the fight for cyber supremacy." land --day, "no man's surviving america in the 21st century." gatekeepers."e author series, all this week at 8 a.m. eastern, on c-span, c-span.org, and c-span radio. recent debate on capitalism and socialism with editors and academics. nick gillespie argued in favor of capitalism. a new york university professor argued in favor of socialism. michelle goldberg, "new york times" columnist, moderated the debate. this is one hour and 20 minutes. >> [applause] they can also much for coming out on a friday night. we are here to discuss that capitalism improves the standards of living and provides economic opportunity. the reason i was intrigued when someone asked me if i wanted to do this -- i came of age at a when it seems as if alternatives to capitalism had been completely discredited. remember, how much you have seen if there was really no alternative. it doesn't matter what you think of human mortality, the m imaginefact of life, i that if you are coming of age now, it seems as if communism has failed and capitalism has now failed. we are governed by this comic book villain oligarch, while people are forced to wear diapers, because they aren't given aspirin breaks. -- bathroom breaks. this is at a time when wages are while tens of millions are investing in silicon valley startups. i'm interested to see if i can be talked out of my sense of despair. i am grateful to cooper union for giving us this to have this debate and. -- i'm grateful to cooper union for giving us this historic great hall to have this in. it was scheduled for a different venue and it sold out quickly. it's testament to how much hunger there is for intelligent political debate that all of you are here. this is home to a tradition of political debate going back to 1860 when abraham lincoln made a major anti-slavery address in this very place. thank you to -- [applause] books,ou to haymarket operating sales outside the hall. verso books and the union for providing licensing services so this debate can reach people beyond this room. and let me explain how this is going to go. we're going to -- we have a number of formal questions that everybody that we talked about beforehand -- people will have three minutes on each side to address them and then two minutes for rebuttals. so that i don't have to kind of talk over people and try to bring segments to a close. their mics will cut out when their time is done. keep it moving fairly briskly, then we'll move into a more informal discussion and there are not going to be audience questions, which i hope doesn't disappoint people very excited -- who are very excited to hear. > let me introduce our panelist. nick gillespie editor in chief of reason and reason tv. sorry, editor of reason.com and reason tv. katherine mangu-ward is editor in chief of reason. vivek chibber is professor of sociology at new york university. [cheers and applause] wax and a person with a very active fan base, and the editor of catalyst journal of, his latest book is post colonial theory and specter of capital. bhaskar sunkara is the founder editor of publisher of jacobin. >> [applause] >> we're going to begin by trying to define our terms. the first question, which is going to start with reason, what is capitalism? >> thank you very much, michelle. thank you very much to jacobin for organizing this debate. let's get it out the way. capitalism is a system that doesn't have any answers. it does not seek to impose answers to the question which -- what should we produce, how should we produce it, who gets the stuff we produce. that kind of sounds like garbage. i will try to get little more nitty-gritty also in my answer. what that means in practice is that property is largely privately owned. it means that profit provides incentive for production, it means employment is at will. the government role in the economy should be limited and forces of supply and demand in a free market are the most efficient means of providing the for the general well being of human kind. i'm mostly going to obsess about that last point. my colleague nick gillespie will be hitting on other topics. i will keep coming back to this idea. question whether or not capitalism lets people flourish, whether it provides the best life that we can provide for them. couple of points here. between 1990 and 2010 we have had the most incredible revolution. michelle's introduction expressed dispair. i rarely find myself on the side of optimism. i will give a go here. say that in those 20 years, we took the number of people living in extreme poverty and cut it by 50%. we did the same thing for the number of people who don't have access to clean drinking water. what happened in those 20 years? i know. capitalism. that's what happened. capitalism came to india and china. the version of capitalism that came to india and china is wildly imperfect. it doesn't look anything like the version of capitalism i would like to see in the world. it looks enough like capitalism to have generated this huge boom in standards of living. when americans talk about capitalism, we can be myopic. we can think about what our capitalism look like now. that's a different question, what capitalism and idea looks like and what capitalism looks like in the world at large. you don't hear that either nick and i are fans of big business. we're not hear to argue for crony capitalism, we're not here argue for big government. we do not like those things. we do want to talk about how things really fit in the world. i'm sure the gentleman from jacobin would like to disavow how socialism plays out in the world. let's talk about the real world but let's keep in mind that we have an ideal vision of capitalism as well. >> thank you. [applause] >> jacobin. >> what capitalism is an economic system fundamentally. my colleague said capitalism doesn't have any answers. that's exactly i think is right. it doesn't have answers to most problems the world is facing today. what it is is a system fundamentally organized around exchange. around trade around money around commodities. in particular, capitalism is organized around purchase and sale of labor power. the first system in the world where work has been fundamentally carried out by people working for a wage in the united states today and in the world where any part of the world that will be called capitalist. the form of labor is wage labor. this country is 65 to 70 percent of the population are wage laborers. on the other side of this, is a group of people who own production. this is a tiny percentage of the population. when we say owns means of production, it means two things. either it's direct ownership of the means production or control. a ceo for example technically is a salaried employee. we'll call them a capitalist because