The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it resolved, liberalism gets the big questions right

Episode Date: February 5, 2025

Liberal democracy has long been credited with the West's economic development, social tolerance, personal freedoms, and the rule of law. And yet, in recent years, it's been blamed for everything from growing inequality, environmental degradation, political polarization, and cultural fragmentation.  Its critics argue that liberalism's failure to meet the moment has fueled trust societies and given rise to populist movements in the US, England, France, Germany, and even Canada. Is it time for a new, animating ideology? On this special edition of the Munk Debates podcast, we seek to answer this question featuring the best moments from the Munk Debate on the Crisis of Liberalism, which took place in the fall of 2023 in front of a sold out crowd of 3,000 people at Toronto's Roy Thomson Hall. The debate resolution was: Be it resolved, liberalism gets the big questions right Arguing for the motion was the controversial former British M.P. and cabinet minister, Jacob Rees-Mogg. He was joined by the American writer and columnist who has shaped a generation's thinking on the important issues of our time: George F. Will. Opposing the motion was U.K. journalist, self-avowed communist and popular leftist thinker, Ash Sarkar. Her debating partner was the disruptive and thought-provoking American social conservative, Sohrab Ahmari, author of the bestseller Tyranny Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty.   The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 15+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ Senior Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Editor: Kieran LynchBecome 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.

We tried socialism all through the 20th century, and it failed every time. We should restore dignity to the working class and stop saying you need a credential in order to achieve the most basic, modest version of the American dream. Netanyahu is the worst leader the Jewish people ever had. He should be impeached. Genocide is the latest modern blood liable that anti-Cemites use to justify their anti-Zionism. We should prioritize making sure that no more Ukrainians do. die that this war is brought to an end. All parents want to help children with their feelings, but I argue that not every feeling is worth paying attention to.

Why are these students covering their faces? I think it says something about their movement, about their ideology, and also simply the fact that they're also cowards. Welcome to the Monk Debates. Every episode we provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issue of the day. Our goal with each and every program of the Monk Debates is to arm you with enough information to make up your own mind. Today's debate, be it resolved, liberalism, gets the big questions right.

If we look at how the world has grown more prosperous, in our countries and in others, it is because of free markets and liberal economics. Freedom for the many, rather than just a few, requires collective action and a government prepared to tame market tyrants. When you go down that path, you wind up either with the Camero Rouge in Cambodia or on a typical American campus today. How free are we really in liberal societies? I would say not free at all.

Liberal democracy has long been credited with the West's economic development, social tolerance, personal freedoms, and the rule of law. Yet in recent years it's been blamed for everything from growing inequality, environmental degradation, political polarization, and cultural fragmentation. Its critics argue that liberalism's failure to meet the, moment has fueled a breakdown in trust in society, giving rise to populist movements in the U.S., England, France, Germany, and now even here in Canada. Is it time for a new, animating, social and political ideology?

On this special edition of the Monk Debates podcast, we seek to answer this all-important question by featuring the best moments from the Monk debate on the crisis of liberalism, which took place in the fall of 2023 in front of a sold-out crowd at Toronto's Roy Thompson Hall. The debate resolution, be it resolved. Liberalism gets the big questions right. Arguing for the motion was the American writer and columnist who has shaped a generation's thinking on the important issues of our time, George F. Will. His debate partner was a controversial former British MP and cabinet minister, Jacob Rees-Mogg. Opposing the motion was UK journalists, self-avowed communist and popular left-wing thinker, Ash Sarkar.

She was joined by the disruptive and thought-provoking American social conservative, Sohrab Amari, author of the bestseller, Tyranny Inc, how private power crushed American liberty. As with all our live, Monk debates, the audience voted on this resolution prior to hearing the debate. Initially, 75% of attendees were in favor of the debate motion, and 25% of the debate motion. and 25% were opposed. We did another poll after the end of the debate to find out how many people had changed their minds once they'd listened to the arguments from both sides.

We'll give you those results at the end of today's special program, but let's first join the debate in action with George F. Will giving his opening statement, arguing in favor of the motion, be it resolved. Liberalism gets the big questions right. liberalism gets the big questions right to keep the peace that's the fundamental problem in politics is social peace and liberalism gets the big questions right

by leaving many big questions out of politics is there a god how should we worship what is virtue how should we promote it should we have false consciousness purged and true consciousness inculcated liberalism doesn't do that liberalism recognizes that the great problem of politics is that human beings are opinionated and egotistical. They like their opinions and they have different opinions, yet they have to live together in peace. Liberalism is often faulted as pedestrian and boring.

I prefer to say it has heroic modesty. It does not presume to tell people how to find meaning of their lives in politics. Genuflecting at the altar of politics is illiberal and produces illiberalism. My partner, Jacobs, is a devout Catholic. I describe myself as an amiable, low-voltage atheist. It doesn't matter. We could live together in a liberal society because the government is neutral about such things.

Some people in politics say, let's envision the best and pursue it. Prudent, classic liberals say, let's define the worst and avoid it. And Lord knows we've had enough of those. Classic liberalism, let's define it with economy. It believes there is a settled human nature and that natural rights are derived from that. Natural rights are rights that history teaches us

are essential to the flourishing of people with our nature. All illiberal politics in the last two centuries has begun by saying that there is no fixed human nature, that human beings are merely products of the culture they find themselves raised in, that malleability is the most important feature of human beings, and therefore firm, hard-driving, coercive politics is justified to produce the proper consciousness in people. False consciousness must be gone.

people must be conditioned. Speech must be limited because it does harm by giving people the wrong consciousness. The vocabulary of liberalism cannot cope with that. And when you go down that path,

you wind up either with the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia or on a typical American campus today. Another way that liberalism keeps the peace, and remember, peace is always the fundamental problem. problem is by having markets allocate most opportunity and wealth. The alternative is political power will allocate opportunity and wealth. And that way lies bitterness. That way lies an unhealthy

high stakes of politics. Let markets, impersonal market forces do these things and you will not have the bitterness that comes from the ever-increasing high stakes of politics that determine who prospers and who does not. Now it was said that liberalism produces inequality. Indeed it does. If you say you are for liberty, you are for inequality because people have

different attitudes and aptitudes. Some people want to teach kindergarten, some people want to run hedge funds, bless them all. But the rewards are going to be different. Monetary and otherwise. A classic liberal society says we want, above all, meritocracy, careers open to talents. Obviously, any society is going to be governed by elites. The question in any mature society is not whether elite shall rule,

but which elites shall rule. And the challenge of democracy is to get consent to worthy elites. When I was young and the world was young, in the late 60s, I taught at the University of Toronto where a particular luminary at the time was C.B. McPherson, a very fine political philosopher, whose subject of main interest was he said possessive individualism, which he did not punch care for. I think possessive individualism is excellent. It is the direct descendant of Locke's teaching

from which most of our liberalism descends. Possession is important because possessions give us a zone of sovereignty that is not dependent on state power. Individualism, possessive individualism matters, because when you step away from individualism, when you step away from the individual, as the fundamental social unit, you find yourself where we are today with tribalism,

with people defining their identities by their group memberships, and a scramble, a zero-sum scramble, for preferences as one group throws elbows against another. The fact is that liberalism produces as no other political philosophy can an open society, a churning society. Yes, it's disorderly. That's part of the fun. But as the great American poet Robert Frost said,

I do not want to live in a homogenized society. I want the cream to rise. Classic liberalism is a recipe for getting the cream to rise. Well-argued, well-timed opening statement. Ash Sarkar, you're up next. Six minutes on the clock is yours. Let me see by a show of hands.

