The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it Resolved: A Society that Allows Billionaires to Exist is Immoral

Episode Date: June 21, 2022

Should billionaires exist? On this episode of the Munk Debates Podcast, the editor of Jacobin Magazine, Bhaskar Sunkara, debates American Enterprise Institute's James Pethokoukis on the motion Be it resolved, a society that allows billionaires to exist is immoral. SOURCES: NBC, CNBC, SXSW, CBS NEWSBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I think it's time for this toxic binary zero-sum madness to stop. We're not an imperial power. We're a revolutionary power. We are no longer in a world where you can plot out moves statesman to statesman like a chessboard. You don't know anything about my background to where I came from. It doesn't matter to you because fundamentally I'm a mean white man. We can't do this to the next generation because America will cease to exist. debates podcast. Every episode, we provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issues of the day, free of spin, focused on the facts, and animated by smart conversation, to arm you, the listener, with enough information to make up your own mind. Today's debate,

be it resolved, a society that allows billionaires is immoral. We have a grotesque and immoral distribution of wealth in income. Mike Bloomberg owns more wealth than the bottom 125 million Americans. That's wrong. That's immoral. That should not be the case when we got a half a million people sleep it out on the street where we have kids and come out. Hello, I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffiths.

Well, billionaires are under attack in America and around the world by the likes of Bernie Sanders, the frontrunner for the Democratic Party's nomination. for President of the United States. The billionaire class stand accused of accumulating vast amounts of wealth by exploiting workers, destroying the environment for profit, and corrupting governments and public institutions to do their bidding. Needless to say, the super wealthy and their defenders disagree. Mayor Bloomberg should you exist?

I can't speak for all billionaires. All I know is I've been very lucky, made a lot of money, and I'm giving it all away to make this country better. I'm the only one here that I think this ever starts. of the business. Supporters argue that billionaires, like Michael Bloomberg, former New York mayor and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, are innovators and wealth creators. They have supposedly created millions of jobs, invested in the technologies that will define our future, and through their massive

charities help needy people and causes around the world. Maybe most important of all, billionaires are powerful examples of how people can succeed beyond their wildest dreams in free market capitalist societies. On this episode of the Monk Debates podcast, we challenge the essence of these arguments by debating the motion, be it resolved, a society that allows billionaires to exist is immoral. Arguing for the motion is Jackman publisher and editor Bashkar Sankara. Arguing against the motion is James Pethukas. He's a journalist and a policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributor at CNBC. James Baskar, welcome to the Monk Debate podcast. Thanks for having me.

Thank you. Well, Boshkar, as for debating convention, we're going to put two minutes or so up on the clock for you. We're going to look for your opening statement first on our resolution. Be it resolved. A society that allows billionaires to exist is immoral. Take us off. Well, I'm an old school, Democratic Socialist. I'm more concerned about disparities of power than wealth. But billionaires are a symptom of an unequal system. It's a system that's allowed a handful of people to accumulate an outsized role in the lives of others, not just an outsized wealth, but an outside role in people's autonomy in their ability to participate in our democratic structures and so on. So wealth construction may not be as zero-sum game. But on the shop floor, for instance, of a workplace, in our democracy, power and

autonomy are. So I've been looking at this Democratic Party nomination race. I'm sure many people in the U.S. and Canada are. And it's a perfect example. There's two people among the last batch of Democratic contenders vying for the most powerful office in the land. And Bloomberg and Steyer are both there, mostly on the merits of their wealth, mostly on the merits of the fact they've been able to bring to bear on this race, millions upon millions of dollars to spend, whereas the other candidates,

even more moderate candidates, like Joe Biden, have to try to assemble money from small donors and from the rich and from super PACs and so on. So this in itself shows the problem with billionaires in our society. It's a violation of the democratic principle

of one person, one vote. it threatens to undermine our political democracy. If you look at Bloomberg, it's a classic definition of an oligarch and that it's someone who's ideologically flexible, who's hopped from party to party, but is overriding and has personal business interests, but is using their money, their billions of dollars, to try to influence our political process.