they make all the decisions an owner would make. in between these, we have a population of in the united states about 20 or 25 percent of the people depending on how you measure it, who we would call middle class. this will be people who are managers, people who are white collar, high level salary people or owner operators. mom and pop shops. people who have their own engineering, graphic designers, things like that. the essence of capitalism everything we know about it, resolves around the relationship between the first and the second group of people. the wage laborers and the capitalist. we're going to ask the question, is this a system that is the best possible means for improving standards of living for providing opportunities, etcetera. it's a hard question to answer, when we say best possible for socialists, you're comparing against two things. you're comparing it against a system that today, i hope we will all agree on this, a system that today nobody supports. which is soviet style or chinese style system of socialism. on the left today, people don't support it. on the right it's strong man to knock down socialism. i want to stipulate now for the rest of the conversation, neither i or nor bhaskar will support that system. a second alternative to which we compare it is the improvements that have been made within capitalism improvements that push it in a socialistic direction, but without going whole hog into public ownership with means of production. the reason most socialist s embrace those systems they are driven by the same principles. >> thank you. [applause] >> you know the first thing i want to say, michelle is, i didn't realize when you were talking about working conditions, that the "new york times" requires its people to work at their desk and wear diapers. i thought that only happened in the third world. >> it clearly does not. >> i realized many of the people at the "new york times" are that old. we'll let that pass. >> obviously if everybody in this country had working conditions of the "new york times," capitalism won't be up for debate. >> well, yes. >> [applause] >> the revolution, right -- i want to pick up on some of the things he said that capitalism is an economic system. i want to stress, actually that capitalism is a subset of a larger liberal political philosophy. i suspect that reason people in jacobin and people in this audience agree on which, the very way that we're talking about this question does the individual, you have individual fair under a particular political economic social system. capitalism is the application to economics of a kind of classical liberal theory that goes back at least to the 17th century. it's really all about centered around the individual and increasing and maintaining autonomy for individuals. the way that i think about capitalism or the world and the liberal philosophy from which i tend to defend capitalism was best summed up few years ago by a canadian politician named tim mowen, who ran around the slogan, i want my married gay friends to be able to defend their plans plants with guns. that's in my ways, is what reason's vision of capitalism is about. it's about securing basic rights to live and to explore and to express yourself to participate in what john stewart, a political economist who straddled libertarian ideas as well as socialist ideas, said about running experiments of living. that's what we're defending when we talk about capitalism. >> thank you. you get the last word. >> i'm glad you said that. actually we couldn't agree more. socialist and people on the left for generations have fought for those right. the reason we have those rights -- because of the left. >> [applause] >> it's important to understand that the liberties that libertarians embrace are liberties that were not bestowed upon the population by the elite power in the 19th power. -- 19tyh century. what they put in place was oligarchies. everyone where and always came about through fight and struggle of trade unions working people, of all colors and all genders. that's a baseline that we can agree on. what in the rest of the debate i will be trying to establish is that the problem with capitalism is not that it's based on the principles or the philosophies that our colleagues here are talking about. the problem with capitalism is that it cannot possibly deliver on them. this is what we're going to try to establish from now. >> [applause] >> to return to jacobin. first question, is the -- is this a force for good? >> maybe i'll surprise you, michelle. no. in a limited way. what i said earlier, what capitalism is a system that's based on market exchange. that's little bit misleading. what capitalism is a system which structurally compels firms and on owners to maximize profits. at the center of capitalism is blind relentless pursuit of profits. it's a compulsion. it is not a profit opportunity. it is not an entrepreneurial spirit. it is a compulsion. if firms don't maximize profits they die. this is a very important consequence. it goes straight to the question of freedom and autonomy. because in capitalism for the vast majorities of the population, there's no choice but to offer up labor services for wages. they have to seek employment. the employer who hires them is an entity for whom the only thing that matters and only thing that can matter is not just acquiring but maximizing their profits. this results in two things. for the worker, they have to when they take the wage bargain, what comes with the wage bargain is an increment for the eight, nine or ten hours or 19th century 12 hours or third world today, 14 hours, for that period, i surrender my autonomy to you. i pee when you tell me to, i talk when you tell me to. i stand where you tell me to stand. you get to set the wage level. it's not just that inside the workplace the boss gets to tell me what to do. because he has the power to set the terms of the wage bargain, the boss gets to decide what the level of wage is. he gets to decide what time i come in and leave. i understand this. it means that first of all, income distribution and capitalism is set by people who run the firms. by the ceo's and managers. that means that their power, their bargaining power sets what they will get out of it. that's why in the last 45 years, what we've seen in the united states while productivity and manufacturing as gone up, real wages, production line workers , for ordinary workers have stagnated. they've gone up maybe six percent. for the bottom 60%, there has not been rise in wages in 40 years. that's a consequence of their lack of freedom. secondly, means that for the ten hours they're at work they are unfree. for the time they leave work, now they are spent rest of that time getting ready to come back to work again. they have