Who here has seen the cost of their housing go up in the last 18 months? They have it. Liberalism has failed. I can imagine how I might be caricatured during this debate, but I imagine there are a lot of people here who describe themselves as liberals who believe many of the same things that I do. You believe, like me, in freedom of conscience. You believe, like me, in due process.

And maybe you believe in slaying the giants of racism, homophobia, abelism, and sexism. You want to avert the climate crisis, so do I. But hopefully, over the next 90 minutes, what we're going to show you is that the liberalism, as espoused by these two gentlemen over here on my right, both literally and politically, is that that form of liberalism not only fails to advance those most dearly held values, it actively imperils them. So what are these big questions that liberalism supposedly answers? Well, of course, the mac daddy of political questions for the classical liberals of the 18th century was freedom, the freedom to live without arbitrary constraints in a system that balances your freedoms against the rights of others.

But if all we did was debate about Hume and Locke and Bentham and all the rest of it, I think it would be kind of boring. So alongside freedom, I would like us to consider inequality and climate change, the two biggest questions of our time. So let's start with inequality. My friend George here was very relaxed about economic inequality, but I'm not, because here's the thing about unequal societies, they are also unfree societies. To maintain the distinction between those who have and those who have nothing, it takes the violent, coercive power of the state. And the relationship, the relationship between those who own stuff and those who don't own stuff, the people who don't own stuff being extracted from in the form of rent,

that is not a relation of free individuals. So let's take, for example, housing. My best mate, who lives around the corner from me, just got hit with a 600-pound hike in his rent. And of course, he's free to reject that. He's free to tell the landlord where to go. He's free to move out, upend his life, quit his job, break up with his girlfriend, leave all his friends and his family who live nearby. He's perfectly free to do all those things. But what kind of freedom is that?

The extracting of rent, whether it's from tenants like my friend or from the private companies who own our infrastructure, it's dependent on a coercive relation, because you need the housing, you need the water, you need the energy, you need the transport. And so when you need, and the others have, there is no real competition

between landlords or the landlord class in the marketplace. There is only naked class interest. The great defense of neoliberalism, which I'm sure will hear, is that it alleviates poverty worldwide, and of course there's truth in that, but it has also seen the rise of deeply unequal societies lacking in shared purpose

and lacking in evenly distributed increases in the standard of living. Right now, tens of thousands of workers in Bangladesh who liberals would have praised themselves for lifting out of poverty in the 1990s are out on strike. Why? Because they want their wages tripled. Why? Because our audio of consumerism,

the thing that makes us feel so free because I can buy one dress with a broken seam or another dress with a broken seam, that is fuelled by the engine of exploited labour in the global south. And that, of course, brings me to climate change. Climate change, we should call it the climate crisis, because it's a crisis brought about by the rapacious consumption of goods right here in the global north.

And if liberalism had the solution to climate change, it would have implemented it already. But instead, like children who are too in hoc to magical thinking that we can't let go of the myth, we just say to ourselves, oh, no, business, big business, that's going to innovate ourselves out of extinction. But Shell spends 14 times more on shareholder payouts, six times more on oil and gas than it does on renewables. And I'm sure that invisible hand of the market is going to pop up any time now. a political system that has allowed the plunder of the earth's resources at the expense of its future,

I don't think we can consider that system free because we will not be free on a four-degree planet. We will not be free on a planet where millions of people die so that oil shareholders can stay rich. So when we get to it, there's only really one freedom that's truly sacrosanct to these liberals. Everything else is up for discussion.

It's the freedom to hoard wealth and to hoard resources. and it takes violence to not only maintain that kind of inequality, it takes violence to turn things into property. Once upon a time, the land of Canada was not property. The land of Canada, it was under the custodianship and the stewardship of indigenous people. And to talk about them owning the land,

what sounds as ridiculous to them as it would to you to talk about owning the stars above your head. But property, this land was turned into property because of gunpowder and germs. it took violence to introduce a market society into this place, and that's not just the barbarism of the past. It takes violence to sustain a market society today. So please, I implore you.

Vote against this motion. It would make my day. Well done, Ash Sarkar. Another great opening statement. Sir Rizmog, you're up with your opening statements. Similarly, six minutes on the clock for you to make your argument. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman. Ladies and gentlemen, all politicians always say what a pleasure it is to be wherever they're speaking.

But on this occasion, it's true because Roy Thompson was a friend, mentor, an employer of my father, and even lent my parents his house in the House of France for their honeymoon. So for me to be speaking in the Roy Thompson Hall is a genuine privilege and honour. So thank you for having me and being willing to listen to me. So the real question about liberalism, as George explained, was about the individual. Who do you think should be in charge of your life? Should it be you or should it be the state? Is society built from the bottom up by the millions of decisions of individuals as they go about their daily lives?

Or is it a top-down process where you get told what to do and how to behave? And let me go back in history way beyond the last 200 years, because the first liberal was in fact Prometheus. Because when Prometheus came down from Olympus and gave mankind fire, he was giving us freedom and he was going against the consensus on Olympus that mankind shouldn't have fire. So we start liberalism very early in our prehistory. And when we look around the world, we see that it's liberal societies and liberal economies that have succeeded. Where is the empire of Rome or of Carthage? Where is the Ottoman Empire? but where more up to date is the Soviet Union, lost in dust.

But the Soviet Union had one of the fastest-growing economies in the world from the 1930s through to the 1960s. But it didn't have a liberal society to make that possible or continuous. And then we see what we have got, that our societies have got. We have a constitutional stability that is built on liberalism. What are those pillars of our constitution, that successful liberal constitution? Yes, they're the rights of property. They're freedom of speech.

They are democracy and they are the rule of law. These liberal ideas protect and shelter us and provide us with stable government, even when politicians make mistakes. The rule of law. The state is not above the law. You can trace this back to the 15th century. Sir John Fortescue saying the king of England was beneath the law.

A fundamental safeguard against arbitrary government. Democracy. you can chuck the blighters out. Freedom of speech, you can expose what they do that is wrong. Try doing that to President Xi in China or in any other of the totalitarian regimes around the world. Rights of property, so you get the fruits of your labour. These are the building blocks, the pillars of a liberal constitution.

But they support a liberal economic system. Because with the rights of property, you get what you invest in, it comes back to you, and this means it's worth doing. And you get a law that protects you so that contracts can be enforced and implied and an arbitrary government cannot steal from you. And you get free trade.

And free trade is at the absolute heart of a liberal economy because it puts the individual, the consumer, ahead of the producer interest. And we have seen, to the enormous benefit of the world, countries like China getting on the tailcoats of our freedom and of our free trade to benefit their citizens. Did you know that in 1990, 36% of the world lived in absolute poverty, 1.9 billion people, and that now that's down to 9.2% of an increased population, so 719 million people. That hasn't come about because of some accident or divine providence.

It's come about because of liberal economic policies that allowed the poorest countries in the world to trade with us. And we bought their goods, whether from Bangladesh or from China, and lifted millions into the hundreds of millions out of absolute poverty because of our liberal economic values. And then what about a liberal society? I go back to my point who do you think in society should choose how to lead their life? You or the state? And what do people want?

What do individuals want? They want families, they want to be part of a society in a community and you can trust people to make good choices for themselves. And societies that try and control actually always end up leveling down, cutting off the tall poppies,

cutting down the innovation, It is individuals and individual choice in society that makes a success. And George mentioned religion. Freedom of religion is essential to a free society because you can challenge nostrums that you don't agree with. Now, I accept lots of, all of, I'm a dutiful Catholic, the teaching of Holy Mother Church. But I do that through my free choice. I'm not forced to.

