Rev Left Radio - Defending Socialism: A Logical Critique of Capitalism

Episode Date: May 28, 2024

Philosopher Scott Sehon joins Breht to discuss his new book "Socialism: A Logical Introduction". Together they analyze arguments in favor of capitalism, argue against them, and defend socialism as a superior form of socio-economic organization in the process. They discuss different definitions of socialism, social democracy vs. democratic socialism, have a friendly back and forth about the Soviet Union, the role of morality and values in political debate, wealth inequality and its deleterious impact on society, the contradiction within capitalism between free markets and monopoly formation, democracy v. markets, and much more.    Get 15% off any book in the Left Wing Books Library HERE ------------------------------------------------------------ Support Rev Left and get access to over 300 bonus episodes in our back catalogue, as well as new bonus episodes each month. 

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. All right, on today's episode we have on Scott Cion to discuss his book, Socialism, A Logical Introduction. This interview was set up by our mutual friend and friend of the show, multiple-time guest, Kristen Gotti. And I always, you know, respect and trust her. And she's like, here's my friend. Do you think you guys would have a great time? And we did. This was a really fun conversation, lots of laughs.

but also we get into the logical, systematic argumentation for socialism, and we take on the common arguments that are advanced by capitalists and liberals of various sorts for the superiority of capitalism and the inferiority of socialism. We take them head on. The book is all about systematically working through those arguments to reveal their premises, to critique them, to strip them down to their bare parts and analyze them. And I think it's a really fascinating and helpful thing to do for those of us interested in moving this world in a socialist direction. So it's going to be a really, really fun episode. I'm really excited for it.

I also want to remind people that we have an ongoing collaboration with our friends over at leftwingbooks.net associated with Kersibleb Publishing, wherein Rev. Left listeners can get 15% off any book in their library. And they have an ever-growing library of left-wing Marxist, socialist, feminists, anti-colonial, decolonial, anti-imperial, books of theory, of history, biographies of certain individuals, et cetera. And it's a wonderful, wonderful outlet for people to go and get books.

And now if you're a RevLev listener, just click the link in the show notes. We already have the code embedded. You can type in, I think, Rev Left at checkout, but we'll just give you the link. So once you click it, that already automatically applies. You automatically get your 15% off. And you can get easier access, more affordable access to a wonderful amount of books. So we really appreciate our comrades over at left-wing books, and we support what they're doing. They support what we're doing.

It's a perfect match. So if you haven't already taken advantage of that, definitely give it thoughts. Go check them out. Go support them. It's a wonderful thing. All right. Without further ado, here is my discussion with Professor of Philosophy, Scott Seon, on his recent book, Socialism, a logical introduction. Enjoy.

Hi, I'm very happy to be here. My name is Scott Sion. I'm a professor of philosophy at Bowdoin College in Maine, and have been there teaching for quite a while, about 30 years, teaching logic and other areas of philosophy, but also recently, of course, called socialism, capitalism, and democracy. Oh, nice. You actually teach a class entitled that, huh? Yes. That's very interesting. Cool.

Well, yeah, I'm very happy to have you on. The book we're going to be discussing today is, of course, socialism, a logical introduction. I always enjoy having philosophers on the podcast because I myself come from a philosophy background, just a bachelor's degree in philosophy, but still it's always been a core interest of me and a sort of a core theme of this podcast. You know, we even cover philosophy outside of politics proper. But, yeah, it's always fun to have a philosopher in on the show. And so we're going to cover this book with you today.

And I guess the first question I want to ask and just to also help listeners orient themselves to the book and the discussion is kind of what was your impetus behind writing this book? And what were you hoping to accomplish with it? Yes. And it was an odd history in some ways. A lot of my previous work in philosophy has been on much more metaphysical, hamstruse questions, free will. and nature of the mind-body problem and that sort of thing. This book came about in after I co-authored an article for Eon magazine with anthropologist Kristen Gadsie, where we were, the article was titled anti-anti-communism.

And part of the article was talking about the responses. There had been a spate of anti-communist arguments that were, not particularly good ones. And Kristen's part in that article was to raise various ethnographic data and various empirical problems that ended up infecting the anti-communist arguments. My part was to break down their argument into careful and explicit steps and thereby be able to show why their argument might be appealing and yet why it seemed to go. wrong and that if you fixed it up this way, then it went wrong for this reason. If you fixed it up another way, it went wrong for that reason. That sort of argumentative analysis that we do in

philosophy all the time. And it was surprising to me that the article was shared thousands of times on Facebook and it basically occurred to me, well, I'm certainly very interested in these issues more broadly and have taught some of this sort of material. And maybe there's room here for a much more lengthy treatment where I break down the arguments for and against socialism in the contemporary context, not really attempting to do much justice to the rich history of the topic. And just try to see what we can gain from this process and in the end, arguing for moving in the socialist direction. What I'm hoping to accomplish with, it is or people on the left that they better understand the reasons and arguments for their

own position and perhaps better understand at least the motives and arguments of those who do oppose them, even if I then take pains to try to show where those arguments go wrong. I'm also in a lot of ways aiming at people more in the center or even far right or libertarians I often had in mind the sort of young libertarian who's really impressed by the arguments for libertarianism and I think some of those can be flipped I think they can you know they can come to see

reason and realize that their arguments tempting though they are don't work and that actually the arguments lean much more in the direction of socialism wonderful yeah one I've always been a really strong advocate on this show of engaging with people who disagree with us fundamentally, engaging with their opinions, understanding where they come

from. And I feel like that is a core advantage for any position holder to understand deeply your various opponents' critiques of you. And I think one of the advantages of being on the socialist and communist left is that so many of our opponents have never really had, because of the ambient ideological background of American society for the last hundred years, have not really had to seriously engage with our arguments such that it's very easy to go on Fox News or MSNBC or in the pages of New York Times and, you know, we're on real time with Bill Maher and make the laziest sort of hand-waving, you know, anti-communist, quote-unquote arguments that are just so silly and infantile and it clearly betrays their lack of engagement with the actual

tradition. So it's always our advantage to understand our various opponents' viewpoints deeply. And then also I think it's really what I like about this book and what I think is really important about it is that there are many ways that we can engage on the on the terrain of political opposition and debate, you know, and often, you know, people that disagree with us on the socialist left, they will say that we're just driven by peer ideology or some of them will argue that, oh, we're just very emotional or, you know, various caricatures or that, you know, what you often hear is that we just really want power. And so what we do is we hide behind this, you know, ostensibly mass-driven politics and this ostensible care for the poor and the working class. But really all we are, you know, greedy tyrants in waiting. We just want our hands on power. And, you know, that flies for serious argumentation in mainstream American discourse, unfortunately. But, you know, with a figure like you bringing this very logical, you know, philosophical engagement with these arguments and breaking them down and sort of. through them. I think that is, that is very helpful. And it can help young people coming up who embrace, you know, socialism or left-wing politics, but maybe, you know, could use some of that, some of that ammunition, you know, to go to debate and actually have, you know, interesting and deep things to say. Before we move on, though, you mentioned libertarianism. And, you know, I'm sure

as a college professor, I'm sure as a philosophy professor, you get your fair share of, you know, young libertarians coming up. And I wonder if that's changed over the years because, you know, I have this sense that neoliberalism, this period of American life for the last 40 or 50 years, you know, reigned in since Reagan at least, is this period of more or less applied libertarianism where the ideas of somebody like Milton Friedman really took hold and were pushed ideologically by Reagan and then were accepted by third way Clintonism and have become the more or less dominant mainstream norm. Of course, it's not pure liberalism. libertarianism because I don't think pure libertarianism can even function, but it's applied libertarianism and many core ideas from a figure like Milton Friedman were ushered in under Reagan. And that period of time is coming to an end. A lot of people right left and center, maybe not center, but right and left are becoming more skeptical. Do you, have you noticed a difference in the amount of people engaging with, you know, as advocates for libertarianism or is it more or less stayed the same? Well, I haven't, I don't have any systematic data. But yes, I think that.

There's something to what you say, that there's probably been a little bit less of a tendency towards it now. But still, it's a strong undercurrent and with college students as well, even though it is true that by and large, college campuses are bastions of liberalism and not this sort of neoliberalism. And they generally are the students are on the left, but not by any means all. And there is a substantial sort of. Milton Friedman-esque libertarian current. Not that most of the students these days have read Milton Friedman or know much of anything about him, but it has been just kind of absorbed into the culture, as you say, since Reagan. Interesting. Yeah, I'm very interested to see how that plays out in the coming years because I even see figures on the right wing. I'm now being, you know, like explicitly against libertarianism. Tucker Carlson, for example, has come out against libertarianism. and there's this new right movement that is very skeptical and even disdainful of libertarianism.

