Stuff You Should Know - How Socialism Works

Episode Date: September 16, 2014

In America it's virtually a dirty word, but after being dragged through the mud for a century, socialism is still a part of the U.S.'s national character. Learn about this foil and complement to capitalism and why it might not be so bad. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. On the podcast, Hey Dude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And hold your paws. Jerry Rowland. Socialist. And me. Socialist. It's not funny. It's a dirty word. Yeah. People love calling politicians socialists these days.

Yeah. They're just a socialist. Yeah. It's weird that, you know, the fact that that is a dirty word is because we stand in a moment in history where it's been drugged through the mud for 100 years. Sure. But the tenets of it, the basis of it is the same. It's virtually unchanged. And it's still kind of sensible in some ways. Well, I mean, I looked at, there's been various, we're going to talk about these, but various experiments, social experiments throughout the years. And some work pretty well for a little while, but it kind of dawned on me at one point. You can't account for laziness. Yeah, that's a huge problem. And that's when it all comes crumbling down. Yep. Everyone had that same work ethic. It could thrive, but soon as that one dude is like,

I don't feel like working. Yeah. And I'm a sucker because if I do, because I get the same junk that you do, then it's just, that's the beginning of the end. Yep. If everybody had the work ethic of the people depicted in WPA murals and post offices, we'd be fine. Which do look uncannily similar to Soviet era depictions of workers too. Yeah. You know, because they're related. Yes. So we're talking socialism today, which is a huge, enormous, sweeping topic. But we're going to try to explain it in as best of terms as we possibly can. That's right. And it's really tough to talk about socialism without talking about capitalism too. Yeah. Because they're antithetical pretty much. Sure.

But they're both based on the same idea that from your economy springs forth everything else. Yeah. Like Karl Marx, Joseph Engels, the guys who got together and wrote the Communist Manifesto. Yeah. They basically said, it's the economy, stupid. Yeah. What was that from? That was James Carville. Was that Carville? I thought that was some, no, I was thinking of some else. I was thinking of, I'm with stupid. No. Or no, I know what you're thinking of. Lose weight now. Ask me how. What? I can do this all day. Where's the beef? Yeah. What else? Can't you get any other ad ever? I don't want to grow up. No, there was one stupid though. It was an oil or a gas commercial. It's the economy. A bunch of old guys sitting on the porch.

Oh, yeah? Yeah. It sounds like a fracking commercial, but I don't think they're saying like, it's the economy, stupid. They're saying just sit there and shut up, stupid. Yeah. Probably so. That's more the case. Let's just go back to James Carville. So he said it's the economy, stupid. It was one of the three main talking points for Clinton's 1992 campaign. Yeah. So Karl Marx didn't say that, but the idea was that you have this economy and depending on what you do with it, you can either have a completely, literally utopian society. Yeah. Where everyone's equal, nobody wants, everyone's taken care of, and there is no class stratification. Yeah. Or you can go the opposite way and let this economy run on its own devices

and step out of the way. And what you have is capitalism. And in Marx and Engels opinion, that was basically the most inherently evil thing a state or government institution could do is to just let an economy run rampant. Right. Because you have something called classes. Sure. You have stratification. Yeah. You have wealth gap. Yeah. And basically the exploitation of the very people who are producing the goods in a society, the workers. Yeah. The workers stay poor and the rich get richer. The poor get poorer. Right. And like you said, it was based on this word utopia. A British writer named Thomas More in 1515 coined that term. He wrote a book called Utopia about a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. And there was no private property. There were no

locks on the doors. Yeah. Houses. You rotated houses every 10 years. So even if your free house, you thought your neighbors was better, 10 years, you're going to get in that same house. Don't worry about it. You just hope your neighbor doesn't trash it in the meantime. Exactly. They all wore the same clothes. There were no fancy clothes, six hour workdays, free health care, state endorsed euthanasia, which in 1515 was pretty radical. Yeah. There's a lot of killing back then. Divorce was okay. So this was his version of Utopia. And one thing we'll talk about is utopian socialism. That word utopian was tagged to it later on as like a pejorative, kind of like there is no utopia, you naive nanny.