There's no risk to me if I don't, or if any of you choose not to. And free will is an essential part of the freedom. that we enjoy allowing us to make these choices. So if we look at history, we look at those countries that are most prosperous, they are the ones that have a liberal constitution and a liberal economic system. If we look at the countries that are most stable constitutionally,

they are the ones that have a liberal system, a liberal constitution. If we look at how the world has grown more prosperous, in our countries and in others, It is because of free markets and liberal economics. So much has been contributed to what we enjoy. These are the pillars of our success. They have succeeded across the world, so others copy them. You should therefore vote for them.

Thank you, Jacob. We'll now have our last opening statement. Sir Rabamari, you're up. Your six minutes is on the clock. Well, thank you for having me. This is my first time in Toronto, or as we Iranians in the diaspora call it Tehranto, resolved, liberalism gets the big questions right.

Before you make up your minds, you have to untangle what the big questions are. When you hear liberalism, you might think tolerance, due process, impartial administration, self-government. But wait a second. The pre-liberal ancients were aware of what a fair tribe, should look like, just look at the Bible. Self-government is as old as Greece. Impartial impartial administration as old as Rome and China. I just got in my mention of the Roman Empire

for the day. So if these values weren't invented by a handful of Englishmen in the 17th and 18th centuries, then we have to ask what made liberal ideology new? It was the answers liberalism gave to the questions, what are human beings? And what? What makes them come together to form political community? And those answers were terribly wrong. They've yielded societies defined by eye-watering inequality, profound alienation, and the tyranny of the most selfish among us. What are human beings?

What makes us form political communities? Let's turn to a living philosopher, I'll tell you his name in a minute, to help us summarize the two starkly different sets of answers to these questions. the ancient answer and the relatively recent liberal one. For a very long time, the core consensus of the Western tradition, as our thinker put it, was that human beings are naturally social. Political community comes naturally to the human animal who yearns for the common good, which is also his or her own good as an individual who's part of the whole.

In this older telling, our philosophers said, freedom is not only the absence of external restraints. It's about freeing ourselves from selfish passions, with politics and law helping guide us and helping us to fulfill our social natures and thus to become more fully human. Liberal ideology trash this core consensus. Human beings for liberalism are little more than self-interested brutes thrown into a brutish world and naturally at war with their fellows. We form political community because we fear each other. So the best we can achieve is to let everyone maximize his self-interest and hope the public good emerges spontaneously out of this ceaseless clash of human atoms.

Our thinker, the one we've summoned to present these two rival views, wasn't very fond of the liberal answer. He doubted that people motivated solely by anxiety about their physical safety and the security of their property could build humane, decent societies. The common good, he worried, disappears in societies founded upon individual self-interestedness. So who was he? I won't keep you guessing any longer. It was none other than George Will, writing four decades ago.

Today, he's frequently a proponent of liberalism in its most extreme form, U.S. style libertarianism. I don't mention this to give George a hard time about his intellectual evolution. People are allowed to change their minds. I only turn to his earlier, wiser self, because he did such a wonderful job framing our debate. What are human beings and why do we form community? Are we naturally social animals capable of discerning and building the common good? Or are we self-interested brutes who form a social contract out of bare necessity to protect ourselves from our rapacious neighbors? You're welcome to choose that first set of answers, my friends.

But before you do, keep three things in mind. First, as we said, liberalism is not a harmonious outgrowth of the Western tradition. It came as a shock to the value system the West had cherished. per millennia. It was a rupture. The George Will of 1983 got the intellectual history right. Second, remember that liberalism is not natural. The brutal state of nature is a philosopher's myth, as is the atomized liberal individual. It took coercion on a monumental scale to bring about this liberal subject, to make the reality out of the myth. We see this especially in economic history to goad workers to compete individually in modern labor markets. The first liberal society,

England's had to enclose and destroy the common grounds that had been used by peasants for grazing, blocking peasants from shared lands that permitted generations to sustain themselves in communities of leisure and mutual help. The insecurity you feel in today's labor market, that's not natural either. Hedge funds and private equity firms destroying the real economy, privatizing the gains while socializing the costs, none of that is natural or fundamental to who we are. The minute working people have the chance to resist any of this, They do something un-liberal. They mount collective action. They form labor unions.

They demand social solidarity and welfare. They defend society. Third and finally, remember that liberalism has not overcome coercion in human affairs. Liberal societies are shot through with coercion, only it's often meted out by private actors, which makes it harder in some ways to combat. Consider censorship. Does it make any meaningful difference that today's censorship is meted out by large privately owned corporations. Do a Silicon Valley dwebes Birkenstocks taste any better than

a junta commandant's boots? Here, liberalism's faith in private self-interest has betrayed even its own aspirations toward open debate. In 1983, George Will lamented that a trait that used to be considered a defect self-interestedness had become the pillar of Western society. He was right. Liberalism gets the big questions wrong, and so I urge you to oppose tonight's motion. Thank you very much. Well done, Sorab. We always like a little bit of opposition research here at the Monk Debates. We applaud that.

So now we're going to go to rebuttals. This is an opportunity for each debater to have the stage on their own and react to what they've just heard. We're going to go in the same order as the opening. So, George, please take us away on your three-minute rebuttal. He quoted from a book that I wrote a long time ago. It was read by dozens. And there's one of them.

Actually, in 1983, I was invited to give the Godkin lectures at Harvard, and I gave it, and then it became a book called Statecraft as Soulcraft. The subtitle was, what government does, not what government should do, but what government cannot help but do. Any regime will shape the behavior of people, the incentives it has, what is stigmatizes by criminalizing, what it subsidizes and encourages. My contention is, and I have changed a bit, and I have. I'll now tell you why.

I did not appreciate at that time the extent to which capitalism itself is soulcraft. Capitalism makes us not only better off, which is manifest for the reasons Jacob demonstrated with the astonishing conquest of severe poverty in the world. The capitalism makes us not just better off, but better. A capitalist society is a cooperative society because it depends on contracts

and promisekeeping and trust. walk into any store in Toronto and the first word you're going to hear are, how may I help you? It is a society that is cooperative in its very essential dynamic. I didn't appreciate it as much then. I do now, and I welcome you to join me in my celebration of capitalism. As you vote tonight, I'd urge you to bear something in mind. People all over the world are voting in a deadly way to get into societies that are run on liberal democratic principles.

They're voting with their feet walking from Honduras to the Texas border. They're voting on rafts crossing the straits from Cuba to the United States. They're risking their lives literally dying to get in to the southern tip of Italy

coming from North Africa across the Mediterranean. Why? Because these societies are organized on a principle, and it is this. The most important word in the American Declaration of Independence is secure. All men are created equal, endowed by their creator with inalienable rights, and governments are instituted to secure those rights. First come rights, then comes government.

And for that reason, abuse of governments can be overthrown, as the American founders did. When those rights are abused, the American Declaration of Independence is, in its first two paragraphs, the distillation of classic liberalism. And these are values shared by Jacob's country, by your country, and it is, as I say, the society in which people are dying to get in. Bear that in mind when you vote. I'm going to say, I disagree with you a bit, George. It's not a huge surprise to me why people fleeing countries that we've destabilized, that we've bombed, that we've hit with embargoes and sanctions perhaps want to escape some of those places. You talked about the malleability of human nature in your opening remarks, and it reminded

me of the words of a very great thinker who once said, economics is the method, the object is to change the soul. That wasn't Lenin, it wasn't Trotsky, and it wasn't Marx, it was Margaret Thatcher. And she understood it very well, that conditions shape consciousness and the material conditions that we live in make us the people who we are. So what did she do? She broke down the institutions of solidarity like the trade union movement, she sold off council housing, she de-industrialised the Midlands and the north of England.