So it's not just about the old socialist dream of extending political democracy into social and economic spheres. It's a threat to our very minimal political democracy that exists today and all the gains of the past. Now, on this moral question, again, in a different sort of society, if you could abstract away our current society and we think, okay, maybe there could be a country or an environment, a certain particular labor market, or let's say a longshoreman, skills are so high in demand that that longshoreman is making $10 million a year and could retire one day with a billion dollars in savings. Would that be immoral? Absolutely not. My problem is

less with the sheer number and the amount of wealth so much as the outsized influence of this group of people, our current billionaires and the role that they're playing in our society. Bashkar, thank you for that opening statement, arguing in favor of our motion, be it resolved. A society that allows billionaires to exist is immoral. James, we're going to go to you for the counterpart, the argument against our motion. Let's put two minutes on the clock and have your opening statement. Thanks. One of the most interesting parts of economics are sort of natural experiments. Economics in the wild. You don't have to have any fancy models. You don't have to, you don't have a bunch of philosophizing. You can actually see how things work. For instance,

if we were talking about what's a better way of running society, socialism or capitalism, We could sort of theorize about it, or we could look at actual real world examples. For instance, we could see how West Germany stacked up against East Germany, or we could look up how North Korea stacked up against South Korea, or even maybe how Cuba stacked up against Puerto Rico. And then we could look at those and see which are the more prosperous societies. And if we did that, I think we would find out that the capital societies are far more prosperous, that people were sort of dying to get into those countries and those other places

people were sort of literally dying to get out of. So I think we can actually do a real world experiment on the motion. Are billionaires' morals should they exist? In fact, that experiment has sort of been ongoing because we have countries in the world which have a lot of billionaires and we have countries which have no billionaires. And the countries which have a lot of billionaires score very highly on every index that you would want to score highly on. Happiness, well-being, income.

And again, we're not talking about the United States. We're talking about Canada. All the Scandinavian countries, which we marvel at their egalitarianism, they all have lots of billionaires, even more than the United States on a capital basis. And the places that don't have a lot of billionaires are kind of places probably you would not want to live. They have dysfunctional societies, dysfunctional economies.

So what that tells me is that if you have a functional society and a very good economy, it's naturally going to create lots of rich people. And if you're going to sit here and argue that we need a totally new system in which that wouldn't happen, that's a very interesting argument. I don't think there's a lot of evidence for that. And I think it's a very, very sort of high hurl to say, we need to do something very different than have the kind of the capitalist society, which is really sort of the dominant, socio-economic way of running a good society and a good economy in the world.

James, thank you for those thoughtful opening remarks. And before I go to both of you for your rebuttals, let me just, for the benefit of our listeners, just quickly summarize where we stand in this debate. respective opening statements. Boschkar, you're making a point to our listeners that the problem with billionaires is more than just the money they've amassed. It's their political power. It's how they use that money to change and shape the democratic process into something that furthers their aims and objectives, in a sense, obliterating, in your view, the notion of one person, one vote, and just the fundamental equality of all citizens. James, you make an interesting point here about

the real world and how societies that allow billionaires to exist seem to be societies that thrive in comparison to those that don't. Therefore, raising the question, what happens? What are the costs of substantially changing our society in such a way as to obliviate billionaires as a phenomenon? What would be the cost that all of us would incur as a result of that? I think these are two great, different opening arguments to set up this debate. Let's now go to rebuttal. So Boschkar, again, I'm going to put a couple minutes on the clock for you to rebut what you've heard from James. Well, what I appreciate about James' remarks is that he took it from the abstraction to talk about the concrete, the real world. Now, let's think about the way that other functioning societies have worked and the role of democracy in those societies.

So he mentioned the Nordic states. He mentioned Sweden. So if you take a country like Sweden, Sweden was governed by some of the United States. self-described democratic socialists by a party with roots and the Marxist Second International, from 1930 to 1976 with only a couple months of interruption. And then they were back in power in 1982. During this period, the Swedish economy was, of course, still an economy that had private ownership of firms, but the entire structure of this economy was shaped by a powerful workers' federation, the L.O. and by centralized bargaining.