So we'll see how that plays out. But let's get back to the question and to your book. Now, this is, of course, coming from a socialist perspective. And, you know, as a Marxist myself, I personally tend to see socialism as this transitionary stage out of capitalism and toward communism. And I believe you identify in the book as a sort of democratic socialist. So I'm wondering if we have any disagreement on this front. So what do you make of this conception of socialism as this transition out of capitalism and explicitly toward communism? And what are your core criteria as a second point for meeting the standard of what qualifies as socialism, despite maybe some different interpretations of what it could mean?

Okay. Yeah. Let me start with the second part of that question because I think it helps to inform the first part. My criteria for meeting the standard of socialism, well, or at least how I define socialism, I am a couple of things. One is, first, I hope not to get too hung up over words and have semantic disputes replacing substantive disputes. I'd always rather prefer that we argue about substance rather than about who gets to use what word to describe their view. And then secondly, given that, and this sort of goes along with that, I see these various different positions as largely being matters of degree that, and in particular, I see the degrees on a couple of different axes. We can have differing degrees of how egalitarian our distribution of resources is and such that, you know, complete egalitarian distribution, or the Marxist idea of two each according to, from each according to ability to each according to need would be, you know, the high version of that. Allowing extreme versions of inequality would be the opposite direction.

The other axis would be the degree of collective control that we democratically have over the economy, whether that means directly through owning and operating the means of production or just highly regulating it, but, you know, these things come in degrees as well. And basically my idea is, and just in terms of how I want to use the term socialism, is that the further we move in those directions, the more egalitarian, more collective control of the economy directions on these two axes, the further we are moving in the direction of socialism. So that's just sort of by background. As for a core criteria, there are certainly those who would say, no, it doesn't count as socialism unless you basically have no profit motive anymore and you take, you have collective ownership of the means of production and nobody owning and walking away with profit. That is, you can use the word that way if you want. I think it's, you know, again, as long as we are clear on substance, who gets to use what word is less of a concern of mine.

Now, back to your question, the first part of the question about seeing socialism as a transition out of capitalism and towards communism, I am basically arguing in the book for moving in the socialist direction as being better, where this means that we have more democratic collective control of the economy through a reasonably strong state and more egalitarian distribution of resources. again done through a state. It's possible that one could see that as a transition to something one might call communism where there's a withering away of the state and there's a much more sort of anarchist picture. And that's possible. That could happen. It could be that if we move far enough in the socialist direction that something different and even better could arise from such a withering away of the state. I myself am a little bit dubious about that. I tend to think that in a world with nearly 8 billion people, we are going to need states to stop extreme inequalities to regulate control, regulate and control what will have to be a complex economy

to handle the bad apples, to provide infrastructure, support, that sort of thing. But I will admit that I don't consider much about that in the book, about sort of moving even further in these directions. The book is mainly aimed at understanding the arguments for socialism against capitalism, and I hope to convince those, you know, inclined towards capitalism, the socialism's a better way of going. So I would hope that people like you who see socialism as a transition to something quite different will at least see me as an ally. And even if we may disagree on where the endpoints are, the left does have this unfortunate tendency to form circular firing squads. Absolutely. And you're certainly an ally and a friend. No worries there. I just think

it is sort of an interesting question. And I think that there's also a big question mark where socialism leads of where organizing society in that direction can ultimately lead. There are, you know, Marx's sort of core predictions of stateless, moneyless, classless society. But that's still a very sort of vague, you know, set of sentences. And it's not necessarily a full and complete picture because it can't be because we're in the historical fog of our own time and that seems to be far away from where we currently are. One of the things that I think about with communism is not necessarily the statelessness of the end point, but more of like, can humanity transcend class society? Can humanity transcend the dividing of human beings up into various classes where some are in the

elite with wealth and power and others have to toil their entire lives, right? That's true under slave societies. That's true under feudal societies. That's true under capitalist societies. You know, Albert Einstein called all of this the predatory phase of human development. And I think that that leaves open the possibility that we can mature as a species beyond, you know, class societies in all their forms. So just for thought. Yeah, I think that's actually quite, you know, just sorry to make one, I interrupt me make one point about that. It's not just a matter of maturing. You know, there's a good deal of evidence that our evolutionary ancestors lived in very egalitarian societies without much by way of class structure.

So one might even say that we have imposed this upon humanity, and now if we can get further away from it, we would all be better off. But that would be perhaps going back to an earlier stage of where we were. Yeah, I think it was Marx who talked about that as kind of returning to the community at a higher level. Like, you know, there's that pre-class society formation of very egalitarian social structures with the introduction of the agricultural revolution and, you know, human civilization. We immediately go into now the realm of class society. And it's not so much that we want to go back to being hunters and gatherers, right? But it's that we want to come through these periods of

human development, this sort of adolescence of our species, if you will, and come out the other side, having gone through that experience and returning to that sort of egalitarian communal structure, but at a much higher level and a much more technologically developed level. So, interesting. Just as a quick aside, before we get deeper into this, do you see a meaningful difference personally between social democracy and democratic socialism? Do you think about the tensions there or where there may be meaningful distinctions? Not in this book, but just personally.

Yeah. Sure. there's obviously that the traditional distinction here is that with social democracy you have a you still have markets you still have private ownership but you have a very strong social welfare state and with socialism the traditional classical view is that to count as genuinely socialist and not just social democracy you basically need to get rid of private ownership of the means of production and get rid of you know the profit making motive now there can be different variations on that and again I've don't really like arguing about words and who gets to use which word. Does it not count as socialism unless you have no private profit and no markets at all, you know, I'd again, I'd just rather be clear on the substance of what we're talking about. So, but all that said, the traditional picture of social democracy is, you know, it's perhaps at a different point on these two axes that I'm envisioning.

It's less far and up to the left than classic socialist. The question of how far we should go, I do still think of as matters of degrees. And I think it's largely, it's, you know, in large part an empirical question. There are moral aspects to this question underlying it. But, you know, what's best for us? What's best for human well-being? And if I'm at least open to the possibility that what's best for human well-being is something that a lot of people would call social democracy rather than what they would call democratic socialism, I also tend to think that so far it seems to me. that the arguments and the evidence point to moving quite far in the socialist direction, something beyond perhaps what people would traditionally call social democracy. Yeah, absolutely. And I do think that sort of metric that you use of what's best for human well-being, I think that is that in and of itself, I think, is a really important metric because that is not the metric of capitalism. It is not interested in any way of increasing human well-being generally.

It's very interested in producing higher levels of well-being and material wealth for a relatively small group of people. But this idea that we could orient our entire society around not profit accumulation and market competition, but around human flourishing and human well-being and human standards of living, I think that in of itself is a shift away from capitalist realism and modes of capitalist thought. But yeah, I really appreciate and agree with your point, especially about degrees. and moving in certain degrees. The social democracies of like Northern Europe, for example, are also products of socialist and communist struggles over the last century, right? They are, they are sort of the fruit of a certain sort of left-wing radical tradition and struggle that's settled into social democracy, as we now know it, but absent those more radical movements for more robust forms or higher degrees of socialism, social democracy itself wouldn't

even exist. And so, yeah, interesting. Everything is sort of tied together. in that way. But you mentioned morality, and I think that's a great segue to this next question. I have long thought that when people debate big ideas or systems, what they are really debating are core moral values, which often get obscured in the war of marshalling facts. Other Marxists have at times downplayed the relevance of morality in favor of structuralist and historical lines of argumentation. What role does morality play in the capitalism versus socialism debate as you see it? that. Maybe you can talk about what you refer to in the book as the master arguments for capitalism and socialism. Right. Yes, I do think that the issue is fundamentally a moral one. The question,

after all, is how ought we to structure our economy, our society? And that is inevitably a moral question. It's a question about what we ought to do. It's not just a question about history and what will happen or what people happen to want, that sort of thing. And I think it's important to recognize that. I think there are some, you know, perhaps more on the left than the right, who shy away from talking about moral values and, you know, some in the Marxist tradition, but also just more generally. You know, and perhaps that's because they're afraid to think that there might be anything objective that one can say here. They might think that everything is relative. Or perhaps they buy into the Kool-Aid from the religious right and somehow

think that the only way of being in favor of moral values is if you thump the Bible and go on about the alleged sense of abortion and homosexuality. As an aside, I'll think that those on the right who talk this way would get a better moral education if they would stop thumping that Bible and actually read it. But that's a different matter. Absolutely. I also don't think that one needs any particular religious commitments to be a moral and morally thoughtful person. But the big point is that I do think it's a big mistake to cede talk of moral values to the right. When we on the left are concerned, when we're concerned about the well-being of poor people struggling to survive in a land of extreme wealth, that is a moral concern. I don't think there's any other way to put it as far as that goes.