Did it make any of us in the UK happier people? As a Brit who's riddled with anxiety, I can tell you safely, no. And I think that there is something about this particular form of capitalism that we live under. It has commodified

every waking second that we have. So even a simple business, trying to meet someone, find them attractive, maybe fall in love. That too has been commodified and we are lonely staring at our blue screens, swiping Tinder, hinge or even field, which is the spicy one. And that doesn't make people happier. It makes them feel disposable and it makes them feel lonely. And I think that's one of the reasons why so many people of my age are dealing with anxiety are dealing with depression. It's because they live in a society, whether it's through work or housing or indeed the war of all against all that is online dating, they've been made to feel fundamentally

disposable. And I think that's why you can't be too casual about material questions like the question of ownership. Jacob, you talked about free speech. I don't think in the UK we've got protected free speech at all. I think what we have is a press which is dominated by oligarchs who use it for their interests. Three quarters of UK newspaper circulation is controlled by conservative supporting billionaires, and I can see why you'd like that. But that is certainly not a free press where ideas can be contested openly. And one last thing. I, as you have guessed, and I've said many times, I'm from the UK. There is only one right that is protected. It's the right to accumulate. When it comes to the freedom of protest, that's cracked down on. When it comes to freedom of

speech, the freedom to support something like BDS, the freedom support the climate movement those are things that are all cracked down on. So I think one of the questions you've got to have in your mind as the course of this evening continues is how free are we really in liberal societies? I would say, not free at all. Jacob? Well, I'm delighted that Ash has joined this side of the argument

because she actually wants us to be more liberal, and that is what she just said in her last comments. She wants more freedom of speech. Well, I'm all in favour of that. I think there are too many restrictions I wish we had in the UK of First Amendment that gave us an absolute right to freedom of speech. But look at what?

liberal behavior has done. People working now have much more leisure than they did a hundred years ago. A hundred years ago, people were working six and a half days a week. They're now working in the UK 35 to 40 hours a week. That's an extraordinary increase in leisure of freedom, of time to do what they want. Why? Because the economy's done well. And that means that we can afford to lead lives doing things that we want rather than just being wage slaves. And I'd go back to the point I made on absolute poverty. Now, liberalism may mean that there is inequality, but actually, if you have no money at all, if you have under $2.15 a day, are you worried about relative poverty or absolute poverty? And I'll give you those figures again. The liberty, the free trade in the last

30-odd years has reduced absolute poverty in the world from 1.9 billion to 719 million, 36% to 9.2% of the global population. That is a fantastic achievement of liberalism. And do you know what reduced inequality, briefly in Western economies? The financial crash of 2008. And that's what the other side want. That's what the socialists always want. They want to level down to make everybody poorer, and that helps nobody. You don't help the poor by making everybody poorer. Then you look at climate change. Where has the biggest increase in emissions come from in the last 30 years? Totalitarian China. The UK, liberal UK, has reduced its emissions by 40%. The US has grown its economy and kept its emissions stable because it invested in shale gas, something that

is a liberal free market solution. And then we heard about housing in the UK. Housing is expensive in the UK because it's governed under a Socialist Act of Parliament, which means you can't build new houses. Because you restrict supply under a socialist policy, you're not getting the liberal consequence of more housing being built to reduce prices.

Even the leader of the Labour Party's now in favour of liberalising planning. Then we had a wonderful line that the Roman Empire in China had impartial administration. Yeah, right, they did, but it didn't last very long, did it? Why? Because they had no freedom of speech, no rule of law, no democracy, to throw out crooked leaders. And then you end up with Caligula. So let's have a few colligulars. And then we'll wish we were liberal. And also the point on common land being enclosed, that meant we could feed the population. That's why Malthus was wrong because we've had

growth in agriculture, because we've followed liberal precepts. Again and again, liberalism works. So I have to do a sort of mop-up here being the last, so many arguments thrown out, I'll try to go down some of them. The first was George's promise of neutrality. If you lived through the social turmoil of the past two to three years and you still believe liberal societies or societies at all can be neutral about fundamental things, that you did not live in the same planet than I did. Social peace, we are at war with each other constantly. along identitarian lines, certainly along lines of class

and economic differences. It's built in that form of conflict. Low-level conflict is built into liberal ideology because it says maximize your individual well-being, and it denies even the ability of human beings. Unlike the classical and Christian tradition, unlike the human civilizational heritage, liberalism denies that we can know the good

and try to build it together. George says the only alternatives are two things. You either deny that there is such a thing as human nature and therefore you endorse regimes that try to mold human beings brutally like communism and other sorts of totalitarianism or you believe like liberals

that human beings do have a nature and instead of natural rights. Notice he left out a third alternative which is the alternative that I put forward which if you think Aristotle and the Catholic Church and Confucius, that whole tradition of that you broadly call natural law, the human civilizational inheritance, that they were all wrong. They all, when they portrayed human beings as capable of more than mere self-interest,

if you think that civilizational heritage is wrong, go ahead and agree with George that it's either liberalism's very low definition of human nature or no human nature at all. But there is a third definition, and that is a higher definition of what human beings are capable of. Markets are shot through with coercion and power. The market that George described that allocates resources in this kind of perfectly non-coercive way is a market system that existed brief period in the late 18th century when you had the so-called masterless men,

yeoman farmers, artisans, and so on, who really could deal at an arm's length. And there was genuine competition of the kind where you could say, yes, competition is, panacea against market-based coercion. That world was swept away by the industrial revolution. Ever since the late 19th century in Britain and the United States, most industries are dominated by a very few actors, a handful. Price is no longer this kind of perfect signal of supply and demand. It's what the large actors say it is. Meritocracy, and I'll stop here. In the United States today,

a Brookings Institution research shows. It takes six generations for the, effects of generational wealth to disappear. We're not living in a meritocracy anymore, if we ever were. So we have to get over these illusions and look at our society the way it really is. Thank you. Well, great rebuttals. Great opening statements.

This debate's really coming together. I'm going to join the conversation now and try to think of some questions that would be top of mind for our audience here tonight as we ponder this big debate. And I want to debaters try to re-center us on the resolution because we pick these resolutions carefully. They're designed to get us thinking and try to have a structured discussion. Our resolution today, be it resolved, liberalism gets the big

questions right. I think it might be helpful if we could just quickly do this, have each of you say what the big questions are. Not a lecture, but just a list, a concise list so that this audience can understand if there's any agreement here about what they are. So George, do you want to start? What are the three or four big questions? The first big question is peace, social peace, letting egotistical people get along. Aristotle was right. We are social creatures, and hence political creatures,

but we are also, and inevitably and irreducibly egotistical, and a lot of good has come from that. So that's the first big question. The second is, markets are not perfect. until you compare what they do to what the government does when it supplants the markets. I believe it was a Nyron Bevin,

a Welsh firebrand, member of the post-war labor government, who ridiculed people who said socialism wouldn't work well. He said, our nation is bedded on coal and surrounded by fish. It would take an organizing genius to produce a shortage of either.

It took them two years to produce a shortage of both. Markets are not perfect. We are not perfect. talking perfection. This is human lives we're talking about. We're talking about how to minimize waste inefficiency

and how to maximize the kind of uplift from grinding poverty that Jacob talked about. Okay, let's go to Jacob knows. Peace, some efficiency, the more effective distribution of society's wealth across society.

