when you talk about power concentration, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but Exxon inside internal documents in the 80s admitted, outwardly admitted to one another that, yes, climate change is happening and is going to be a problem, and then still went on to use their billions and billions of dollars to astro-turf organizations and prop up pseudoscientists to promote this idea that climate change was a hoax. And eventually it results in a president of the United States of America calling climate change a Chinese hoax somehow mixing pseudo-scientific, you know, rejection of science with hatred of foreigners in one compellingly disgusting statement.

Yeah, that's, uh, that really has been sometimes. of Trump's innovation. People talk about how he's such a departure from the past. I mean, his policies are pretty hard right Republican. You know, I mean, Bolton worked for Bush. There's plenty of continuity there. One thing he does do, yeah, this racist dog whistle more openly than everyone else. But that's really, I mean, yeah, that's, that's, we're all familiar with the current

administration and what it is, I guess. We don't have to dig too much into that. But that really, that actually is a good example of the specific, nativist twist that Trump has brought to our hoary American conservatism is, you know, not only is this a lot. It's some kind of dirty foreigner lie. Let's throw that in there. Yeah, this is the era that we're in. I think your work kind of blending this critique of libertarianism and capitalism in with this idea that actually the authority and the domination spill over generationally is extremely important.

And I hope people pick up that argument and that concept and put it to work in their own debates or their own theoretical understanding because it's essential. And as a father myself, it's something I think about on a daily basis. But we're over 60 minutes now, so I'm just going to wrap it up with this last question, because in the last chapter of your book, you argue for a democratic socialist alternative to capitalism. You discussed a lot of ideas and arguments in that chapter, but given our time restraints, I would like for you to outline what a socialist alternative could look like, and more specifically, the importance of experimentation in finding what that alternative will be. Oh, I can do that in like 40 seconds. Yeah, right on. A lot of us have spent a lot of time thinking about how we could reorganize society. And that's one of the first things I say is, you know, we could use a plurality of views here.

There is a tendency where people want to say, okay, explain how you would run the system differently, Mr. Smart Guy. Like, well, I'd want to put the average working people in charge of the experiments to figure out how to do it, you know. And again, I come out of the scientific background. Maybe that makes me think it's enough to say, well, we should experiment with socialism. But that is, I think, ultimately where we should land. I mean, there's such a range of people. and historical backgrounds, the way that just different industries work, we should expect a variety and diversity of approaches. So anything I say about what I would like as far as libertarian socialism or something along those lines, in my mind, this is within like the legitimate different views of lots of other people who would see very different things from it, as it should be.

We should be freely exploring this stuff. But my basic picture, I mean, when I describe this to people, I think starting politically as a mistake, I think we should start about what people's daily lives would be like. And I think the crucial thing we should say is when you go to work, you and your co-workers are in charge. When you go into the office or the factory or the server center or the farm or wherever it is you work, the decisions about what you're going to do, what you're going to produce, how it's going to be done, those aren't in the hands of management who keep all the crucial information for themselves. You have the information. You chop it up with your colleagues.

You settle on something and communicate. with the other crucial businesses that you need to work, you know, the companies that make whatever inputs your production uses, you'll need to be in touch with their workforces and to organize that exactly how you organize it. You know, do you do it through councils or through an iterative planning body that people choose through a validing process or is it done through shop representation where you have a parliament of workforce representations for industry? these to me are the kinds of broad possibilities that we should be trying in lots of countries each

to see which ones have different kinds of results. So I'm always the type that shrinks from doing like what Michael Albert and Robin Handel did with PariCon and making like a more detail blueprint. But I should say I love Pari Khan. I think that was a very useful contribution. But to me, what we should be emphasizing is the key thing is that when you go to work, you're not being dictated to by some boss living somewhere in Kingdomcom, who knows, you guys have the information, you all work together and figure out what the plan is going to be. And it doesn't mean that we'll have everything working out perfectly and that we won't have screw-ups,