And that does play into what you mentioned, my, what I call my master argument or socialism. One could also have an analogous argument for capitalism. But, you know, I think the one for socialism works better. So what I call the master argument for socialism, and I break this, what I do in the book a lot, I break these things down into explicit numbered steps. And this is the third step of that argument, but since we've been talking about the moral matters here, I would say that as a general premise that is effectively moral, I would, about morality, I would say, given two styles of governance, if the first better promotes human well-being,

than the second does, and does not violate the moral rights of individuals, then we should do that. You know, we should aim to better promote human well-being so long as we are not violating rights. The other premises of the master argument are just that socialism does that better than extant alternative styles of governance, better than U.S. style capitalism in particular, and that socialism doesn't violate the moral rights of individuals. So it follows from those three premises that we should be choosing socialism. We should be moving in that direction. But that premise about what type of system we ought to choose is a fundamentally moral one. And I don't think we should shy away from that sort of talk. I genuinely completely agree with that. And your point when you said, you know, that we,

there's this tendency to seed moral values to the right. I think that's true and it needs to be combated. And I do think it's a product of what you alluded to, which is this sort of this moral relativism that seeps into, I think, you know, mostly probably the liberal left. I think there's a little bit more moral clarity in a tradition of certain moral lines of argumentation that align with the structural list and historical lines of argumentation over on the Marxist left, socialist left. But for sure, there's a certain moral relativism on the left that, you know, makes people reticent to, to make, you know, universal moral claims. And in comparison to that sort of waffling moral relativism, it makes the right seem like they have moral certitude on their side. And that is very appealing to people in the right wing to this very day, you know, will often play into this idea that they have, you know, the moral certitude on their side.

and that on the left, it's anything goes and nothing really matters, a sort of nihilism of moral relativism. And it can be alluring for people ideologically to be captured by that line of argument. But I agree with you that we can't escape morality. When we're talking about how to build societies, the moral is inevitable. We bump into it. And in fact, the way that I've long said that when you're trying to convince somebody of like socialist politics, socialist values, of course you resort to moral argumentation. If you're just talking to like a regular person and you're trying to convince them of the superiority of like, you know, socialism compared to capitalism or just trying to critique capitalism, how could you not talk about the lack of health care? How could you not talk about brutal imperialism? How could you not talk about the injustices of, you know, stealing people's, you know, excess surplus value and not raising wages while profits go through the roof?

Morality is seeped into this entire thing. And I think it's foolhardy to try to try to avoid that. That doesn't mean we should not advance. the structuralist and historical, you know, lines of argumentation, but that they should all go together and we should have our own moral vision that we stand on and that we are proud of and that we advance along with our broader politic. And I think that's crucial if we're going to have any chance of defeating the right. Absolutely. Well, we were talking about human well-being and one major argument for capitalism, sort of amusingly to people like me and you, but, you know, they marshal it quite often,

is that capitalism itself has dramatically increased human well-being. Specifically, it's increased human well-being through prosperity and the generation of massive amounts of wealth and the ostensible and real material progress that people have seen from, you know, monarchal feudalism to today's 21st century techno-capitalism. And so one of the first argument you'll hear when you're debating a capitalist is look at what capitalism has done. Like, you know, look at you typing on your iPhones and on your computers, criticizing capitalism, right? How could you? But you argue that capitalism and free markets are actually not the drivers of these particular gains and prosperity and wealth and material progress. So can you kind of elaborate on that argument? And if it's not capitalism and free markets proper, what is the main driver of these gains? Right. Yes. And I, well, one thing I'll say, you know, to caution against, not that you were doing this, but I think there, I think the capitalists in making this argument are right about a couple of things. One is, that there has been a significant increase in overall human well-being over the past couple of centuries in contrast with the centuries before that.

Not just for the super wealthy. I mean, life expectancy has gone way up. We live in levels, even those of us who are not incredibly rich, live in levels of well-being and prosperity that would be the envy of kings in earlier generations. And it is also true that this increase in well-being correlates roughly with the rise of capitalism as an economic system. All of that's, I think, true, and one shouldn't try to deny it because you'll basically

have a tough time denying some of the facts involved there, though one can certainly quibble about many of the details. But in any event, correlation is not causation. It's the fact that there has been this increase in well-being over the past couple centuries and capitalism has come to more and more to dominate. That's a correlation. That doesn't show that this is explaining that. An example that I use to show the correlation is not always causation. Since Putin took power in Russia, Major League Baseball salaries have gone way up. But I don't think any Major League Baseball player is worried that if Putin were to lose power, that their salaries would go down. It's just obviously in that case, it's a spurious correlation. In the case of the rise and well-being in the United States and other countries like that in the West in general and capitalism,

one reason to go against the claim that it's causation in addition to correlation is that the countries in Western Europe and Northern Europe that are further in the direction of the socialist side of the spectrum, tend to be happier than people in the United States and they tend to have better measures of well-being in a lot of respects. In addition, they simply report being happier. There can be lots of explanations for that, of course, but it would be surprising if it is capitalism that explains the gains in well-being. There's also the interesting fact that the Soviet bloc countries in the, you know, from 1917 to 1991, um, thereabouts, um, that, you know, they don't count as democratic socialist on my view because it wasn't genuine collective control. The were totalitarian that, you know, not advocating those systems, but they weren't

capitalist in terms of how they organized the economy. And yet the data that we have, the data are imperfect, but the data that we have, so, you know, they had a lot of economic growth. Their life expectancy increased dramatically. Yes, by 1989, 1991, they were still behind us, but they started much lower than the Western European countries and the United States. And yet they managed to more or less keep pace. That is utterly mysterious on the claim, the capitalist claim, that it is capitalism that explains the rise in overall human well-being. And now it's the capitalist who has to try to explain away this apparent exception to their claim. I think just stepping back, you asked what the real driver was here. I think, you know, where's the scientific revolution?

You know, we have antibiotics. We have all kinds of things that science has provided, yes, including iPhones and things like that, the computer technology that arose out of fundamental scientific discoveries first. We've had, you know, scientific revolution and scientific progress. I don't think is attributable to capitalism and that that's what really explains the great increase in human well-being over the last couple of centuries. And so it's not due to capitalism. Yeah.

I find that incredibly convincing and absolutely true. And there's also this dual, this two-sided nature of capitalism that pro-capitalists like to ignore, which is, you know, and Marx kind of got at it when he was looking at industrial capitalism in the 19th century and he says, how can a system increase its wealth while at the same time increasing its misery. And there's a sense in which the more materially prosperous, quote unquote, at least the West gets. And, you know, we have discussions of colonialism and imperialism embedded in this, in this as well with regards to how certain parts of the world became incredibly rich and other parts of the world are systematically underdeveloped. But, you know,

for those of us in the West, there is we're living through, you know, mental health crises like never before seen. We're living through periods of intense alienation. One of the things I do as sort of a sociological interest of mine as I go on YouTube and I look up Gen Z talking to themselves about their situation, about their lack of a future, about what their take on society is and how they feel utterly and completely devoid of meaning and purpose and a life plan. And it really drives home this point that, you know, that this cohort of young people coming up right behind my generation are suffering deeply. And there's a sense in which capital, is antithetical and hostile to some basic, you were talking about, you know, evolutionary

biology earlier, some basic impulses in our nature as human beings, which is to be social creatures, to fit into, you know, a social ecosystem, to have a sense of community, and those things have been systematically stripped away by capitalism. So for the pro-capitalist saying we have this one, these wonderful improvements of well-being, your scientific and technological argument is absolutely crucial. But we can also cast a skeptical eye on that claim because raw material progress for some is not necessarily the exact same thing as higher levels of well-being. And in fact, studies prove that at a certain point of material well-being, getting more material stuff does absolutely nothing to move the dial with regards to

happiness and life satisfaction. So certainly, like in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, there's a certain level of material, prosperity, and wealth that a human being in a society need to be comfortable, but beyond that, billions of dollars, three yachts, multiple houses, right, while other people are sleeping on the streets. I mean, that's the sort of grotesquery of the system. Yes. But I do have another point to make, and I just kind of want to bounce this idea off of you, and, you know, this is all in the spirit of a friendly, comradly discussion. You do have a sort of a little bit more, less sympathetic take on this.

the Soviet Union than I might have. And, you know, you, you, I think correctly point to the fact that over time this system, despite its ideological pretensions, you know, did seem to to move away from democracy and more towards, you know, more authoritarian, perhaps ways of structuring society. And I would just, I would, I would offer this to you, and I would love to get your thoughts on this. There's a couple of things at play here with, with regards to why that happened. The first thing is that when you're transitioning to a whole new way of doing things, right, this attempt to move into socialism for the first time ever is like the first attempt to move out of monarchal feudalism towards capitalism or towards mercantilism, right? It's never going to be in one big jump we get there.