So Jacob, what would be one or two of the key answers that you think we're debating here tonight? I think the one fundamental question is who runs your life, you or the state. Liberalism allows you to run your life and illiberalism, however defined,

handed over to somebody else. And from that, everything else flows. Free markets flows, a liberal constitution flows, once you've decided who's in charge. Okay, good answer. Ash, let's come to you with the same question. So for me, the big questions are freedom, not just the abstract freedoms that we possess, but the enabling conditions of freedom.

A hungry man is not a free man. A homeless man is not a free man. When you are materially lacking, you are not able to be a political subject, in my view. The second thing is inequality. I think an unequal society is an unfree society. It requires coercion to sustain it. Third, climate crisis.

No bigger issue is facing us as a species. and sure, China is the biggest polluter on the planet, but that's because we keep buying all their stuff. And I think one word, which hasn't come up a lot so far, but I hope that we explore it in some detail, is happiness. I think happiness is one of the biggest political questions that we sit here debating. We're differing about what it means to be happy

and what it takes to make us happy. And I think that this atomized, individualized, precarious state has made a lot of people deeply deep. deeply unhappy. So Rob, same opportunity for you. I know happiness is a big part of your writing, thinking about how people find flourish. How do we flourish as a species? Is that one of the key questions? Yeah, human flourishing. But I would go back to the question of human nature. What are human beings? If you define human nature as low as, for example, David Hume did, where he said, you should just assume that everyone's a knave. Everyone is selfish. Everyone's a brute. Everyone is

self-maximizing. You will build a social order that kind of looks like ours in some ways, in many ways. The second question is the question of markets, and one of the difficult things with debating classical liberals especially, and I respect both of these men, is they always reduce the alternatives to its either liberty, freedom, capitalism, or dread communism or socialism. They forget there is all sorts of middle ground in between, social democracy, Christian democracy, these were not liberal projects, even though they emerged within liberalism, but they tamed liberalisms,

at least its worst aspects in significant ways that allowed a middle class to emerge, labor unions, social welfare, this country's health care program for all its flaws. That's very important that there is an alternative. You don't have to pick between communism, Stalin, and Adam Smith. And funny, I would say with respect to the question of alternatives to markets, I have to say, Jacob, the reason that workers have more time to spare now is not because of capitalists becoming nicer.

It's because of a labor movement which organized became militant across the developed world. It's not. It's because the whole structure of the economy and modern economy has changed from large employees with vast numbers of staff to lots of small businesses because they've been free to set up, they've been free to establish their own business and set the terms that attract employees who have the power to negotiate why because the world's become more prosperous. Just to be fair, too. Your predecessors as classical liberals would have opposed those movements for fighting for

minimum hours or maximum hours for children, all the kind of basic elements of... The Conservatives in England who introduced maximum hours. No, in... So it was a Conservative Party policy to maximize the 10-hour act was conservative policy. I understand, but classical... classical liberals as such have often stood opposed to these games. So we can't say it's either you have to live with kind of Victorian capitalism or it's got to be communism.

There's other options which are a mix between liberalism and other systems. Let's let me bring George in here because this is very helpful to go around like this because I think we understand now where you align on some of the key answers that liberalism has to have a response for. And George, on this topic of how the economy is structured right now, the United States, your country, is that a liberal economy? Yes. Fairly liberal. People always say market fundamentalism, to which I say if only.

But yes, it's a broadly liberal society, as are all the societies in which the social democratic programs that you celebrate, have been instituted from Italy and France and Britain, the United States. These are not only compatible with liberalism, they depend on the revenues thrown off by capitalism. Social democracy, which is watered down socialism, has always been parasitic off the revenues thrown off by an enterprise economy. And they run into trouble when they forget Margaret Thatcher's warning. Sooner or later, you run out of other people's money.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I really have to step in here because I've grown up in this society under the shadow of privatisation, privatised railways, privatised water, privatised energy. What we've ended up with is train cancellations as long as your arm, and we're an island surrounded by effluence because the sewage companies managed to pump it out without, you know, so much as a proper slap on the wrist.

They're not worried about losing these contracts. And these are purely extractive. enterprises. Yeah, billions paid out and shareholder profit rather than being reinvested. Billions paid out in shareholder profit rather than being paid out in the form of wages. And this, I would say, is the problem of neoliberalism.

It's not productive. Infrastructure building has stalled in the UK. We can't even get high-speed rail off the ground. Why? Because rentierism is parasitic. It's not social democracy. And the problem with neoliberalism to coin a phrase is that eventually you run out of public assets to privatise.

But that's simply inaccurate. I didn't expect any for a discussion about water privatisation here, but when water was in national ownership, the water companies could pump sewage out into the sea, and nobody even recorded how it was done. The only reason we know the figures now is because the water companies have been banned

from pumping it out into the sea, and when there's very heavy rain, they have to record the overflows. That's because of the billions invested of private capital into the water. State-owned water companies had a license to put any sewage into the sea they wanted. It is capitalism and,

free markets that has made our beaches cleaner. So I was going to bring, George, because I want to follow this economic argument a little bit further. George, many people would look at the U.S. economy and say that it's highly concentrated. There are very large companies that control broad swaths of your economy, and that that trend towards concentration has continued now for multiple decades, largely seemingly unimpeded by government or the public will. Again, how is that an expression of a functioning, vibrant liberal order. A, I don't think it's quite right. Amazon, this great behemoth that in 1994 was an online bookseller in Seattle, Amazon has a tiny, someday 15% of retail sales in the United States.

Capitalism takes care of concentrations. Let me give you one or two examples. I don't know how many A&P stores you had here in Canada. The United States had 15,000 ANP stores up to 1935, one for every 9,000 Americans. When's the last time you went to an A&P store? Piggly Wiggly came along and figured out how to do things better. Believe it or not, the Justice Department in the United States, the antitrust division was worried in the mid-1970s about IBM's monopoly on office typewriters. Do you remember what a typewriter was? Capitalism's own dynamic takes care of this. There's one further example. November 19, in November 2007, the cover of Forbes magazine said,

one billion customers can anyone challenge the cell phone king? The cell phone king was Nokia. Five months earlier, something called an iPhone had been invented. Capitalism is creative destruction, as Schumpeter said. It is destruction, but almost always creative. I really have to disagree with you a bit here. because the technologies that make that iPhone such a good piece of technology,

things like GPS, the touchscreen, they were first developed with taxpayer funding. And so this is the great myth of capitalism, that capitalism means that it is private interests who take on the risk, and that's how you get research and innovation. No, you get research and innovation when you've got the state to back it up with money, to allow people to experiment without fear of destitution

or going bust and to do things for its own sake. And that's how we've ended up with some of these technologies, which have transformed our modern world, the internet, the iPhone, many of our vaccines start out in publicly funded institutions without a active state. You do not have entrepreneurialism nor innovation. You just get the iPhone 15. I want to bring, I want to bring so on him because he's been patient here, but I want to you address George's point that we live in a society of change.

Change is relentless. It's everywhere. It's all the time. So why isn't liberalism's embrace of change, of destruction, creative destruction, as George presented it? Why isn't that one of the great strengths? It reflects the way things are, not as we might wish them to be. First of all, George, I'm glad it's agreed that ours is a, I mean, the United States economy is a liberal economy. Let me give you a few snapshots of that economy.