but we have things that don't work and that get screwed up now, and they get screwed up in the interest of whoever's in charge. But to me, the key thing is, yeah, you go into work, you have access to the information about your business, you make decisions, you run those decisions past some legitimate representation for the community itself that your business operates in, because you have to consider that, and that's going to include people who care about the natural environment where they live, so that piece can be a part of it as well. And again, usually the thing we always refer to, because, of course, conservatives will say,

yeah, but see, already, look at you, communist, you're trying to make decisions for all of us about how our economy is going to work. Jeff Bezos should get to make those decisions, you know, but they'll accuse us of being authoritarian. Well, the key thing is what we always emphasize is recall of representatives. That's one thing that I feel is the real core of the old socialist tradition, and maybe now more of a libertarian socialist thing, is figures like Anton Panacock and Rosa Luxembourg, and I quote these figures and talk about their ideas quite a bit in the last chapter of my book. What they emphasize is that the decisions need to originate from the rank and file. And obviously a big, complicated economy, like our global economy today, needs a ton of organization.

We can't have every workforce deciding what they're going to do. We won't have things moving through a chain of production that allows us to remain alive and have any kind of standard of living. But those representatives who go then to work out the overall plan need to be subject to recall and have to tell their constituents, you know, their workforce colleagues, everything that was discussed. And always, too, we tend to support, you know, having mandatory retirement of representatives in any kind of socialist economic process so that no one becomes, you know, political dynasties or big experts. on the subject. And I frankly, I can't remember who proposed this, or who used this analogy in the past. That might be a good one to end with. But someone said that in a libertarian socialist system, making economic decisions, like being management these days, management would be like jury duty. Like, well, it's my turn to be on the planning panel this week. Okay, fine. I'll work

less than do that. Like, those are the kinds of ideas that I think start us down the road of thinking about what libertarian socialism or other forms of socialism could be. And we should be. And we should be experimenting, you know, maybe one or two of those ideas is too top-heavy or too unresponsive or something. By experimentation, we figured that stuff out. Right. Yeah, I totally agree with the notion of experimentation being essential. And there's also a crude irony when defenders of the status quo and the current paradigm argue that, oh, look at you communist trying to tell us what to do again, when in reality, just a very tiny global elite of capitalist ruling class people dictate the direction of our planet and the lives not only our everyday lives today but the the trajectory

of our children's lives so already this system of just competition and profit the anarchy of the market the boom and bus cycle is already a dictatorial apparatus that dominates and directs all of our lives with little to no say on our end so you know it's it's really it's really a projection of what they are defending is like this this small group of elite people dictating you know our entire lives for us. And what we want to do is overturn that. And experimentation is going to be essential. And I always point people back to bourgeois revolutions, this slow transition from feudalism to global capitalism. It didn't come about with one perfect revolution where everything went off perfectly well and everybody just kind of fell into this new paradigm. But it was fits and

starts. You know, things happen in one part of the world. Things happened another. The revolution itself gave rise to all new problems. You know, the bourgeois revolutions of the U.S. France, et cetera. And so I think that this new era, this period of transition we're in now is going to be similar in that we're going to have to, you know, be open to experimentation, see what works, learn from the past, but also be very stubborn about moving forward into the future. And, you know, that means there is no blueprint. There is no manual on how to do things. But, God damn, our entire lives and our kids' lives depend on us doing something. So we have to fight and we have to try and we have to engage.

in this experimentation in good faith and in a sort of principled comradly way and not a way that was a slit the throat of anybody who disagrees with you, you know? I think that's exactly the kind of, you know, very open-minded, very conciliatory attitude. I think a lot of, especially today's younger, as it were younger, I'm under 40, so that goes. I think a lot of the current generation of radicals are seeing this more and more. I think there is more of a willingness to not, you know, to not evaluate everything by, are you sticking by my very favorite dogma and willingness to, like, listen to other people and be conciliatory. And yeah, exactly what you said of accommodately, uh, when you're thinking about these issues. Like, I think that's the kind of