Yes. So your socialism, your utopian socialism is not possible. Oh, I see. Very clever. Sure. It's funny what people can do with words to just completely tarnish the concept. Because you can't account for laziness. So you've got Thomas Moore writing in 1515 and he coins a term utopia. And it's not in and of itself socialism, but it has a lot of the hallmarks of socialism, right? Sure. Like there's no, it's a classless society. Yeah. House swapping. Yeah. And it's a society that's operated and owned by the people, the very people who are producing goods. Yeah. And we should have set up front. There are dozens of types of socialism. So this, this could be like a 12 part series. And it will be. And this is, oh my God, no. Well,

no, this, this one I was thinking, this fits into what's become our socioeconomic suite. You know, we have a death suite. Sure. We've done so much economic stuff and socioeconomic stuff. Brainbleeds. That I feel like we've got a suite coming up that I'm going to put together. Sweet. Yeah. So Thomas Moore comes up with Utopia, but he's not the first person to ever write about the concepts, the basic foundation or principles of socialism. That award goes to Plato, who described a place in his republic that basically had two classes, the governed. Yeah. And those who govern. Yeah. And the governed were completely subservient to those who governed, but those who governed were just basically inherently perfect in every way, shape, or form.

Yeah. And aside from that, they're the, it was classless, right? Everybody else was very much equal in the government where this hierarchy of a blunted pyramid. Yeah. But they decided who was going to make what and in what amounts. So you have this hallmark, this other hallmark of socialism, which is complete and utter government control of an economy, which constitutes a planned economy. Yeah. And things we were talking about utopian works, between 1700 and 1850, these were very popular because these themes were because there was a lot of oppression going on in that 150 years still is around the world, of course. But it became a popular theme in books and novels to write about these utopian societies.

Like, man, it could be so much better. No oppression, no slavery. Everyone is, all boats are rising. And then a French revolutionary named Francois Noël Babouf is considered the first socialist because he is the first one who said, you know what, no more private property. We should all be equal. And I'm the first socialist. Yeah. The reason he was, no, and he had his head cut off by the French Revolution at age 37 for his views. See where that got him. Technically, today he's referred to as a revolutionary communist. Yeah. We should go ahead and cover that. Yeah. Because socialism was, the word was around when he was around. Yeah. He was called socialist, but his views were so militant that he's now

considered a revolutionary communist. And that sort of communism is basically like socialism with guns. Yeah. If you're a communist, socialism is a, it's a transitional state. Yeah. Between a capitalist society and a communist society. So it's a temporary point in the glorious transition from capitalism to communism because communists know from experience now that you can't just go from capitalism to communism overnight. You're going to completely cripple your economy. People are going to starve to death. You just have huge problems. So you have to go to socialism. So the difference between socialism and communism is that in a socialist country, everybody's producing for the general good. Yeah. But what you receive is based on your merit.

Whereas with communism, everyone's producing for the general good. And what you receive is based on your need. Yeah. And communism is a militant takeover. And utopian socialism, the main difference there is the idea is that everyone is on board and just gives this stuff up. There's no overthrow of the upper class because the upper class is like, no, I'm on board. Right. That's in utopian socialism. But with communism, though, I think it's kind of gotten the I think in practice, it's been at the at the barrel of a gun, basically, like Mao said, power springs from the barrel of a gun. So the idea that communism and militancy are associated has, you know, become kind of a thing.

But I think theoretically, they're not necessarily related. Right. You know. And then a few others, you have market socialism, which Yugoslavia and Hungary had a version of in the 60s and 70s. And that is most people see that as sort of the bridge between socialism and capitalism, where the government does own the resources, a lot of them at least, but market forces determine production and demand. So there is incentive and true socialism. There's no incentive to work harder. See, I don't know that that's necessarily true. I think it's communism. In socialism, you're still allowed to give incentives for harder work. Well, which kind of socialism though? Yeah. Remember our blimp episode? I do.

Remember the helium supply that the US government controls? Yeah. That's an example of market socialism. Yeah. That's a good point. I think we're demonstrating just how hard it is to define it because there are so many times. Yeah. And we can you can talk about it in pure terms, which we let's let's do that. And then I think if you understand, you know, just the pure definition of socialism, you can start to understand you can recognize it in the real world, right? Right. So with socialism, you have no no classes. Everybody is told what to do to what to make where to go to work. And the production output is determined by a central planning committee. Yeah. In most cases, the government.

Yeah. And then that same committee takes all these this production and distributes it according to who needs what and the economy is completely controlled and planned. And this plan is put into effect by the workers and everybody's equal. And there's no private property. Yeah. And that's a tricky one too. Because if you went to Soviet Russia in the 60s, you go into somebody's house and they had a TV set and that was that family's TV set. Yeah. So the distinction that I came across for private property is there's in socialism, people can own TVs, but nobody owns the factory that makes the TVs. So by the government controlling the factor that makes TVs, theoretically, you can make even more TVs and more people can enjoy