The wage demands of pushed by both this social democratic party with Marxist roots and by this worker association were so extreme that it forced Swedish capitalists to invest in this kind of high wage economy, this economy that was incredibly capital intensive. It forced weak firms out of business and allowed other firms to expand and thrive. But it was driven primarily from these forces of the left. And this, of course, was a system that worked. It was a system that allowed people to have greater opportunity in progress. It was a system that was more democratic. It was a system in which, no matter where you were born in the country, you could be reasonably assured of a good life. That's not the case in a place like the United States where your life outcomes.

You were born in Fairfield, Connecticut compared to Hartford. Every single American would tell you that it's going to be different depending on where you're born in any given state. Now, this is just an example of the type of system that the left has pushed for and that the program of Senator Bernie Sanders is pushing for that, in fact, these demands are being galvanized by people who are using billionaires as a symbol, as a totem for what's run in society today. Now, concretely, can you imagine a social democratic system functioning and thriving and producing a society today? certain group of people that are making billions of dollars, well, unless you have a maximum income rate, unless you have a massive wealth tax, which doesn't figure very prominently in these new proposals on the left, then, yes, hypothetically. But that's a very different society than the type of society that created Michael Bloomberg, that's created Tom Steyer, and it's creating

dozens of new billionaires in the United States, because that society is one that's giving us a tremendous amount of child poverty more than any other rich nation on earth that's giving us tens of millions of uninsured people that's giving us the opioid epidemic and a lot of the poverty and desperation that you're seeing amid tremendous riches. And that's at hand here. We could talk about the horrors and absolute horrors of authoritarian communism in the 20th century. We should also talk about the track record of success of Democratic Socialist parties throughout the 20th century. And I think a lot of the anti-billioner rhetoric is getting at the resurrection of the latter, not the former.

Thank you, Bashkar. So, James, your rebuttal and maybe just as opposed to focusing what Bashkar just said, you might want to touch on that. But if you could really go back to his opening statement and this argument about the political seeming injustice of billionaires and how they're affecting democracy, especially in the United States. So for me to believe that billionaires and the super wealthy have too much power in reality, I would expect to see a certain kind of society.

And I don't think that's the kind of society that we've seen for the last 30 or 40 years in which we've supposedly had this massive explosion of income inequality and wealth inequality. And yet, we've had corporate tax rates among the highest in the industrial world. We've had taxes on investments among the highest in the industrial world. We just had a trade war, something. that businessmen and wealthy people did not want over and over again in the United States, you see those kinds of policy preferences not happening. But where do you see those policy preferences happening? Well, in those egalitarian Scandinavian states where, by the way, they have more billionaires

per capita than the United States, where they have very low corporate tax rates, where they have very low rates on investment, where they have very open trade. trading system. Those kinds of egalitarian nations aren't anything like the sort of world that Bernie Sanders has been outlining. Sweden was very close to being a failed state by the 1990s. People weren't working. They had massive banking problems. They had massive fiscal problems. And they had to become, I think, what Bascar might say, more neoliberal to get to where they are today, which is a thriving economy, scores very well on all those indexes, sort of the fantasy version of Baskar's argument, that doesn't actually exist in this world. Now, maybe he could create that in the future.

And perhaps he can point to one example here or there, which gives him hope that that's what we could do. But that is not what we have actually working and succeeding in the world as we know it. You're listening to the Monk Debates podcast. Be it resolved. a society that allows billionaires is immoral. If you like this podcast, make sure to check out our other episodes, including debates on everything from impeachment to social media to whether China poses an existential threat to the U.S. All free to download or stream on our website, monkdebates.com.

Now, back to the episode. Bashkar, as we move into the kind of moderated middle of this debate, I want to pick up on this point of James is that billionaires are symbols of the larger underlying productive capacity and dynamism of any one capitalist country or market. Let's have you respond to a clip we're going to play of Leon Cooperman, someone I'm sure you know well, who was hitting back against Elizabeth Warren, also running for the Democratic nomination and her kind of pointed critique of billionaires. The idea of vilifying wealthy people is so bogus. You know, they're appealing to the masses. Every billionaire I know made their billions by providing a productive, useful service or product,

and that's why they made their money. And then they take that money and they give it back to society. So, Boschker, you know the argument. It's a simple one, but for some people, it's a powerful one, that a lot of these billioners, Leon Cooperman, included, they're self-made. They created something that was a product or service of incredible value, that benefited society as a result of it being of value, and in turn, they reap the rewards of that.