The results of basically Reagan-I-Sathrite mentalities of tearing away at Union tearing away at prudent regulation of the economy, not socialism, but the New Deal Order, which again George celebrated in that book, Staircraft as Soulcraft. But in our economy, in our snapshot, the Federal Reserve says four out of ten Americans would struggle to come up with $400 in cash in an exigency, and 12% couldn't come up with any money at all. It's an economy where half of fast food workers rely on public welfare. It's an economy where a quarter of college adjunct teachers rely on public welfare. So we've built, as a result of doing a way with, first of all, with industrial policy,

with unions and so on, we've built a low-wage, high-benefit economy. What that means is not that the benefit system is generous. In fact, it's quite miserly. It tests you in all sorts of ways, humiliates you to get benefits. But it just means that as a share of the total income that working in lower middle-class people need to make ends meet benefits make up a high proportion of it. It also means that the taxpayer is essentially subsidizing low-wage employers. They privatize the gains, but the rest of us have to bear the cost.

This is what the American economy on purer liberalism looks like. And yes, we can certainly see some innovation in the economy. But not every form of change is good. Human beings are not just a change-seeking creature. We also yearn from home. We yearn for stability. All of these other fundamental human needs are not met by liberalism. And all of the things that capitalism invents are not good.

Like apps that are mindlessly addictive for children, ban it. A previous generation of conservatives would be prepared to ban those. But doctrinaire libertarians are not willing to do that. And they use neuroscience to try to make them more addictive. Easily, how is that, you know, compare that kind of production with what we used to build under the Social Democratic... model, the United States used to build stuff. Let's go back to building stuff. And that doesn't have that kind of dynamism that George is talking about. It requires, do you have factory effects?

It takes really, really, it's very hard to innovate in those kinds of industries. So George, TikTok is the failure of liberalism. That you would probably agree with. Well, I think it's useful to hear the word ban it because that's so much of the vocabulary of the anti-liberal folks. there's another answer to children and their cell phones and their screens and it's called parenting. The same parent, George,

maybe having to work two jobs to make ends meet because of other elements of the economy you celebrate. Not everyone has the resources of an upscale middle-class northern Virginia household. I'd like to make one point and then... Yeah, then I'm going to go to church, Jacob. Beating up on corporations

as everyone's favorite pastime, particularly pharmaceuticals, until COVID arrives. All of a sudden, Operation Warp Speed went into effect and we had a vaccine. When the AIDS virus came to the United States

in the early 80s, took us four years to identify the virus. If it took us that long to identify the virus in COVID, we wouldn't have a vaccine yet. So the corporations, punching bags so that they are

come in handy, every once in a while. well now but before we go I'd like to address to you because you have revised a particular sinister idea of freedom that I thought Isaiah Berlin drove a stake through the heart of in his 1958 lecture on two concepts of liberty I was a little before my time I'm sorry still valid however what Isaiah said was freedom is is the absence of coercion that prevents you from doing things you choose to do. Now, the tyrants of the world always say, no, no.

Freedom is having health care. Freedom is having housing. This is the social contract of China today. We'll give you prosperity and you be obedient. But obedience is not freedom. And that's too high a price to pay. China is a society that I would want to live in, no. There are these freedoms that we're discussing freedom of conscience.

freedom of the press, freedom of expression, which I do hold very, very dear. Can't be casual about those things. You only have to look at societies without them to know how dangerous it is to be casual about those things. But what I disagree with here is that whenever you have some kind of social provision of basic necessities that people need to live, that the quid pro quo is obedience. It simply isn't. In the UK, we had a council house building program. It housed millions of people in the UK in the post-war period.

And people got told which colour to paint their door. Because the state told them you could only have an only have an... orange door or a pink door and you had to follow the state when it was council owned. Two, have you ever lived in a conservation area? You can't decide what color to paint your windows. I'm sure you do. I live in a conservation area. I'm sure you do. But hang on my political pen and should say I am a conservation area. But if I may finish this point very briefly, obedience wasn't really the quid pro quo here. There were conditions that were placed on people living in council housing were not more

owner or some people living in privately owned, owner-occupied or privately rented housing. What happened when Right to Buy was introduced was that it did two things, is that it sold off council housing stock and it wasn't replaced. Two out of five properties sold onto Right to Buy, so these were once council-owned homes, which were then bought by people who live there, they're now buy-to-lets. They're now in the hands of private landlords, and they're leveraged over people who are my age, who are paying over a grand a month sometimes to live. in a flat that the council had rented out for a fifth of that price,

if not in some cases, less. And what Bytele has done is that it has excluded two million people from home ownership. I want people to have security over the things that they possess, but that is not an uncaviated right. You do not have the right to accumulate

at the expense of others, I think, in a society which takes the freedom of most people seriously. George, let's hear you know, let's hear that. First of all, the houses still exist. People are still living in them. They haven't been taken out of the housing stock. It's now a thousand pounds rather than 200.

The people who bought them got the absolute security of ownership. They did better. And most importantly, the problem with our housing is we're not building enough housing because we have a planning system that was set by the socialists in the 1940s. What we need is masses more house building and then you lower prices and then you provide home ownership to people who want it. The problem is not too much liberalism. It's a lack of liberalism in our planning system.

George, George, on your COVID point, our response to COVID, including the Big Pharma response, was not an example of Adam Smithian genius of the invisible hand type of work. That's not what it was. It was actually a resurrection of that older model I'm talking about. Again, the choices aren't socially. or absolute capitalism, there are models in between.

And in the mid-century era, we had government and corporation, especially in response to war, and then in post-war era, working together for the common good rather than the kind of Wild West capitalism. And the COVID response was that. Moderna, producer of one of the vaccines, had never brought forth a pharmaceutical to market before its vaccine. And it used, allegedly, the technologies of a pair of other pharmaceuticals, providers. The United States government indemnified Moderna against lawsuits subsequently, and now Moderna is trying to get the taxpayer to pay for the copyright or intellectual property case. So that is not just a market working its genius. It's actually an example of the kinds of things

that we can do if we're willing to use the power of the state to direct the market in useful directions, not least submit an emergency. That is not pure capitalism when you indemnify a company against lawsuits. I just want to be conscious of our time. A good answer. Thank you, Sarah. Before we go to closing statements and talk a little bit about what came about when we went around the horn at the beginning, this idea that one of the answers we all want an answer for is, we call it happiness, we call it flourishing, we call it, what is it? Is it a philosophical state? Is it a mental state? Is it a spiritual state for some people? And George, I'd like to hear you a bit more on how liberalism provides that. Because

I think that there is a perception that liberalism in its neutrality is soulless, that it doesn't speak to some higher value, some higher calling on our parts. It doesn't animate our souls towards greatness. I think that's half fair. Half fair in this sense. That what liberalism says is we want to have a functioning society with intermediary institutions that do much of the work that you rightly want to have done

to ameliate everything from loneliness to poverty. To Tocqueville, an impeccable liberal, came to the United States and was amazed at how in this liberal society, lightly governed society, when he was here in the Jacksonian era in the early 1830s,

if you didn't buy something that paid a tariff on or if you didn't get something from the post office, you had no contact with the federal government which barely existed, but de Tocqueville went away amazed at the fecundity of freedom and producing these wonderful intermediary institutions that made America work then and still does.

Jacob, same question for you. Is there a soul to liberalism? Is there something there that pushes us forward to, I don't know, a sense, you're a devout Catholic, you've talked in our previous interviews about your utter respect for the kind of sanctity of each person of their lives, of their individuality.

Everything I think about the individual fundamentally comes from my view as a Catholic that every soul is equally valued by God. And every soul of whatever kind, able, disabled, whatever nationality, is loved and valued by God. And that person as an individual is worthy and is valid and worthy and valid to take charge of his or her own life.