the fruits of the TV factory's production. Yeah. Does that make sense? Sure. Okay. I think if you want to explain something, do it and by explaining it in terms of TVs and TVs, Jerry just, she went to Cuba this year, remember? Yeah. And had an experience with communism that was really interesting. We should do a podcast on Cuba as a whole. I agree. And have Jerry sit in and not speak. Right. She'll just write things down and we can relay the message. And like I said, to understand socialism, you have to also understand capitalism. And capitalism is basically like the supply and demand runs everything. And if somebody needs something, they're willing to pay a higher price for it, which means the sector over here will start to ramp up because they want to make

more money. That's right. There's no planned economy. It just changes based on the needs of the individual. Yeah. And there's competition. It's encouraged in capitalism. Right. Not so much in socialism. Not at all in socialism because competition is one of the great evils of capitalism and that if you make a bunch of money and we're in the same industry, I'm not making a bunch of money and I can go bankrupt and my family could starve, but you're really rich. Yeah. I like that. Yeah. Imagine if the shoe were on the other foot. I want us to all be rich. What's that called? Socialism. Okay. All right. So I was talking about Francois Babouf and he was credited with being one of the first socialists, but the idea, the concept wasn't really popularized

on a broad scale until the 1700s, thanks to something called the Industrial Revolution, which is when, as everyone knows, Robert Barron's kind of started opening factories and controlling the wealth and putting people out of work or making people work for or offering people work, I should say, for very little money. And there was a big wealth gap. It was the first big wealth gap. The rich got richer in that case and the poor got poorer and people got, there was a lot of unrest because of the slave labor and the idea of socialism kind of became more popular all of a sudden. Right. It seems like anytime that business and industry has overstepped its exploitation of the working class, socialism's kind of been there to step up as a solution to that and people

had been more prone to adopt it. Yeah. And tough times, obviously. Because that's one of the by products of socialism of a group of the government controlling industry. That means that the government also protects the workers from being screwed over by industry. Yeah. Because you're working for the government and the government's not seeking to screw you over. Right. Does that make sense? Yeah. I feel like I'm not explaining this correctly and it's driving me a little bonkers, frankly. No, you're doing great. Because of this, the Industrial Revolution, though, there were these communes that started to pop up and all over the place that were people, they were kind of socialist experiments. Yeah. One was called Brook Farm in the 1840s,

just outside of Boston and West Roxbury. And it was founded by a Unitarian minister and his wife, George and Sophia Ripley. And they said, you know what? You can choose your job and do whatever you want to do. Everyone's going to get equal pay. We're going to base our little society on a guy named a Frenchman named Charles Furrier, who just died a few years ago. But he was super smart, we think. And he actually coined the term feminism. So ladies are going to be equal to men. Yeah, that was another big one. That's a huge thing. Because this was, I mean, 1840s, that was way ahead of its time. And they had visions to build this big structure called a Fallon story. And that was their undoing. It seems like there's always this one thing that ruins these experiments.

And that was theirs. A fire destroyed it and basically bankrupted them by 1847. So that was the end of Brook Farm. And that's just one example. Yeah, one of many. Like you said, there are a lot of communes that sprung up within larger capitalist systems, but that practiced their own brand of socialism. They were Christian socialist communes. Like the shakers were a socialist community. Yeah, I was wondering about the Amish. And I looked up like our Amish socialists and I think they have a hierarchy. Yeah, and they weren't, I don't think they're thought of as true socialists, but they have a lot of the same values, I think. Yeah, like we all work together. Right. We all work hard for the good of all of us. And values are what drove all of these

socialist experiments, including the Christian socialist experiments, because basically they were saying, Hey, you know what? We don't think capitalism really jibes with Christian teachings. Yeah, we think socialism does a little more. So we're going to go off and try this and don't even try to persecute us because religious freedom, religious freedom. Yeah, you've seen the bumper stickers. Jesus was a socialist. I haven't. Oh, they're out there. Last one I saw said easy does it. So Chuck, you're like you were saying like this is Brook Farm wasn't didn't exist in a vacuum. There were a lot of these socialist experiments going on. Everybody, there seem to be two types. There was one that just wanted to just get away from the world. Like just leave

us alone. Yeah, we're doing our own thing. If you want to come join us awesome, but we're not trying to change the world. We're just trying to change the world, our world. Yeah, there were other ones that sought to like basically perform this experiment that demonstrated that this that socialism worked in the hopes that it would spread out to the rest of the country or the rest of the continent or whatever. Yeah. And one of them was in Scotland formed by a guy named Robert Owen. Yeah, he was a Welshman who was a wealthy, wealthy, wealthy capitalist who decided that capitalism was evil and they was going to use his wealth to try socialist experiments. And his first one was in Scotland in New Lanark. Yeah, in 1786. He basically moved out there. He bought,