It's going to be, you know, two steps forward, three steps back. It's going to be meant with counter-revolution, you know, think of the French revolution and the reaction to Europe after that. Napoleon's crusade throughout the entire European continent spreading Republican values and how much he was fucking hated for that by all the kings of, of Europe. Europe, et cetera. So there's that part of it, that historical progress, it takes many iterations to make a jump. There's also the history of, let's look at Russian history, right? This is a history of czarism. There's no democratic culture in Russia at this point, right? We're looking at Zard Nicholas, and in a thousand years prior, we're looking at these really authoritarian, monarchical systems of domination and hierarchy that are really unquestioned. And to take a society from that,

and to try to move them, not even just a bourgeois parliamentarianism and, you know, liberalism, but to even take it further to actually like we should own the workplaces, that's a lot to ask of a culture and a society that doesn't have a lot of history with that, right? The default is to go back to sort of some version of a strong man. And then the third part is, of course, being immediately attacked. So the moment that the Soviet Union came to be, moment the revolution was successful, We immediately descend into the civil war. We have 14 of the strongest European and, you know, American countries coming in, trying to strangle the baby in its crib. You know, then we lead to the Cold War where there's threats of nuclear annihilation just for a society trying to orient itself around a different set of principles. And that also results in having to cut back on democratic flourishing, on experimentation, because you have to take a defensive posture and sort of, you know, fight for your life just to continue existing. So what do you make of kind of those arguments from somebody who might be slightly more sympathetic to the Soviet system? Yes, I can certainly understand that perspective. And I agree with most of what you just said there.

They started with some tremendous obstacles towards trying to adopt a socialist society, which was, you know, at least they had the very noble goals. Even, you know, Marx basically thought, you know, it has to go through capitalism first. They kind of skipped that part. They just, you know, this feudal system and then tried to go straight into a socialist system. And so that was going to be extremely difficult. And, yes, and then you're quite right. They, you know, having the city being attacked on all sides and strangled on all sides, you know, made it even harder for that system to work. Whether they, you know, apart from some of these considerations, whether the people involved there could have settled into what I would have.

thought of as a more egalitarian. I mean, economically, they weren't that far from being fairly egalitarian, but more, you know, democratic, a system where there was genuine collective control rather than, you know, a strongman at the top or a narrow committee of Politburo members that basically controlled everything. That's a very interesting question, just historically counterfactual question. What would it have happened? You had the Soviet Union, first of all, started with a bit more of a background in democracy than they had under the czar, which was essentially zero, of course. And what would have happened without the opposition of the West? Those are really interesting questions. I just want to, you know, I think as a both as a substantive point and as a

strategic point, it's worth noting that the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc countries were in fact not democratic and that they they don't fall easily on my definition of socialism with these two axes because although they had very substantial state control of the economy, it wasn't democratic, and so it wasn't collective control in that sense. And so that that's substantively important pragmatically. I think that if one ends up sounding like one is defending Stalin, then it's going to be really hard to convince anybody. Yeah, that's true.

So, so, so, so, so, so, yeah, and I don't feel any stake in defending Stalin. I mean, of course, Stalin is not to be associated, you know, it's, he was one, one leader, but for a long time. And so, so, so, yeah, so I was, so I'm certainly less concerned about defending, um, the Soviet bloc, but I think it is definitely worth noting as I did that, you know, things weren't as bad there as they're portrayed. And that's really interesting. Right.

And in fact, once the collapse of the Soviet Union occurred, the Soviet bloc countries had a depression worse than ours in the 30s that they're still recovering from, which is, again, very, very odd on the capitalist claim that what you need to produce economic wealth and well-being are capitalist markets, because we introduced those in 1991. and their economy collapsed, life expectancy went down. There was much more suffering. Now they're starting to crawl back out of that, but it took a long time, which is obviously kind of baffling on the capitalist hypothesis. Right. Yeah. And of course, Kristen Godsey does really good work on this. You know, her book, Red Hangover, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism. A lot of her work kind of focuses on examining what was the reality, not the cartoon version we get in the West, but what was the reality? And, of course, the differences between. various socialist states because there was high degrees of differences with regards to some of these metrics between different states. So I think that's certainly interesting. One of the things that happened when the Soviet Union collapsed, of course, is that capitalism in the West became more rabid. I don't think it's a coincidence that, you know, neoliberalism and Clinton Third Wayism arose at the same time. The Soviet Union, the main ideological and material perhaps challenger to the capitalist West collapsed that you get this hyper-capitalist era.

in the West where they're like, oh, we don't have any enemies right now, right? We can do whatever the fuck we want. And so those things are all very connected. But there is something, there's something beautiful in the idea and the early formation of the Soviets. You know, I find like there's that there's that possible seed of true democracy, the sort of thing that you're saying eventually was lacking in the system. The possibilities and the seeds were certainly were certainly there. And of course, circumstances, historical weight, you know, the past ways on the present like a nightmare. All these things come. into play. But there's indications. And I try to find those little gems, those little diamonds of possibility in these experiments. But I appreciate you going back and forth with me on that. I think it's a fascinating question. And this is sort of more interleft disputes and conversations. But we should have them sober-mindedly and friendly and figure this stuff out because that hypersectarianism and that angry vitriol infighting gets us absolutely nowhere. Absolutely. Right. All right. Well, let's go ahead and move on to the next question. and this is about wealth and equality, and I think it's rather obvious just looking around at the society I live in, that massive wealth inequality tears societies apart, undermines social cohesion, obliterates the basis for real democracy and is a genuine threat to the long-term viability of any society.

Capitalist apologists argue, of course, that we socialists are just jealous. We're just jelly. We wish we had what they had, you know. Give us a yacht and we'll stop talking about Marx. But of course, I don't feel that way. So what are your thoughts and lines of argumentation with regards to wealth and equality and how it plays into this socialism versus capitalism debate? Right. And, and you, I will say just in defense of the capitalist reaction before and trying to take it apart is that it can look like jealousy. If, you know, if you have, and mere jealousy, if you have a situation right now where you and your neighbor both make $50,000. And you're offered a situation where you make $75,000, but your neighbor now makes $150,000. The obvious question that the capitalist race is, well, why would you want to be less? Surely you would choose the second scenario, even though it involves much greater inequality because you're better off. You've got $75,000 rather than $50,000. And there is something to that that's, you know, to some extent, maybe some of it is in the,

perhaps. On the other hand, one general point that obviously needs to be made about great degrees of wealth inequality is what economists call the diminishing marginal utility of money that by way of example, if you give me a chocolate bar, I will greatly appreciate it and eat it and gobble it up. If you give me a second one, I will like that too. I'll probably like it a little bit less than the first one. By the time you've given me a 12th chocolate bar to eat, I really don't even want it anymore. It would certainly bring a whole lot more pleasure to somebody else who hasn't had 11 chocolate bars to eat already. You know, the chocolate bars have diminishing marginal utility.

As you add more of them, the utility that they provide to the person that you're giving them to decreases. And money is like that as well, fairly obviously. If you give a young woman who is struggling to feed her kids and working a couple of part-time minimum wage jobs, if you give her $20,000, that will make a huge difference in her life. If you give Jeff Bezos another $20,000, he presumably won't even notice it would be like a drop in the bucket for him. And he just made $20,000 while you finish that sentence. on tap of it, yes. But go on. Yeah.

So it seems like, you know, that when the capitalists bring up these scenarios like I did at the beginning, wouldn't you rather have 75,000 and your neighbor have 150,000, then, well, one question would be, well, wait, given the diminishing marginal utility of money, would we be better off if we made that closer to equal just because of the diminishing marginal utility of money? And I think there is certainly a case to be made for that. There might be reasons for allowing some inequality. But as you point out that it does tear societies apart, the degrees of inequality that we have. And one of the, I discuss in detail in the book, I draw on a data from a number of sources, but there's in particular a couple of books by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett called the inner level and the spirit level, respectively the two books. and they talk a lot about the evidence about inequality and it's negative effects on people, negative effects on child well-being, on life expectancy, on mental illness, obesity, crime

rates, all of that is correlated in a bad way with inequality. Inequality, especially in the extreme, is just toxic to us. And I think this, you know, maybe it does have to do with the fact that our evolutionary ancestors, lived in highly egalitarian cultures. And we're just, we're not built to have, you know, people like Jeff Bezos going around with the multiple yachts, while we also then walk by homeless people on the street or homeless ourselves. It just doesn't work well for us.