Why isn't that a kind of virtuous circle in any society or economy? Well, I think that we could reject the idea that billionaires or capitalist more general are parasites, and we can say that indeed, a lot of these people had performed a valuable social function and that they created new enterprises, which took a degree of entrepreneurial risk, and they provided some role with managerial oversight of these enterprises and so on. But I guess the real question is, do we believe that these enterprises they created, that were so productive and so profitable, do we believe that the workers also played a major whole setting those things up?

Do we believe, in other words, that wealth is socially created? If we believe wealth is socially created, then we should think those workers collectively through their organizations like trade unions and through a democratic state has some dominion over that socially created wealth. You made that money off the backs of undocumented people. You made that money off of the backs of black and brown people being paid under a living wage.

You made that money off of the backs of single mothers. And all of these people who are literally dying because they can't afford to live. And so no one ever makes a billion dollars. you take a billion dollars. So in a country like the United States that has a fairly anemic welfare state, that would mean saying that some of this billionaire wealth

should be taken and given to this state. It also means that if we push towards a model that I prefer, a more social democratic model, then what we would end up with is more of this wealth, before even gets to the billionaire, would be reinvested into, expanding productivity, expanding production.

And right now, what we're seeing is billioners capturing an outsized portion of the social product. I've been giving some back through philanthropy. You know, not all these people are sociopaths. I would rather not rest the future of human civilization on people like Jeff Bezos donating billions of dollars to a climate fund. The richest man alive, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, has announced he's giving away $10 billion to, fight climate change. In a post on Instagram today, he unveiled the Bezos Earth Fund. He says the project will fund scientists, activists, NGOs, and any other effort that will help preserve our warming world. I'd rather that money be handled in large percentage by the state and by, again,

these collective institutions that we have more democratic voice over. Thank you, Bashkar. James, come in on this point about the extent to which we need a society. in which wealth is recycled. And then when we have these concentrations of wealth, as we're seeing in the United States, Canada, around the world, there's something fundamentally unfair about that, that that wealth is not being recirculated through democratic institutions that are accountable to citizens. They are being done at the whims of the business directions or the philanthropy of the Uber rich.

And that's fundamentally undemocratic. Well, I would like the money funneled through government, and government can think of things to do with that money. But I also like the fact that billionaires use philanthropy and bring a different perspective and maybe different ideas on how to tackle big problems. I think there's a world for both, just like I think there's a world where you have a thriving private sector economy, which allows people to come up with good ideas and get really, really rich along with a state. that provides a social safety net and valuable public goods. You can have absolutely both. And let's dispense with the idea that people sort of start companies and then they get big and then you can just kind of replace them with somebody else or you can replace them

with worker councils. I mean, take a company like Microsoft, which got really, really big under Bill Gates. And then Bill Gates left. And then they brought in a different CEO named Steve Balmer. And then the company did really, really bad. and then they brought in a new CEO, Sata Nadella, and it's doing really, really well. CEOs and entrepreneurs, they bring a lot to these companies.

They're just not replaceable people that it really doesn't matter who runs these companies, this CEO or that CEO or that worker council. They actually provide a valuable service. But most of the value does not go to them. Most of the value does not go to the entrepreneurs. most of the value from these entrepreneurial creations goes to the rest of us, the rest of the world. There was a great piece of research for William Nordhaus, who won the Nobel Prize, that maybe 2% of the value created by innovators goes to the innovator.

Everything else goes to us, not even just the workers, but also the workers and consumers. So to create this sort of scenario where they're sort of hoarding all the wealth and just kind of parcel little bits their workers. Again, that's just not reality. Bashkar, what's your rebuttal to that idea that we're all benefiting to the tune of 98% from the innovation and the spinoffs of these billionaire companies and corporations that are shaping the society we live in and that are shaping our futures? Well, I don't know about the 98% number, but the creation of wealth is certainly not a zero-sum game. I do think, however, that a CEO

would be willing to work at a ratio of wages to the average employee at a 50 to one ratio, just as much as they'd be willing to work at a 400 to one ratio. So the idea that you need to encourage people to innovate, you need to encourage people to take risk, you need to encourage people who've provided a good or service that consumers want, you don't have to completely abandon that idea to say that our current system is skewed and out of whack. What happens when they decide to withhold investment? What happens when capital decides to get up and flee? Now, a worker cooperative, let's say Mondragon in Spain,

if they could find cheaper labor in Morocco, are not going to get up and leave tomorrow. But a company in the United States investing in a place of Rochester, New York, might decide to get up and leave tomorrow. And yes, that might deliver some marginal benefits in terms of social productivity, but those benefits certainly aren't trickling down enough to help the people displaced in Rochester.