like you said, he had a lot of money. He was a big philanthropist. And he bought a mill and said, you know what, this cotton mill, I'm going to base this cooperative society around this mill. And it's going to be our foundation. That's how we're going to make our money. And we're going to divide up property among everyone. And everyone's going to work the same and get paid the same. And it didn't work out, of course, but he was huge in the early progression of child care, basically. Yeah, he was really big on protecting children. He raised minimum the minimum age to 10. The minimum working age. Yeah, the working age to 10. And no, not minimum age. Like, you have to have a child this 10 years old. Right. If you're born under the age of 10,

you go to jail. But he instituted infant child care for the first time in Great Britain. He first preschool. Yeah, first preschool, first public library. Yeah. First public school, too, I think, like free public school. Yeah. So he led a lot of reform, but it didn't work out in England. And so he said, or I'm sorry, Scotland, I know, I think New Lanark itself worked out, but it didn't catch on. And so he said, nuts to you guys, I'm going over to America where they're way more open minded. That's right. So he went over and there was some land in Indiana in a place called Harmony. It was actually, there was already a commune of sorts there that lasted 11 years from 1814 to 1825. Yeah, but they were a non socialist religious commune,

right? No, they were totally socialist. They were separatists from the German Lutheran church. And they formed their own little socialist society there in Harmony and succeeded for 11 years, thanks to their German work ethic. And then they decided they wanted to go back to Pennsylvania. Yeah, they just left. And then Owens comes in says, Hey, this land, I'd like to buy it from you. I'll name it New Harmony. And I'll start my little experiment over here in the United States and see how it works. And they basically did the same thing. Yeah, they said, thanks chump. But that lasted just two years. Yeah, this was not Owens fault here. Well, I mean, from what I gathered, the main reason that it didn't work out is that people liked it so much.

It was a bit chaotic, though, and they started splintering off forming their own communes, right? And all these other communes started popping up and it just couldn't survive anymore. Okay. Well, also his business partner for the commune took all the money and left. Yeah, I didn't see that. That was the main reason, though. I think they were dead in the water by that point. That might have been the nail in the coffin. Right. So you pull the Mr. Burns. Yeah, exactly. So that's three. There's that's just three communities. Yeah, he was he was like, all right, yeah, because I'm out of here. And he started, but he, he really, I guess, got a lot of press and raised awareness for the concept of labor reform

and really helped set the stage for the labor struggles that would take place in Europe and the United States throughout the 19th century. And again, this is the result of a couple of things, but mostly the industrial revolution. Yeah, because in the industrial revolution, business owners were the income inequality gap was growing by leaps and bounds because business owners could buy a machine that could do the work of 10 people for a 10th of the price. And so as a result of this, you have experiments and socialism. You also have another thing grow up called Ludditism. You know, the Luddites, they're supposedly afraid of technology. Yeah, I've been called that. That's really a misinterpretation. Yeah. The Luddites like to

smash technology that took their jobs. They weren't afraid of the future or anything like that. They just wanted to keep their jobs. Yeah. So Luddites sprang up at about the same time, too. So you have Luddites, socialism. And in 1848, there was what's called a revolutionary wave, similar to the Arab Spring of what 2012, 2013, where almost all of the monarchies in Europe faced challenges from socialist revolutions. Yeah. And most of the revolutions were crushed, but some of them had lasting effects. Like, you know, how Sweden is considered a partially socialist state. Yeah, still the same with Denmark and all these other countries, France, all of them had to do with the socialist uprising in 1848. Yeah. They made an imprint and impact.

And when the when the revolutions themselves were crushed, they started to move over here to the U.S. And that's when you saw a lot of these socialist experiments pop up. Yeah. And every country still has a lot of socialist programs that you could label as socialist for sure. So we'll talk more about socialism in the United States right after this. For two decades, Chris Harrison saw it all. And now he's sharing the things he can't unsee. I'm looking forward to getting this off my shoulders and repairing this, moving forward, and letting everybody care for me. What does Chris Harrison have to say now? You're going to want to find out. I have not spoken publicly for two years about this,

and I have a lot of thoughts. I think about this every day. Truly, every day of my life, I think about this and what I want to say. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. You've come to the right place because I'm here to help this. I promise you seriously, I swear, and you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. So Chuck, we're talking about socialism in the US, which people are like, what are you talking about? The US is a capitalist society. Well, there's actually been a lot of socialism throughout the history of the US. Sure. There's been the Socialist Party. Milwaukee's had some socialist mayors. If you live in Vermont, one of your senators is a socialist Bernie Sanders. And there's this kind of long storied history springing out of workers rights movements, labor movements in the United States that were supported

by socialists and actually gave rise to the Socialist Party here in the US. Yeah. In 1876, the Working Men's Party was formed and then a year later changed their name to the Socialist Labor Party, of which Jack London, writer, was an early member. Good writer. They were called the workies and they had someone on the presidential ticket every election from 1892 to 1976 and had a little newspaper. I did not know that. Oh, yeah. Wow. They had a newspaper called The People that was finally folded in 2008 and they even had an office in 2008. Although as of 2007, they only had 77 members and apparently the official meetings in San Francisco were only attended by three to six people. That is, that's a far cry from the peak. Yeah, sure. When Eugene