And it goes deep into our psyche. And it makes us feel much more nasty about other people and more competitive in various ways that are just quite unfortunate. I mean, if this is truly a melting pot in the country where we care about, and Lady Liberty got a hand like this, she really loves us, then we really need to be like that. And it needs to be the black kids, and if there's a white person who got money, then you need to help him. He need to help black kids, Mexican kids, Korean kids, whatever.

But it needs to be real. And it need to be, before we all die, and then you say, oh, I made a mistake. We should have gave them some money. We really should have helped these folks. It's going to be too late. You know what I'm saying? And then that's when you've got to pay your own karma. And that's when God make you punish.

when God punishes you because I feel like, you know, it's too much money here. I mean, nobody should be hitting a lot of for $36 million and we got people starving in the streets. That is not idealistic. That's just real. That is just stupid. There's no way Michael Jackson should have, or whoever Jackson should have a million thousand, droop a billion dollars and then that's people starving. There's no way.

There's no way. These people should own planes and their people don't have houses, apartments, shacks, drawers. pants. What do you say to people that say, well, they earned it? Now you go out and you're earning it. If they earned it, then I think that that's good. I think that they deserve it. But even if you earned it, you still owe.

Because look at me, I don't have that mega money, but I feel guilty walking by somebody. I got to give them some mail. And if I know I got $3,000 in my pocket, I feel like it's wrong to get that purse in a quarter or a dollar. It's wrong. Only you know what you got in your pocket. And that's wrong. No matter what they do, if they take it and drink it, they take it and drink it.

But, I mean, you got. You understand that we all know how hard it is, and it's not about if you good or you bad. So since it's not about if you're good or you bad, we know that because he don't got, don't mean he was bad. Or don't mean he's a criminal, or don't mean he's crazy, or a drug addict, or none of that. It just means he don't got. And ain't it bad that you got 30? I mean, can you imagine somebody having $32 million? $32 million.

And this person has nothing, and you can sleep? You can still go to the movies about, I mean, I mean, and these are the type of people that get humanitarian awards, millionaires. How can they be humanitarians by the fact that they're millionaires and there's so many poor people shows how unhumane they are?

You know what I'm saying? And that bugs me. Not saying that when I'm never going to be rich and I'm there, you know what I'm saying? But I'm saying, it's a struggle and I think everybody deserves. And I think there's a way to pay these people. I think there is a way.

It just takes to be revolutionary. and it takes to do something out of the ordinary. You know what I'm saying? Like, I think that if we just said, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, I got an idea. No more porno buildings, you know what I'm saying? Let's build houses. Or no more polo games. Let's build houses for poor people.

You know what I'm saying? Or look, okay, I know you're rich. I know you got $40 billion, but can you just keep it to one house? You only need one house. And if you only got two kids, can you just keep it to two rooms? I mean, well, I have 52 rooms and you notice somebody with no room. It just don't make sense to me. They don't.

And then these people celebrate Christmas. They got big trees, huge trees, all the little trimmings, everybody got gifts, and there's somebody starving. And they're having a white Christmas. They're having a great Christmas, eggnog and a whole nine. That's not fair to me. And so, yes, I think that by and large, there's very good empirical evidence that moving to a much more egalitarian distribution of resources will do much by way of improving

overall human well-being. Absolutely. And there's another element, too, of massive wealth and equality under capitalism, where it's like, are these people even deserving? Like, you know, it's not like these people are curing cancer or are you making these huge technological leaps for humankind based on their peer brilliance. I mean, they fucking started PayPal. They figured out that we could do libraries online.

Like, it's not, these aren't like brilliant, you know, manifestations of Uber mention, right? No, not at all. Although, you know, and even those are at least ideas. I mean, you know, starting Amazon, okay, it was actually an understandably, you know, from an economic perspective, from a market perspective, you know, having books sold that way rather than you just get a mail to you, but maybe it's going to work. And then it's worked very well economically. But still, like you said, you know, is that make Jeff Bezos worthy, deserving? And but that's, you know, even that level of actual entrepreneurship is, that's not where most of the wealth is. By some estimates that I've seen, 60% of wealth in our society is just simply inherited.

Absolutely. That's just a matter of, you know, I mean, I guess the conservatives can look at us and say, well, look, you know, look, you should have chosen better parents. But otherwise, it's hard to figure out how it is that much of this wealth is any sense naturally deserved. I mean, because that's in the background, because I want to say, yes, we should have much more egalitarian distribution of resources. In practice right now, that means much more egalitarian redistribution of resources because we are so far from having an egalitarian distribution of resources now. some people will of course object that wait but no this is my money you are taking it I deserve it I earned it and it's worth noting I mean before getting into any details about that and how much you know that they deserve and how much they would have managed to do without the rest of us providing societal infrastructure through our taxes etc etc but that a whole lot of that wealth was simply inherited and to the idea that you just deserve it just simply makes no sense in cases like that. Absolutely. And I mean, if you take Jeff Bezos away right now, the Amazon, you know,

system, the workers, they'll continue to produce value. If you took away the workers, there's no more Jeff Bezos. And I think that speaks volumes in and of itself. And to your point about inheritance, yeah, like, you know, you get to this point where once you have wealth and equality, once that ball is starting to roll, then yes, you begin to obliterate even the basis of the equality of opportunity that liberals love to talk about so much by by stratifying society such that the clash of, you know, you were born into becomes much more likely to be the class you're going to die in over time as that as that wealth is sort of hoarded by a relatively small amount of people and then handed down to their families like the people that own Walmart and our billions you know billionaires

all the kids of the guy who created the damn store are now living you know rich beyond belief because they happen to yeah have the right set of parents and then just were just handed a life of complete opulence and luxury um and and you know somebody born like i was to just regular working class people in the middle of Omaha, Nebraska, there's, I, you know, nothing. It doesn't matter how smart I am or how much I produce or how much I contribute to my community. It means nothing. And then you also have the element of moving capital around in financialized capitalist systems. Like, you know, people that that have capital, move capital around, invest capital, make more capital. If you don't have capital, you're sort of locked out of the game of

even being able to do that. And then, of course, you tax capital gains at, you know, half the rate that you tax income and all the other absurdities that come from it. And finally, as I said in the question, the obliteration of democracy. Because wherever in history, there is massive wealth inequality. There is instantaneously and simultaneously massive political inequality. You cannot have a functioning democracy in which there are these incredibly stratified tiers of some people who have yachts and mansions and own huge businesses and own the means of production and other people who have to sell their bodies in time.

you know, rent them out to rich people just to be able to pay their bills. Democracy falls away, and that's what we're seeing in the U.S., which makes the whole Biden campaign particularly amusing when they're like, this is a fight for democracy. If we lose, democracy is done. It's like democracy's already been done. And it's because you guys, just like the Republicans, have obliterated it through your donor classes, through Citizens United, through PAC money, through insider trading, through all the corruption that occurs on both sides of the aisle.

You've already destroyed democracy. Please don't condescend to us and tell us that not voting for you means that we're throwing democracy in the trash bin. Well, I will, I think we could lose democracy. I mean, democracy, like most things, I think, comes in degrees. And you're quite right. The extreme forms of inequality that we have mean that there's so much more political influence for those who already have all the wealth. There's, you know, scary data about the degree to which. policy decisions reflect the interests of actual numbers of voters, and it's, no, it just

reflects wealth by and large. It could be even worse, you know, and it is entirely possible that we will, you know, at least for the moment, it does appear that our votes are counted in the literal sense of they count when you, you know, they get counted when you go to the ballot box and you can elect a representative to Congress or to the Senate, which, of course, is itself very undemical, given the very structure of it. But it could be worse. And so I do think it's worth trying to preserve, but then much more so increase the level of democracy that we already have. Yeah, I totally agree with that. Like, yeah, protecting voting rights, absolutely essential.

I'm fighting back against Citizens United, absolutely essential. And again, your degree model comes in handy here because it's not black or white. It's not either or. It's degrees of democracy. And the U.S. has never been a bastion. It's never been the sort of democracy it pretends to be. It's always been very limited in scope. And people have fought and died to expand that scope.