So one problem, again, with the current crop of billionaires, isn't that they're all useless, greedy parasites. It's that we have allowed ourselves to be so dependent on just a handful of people who have this tremendous, tremendous power in our society. And like I said, you know, maybe we are lucky that Jeff Bezos wants to donate billions of dollars fighting climate change instead of just contributing to it. But we also have seen what happens when he sponsors a race to the bottom with this Amazon headquarters race, which encourages cities all around the country to push for tax breaks to encourage

the company to come in and also just a whole web of labor deregulation to make sure the company has cheap enough costs. Maybe again in the aggregate, this is a net benefit, but it certainly doesn't feel that way to a lot of people in neglected communities all across this country. You're listening to the Monk Debates podcast. Be it resolved, a society that allows billionaires is immoral. Arguing for the motion is Bashkar-Sankara, editor and publisher of Jacobin. Arguing against the motion is James Pethakukas, an economic analyst at the American Enterprise Institute and a CNBC contributor. Now, back to the episode. Well, James, let's bring this discussion down from the theoretical to the present day and the political. You know, Bernie Sanders

is out there right now with a proposal basically to take the number of bills. billionaires in America to half in 15 years through a series of new progressive wealth taxes that would kick in at ever higher levels, the more wealth you have. You're in Washington, D.C. at the American Enterprise Institute. Are these types of proposals feasible within the U.S. economy? Do you think they're politically viable? I don't think they're politically viable. I think of these kinds of proposals look like they're about the pass. I think financial markets would collapse. and Congress would quickly change its mind, just like it changed its mind back in 2008

when it voted against the bank bailout, markets collapsed, then it said, you know what, maybe we should try to save the economy and bail out the banks. We can try to make the case that these billionaires, you know, they would start these companies for a lot less and they wouldn't have to make so much. I find that people who make those arguments

really have no idea how these companies were created, that all these guys could have done something else. When Elon Musk created his companies, He was already a very wealthy man, and yet a few years later, he found himself in the desert hanging doors on cars in order to meet their sales quotas. Jeff Bezos was working at a hedge fund, making good money. Would have been rich either way when he decided to chuck it all, drive across country to Seattle, and then found themselves in a warehouse, putting books into packages and mailing

them out. To say that we're going to get rid of the billionaires. And let's be honest, the same people want to get rid of the billionaires, I also want to get rid of the 500 billionaires. and the 20 millionaires and the five millionaires. All the stuff that we like about society, that we like what those billionaires generate, what a capitalist society generates, not just individual products, but a very high level of wealth. To say all that stuff is going to be the same and only the stuff that you don't like will be different.

It seems a little bit fantastical. So, Boscar, you're the publisher of the Jacobin magazine. You know, America's kind of leading place for thought and ideas around the social democratic movement. what's your read of this political moment that we're in? James is saying that these ideas are non-starters, that the economic effects of them would be so profound that there's no political way through to the types of wealth redistribution that you and others at the Jackavan want to see. Well, I think that anti-billionaire rhetoric and agitation around things like a wealth tax are kind of a left populist shorthand for people's justifiable discontent with this. system. They've seen how in the last 20, 30 years, our prevailing economic model has indeed produced wealth, has solved the crisis of the 1970s and has restored profitability to our

firms, but that increasingly, these gains are going to just the top 20% of people. And for the rest of us, the bottom 50% is having stagnated real wages and so on. What you have here is massive income in wealth inequality. And as a nation, we have, we have. We have a nation, we have a have got to think from a moral perspective and an economic perspective, whether we think it is appropriate that three people, one, two, three, own more wealth than the bottom half of the American society. Now, do I propose a wealth tax? I mean, sure, I wouldn't oppose a wealth tax, but I think that a lot more can be done to fund the social safety net and to change the structure of the U.S. economy through closing corporate tax loopholes, through pushing a progressive income tax,