Debs, who was the socialist candidate for the fifth time, I think, when he was in jail and still managed to get a million votes in the general election for president as a socialist. Not bad. And then they're down to three to six members in San Francisco. Well, that was in 2007 and 2008. Maybe they're booming again. Who knows. But part of it is because the term socialism, since socialism is basically, in a lot of ways, antithetical to capitalism, has been, like I said, dragged through the mud over the centuries and it was about this time. Actually, it was in 1917 that it really started in earnest. Yeah. The government here in the U.S. enacted the Espionage Act and kind of tied everything to not everything, socialism, at least to communism

and made a lot of things illegal to publicly endorse things like communism or socialism. Or criticize the involvement in World War I, which is why Eugene Debs was in jail. By the time 1950s rolled around through McCarthyism, which we have a great episode of McCarthyism, the Socialist Labor Party was waning because you did not want to be tabbed a communist unless you were a communist. I mean, you could basically lose your career by being blacklisted by the McCarthy trials. And that's in the U.S. elsewhere in the world. Long before the 1950s, it was a dictator in the Soviet Union named V.I. Lenin, you might have heard of. And he was the first world leader to really implement socialism on a big, broad

government scale. Yeah. Up to that point, it was all theoretical, except for his little experiments. Yeah, or little communes. Lenin was the one who said, let's see if this can work. Yeah. And he was a communist, but he implemented socialist initiatives after taking over in 1917, nationalized industry to a large degree in agriculture, but things were not profitable. So he kind of had to backtrack a little bit to a mixed economy. A little bit. And one of the reasons why things weren't profitable, Chuck, was what you were talking about. Can't account for the lazy. Yeah. Incentive. People didn't have incentive. And Lenin hadn't figured out that to truly incentivize people in the absence of money,

you needed violence. Yeah. And so Stalin came in and recognized this. You won't die. Pretty much. And tens and tens of millions of people died under Stalin's rule as he basically forced communism to work by stripping people of any kind of private ownership of land or farms or anything like that, instituting collectivism and really taking communism in this communist experiment and making it function by forcing the gears together. And a lot of blood came out of that interaction. Yeah. But it worked for a little while. Like in the 60s, the Soviet economy was growing at a rate of about twice that of the United States per year. And this is all considering that the government is deciding exactly how the economy is going to go.

Yeah. And then post World War One, there was a lot of activity in Europe, socialist parties springing up in Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Belgium, Great Britain, Africa, Latin America, Asia. People were dabbling in it, basically. Yeah. Governments were dabbling in it. There's a wave of it in Africa in the 70s, too. And in part, that was because, well, there's proxy wars being fought between the United States and the USSR. Yeah. But also it's because the USSR appeared successful. And can we talk about the USSR for a second and how it worked? Sure. So basically, every year, the government planning committee created the Gaz plan, which is like this, the plan for the Soviet economy. They would say, okay, so we need this,

this, this and this and this 25 million different things. And each of these 25 million different things cost this government sets the price, right? Right. So they would say, how can we make this happen? And they would send it down the chain. And everybody would take a look at it and figure out their plan, like this main plan would be split into thousands of tiny subplans and components. And the people who are actually carrying out the work would look at it and say, okay, we can do this and this and this and I can get you this many tons of cotton and we can do this many tons of potatoes. And this is how we're going to do it. And they would send it back up the chain. And for the year, the economy would be planned. And it actually did work for a little while. But the problem is,

it's like you say, you can't account for laziness. And there was a, you can also not account for inaction. There was a huge criticism of this plan by capitalist economists who were saying, this can never work. And the reason it can't work is because in a capitalist society, you rely on the markets for information. You guys don't have a market. You have government control the market. So there's no real information being gleaned. So you can't possibly know who needs what where. And this very famous communist economists came back with, actually, that's not true. All we have to do is look at stocks. If we have a lot of surplus of something, then we know that we need to lower prices. If there's a scarcity of something that we need to raise prices, hence