So the liberalism comes out of this higher view of humanity. It is the highest view of humanity because I believe that individuals coming together cooperating, acting through families and so on do have a non-selfish part of them as well as a selfish part of them. Look at this hall given by Roy Thompson. Philanthropy is part of liberalism. It's not just the baker baking his bread

because he can sell it and he can make a profit. It's once you've made your profit, what you do with that, how you spend it, what you give back to the society to which you belong. That is the freedom of liberalism rather than having it all determined and decided for you by an overarching state. And yes, there is a middle way. But actually, the middle way depends upon capitalism providing the money. It requires liberalism, which provides the funds to pay for what it wants to do.

When you look at the United Kingdom, the bits that are run by the same, the government, the bits that are run by the state, so housing which we've discussed and the health service, are to have the least well-run things in the country. So you want liberalism to allow us to see in joy and relish our higher selves. The reason why I'm laughing is because I think it's quite revealing that a man who is a member of the party that's governed the UK for 13 years is saying the worst run bits of the state are the ones that his government are in charge of housing in the NHS. I think when it comes back to this question of happiness, what any psychologist will tell you about love

is that love needs security. Love cannot blossom in a context where people feel insecure, precarious and disposable. So if I'm having to move flat every year because my rent goes up, if I'm insecure in my work, if I'm on a zero-hours contract, if I'm on temporary contract to temporary contract,

what's that due to my ability to form lasting relationship? with other human beings, I think it utterly corrods it. And I think the second ingredient for happiness is purpose. We need purpose in our lives. We need to feel like we're doing something meaningful. And we saw this during the pandemic, that we saw firsthand whose work was essential. And it was often the people whose work was most poorly paid.

David Graber, who was a very mischievous anarchist, anthropologist, he wrote a book called Bullshit Jobs. And what he found in bullshit jobs is that 40% of people, if asked, would say that if their job disappeared of the face of the planet tomorrow would make no difference. And it's not people who cook,

people who clean, people who care for others, people who work to strengthen the bonds of responsibility and obligation towards human beings, it's the pen pushes, it's the middle management, it's marketing, it's KPMG, And so I think that there's something...

Not a sponsor, not a sponsor. I think that there's something very sick about a society which makes 40% of people feel that what they do with the majority of their waking hours is totally and utterly pointless. So, So, Rob, I wanted you to come in on this, but I want you to pick up on what George was talking about,

but Toekville and the beauty of spontaneity in liberalism, that we do create these associations, Many of them voluntary, most of them. They emerge out of this kind of dance of individuals in the market, in representative democracy. Isn't that something incredibly precious precisely because it's so subject to change? It's so varied. It's so different.

It's so wonderful in that way. It is wonderful, and it's a blessing that all of that elements of the human spirit had survived the kind of doctrinaer capitalism that emerged in the 19th century, was tamed briefly but effectively in the mid-century, and now has come back roaring in a resurgent fashion. In the Jacksonian era that Tockville was writing about, it was an era of immense social turmoil. The reason Jackson was elected was because Western and Southern Yelman farmers

and urban working men were becoming proletarianized. They were miserable, and they were miserable in relation to moneyed elites. And the Jacksonian Revolution was about protecting that kind of communities that they cherished against the relentless turbulent market. And we've had other, across the world, we have movements like this of people asserting politics, the primacy of politics in its full sense, of joining together to fight for the common good, over a view of economism or marketism

in which the market itself becomes the thing around which we organize everything else. The market has its place. It does some things well. But it has to be within the framework of some larger purpose, and lots of modern democracy is about asserting that larger purpose

over tyrannical market. George, I'm going to give you the last word in this segment, and then we're going to go to closing statements. Well, I come back to the problem of when the COVID vaccine had to be invented. You're absolutely right. It was public money helped drive that. But the public money looked around for a place to be spent,

and it found that capitalism had organized in the pharmaceutical companies an extraordinary stockpile of human ingenuity and talent. It was there. if government had had to invent that from scratch we would be nowhere well we'd be up to our waste in corpses but the sheer productivity of American society

organizing science and talent through private enterprise is what at the end of the day saved the country and saved much of the world well I'm going to leave now we're going to go to closing statements this has been a great roundtable discussion. So Rob, this is the one time in the debate where you do

get to speak first. So we're going to put four minutes on the clock and let you have your closing statement. Thank you. And thank you, George and Jacob, for a spirited debate. In 2019, the U.S. state of North Dakota

got rid of its Sunday trading ban. By the end of that year, America's last statewide Sabbath law had gone the way of the rotary phone and the airplane smoking section. Supporters insisted the law wasn't about imposing times of worship, but fostering rest and relaxation

for workers and their families. But they finally couldn't overcome the woke anti-Christian progressives hell-bent on getting rid of the ban. Actually, I'm kidding about that last part. It wasn't woke progressives who got rid of the last Sunday trading ban. It was Chamber of Commerce-type Republicans,

pro-business classical liberals, not only like our friend Jacob. Getting rid of the ban, they said, was about freedom. People want to make decisions for themselves, said the bill's main GOP sponsor in the state legislature. Yet neither workers, nor even small business, had asked for this choice. It was only the state's large corporate retailers

with their ability to lobby that had agitated for removing the ban. For workers, this new, quote-unquote choice just meant the loss of at least half a day of guaranteed rights. So does getting rid of protections for the weekend fought for by the labor movement through the 19th century and the early 20th century, does getting rid of protections for the weekend increase our total supply of liberty? Yes, in a formal, abstract, liberal sense.

But we have to always ask liberty for whom, liberty at the expense of whom? In practice, it just means Jeff Bezos can use his algorithmic human resources scheduling to make a hash of his employees' weekends. I won't ask George to respond to that since he works for the Washington Post. Classical liberals, like George and Jacob, complain about various social and cultural pathologies, astronomical divorce rates,

low rates of family formation and fertility, collapsing church attendance. They're right to do that. But they pay scarcely any attention to the role played by their hollow account of liberty in bringing about the material conditions behind these dismal statistics. In the name of choice and freedom,

they've undone many of the hard-won protections of social democracy, and some choice we have. For upscale professionals, non-stop barrages of emails to be answered, but the ghostly blue glow of the smartphone. For wage earners, low pay, impossibly short breaks, bladders relieved in the vast warehouses of liberal freedom.

In my country, the United States, around 100,000 Americans die each year, from opioids. And researchers have found an uncanny overlap between those U.S. counties with the most severe opioid and fentanyl problems and the ones that have been exposed to the blessings of liberalized free trade. Liberals try to reassure us, yes, we lost solid union jobs with good wages and decent benefits, but look how cheap your devices are, the devices that run apps designed by Silicon Valley neurologists to be as addictive as possible to children. Oh, you want government to protect your job, wages, labor conditions, social welfare,

No, the genius of the free market will take care of these. As Jacob Rees-Smog told the British Parliament in 2012, a good business can be relied upon to take care of its workers because it is in its interest to do so. And if Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, doesn't think it's in his interest to give you sufficient breaks so you have to relieve yourself in the bottle, well, there you go.

This is not freedom. Freedom for the many, rather than just a few, requires collective action and a government prepared to tame market tyrants. If you take away one idea from tonight, I hope it's this, that true freedom requires restraints and limits. It's an insight as old as the Bible and Aristotle and as urgent as our near dystopia today. Please reject tonight's motion. Well, ladies and gentlemen, what you have before you is the success that has been made of the Anglo-Saxon sphere,

the prosperity, the liberty, the ability to leave. the lives that we wish, or you have the ability to unwind hundreds of years of economic progress. The Luddites had a slogan, and their slogan was what Enoch creates, Enoch breaks. And the Enoch in question was a manufacturer of machinery who had also made sledgehammers. And as they took the sledgehammers made by Enoch and crashed them down on the machines that he had made, they said they were creating a better society because they were maintaining a society that was stuck in the past and wasn't going to innovate, wasn't going to produce. And it is that innovation and that production that has given people the prosperity that they now enjoy.