making it easier, more importantly, to unionize and to use the bargaining power of workers and their unions to drive redistribution rather than adjust the state. There's many different models to get there. But I think right now, a lot of this discussion of a wealth tax, a lot of this rhetoric on billionaires is a shorthand for a broader discontent. I think even people who are much more on the free market side than me should take seriously this discontent because this populist rumbling is happening not just on the left, but on the right as well. Thanks, Boschkar. And James, to keep with the political moment that we're in now, what is your reply to,

let's say the average Canadian myself included, is looking at your Democratic primary race right now and looks at a figure like Michael Bloomberg who has more wealth than the bottom 100 million Americans. I mean, it's a staggering figure. I mean, does that not speak to something that is wrong? in America's political and economic system that you have that result? Or, you know, again, is that just coincidence or something that's really not germane to this race and how it will turn out?

Well, I think there's an idea here that people are unhappy because they see wealth inequality around them. And they hear about sort of these factoid that Bernie Sanders unveils debate after debate after the bait. Are people really that unhappy? Poles I see, 70 percent think the U.S. economy is doing. great, 90% of people are very happy with their lives. Isn't it more likely that we had a big economic shock a decade ago, followed by a slow recovery. And now as that recovery's gone on,

people actually aren't quite as unhappy as they used to be. It's not really a crisis of capitalism. It was just a slow recovery. And as a recovery goes on, I think people become a lot more satisfied with capitalism. And again, we have some real world examples. There's tremendous amounts of wealth inequality in Scandinavia, more billionaires per capita, by many measures, a more unequal society regarding wealth. Billionaires, quite popular, actually, in Scandinavia. This worker cooperative idea, they're trying something like that in Germany, with workers have a lot more say, and yet the entire German corporate establishment is in crisis

right now because they realize their companies are unable to keep up with American companies. They move slow. They're unable to generate any new innovative technology companies. And every week, there's like a new white paper coming out of the EU saying, we can't start any new companies. We can't start innovative companies. What can we do? So even that this sort of worker model where it's been tried at any kind of wide scale isn't working. So we better focus on the system we do have, making it work better, making it be more productive, because that's the best system we have.

Thanks, James. Some thoughtful interventions there. So before we go to closing statements, let's just finish here on the political moment that we're in. Boschkar, give us a sense of what you think is going to play out between now and the election. Because in some ways, this issue of billionaires really captures a lot of the dynamics that seem to be driving this race between the type of economy and society that President Trump is expousing for the United States versus, we'll see, maybe Sanders isn't the Democratic nominee. It certainly looks like he's headed in that direction, but this energy on the left that you're part of at the Jacobin to really push back in a fundamental. way against laissez-faire, free market, rocked-ribbed economic policy in the U.S. Well, I think that it's worth noting that James Sites has another figure in it, which is

over half a respondent saying that the economy isn't working for them. And if anything, that's the real powerful ingredients there. Both people think that the economy is doing well, but still looking at their own situation saying it's not good enough. Now, maybe if we were in Scandinavian country, we would be less concerned with gross disparities of wealth, in part because we would know that at least there's something underneath us. The very least, getting sick tomorrow won't mean a medical debt or maybe going without care. Having a child unexpectedly would it necessarily mean having to deal with the burden of child care by yourself? These are the things giving pressure and anxiety and angst among most Americans. I think that the rhetoric of Trump,

the rhetoric of Sanders, I hate to conflate the two. Obviously, I'm a supporter of Bernie Sanders. I find Donald Trump odious in many ways. But what they both managed to do is create a compelling narrative that takes all these experiences and weaves them together with a common enemy and common golds. It just so happens that Donald Trump's is immigrants and racist for Sanders, it's millionaires and billionaires. And if you want this rhetoric against billionaires to end, if you want this angst about wealth inequality to end, at the very least, you should try offering the American people a broader, more expansive safety net beneath them. James, your thoughts of how this debate around billionaires will play out in the run-up to November's vote. Is this a real political issue that