communism works. And for a little while it looked like it worked until the whole thing broke down. And the whole thing broke down is because you have people whose job it is to set prices who are scared to death of screwing up. So they would just remain inactive. And ultimately, by the time they did respond to something, it was too late and people would starve or the whole system would be totally thrown off. Because if you have a planned managed economy, you, if one little bit is thrown off, the whole thing can break down. So that ultimately is why the Soviet experiment failed. It was just too tightly controlled. That's a good one. All right. Back to the United States. Despite McCarthyism and the threats in the McCarthy era, there were some prominent

socialists in the U.S. And there still are actually. Albert Einstein was famous for a paper called Why Socialism in 1949, where he had a plan to, and it was all education based, which is good. But he advocated for planned economies and wanted every citizen to be, had their livelihood insured. Some other notable American socialist, Ed Asner, Saul Bellow, Patch Adams, famous clown doctor, comedian Lewis Black, singer Harry Belafonte, all identify as socialists to this day. And I guess we can't talk about socialism without talking about Britain post World War II. Those, the winds of change were brewing because Winston Churchill was defeated in his reelection bid by Clement Attlee, who was the head of the Labor Party. And that's with a U because it's

England. And it was a Democratic Socialist Party and established in 1900. And Churchill was the head of the Tory Party, the Conservatives. And they were, after World War II, they were, the citizens were fed up. They said our healthcare stinks. There's labor problems all over the place. And I don't think Churchill's got the goods to write the ship. So we're going to elect this Attlee fella. And he had some pretty lasting changes. There were a lot of improvements under some of the nationalization policies under Attlee, like coal miners were given paid vacations, they were taken care of safety wise, they were given sick leave. But of course, when you nationalize industry like that, it became unprofitable because you can't account for laziness. And there was no

competition and workers weren't motivated. But his big legacy was the NHS, the National Health Service, which was established in 1948, which provided free medical care. And it is still in use today, because it was super popular, even though financially it didn't work out for quite a while. Yeah. So Scotland is talking about going independent right now. There's a referendum coming up. Oh, really? And one of the main talking points is if Scotland can go independent, that the Scottish NHS can stay socialist rather than, you know, get sold off the private industry. Right. Like they think is going on in England. Oh, is that what's going on right now? That's what that's what the pro Scottish independence people are accusing the English of.

I did not know that. Yeah. Interesting. Well, they love their free health care. But a lot of it, in the 70s, there was incredible inflation going on over there, 24 percent in 1975. And the winter of discontent of 1978 and 1979 was a dark time over there because there were a lot of major labor strikes going on. And the country was headed in the wrong direction until Margaret Thatcher came along. And despite what you think about her, she did right the ship economically in a lot of ways. Like Stalin. One thing she did was she reduced spending in education and health care. Inflation went down. Unemployment rose still, though. And she started to denationalize a lot of the major industries like the telecom industry and selling it off to the private sector and

things started making a profit again, which is seen as a big victory. Yeah. So that's really great Britain is a good example of the response. People being people being screwed over. Yeah. Socialism stepping in. Yeah. Socialism getting out of control. Yeah. And then capitalism coming in. And then capitalism runs rampant. People start to get screwed over again. Socialism starts to step in. There seems to be like an ebb and flow between those two and mostly just those two, especially if you consider communism, socialism. It's strange. Is there like a third one out there that we're missing? Or is it really just capitalism and socialism? I don't know. Well, we'll talk more about socialism as it stands today in just a second. Let us just take this message

break first. Chuck, if there's anything the web has done, it's democratized humanity. Oh yeah. Yeah. And one of the ways it's done that is now, thanks to Squarespace, anyone who wants a website can have one. Yeah. Anyone who wants a great looking and performing website. Yeah. And some little cruddy one that you just designed yourself. Right. Exactly. It's also very intuitive doing this. You don't have to be a genius, which democratizes the web even further. Yeah. You can just drag and drop to create a really great looking website. And if you find yourself in any trouble, Squarespace has world class customer service. Yeah. It's super intuitive. You're not going to learn how to code or anything like that. But what you will get is a beautiful clean design.