And if we just do the, oh, it's all bullshit anyways and nothing is different, then I think we kind of do a disservice to the people who have struggled for those, for those gains as, you know, tentative as they are and as subject to recall as they are. Our job is not to just dismiss the whole fight, but to carry the fight forward, expand democracy, etc. So I totally agree with you. Good. Let's go to the next question. This is another point about democracy, which we were talking about.

And I think this goes a little deeper into this exact point. The U.S., of course, fancies itself a democracy, or at least as libertarians and conservatives will remind us a representative republic. And yet it is and always has been, you know, very hostile to real democracy since its founding and even to genuinely representative politics. For socialists of any stripe, democracy is a core aspect of our political program, as you and I both make clear. Moreover, real democracy would entail expanding it into the economic realm and into the workplace, which in and of itself would be a direct assault on capitalism. Can you discuss the debate around the issue of democracy versus markets in particular with regards to argumentations by, you know, Hayek and Friedman, et cetera, and your arguments in favor of socialism with regards to democracy. Yes. And I think it's just as a background here, the term democratic socialism,

I think to some on the right can sound like, well, we're just throwing the word democratic in there because we want to make clear that, no, we're not talking about Stalin. We're not talking about some sort of dictatorship or that sort of thing. And we still want it to be democracy. But it actually goes much further than that. We are talking about expanding the role of democracy, trying to improve it in various ways, but expanding it over the areas. So right now, I mean, we even staunch capitalists accept the value of democracy for traditional governmental functions, courts, police, basic infrastructure, education, usually, national defense, all of these sorts of things. they think, you know, they probably basically agree on those things with the Winston Churchill quote that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all of those others that have been tried from time to time. And so, you know, they agree that we should do that for these sorts of things. Why? Well, presumably, because at least part of the thought is that we'll all be better off. When everyone who is affected by a decision at least has a voice in it and where we try to make those voices reasonably equal, we benefit from the voice.

of everyone who is affected and those people benefit they have by and that sort of thing. Presumably that's sort of the argument for why we even have democracy for these standard governmental functions. But there's a realm where major, major decisions affecting millions of people are made in an entirely undemocratic way. As you mentioned with Jeff Bezos, if he makes decisions, he can affect multitudes of workers and the rest of us, for that matter, given his. influence in society. And that's, you know, I didn't get a vote on that. Um, you know, his workers

didn't get a vote on that. And so what socialism by saying more collective control of the economy is saying is that, well, wait, it's not just things like arranging our courts and police and basic infrastructure where democracy should be valuable. But democracy be, if we think it's valuable there, then presumably we should think all thing being equal, it should be valuable when we are making economic decisions. So we should bring democracy into the realm of the economic. And, you know, unless there's some particular reason that we would think it would be better not to have democracy there, that for some reason letting Jeff Bezos run things exactly the way he wants to, even when his decisions affect multitudes of people, that that's better

for all of us. That's an argument. You mentioned Hayek and Friedman. They both make that sort of argument. They think that we will be better off not by allowing certain things to be democratic. When it comes to economic decisions, the claim is that by having the incentives and the free market, it will actually work out better for all of us when we have things done undemocratically. That people, because they have the economic incentive, they will make decisions that are better for them. They will be more careful about it when they have an interest involved, a direct interest, and if we're all making decisions that are better for each of us, then it will be better for everybody. That seems to be the thought. But that crucial thought,

that last part, that if we each make decisions that are better for ourselves, that it will generate a decision that is better for everyone, that's highly questionable in at least many, many cases. You know, you can have Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk get to and make some decision that's really great for them, for both of them. They both walk away thinking this was the right thing to do, but it might be a whole lot worse for the rest of us. So that's the question. That's the tension that we all generally, at least within the main part of the political spectrum, think that democracy is a good thing in general. And then the question is, well, why not expand it more into the realm of the economic? The capitalists have some. reasons there, but I don't think they hold up by and large. Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree. And of course, you know, the Marxist response to this idea that by, you know, freely choosing in your own self-interest, you create an environment where everybody benefits, is that it completely ignores, as you were sort of alluding to, the core contradiction of capitalism, which is that

there's this contradiction between bosses and workers, right? The boss wants to maximize profits by the very nature of the system and the competitive market that he's in. He needs to maximize maximize profits. And the worker wants to maximize wages, you know, to take home to their family. And so those two things are irreconcilable. And you can't just have, as you said, yeah, Musk and Bezos or whatever making decisions that then are, you know, put out in everybody benefits. Absolutely not. The more profit, a boss accumulates, you know, the less that the workers get. And the more wages and the more union activity workers have, the more of a threat to profits, they become. And the boss is going to try to fight tooth and nail, as well,

we see Bezos doing, as we see Musk doing, as we see all these capitalists doing, to prevent the formation of unions, to prevent the rise of wages. And that's one reason why, you know, in a society like ours where our political system is largely captured by corporate interest, the minimum wage hasn't risen in decades. While productivity is shot through the roof, CEO pay is shot through the roof, every other metric that should be tied to wages has gone up and up and up and yet wages remain nationally at a $7.25 an hour. I mean, that is despise. that is pennies and that is unlivable. And even a fifth, you know, I remember 10 years ago, we were fighting for a $15 minimum wage. That has now been surpassed. And that isn't even not even a living wage anymore for most people in most places. And we don't even have that yet. So I just want to kind of add that on top of your great argument. Let's go ahead and move forward because, you know, a core contradiction of capitalism, in my opinion, is this contradiction between the ideological commitment to free and competitive markets versus the reality. of monopoly formation. The best thing any capitalist could achieve is, of course, cornering

and dominating a given market. In today's epicenter of global capitalism, the United States, almost every industry and every slice of the market is dominated by monopolies or some sort of shared monopoly or a very small handful of corporations, which more or less can collude and often do collude to fix prices, a gouge prices, etc. All of these things undermine competitiveness and annihilate free markets. Like, no, scrappy startup is going to displace Amazon, right? Nobody's going to displace Google.

You can't have this like entrepreneurial, free market, early Reagan era idea of like, you know, the shopkeeper competing in a free and open marketplace at the same time that you have every industry dominated by these sort of monopolistic forces.

So can you, but the right, of course, continues to argue that free markets are essential and what we have is free markets and any attempt to, you know, even trust bust is met with these arguments about, you know, the necessity of free markets, which it just drives me crazy. But can you talk about the tendency toward monopoly under capitalism and the pressures it puts on these capitalist lines of argumentation about free markets? Yes, right. Good question. Yes. I mean, there is this basic idea. I mean, it sounds reasonable

what the capitalists say initially that the profit motive and rational consumers will continue to create pressure and forever better products at better prices. If I sell, Well, widgets for $5 and someone can come along and make equally good widgets but sell them for $3, then, you know, they'll gain bigger market share and I will either have to improve my product or drop out of the market. And it'll just keep getting better and better for everyone. And, you know, there will still be profits because that's what's driving the system, but it'll get better and better for the consumer. The very idea behind capitalism, or at least the most reasonable argument for it, is that our competition will be better for everyone because it will drive more productivity, better products, you know, better mouse traps, you know, we'll all beat a path to the door of whoever makes one.

But as you quite correctly note, the profit motive also means that by far the best thing I can do as a capitalist is to somehow, corner the market and be the only one selling widgets and drive anybody else that tries to sell widgets out of business. And then I don't have to worry about competition and I can charge much higher prices. And reasonable people on the capitalist side will acknowledge that when this happens, the very rationale for the benefits of capitalism has been undermined that it is, I mean, it's, or at least they should. I mean, people like Hayek and Friedman did acknowledge that. They nonetheless tend to be critical of the idea that we should do much of anything about it at the governmental level. They have some tendency to think that collective democratic action to break up monopolies or try to set things up such that they don't happen is going to inevitably be worse.

But it is an odd position and I don't really understand it. You know, once things are tending towards a monopoly, we've lost the reason that one may. might have thought that markets are such a great thing. And so why wouldn't we come in and try to structure things such that that doesn't happen or break it up when it does? I think at that point, I do think there are intelligent capitalists out there and that are not necessarily greedy and immoral. It might be greedy, but not necessarily immoral.