will gain traction with American voters? Is this something that could make Sanders campaign? Should he be the Democratic nominee more viable? I think what we've seen, lately is really still the aftershock of the financial crisis and the further we move away from that, sort of the less relevant these sort of populist issues would be. But to be clear, that all the things that Bachar wants, remember what the premise of the debate is about billionaires existing. But as he himself admits, we can have all the things that he would like and have billionaires. So billionaires aren't really the obstacle to having a somewhat more egalitarian country, a bigger safety net. He may not like how it's being done here,

and maybe he'd prefer how it's done in Scandinavia. But we can have a more egalitarian society and billionaires. So if that's his admission, then I guess the debate's over because they can exist and should. Boscar, you have a challenge there. Do you want to take it up in your closing statement? Yes, sure, absolutely. Well, I think that billionaires are indeed a symptom. Now, should billionaires exist. Well, billionaires are a product of this society that has given a tremendous matter of power and wealth to a few while giving declining shares of this great socially created wealth to many. So in our current society, I don't think there's a justification for people to have billions of dollars while other people are struggling to survive. We're living in a political democracy.

So a model not only has to function at the economic level, but it has to actually maintain a political mandate. And what we're seeing now is the collapse of the neoliberal bottle's political mandate. And the challenge to it is going to come from both the left and the right. I'd much rather live in Bernie Sanders America than live in Victor Urbans hungry. That's our real challenge going forward to figure out how can we create a society in which every single person has the opportunity to reach their creative potential. And along the way, we're going to get opposition from the small group of politically influential billionaires, as we try to establish things like universal childcare,

as we try to establish things like single-payer health insurance and these other safety net programs, if you want this safety net, you have to take on the political power of billionaires. The question of what happens to their wealth, what it's capped it, and whatnot. To me, that is indeed a side question to this broader question of politics, power,

and really the future of our societies. Thank you, Bashkar. So, James, we're going to give you the last word in today's debate. Be it resolved, a society that allows billionaires to exist is immoral. Let's have you take us home. Well, first, I've sort of let this pass by. Wages have not been stagnant for 40 and 50 years. There was a bad period in the 70s and 80s, but since 1990, real wages, that's wages adjusted for inflation of the typical worker, not the manager, but they kind of on the line worker, are up by 30%. I wish they were up more. and I think we need higher productivity rates to boost those wages higher, but they certainly have not been flat.

And listen, if you're really concerned about wealth inequality, the way is not to sort of destroy the system as we know it and then try to create a brand new system, let's do all the things that we sort of know how to do that would make society more equal,

but also be economically efficient. I would tell Boschkar, spend your time working on the housing issue. That's a big chunk of the wealth inequality problem, that we don't build enough housing in this country. You have very high home prices. People can't move to high productivity cities. And when they get there, all their higher wage are eaten up by housing. That's what Jackabend should be focusing on housing, creating more wealth for people. And finally, listen, if you want tomorrow

to be better than today, if you want to have more opportunity for your children, if you want higher standards of living, if you want the kind of innovative economy that can actually solve the climate change problem while also raising living standards, it's going to come from a dynamic capitalist economy where people innovate partially because they can get real rich, and then the taxes from that could help finance expanded basic science and research. If that's the world we want, that's going to become from this system, not a fantasy system that only exists in a misremembered past about Scandinavia and in a magazine. Well, James Boschkar, terrific debate.

This is one of the big issues that will continue to define the political and economic conversation in the coming months and the lead up to November's vote. Your thoughts, your insights, the civility of this debate, a real credit to you both on behalf of the Monk Debates. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Well, that wraps up today's debate. I want to thank our participants, James Pethakukukas and Bashkar Sankara. You certainly gave us a lot to think about. The Monk Debates podcast is a place for civil and substantive debate on the big issues of the day. To listen to more debates on everything from climate change to religion, to geopolitics, to the future of human progress, visit our website, monk debates.com. You can also find show notes on today's debate. Thank you for helping us bring back the art of public debate one conversation at a time. I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffith. The Monk Debates are produced by Antiquet Productions and supported by the Monk Foundation. Redyard Griffiths and Ricky Gurwitz are the

producers. The president of Antica Productions is Stuart Cox. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thanks again for listening.