Your content is going to be the focus. You're going to be creating your logo. You're going to be able to sell stuff. You're going to be able to show off your art or your films or your music. It's really all there for the grabbing. Yep. Like you said, all plans have commerce options. So from hosting an entire store to accepting donations for your personal blog, Squarespace has you covered and you can even find out for yourself risk free. Go to squarespace.com slash stuff to start a 14 day free trial with no credit card necessary. Man. And if you like that, which you will, it's only going to cost as low as $8 a month after that. It's going to include a free domain name. If you sign up for a year, all you have to do once again is use our offer code

stuff. S T U F F at www.squarespace.com slash stuff. You're going to get that 10% off your first purchase and you're going to be glad you did it. Okay. So Chuck, you mentioned the NHS. It's still around today. Yeah. It's an example of a socialist government system. Yes. Canada has something similar. It's often very criticized as being very expensive, very inefficient, very slow, but there's a lot of people who get healthcare that otherwise wouldn't. Yeah. I think about 22% of every dollar in Canada goes to the healthcare systems are right. Yeah. That's what it says in here. Yeah. That's a lot. That's a lot. And every Canadian I know says still better than what you guys got. I mean, it's definitely cheaper than what the Americans

spend on healthcare for sure. Yeah. Like we may have to wait for our MRI, but at least we're not going broke because we get sick. But that's a good example of socialism versus capitalism. If you go to Canada, if you're a Canadian and you go to the hospital, I should say, your MRI is going to cost the same no matter what hospital you go to, which I guess is $0. But if there is a charge to the government, it's going to be the same price, right? Right. Or roughly the same price. If you go to the United States, you can go to two different medical clinics in the same town and you could have a discrepancy of maybe $10,000 for a single MRI procedure. Wow. And that's because in Canada, the government controls the cost of healthcare. It says this

is how much an MRI costs. In the United States, there's a free market for people who have MRIs that they want to contract out to use and they can charge whatever they want. So there's a big discrepancy. Yeah. And they give one example in this article in Canada of a woman who had identical quadruplets that they could not be delivered in Canada because they didn't have the resources. So she had to go to Montana to have her babies born. So that's just one example of maybe some of the downfalls of socialized medicine. Yeah. So here in the United States, like you said, socialism gets tossed about as a, it's a derogatory term. Yeah. And a little willy-nilly, if you ask me. It is. It's also very glib. Yeah. Especially if you're saying socialism doesn't

work. Right. Or socialism exists in an evil direction. Right. Because what you're talking about then is pure socialism and pure socialist theory, depending on how you look at it. Yes. Maybe it does strike you as evil, especially if you think of communism as being militant. The thing is, you can make the same arguments about pure capitalism. Yeah. Where it's just a completely unfettered free market with no regulation whatsoever. The income inequality tends to develop and progress and people tend to get trampled. So the idea of saying like a politician is socialist or something like that. Yeah. If they're a United States politician, yeah, they probably do have some sort of socialist tendencies in that they are,

they're voting to continue funding Medicare or Medicaid. Yeah. Social security. Yeah. Welfare of any kind. Yeah. Any kind of government regulation in the United States. The very fact that there is a rule for a particular industry that says, no, you can't dump toxic chemicals into a river. Yeah. Sorry. That's socialism. That's government control over an industry. In part, it's not nationalization, which is a hallmark of socialism where the government says, hey, your board of directors is gone and these government employees now run this company. Right. But it's still the same. It's still a version of socialism. So what you have today in most western developed nations is what's called the third way, which is a mixed economy,

where you have a free market and supply and demand runs that market, but you still have government protections. Right. You probably have welfare programs. And that is public libraries. Yeah. That is rather than this ebb and tide and spasms between socialism and capitalism, this pendulum swinging back and forth. Yeah. It feels like the two are starting to or have merged together into a hybrid that could conceivably smooth out over time. Conceivably smooth out over time. Yeah. Yeah. It'd be great. It's possible. That's what we're seeing right now. So in the future, all economies will be mixed economies. That's my prediction. All over the world. Yeah. Yeah. Do you got anything else? I got nothing else.

Well, cool. I did read one article I thought was interesting about the United States military being the ultimate socialist experiment. Oh, yeah. Do you tell? Well, it was just, I think it had a lot of holes in it, but just the idea that the military like you dress alike, you all live, you know, you have different ranks, of course, but you're essentially equal all working together for the greater good. It was an interesting perspective, but like I said, it had holes. It's like Swiss cheese. Yeah. It's a good idea though, right? It was interesting. So what that sounds like it's talking about is what people I think are ultimately saying when they're saying like communist capitalist pig, that kind of thing. And they're throwing like slander

back and forth. What you're really saying is collectivist or individualist. Right. If you take the economy part away from it, what you're saying is are you the kind of person who subscribes to everyone working together for the greater good? Or are you the kind of person who subscribes to the idea of individual liberty where people should be allowed to express themselves and move freely and and not be fettered by any kind of constraints? Right. That's what it all boils down to. That's a bumper sticker. That's a long bumper sticker. Just truncate it. That's it. I got nothing else. So if you want to learn more about socialism, you should type that word into the search bar at howstuffworks.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener man.