They might genuinely think it's the best system for everyone. And there's something to be said for this idea that the market will produce better goods for everyone, but to in the face of monopolies to say, oh, yeah, well, we shouldn't do anything about monopolies. When that undermines the very rationale for why capitalist markets are supposed to be a good thing, then it seems to me that at that point it's devolved into a bizarre faith in economic markets that's no longer based on any. reasonable premise or plausible empirical reality. And so, you know, so your basic question is, you know, why do they say these sorts of things? I don't know in the end. I mean, I think in the end, I think they, they start with some, you know, kind of reasonable premise once gets pressure put on it. They just evolve into some sort of faith that markets are good and government is bad. You know, Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981 when the inauguration happened and said that

government is not the solution. Government is the problem. And that's, and that's become, not for any reasons anymore, but just become a faith on the part of some of these on the neoliberal right. And, you know, and we can do our best to try to point that out. And, you know, that, but it does seem hard to get through to them on that sort of issue. Yeah. My, my best theory for this is that each side of this debate sort of triggers a certain ideological thing for them. So, of course, there's the free markets and monopoly. And you think rationally, okay, monopolies are anti-free market, they're anti-competitive, et cetera, you know, we should break these up for the sake of your ideology of free market

capitalism. But the moment you start talking like that, and you alluded to this with Hayek and Friedman, well, the solutions involve government coming in and imposing itself over people who have property rights. And that triggers their other ideological commitment. of being against that in every facet. And so while on one hand there's this contradiction that they, you know, in its own realm of discourse and thinking could lead them to be like, yeah, we need more free markets, we need to trust bus. The actual implementation of the policies necessary to do that involve government stepping in and, you know, basically pushing back against this idea that you have a right to, you know, to whatever, your property.

Jeff Bezos started Amazon and Amazon is super successful. We're not going to punish success. And so they get caught in this back and forth. They're rarely ever forced to hold both those ideas at once in public. You know, it's one or the other. And if you try to pin them down and say, okay, well, this leads to this. And then there's this, which is against what you said over here. I mean, that's never going to happen on CNN and Fox News.

But it would be interesting to see them have to sort of wiggle out of that and have to sit with that contradiction. But, you know, it's not going to likely happen anytime soon. but yeah let's let's go ahead and move on we're getting towards the end here i've really enjoyed this conversation on this is really fun but in your last chapter market failures three you advance the idea of a neighborhood effect with climate change of course being the prime example of such an effect can you elaborate on this idea of the neighborhood effect and argue why socialism is a superior form of socioeconomic organization especially in this regard yes first of all i i did actually borrow the term neighborhood effect

from Milton Friedman. It's often called a negative externality, but that sounds so technical that, you know, that I just, you know, the externality is if, yeah, I don't know, it's hard to, it sounds technical and not very informative. A neighborhood effect,

the idea is that if I own a factory and I decide to make widgets or whatever, and then I do it in a way in which, I pollute the local river that then goes downstream and kills fish and harms people and that sort of thing. But you buy my widgets and I, you know, so we have our transaction. I made my widgets. You buy them. That's, you know, and we each think we're better off.

Otherwise, we wouldn't have both made the deal. But people in the neighborhood are harmed by this process because their water has been polluted and all sorts of things have happened. So the basic idea of a neighborhood effect is that, yes, you have your principal actors in any given economic exchange, but people in the neighborhood of that exchange might also be affected, even though they weren't the ones that made any decision there. And that's a big problem for capitalist arguments that because the basic idea behind behind why markets are supposed to work for all of this. is that if we each go into a transaction and we do voluntarily consent to make some purchase, some economic transaction, that if we're doing it voluntarily and rationally and with our eyes open, then we must each walk away with something better. And if we just keep multiplying that, that's what the economy is.

Everybody making decisions that are better for them, then surely it's better for everyone. That's the idea. But neighborhood effects. That a number of those decisions can be such that, no, people not involved. in the direct economic transaction, are deeply harmed by this. And that's something that capitalism can't easily handle by itself. You need to have some way, if you want to maximize well-being, then when economic transactions start to have negative neighborhood effects, we need some other way of dealing with that other than just more economic transactions. We need to

set things up through government, something to do that. And as I mentioned in the book, I talked this hypothetical example about pollution, but the big one, obviously, now is climate change, that we are doing all kinds of economic transactions that, you know, are in the interest of the individual actors. If you want to see your mother who lives in California, it's a whole lot, and somebody else wants to sell you a ride on a plane to get there, the person selling you the ride on the plane, and, you know, so the airline and you walk away from the transaction, both feeling better off. It's all been good for you, but of course, you've also burned a lot of fossil fuels in the process. And so many of our economic transactions these

days involve fossil fuels and burning them. And it's cheap. It provides prosperity and well-being in a lot of ways. But there's this catch. There's this neighborhood effect, mainly the neighborhood being the entire planet and what we are doing to it and what we are doing to its climate and what effects that will have on everyone. And especially on future generations of people who are obviously not parties to the economic transactions that are leading to this. And so climate change ends up being, you know, World Bank chief economist, he was chief economist at the time, Nicholas Stern referred to climate change as the greatest example of market failure we have ever seen. And I take it what he means by that is that it's, and he said that back

I think 2008, and things have only gotten more extreme and more obvious since then. It's a market failure because it's a case where what seems economically rational to each party involved in the transaction can be disastrous for lots of other people and for future generations. And I don't see a capitalist way out of that. It seems like that's where we need collective control to try to mitigate these effects, to try to rearrange things such that we are no longer destroying the environment on which we all survive and on which future generations will rely, that we need to protect that even if it comes at the cost of getting involved in economic transactions where each person making the transaction thinks this is great for me.

Because what's great for me is not necessarily what's great for everyone. Yeah, incredibly well said. Another, of course, a great example of the modern times is the microplastic epidemic that we're only just now beginning to understand. As a classic example of this exact neighborhood effect, the cheapness of plastic and production results in this sort of deleterious effect on the environment and our bodily health. Like the microplastics are in our bodies right now and we're not exactly sure what that means. It could be better or worse than some people imagine. But in any case, it is this problem. where, you know, nobody signed up for this and yet we're all swimming in it. And also, you know, comparing it not just to present human beings suffering, but to the future, I think is a really important dynamic of this discussion because future human beings, we are responsible to them. And we have to, we have to bake that into our rationale of how we organize society, that we want to hand future generations better societies and, you know, advance the ball for future

human beings. And when we're destroying the planet for short-term profit and gain, we're doing the exact opposite. And the last thing I'll say is on your point about externality, negative externality. One, it's a technical term. It sounds jargony. It sort of obscures more than it illuminates. But also, I think, dialectically, from my perspective, nothing is external. You know, we live on this little snow globe in outer space, and you can't, there's nothing, there is no external. Everything is connected and everything, of course, is internal in some sense. So that's another reason why I absolutely hate that term externality. But yes, neighborhood effect is much better. Yes. All right, we have about eight more minutes

or so. And I know you don't have a sharp deadline here. I want to pop one bonus question at you before we get into the conclusion. And I think I touched on this a little bit earlier. An argument that I've long off had is you often hear defenders of capitalism, liberals as well as conservatives, use this line that, you know, what we support as liberals and capitalists, is the equality of opportunity. And what these, you know, these socialists represent is what they want is equality of outcome. And, you know, we don't believe in a quality of outcome. We believe in a quality of opportunity. And my argument to that has always been to turn that around and say, first of all, equality of outcome is sort of incoherent. I don't even know what that would mean.

There's a material realm to outcomes where people are taking care of. But also there is this inbuilt differences in people, right? Some people are funnier than others. Some people are more athletic than others. Some people are better painters or singers than others. And you're never going to, nor do we want to as socialists, you know, iron out those wrinkles of humanity. That diversity of ability and talent and interests is fascinating. We just don't think that it should result in enormous wealth inequality, right? Just because you're a good businessman doesn't mean you're now entitled to the labor of a million people, their surplus value, 10 houses, and political systems, you know? And so my argument is that what socialists represent is a quality of opportunity.

There is no equality of outcome. That's sort of an incoherent idea. Socialists believe in truly a quality of opportunity. We're talking about inheritance earlier, about choosing your parents, how unjust that very idea is. And so we want to build a society where people genuinely have equal opportunity to express themselves, to live their lives, to find their talents, and their interest and their ways of contributing to the whole and to advance those without worrying about sleeping in the gutter, without worrying about whether or not they're going to be able to get their cancer treatments because they don't have enough zeros in their bank account. And actually liberals and capitalists, they don't believe in equality of outcome. They also don't believe functionally in the equality of opportunity because the entire system that they represent is directly hostile to true equality of opportunity. go to a poor black neighborhood. Look at the funding that that public school gets compared to a wealthy white suburban neighborhood and that public school, how well that's funded, what the ratio teachers to students are, et cetera. And you'll see immediately that there's no such thing. And there never has been of a quality of opportunity in liberal capitalist society. So I'm wondering if that argument resonates with you and if you have anything to add.