What would have happened if we hadn't had all this development in the 19th century and in the 20th century? If we hadn't had the development of machines that give us cars and pharmaceuticals and give us the ability to have hot and cold running water. What one of the greatest advantages of the 19th century was the expansion of water supply. Why? Because it meant people lived longer. It was the greatest single public health advantage. Brought about by free markets and liberal societies. other societies still haven't caught up. Other societies that don't have this wicked liberalism

haven't yet caught up with the clean water that we were getting in England in the 19th century. If you really oppose this motion, what you are arguing for is going back to a rural idyll that never really existed. The idea that the people farming the commonhold land in the 18th century were living these lovely lives is just not true.

They died of disease. The women died in childbirth. They had a subsistence existence with no time for luxury or anything other than the basics of their life. It is free market capitalism that has fundamentally transformed that so those of us in the Western world can travel from London and Toronto in eight hours. That that's not just done by an elite. It's a possibility for people within our societies and that wealth has been spreading. across the globe. That's why I reiterate this point of this decline in absolute poverty. That didn't happen because of Chinese communism. It happened because the Chinese got on the coattails of our liberal economy and traded with us. And that has been so fundamentally important and it's not just China, it's India as well. That's the bulk of where this collapse in absolute poverty has come from. Do you really want to unwind that? Because you think it'd be better to have stronger trade unions in the United States, producing goods that people don't want to buy? When actually you've spread prosperity globally by your purchasing decisions, your free decisions.

And that is always the fundamental point. I come back to it again. Who decides how your life is led? I'm a politician. I represent. 70,000 people in Northeast Somerset. Do you think it would really be better if I led their lives for them? Does one of them, including my wife, think it would be better if I led her life for her? No, we all want to lead our own lives and come together as fellow citizens, come together as families and help make our societies more prosperous. We want to succeed, we want to be philanthropic, we want to lead a full life.

A turn of phrase just employed by my friend Jacob really struck me. He talked about we're witnessing the success of the Anglo-Saxon sphere. And though I am, of course, an Anglo. I'm certainly not a fucking Saxon. And that's relevant. That's relevant to this discussion. My grandmother emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1953, 1954. She was 17 years old.

She came by herself. 17 years old. And she came to the United Kingdom because she was leaving a recently independent, recently partitioned India. She was born a Hindu in Chittagong. Partition meant that she had to flee across the border

to Kolkata. In the 1940s, her father, my great-grandfather, was in prison for being part of the Quit India movement. He was in prison during the time of the Bengal famine. we've talked with I think rose-tinted glasses about the liberalism of the 19th century but part of what that liberalism was built on was the pillaging and the exploitation of the

colonized global south and that left scars of poverty and sectarianism that ended up with me being on your stage right now and the reason why I think that's important is because I believe firmly in keeping two feet planted in reality. So let us not assess the liberalism of fantasy, the liberalism of abstraction. Let us assess the liberalism that actually exists in our world today. His earlier statements, George said, that liberalism is neutral in questions of religion,

but that neutrality can itself be a form of extreme. So if you are a Muslim student, in France right now and you want to wear, you're a buyer to school, you can't, you'll be turned away, you'll be denied in education for what you were. Indeed, when I was growing up as a, not very good Muslim, but still a Muslim, during the war on terror, it was abundantly clear that the state was not neutral on the question of my identity. People who looked like me, who looked like my cousins, were being drawn into control orders, didn't have rights of representation during these secret court panels. Some even were subject to extraordinary rendition.

The state was not neutral on the question of our religion. And this is the thing about the values of liberalism. On closer examination compared to reality, you won't find a single one of them that isn't stained with blood. So we've talked about liberalism as being the result of the free association of people Well, tell that to Salvador Aende, who was deposed as a democratically elected socialist leader in Chile by General Pinochet, whose neoliberal reforms were carried through at gunpoint because he rounded up, tortured, shot, killed, leftists,

all while the likes of Milton Friedman clapped along. Or consider, if you will, Order 39, which was implemented after the invasion of Iraq, which privatized most of Iraq's industries. Liberalism does not make us free. It doesn't get the big questions right. Hell, it's caused most of the major problems that we're facing today. So one last time I implore you vote against this motion

and in favor of real freedom. It's somewhat paradoxical that classic liberalism that stresses markets is losing somewhat in the marketplace of ideas because of its virtue. It's virtue is it's not very exciting. Now, if you want exciting politics, we had a lot of it in the 20th century, the blood-soaked 20th century. You will never hear a classic liberal say, we are on the right side of history.

History doesn't have sides, and it doesn't take sides, and we don't believe that. Classic liberals believe that history is whatever we make by our spontaneous cooperation and by our individualism. We've seen what happens when people believe. that they have an idea of the good so pure, so sound, so unassailable, that they ought to use coercion to get it. During the 1930s, when Stalin, the quintessence of the illiberal, when Stalin was using torture and concentration camps and terror to produce his glittering uplands of socialism, his supporters in the West, who lived at a safe distance for all the excitement,

said, well, you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. To which Orwell's withering reply was, where's the omelette? The glittering surprises of all the liberal regimes, the glittering achievements are always coming tomorrow, and tomorrow is always a day away. Now, liberalism is partly not exciting because it's not regiment, it's not organized, it is spontaneous, and it is, as I say, untidy. Well, the story of the Bible reduced to one sentence is, God created men and women and promptly lost control of events.

We like that. We don't want events controlled. A third reason, a third reason for the success and the admirable nature of classical liberalism that deserves your vote tonight. is ironically that it will minimize envy. Envy is minimized when inequalities are the direct result of government favoritism, of government putting the thumb on the scales. Envy, I don't know, have you ever thought of this? Envy is the only one of the seven deadly sins that doesn't give the sin or even momentary pleasure? I'm going to pause while you go down the list.

Mark Twain was a great scourge of the wealthy. He gave the name to the Gilded Age as the title of one of his unsuccessful novels. But one of his best friends was a hugely successful executive of Standard Oil, the great Satan of its day. And a journalist once said to Twain, Mr. Twain, don't you believe that your friend's wealth is tainted? Twain said, you're damn right, it's doubly tainted. It taint yours and it taint mine.

Liberalism protects people's. right to their own self and what they achieve and acquire. Finally, on the untidiness of it all. Jacob, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe a woman delivering her maiden speech, not quite the right word for her maybe, in the House of Commons, said, democracy is like sex.

If it isn't a little messy, you're not doing it right. So I leave you, as you prepare to vote on this, classical liberalism is like sex. That wraps up today's special feature on the Monk Debate podcast. I want to thank all of our participants, George F. Will, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Ash Sarkar, and Sorab Amari for a terrific debate. After the debate, the audience was polled again. This time the results were 61% in favor of the motion and is 39% opposed. Thus, the con team, Sorab Amari and Ash Sarkar won the debate by a not insignificant margin of 14.

If you have feedback or reflections on what you've just heard, please send us an email to podcast at monkdebates.com. Thank you for helping us bring back the art of public debate one conversation at a time. I'm your host and moderator, Rudyard Griffith. The Monk Debates are a project of the Aurea and Peter and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundations. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gerwitz are the producers. Be sure to download and subscribe where. ever you get your podcasts. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thank you again for listening.