Yeah. Hey, before I read this, I want to say thanks to our friends, Josh and Joel over at pod on pod. Yeah, they're a podcast review podcast. And they gave us we didn't know they were doing this. We just saw it and they they gave us like the best review was really, really nice. Yeah, they gave us like a very well thought out review. It wasn't just, you know, like we love these guys. It's a great podcast. They explained what they liked about it. Well, that's what they do on their show. I listened to some other ones and they really if you're looking to get into other podcasts, I would start with pod on pod and listen to some of their reviews because the review like the sound quality and the production. Right. Exactly. That's what I mean. Just professionalism

and well thought out. Yeah. It's very well thought out and they did a great job. So thanks, dude. Yeah. Go check out pod on pod. They gave Jerry like huge glowing review big ups. I think they called us the new standard in sound quality. That's awesome. You know, yeah. How about that? Over Mark Marin even they said he's gave me tingles. All right. I'm going to call this email. Be careful, Bex. She was listening to our elevator podcast and I mentioned something about hearing that you're less likely to get injured in an accident if you're drunk. And she said she related her story because it happened to her. She was at a house party across the road from a friend of hers and made the mistake of drinking beer than wine.

So she was really, really drunk. She and her friend decided to go into town, got to the main street and bumped into two guys who said, Hey, come over and come have a drink with us at this pub. It was in West London and she says now when she thinks back at 35 how stupid she was to just like attempt to cross the street and join these two random strangers. Well, she was drunk. She is, she's very wary of that now, but she says she went to cross. I looked first left, which was my biggest mistake here in London because we drive on the left. So you should always look right. And you ever been over there? They say that on the street for us dumb Americans like at the airport. They say look right on the sidewalk.

She says she only looked left and decided to take her for my drunken brain that she would just step out into the street. I remember my friend screaming Bex, no. She got hit by a car on her right. She landed on the bonnet and the driver hit his brakes and I hit the tarmac. That's the street. Oh my God. He was going 40 miles an hour and he was only about three feet away when I stepped out. Oh wow. Had no chance of stopping. He got out of the car, got a pen and paper and wrote my name on it and then wrote I accept full responsibility for this accident and made me sign it as I laid there on the pavement and then he drove off. Wow. The guys that offered us to come over and join them for a drink, carried me across the road and into the pub and called an

ambulance. They stayed with me until it arrived, made sure I was all right. I'm very grateful to them still. My injuries were this one grazed little finger. That is it. Wow. No hen injury, no broken bones, no nothing. And I attributed it to two things. One, I didn't see it coming. So I wasn't tensed up and two, I was properly drunk so I didn't tense up. I did end up in the hospital later that night when the shock set in and I got a headache and my family was worried that I was concussed, which I was not. As an aside, I did not escape the incident mentally unscathed. I suffered a period of real sadness and remorse for weeks afterward because I felt guilty that I had come out of it unharmed when so many little kids get hit by cars through no fault of

their own and die. Survivor Gill. Is that what that is? I think so. That's what Jeff Bridge has called it. What was that called? Survivor. Big Lebowski. Something less... I think it was called Survivor. He survives a plane wreck and learns to live now. Yeah, but it wasn't called Survivor. It was a good movie. Are you sure it wasn't called Survivor? Yeah, it was called I Can't Die or something like that. You're thinking of Unbreakable. That's Bruce Willis. No, I watched that the other night again, though. Good movie. It holds up, huh? It does. That's funny because that was the one that was the toughest to watch the first time. I mean, aside from signs and all that claptrap, but I mean, like, the sixth sense goes down easy.

Sure. Unbreakable takes a... It doesn't go down quite as easy, but I would suspect that means that it still resonates more later. Yeah, fearless. I knew it was something less. I think the working title was Survivor. So that is from Bex Bloomfield, and she is a graphic designer at Little Red Robot Design, which you can find at littleredrobot.co.nz because she lives in New Zealand now. Wow. And she is the one who sent in a picture of her awesome dog, Stanley, with holding a sign in his mouth saying, I heart S-Y-S-K. That's so cool. Stanley and Bex. Glad everyone's okay. Yep. Maybe take that as a gift. Yeah. It's a mulligan. She's over the gilded by now, I think. Okay. Well, if you have an amazing story that you want to share, we love hearing

those. You can tweet it to us at S-Y-S-K podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You should send us an email at stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com and join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Attention Bachelor Nation. He's back. The host of some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison. During two decades in reality TV, Chris saw it all and now he's telling all. It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope. We have a lot to talk about. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to, hey dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.