attitude that's going to give us a chance to really, uh, change the world on this more fundamental basis. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a fascinating conversation. Hopefully we can have you back on. I know, I know that, you know, outside of just the purview of this book, you're working in the field of economics. is valuable and a lot of people out there want to learn more about economics and shore up their sort of economic understanding so perhaps in the future we can have you back on

to discuss some of that but before we let you go can you let you let listeners know where they can find you and your work online and let us know what book you're working on currently yeah for sure thanks me yeah I'd love to be back I always enjoy chopping up this stuff but yeah well the current project right now my new book is just out

capitalism versus freedom people should check it out right now I'm working on the next one you know Got to be a productive socialist worker. So the next book is all about something I guess I've been referring to through this interview. You know, our kind of rising newly dominant corporate sector, which of course is Silicon Valley and Big Tech. Those firms are, you know, as we speak, obtaining a new level of power within the overall capitalist system that's, you know, let's say epoch-changing new sector. You know, over time, of course, a lot of us know capitalism is a churning dynamic system over time.

And at one point, the railroads were the most important firms, because after all, those are, you know, like the interstates at that time. They're pretty crucial. Later, you know, Wall Street has sort of been our crucial, central, most influential kind of organizing industry. These days, I think you can make a good case that big tech and is becoming co-dominate with Wall Street because of the huge change, it's brought, its technology. has brought in the economy and it's reorganization of whole sectors of capitalism around it so i think that's you know something that people have a lot of interest in these days and it's even becoming mainstream you know with facebook uh hit with scandal after scandal or as i'd say the other firms it's it's still on its way so right now i'm working on a book i hope to finish uh before

the end of the year and have out next year it's about yeah the giant silicon valley titans and i'm calling it uh big tyrants because i think that's pretty funny and it's going to Hey Market Books. So that's that's the new book project there. As far as where folks can reach me, you know, I'm on Twitter like a lot of us. So my handle is at ironic professor. Nice. And we will absolutely link to you in the show notes. And when we post it on Twitter, we'll link to your account so people can go check out you and your work. Keep up the great work. This is a really important contribution to left discourse. And I'm really honored to have had you on. Let's keep in touch and let's collaborate more in the future. That sounds great, man. Thanks a lot. Have pleasure. If diodesis had never turned grapes into wine, I wouldn't be so mad. If white powder drugs were it outlawed by the state, I'd still be following the trends. If selfishness and greed were inconsidered deadly sins

I'd still be living with my friends And if the pigs hadn't knocked on my door at 8 a.m., I wouldn't be so full of hate But it's too late But it's too late Oh, it's too late And see What's the

Now I am the kind of guy The prospector I deliver it, but it's a difference Between pointing into a truce And I'm not completely innocent participating in the drink And following the American dream And I see her name

It does arrive with Carnegie Artigate or Vanderbilt, so you have the proper placement in this song I think it's more like scarfish, big and small the gym, okay? We all know how those mother's mustries turned out. He was a venture capitalist, profiting from other people's happiness. I think he can't go out, I'm thinking on, I'm thinking a lot. So was it worth this? Think of all the things you have to form it

A tragic deal I hope you know a better who be in jail Oh You can hear me I say Do not despair is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass and dictators die. And the power they took from the people will return to the people.

And so long as men die, liberty will never perish. Soldiers, know to yourselves the brutes. Men who despise you, enslave you, who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think of what to feel, who drink, and die at you, treat you like cattle, use your self. Kind of honor, don't give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men, and which she mine is a machine. You are not wicked, you are not cattle, you are men, you are men in your heart, you hate, only be able to hate, and your lungs and your hatch.

Soldiers, don't fight the same thing. Pray for liberty! In the 17th chapter of St. Luke it is written, the kingdom of God is within man, not one man nor a group of men, but in all men, in you, you, you the The people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness. You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then in the name of democracy, let us use that power. Let us all unite! I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know. I'm going to be able to I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

I'm sorry. I'm gonnae. I'm gonna. ...their... I don't know. We're going to be. I don't know. You know,

I mean, I don't know. I don't know.