Yeah, absolutely. That resonates tremendously. Yeah, I think you're quite right on the equality of outcome that's, you know, it's not even clear exactly what that would mean. We'd go for it. Socialism, as I was defining it too, but certainly traditionally, involves a more egalitarian distribution of resources. That's not, as far as I'm concerned, or it's certainly for me, but I think even historically, it's not that that was ever an end. in itself that we just want equality of resources. Everybody should just be equal. You know, especially like you say, you know, and if you run faster than somebody else, then we're going to cut you off at the knees. There was this, you know, something like, no, nobody's ever said that's never been the point. It's not, the point is not equality or even egalitarian distribution of resources. That's not an end in itself. The end in itself is human well-being, is people being better off and happier and having more meaningful, fulfilling lives. And if we can get to that through more egalitarian redistribution or distribution of resources, then that's what we should do.

That's what motivates, I take it, the socialist project of working in that direction. And that that's what we, you know, and, you know, we should be open to the possibility. it is an empirical claim to say that more egalitarian distribution of resources leads to greater human well-being. That's not something that is just a priori, as philosophers put it. It's not something that you can just know from your armchair, but the empirical data support it. That's what, you know, we've seen, and we've talked about earlier in this podcast even. But that's the issue as is we're concerned about human well-being, not with, you know, and so it's just an unfair character. of socialist to say that we're just after equality of outcome. But I also think you're right that if the capitalist says, you know, we believe in equality of opportunity, if you just held their feet to the fire on that and said, really, okay. And apart from the obvious thing of inheritance, of simply inheriting huge amounts of wealth, yes, it's just the differentials go so much deeper because the schooling, like you say, the quality of the schools, the quality of the neighborhoods.

It is, we are so far from having anything that looks like genuine equality of opportunity. I almost sort of feel like, you know, if you could just, you know, you get the conservatives to agree that equality of opportunity is really, really important. And then just say, okay, now let's sit down and talk about what that means and why things are going to have to change pretty drastically before we can have that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I actually heard Ted Cruz say that, say that exact argument once. And I'm like, I just started laughing and kind of puked in my mouth a little bit, but, you know. he can lead to that response absolutely just looking at him okay so for the final question

can you kind of just summarize the conclusion of your book of course you know as I said at the outset we're never going to be able to capture an entire book in 10 questions I highly highly encourage people that are interested in arming themselves with these sort of methodical systematic logical argumentations to get the book to check it out to learn from it spread it around etc If you're in an organization, you know, get it and pass it around your organization, whatever.

It really is incredibly helpful because, you know, the ideological, rhetorical debate is one of the struggles on the terrain of political struggle. And we have to meet our opponents on that terrain as well as other terrains. And I think Scott does a wonderful job at giving us more tools in our toolbox. But can you please summarize the conclusion of your book and let listeners know where they can find you and your work online? Okay. Yes. Well, I mean, there's the, in a way, there are two aspects of the conclusion of the book. One is almost methodological and the other is substantive and where we should go from there. And so I'll start with the methodological side of that.

That what I do, as I mentioned at the outset and as this probably becomes somewhat apparent through the conversation, I try to break down arguments and really look at what it is that people are assuming and what they are inferring from those. So I do this over and over in the book and break them down into these numbered steps and saying, you know, what's a premise? What's what's the inferences? And once we've identified the premises, then we can say, okay, so what's the argument for that premise? And, you know, is there, you know, does the empirical data support it? Is it an empirical premise? Is it a moral premise? And we can have further arguments about that. This method, this sort of breaking down arguments into their component parts to analyze them, I think is fundamentally very important for understanding our own positions. understanding our opponents and perhaps changing our minds about various things. That these arguments, I mean, a lot of people's time, you know, some will issue sort of arguments and just want, you know, our polarized society, people will just say whatever their camp says and then just shout it louder if somebody gives them some sort of contrary message. And I think that's unfortunate. I think that we should be paying attention to

arguments and reasons. These are the skeleton. They're the framework of our beliefs. And just like you wouldn't be able to walk very well if your femurs were broken, you can't think very well if your arguments are broken. If you don't have reasons behind your conclusion, there's this wonderful quote that I like from A.E. Houseman, or at least just a lead quote, I'm not sure that he actually said it, but he said that a moment's thought would have shown him. But a moment is a long time and thought is a painful process. And the idea behind that is that, you know, it's, or at least the way I'm reading into that is that it's a whole lot easier to just spout the views that your camp thinks are

correct and to abuse this side, the other side. It's a lot more productive and a lot more interesting and fun in the end, although Houseman's right, it is difficult. It's to figure out your actual reasons and to push further and to do more analysis. And I think if we had much more of that, that would at least try to put some breaks on the increasing and unfortunate polarization in our political debates as far as that goes. So that's on the methodological side. The substantive side, when I look at the arguments, when I look at the evidence and present them and what I think is a perfectly, fair way. I think it shows that we should move strongly left in the direction of socialism. We should have much more by way of egalitarian distribution of resources. We should have much more democratic, collective control over major economic decisions. By doing these things, we will make people better off. We will make them happier. We will make them have more meaningful, fulfilled lives. We won't be violating the moral rights of individuals. And that's what we should do.

As far as where they can find me, I do have a website, scotrcion.com, and it has links to the book, a sample chapter, and some occasional links to podcasts that I've done, linked to a debate that I did with Librarian and Brian Kaplan. So various other things. Also pictures that I've taken with my drone because I do that sometimes too. Beautiful. Yes, I will link the book and your website in the show notes

for people to further their investigation. and thank you, Professor, for coming on for sharing your time with us, for sharing your knowledge and your book with us. I really, really appreciate it. It's been a pleasure and an honor because I had a lot of fun having this discussion, and I hope we can do it again sometime. Oh, this was great. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Thank you very much for having me. I pulled up in the Muxie Bowls with the pennies because I'm short on time, so don't be short on a penny, and on New York, they would then be the flavor. That's a bunch of white girls calling Deli's bodegas. Elegant player.

Guys, they call Relevant Major. Look to me for how you step in their gamer. So I'm like relevant to who, because I'm not watching. I feel like Jeff Van Gundy yelling, stop flopping. On the company, they ain't got stock options. When you time this, you don't care if you're not popping. Married to this fly shit, I got poppins. Haters got a list mile long as shit they're not stopping.

Shots dropping out. Here's sipping scotch like I'm Ron Swanson. How you sign a deal to act gangster with a cop option? Wow, new day, new work, straight sauce like the drums could see the kick make the groove work when clicks is the new worth the risk to be true hurts I live this I'd lose first For I'd win cutting corners just to up the score obstacles gonna pop it you just got a budget for him But look at the impression that the passion made I guess there was a method to my madness a I pulled up into Chris Mullin St. John's because the storm coming I see a lot of lightning but I don't hear the dunder though

You gotta let it roll I already told you I'm short on time Fuck your little clicks, we do more off-line Bitch I'm in a zone, why you so pressed Give me what I'm old, not a cent less This ain't most cold, say what you mean The money come first but the paper too great There gotta be somethin more

Now I'm running towards than the wind Snap back but I'm well fitted effort or well figured I wish him well while I'm throwing pennies at well wishes. You get it later. I'm blunt with the switcher, that fire stickier and hell quicker. All hell the Ritler, the hell he raised in the hell with ya. Split up the click cause they all switch. No hell Hitler.

Now Allen get you, no Gilligan's like eye skipper. Make sure you minnow, I'm the way like by ginger. Don't be your boat rocker. Cut a shot, both choppers. Old shot that got your ears ringing, that's a dough knocker. Flow dropper, I go a cappella like the old opera. I say absolute like this the old vodka I feel at home partner you and your partners be at home gotcha

Waiting on that bag use some home shoppers show time to a show watcher I show the parts where they show doctors about to pull a plug I'm a show stopper On Harlem nights I'm a globe trotter and gold prodders plus the gold standard my gold diggers and gold slagher Two mines crafts so me and Marlin can craft a monster that's you per copper It's you to come with the Uber driver you not a rider you and your sponsors forgot them bonkers My coach is conjure with Diazada That block and yonkers. Nah, the monster who's all the war is divide and conquer, but I wear fitted like Humphrey Bogart and Cocker.

The lady told you I'm short on time. Fuck your little clicks, we do more off-line. Bitch, I'm in a zone. Why you so pressed? Give me what I'm old, not a cent less. This ain't most cold. Say what you mean. The money come first, but the paper too green.

There gotta be somethin more. Now I'm running towards than the wind. Thank you.