a choice who to work for. whole point is, whoever they work for, that's the bargain they get. [applause] >> did you hear that little bit at the end? >> yes, they have a choice who they work for. but, that's my whole point here. that's what i will dwell on. people have choices. people have choices when they take a job. they have choices when they buy an object, when they engage in commercial transactions -- where people don't have choices is when they deal with government. one of the strongest spaces for capitalism when we carve out space that is voluntary transactions. i agree, self-expression, individual autonomy. these are the goods we're seeking. it's clear in the case of the modern american market economy, where people are living free their work lives. we heard about the working class and capitalists. hope we hear about the bourge oise, later. if you want. >> these days, we are benefiting from the modern capitalistic system. profits are information. just like prices are information. what profits and prices tell us is when we are making the right amount of stuff for the people who want it, people who are going to voluntarily buy it. it tells us when people are in jobs they are willing to do for the wages that they are offered. this is something that is constantly locked in this debate. the idea that people are somehow coerced in their working environment. debate.it simply is not the livd experience of workers in america at any level. >> [laughter] >> this is not to say that people love their jobs and just bounce in there everyday full of unicorns and rainbows. but, this is still ultimately every morning about the decision , whether you decide to wake up and go to work or not. the day that you choose not to go -- you know what happens to you at that point, nobody comes to arrest you or take you away. that is in fact what happens. i think this is something that our friends on team jacobin like to erase. that is not the ideal form of their system. under capitalism we have a constant ongoing push for profits which leads to all the , riches that you currently enjoy. it leads to the fact that you could pay your five or ten bucks for tickets to this event. it leads to uber and phone that you're texting on now and tweeting about how i'm an evil capitalist. >> thank you. >> [applause] >> let's start with the question of choice. is it the case you wake up every morning, and wonder whether you are going to go to work or not? for me it is. >> [laughter] >> that's capitalism. >> [applause] >> it's a great system if you're on top. it's never been a better system if you're on top. the fact of the matter is, for people who actually are, people who work for a living, here's the expression they use. i have to work for a living. there's no choice in capitalism about whether or not you will go to work. this is no small thing. it is because there's no choice about whether or not will you go to work. that you submit to the power the -- the power, the authority, and quite often the degradations of your employer. it's disingenuous to suggest that when people go to work, they face an open playing field for themselves. what they face is an employer whose soul prerogative, soul to pay out ass little as they can and to get as much work out of the workers as possible. is this a bastion of freedom and is a bastion of opportunity? not really. it's true that it's better than being a slave. it's true that it's better than being a serf it's true that it's better than state socialist society. those are the choices we put before our kids? are these the choices on which we want to hang our philosophy of life. true that thely state social systems were abominations. we have done much better within capitalism. every time we've done better it's been increase power of workers and giving people access to the basic necessities of life without the market. >> [applause] can freedom exist without private property? >> let me get to that. >> we are as if negotiation and ,rade and change improvements the capitalist achievement does of puttingly consist them within reach of factory girls. we live in a world that is flowing with crab. things to buy. opportunities to have, and freedoms to indulge in. it may be among the working brooklynfetishizing youth, but that is what is happening. we tried this and more opportunities than we ever have. we have more things and or opportunity than we have had in the united states, the cost of everything you want to buy that is not completely regulated or prized by the government such as health care and education. it has been getting cheaper in terms of the amount of work that needs to be produced in order to print this purchase it. a car, a refrigerator, a television set, a cable package, and internet connection goes on and on in the developing world. there is not a placement is not getting better, where trade or capitalism increases. even though we have had a terrible economy for all of the 21st century, we are still doing better. we were saying that extreme poverty has been more than halved in the past 25 years, because of trade, not because of aid, not because of giveaways by states to corrupt dictators around the globe. can freedom exist without private property? i would say no. i don't think this is a question about socialism either. begins with the individual and a concept of self ownership. it begins very clearly and profoundly with the right to say no. you're not going to do something and it is a cheap line to say working for a living is better than slavery. it is quantitatively better than slavery, it is qualitatively distinct from slavery as well. --is wrong, particular particularly in an advanced economy from mexico, to try and blur those lines. this is a debate between liberal philosophy and capitalism as a plays out in the world, which makes us richer and better off. >> thank you. [applause] >> i was hoping i would not have to speak tonight, i could just hang in the back of the music video. don't burst my bubble. i think someone ownership is a great way to put it. in that respect, do we have freedom today? yes, we have some freedom. today? yes, we have some freedom. it is limited freedom. it is a freedom was enjoyed by a small group of people who own private property. the rest of us are at these people's mercy. i'm not talking about personal property. i'm not talking about your ownership of a toothbrush. i'm not talking about nick's leather jacket. he got it at the kennedy concert in 1982 and i would die for his rights to keep it. but private property is different. those are the things that give the people that on them power over those who don't. take a privately owned workplace, business owners get to impose working conditions and argument a good alternative most people would reject. while workers do most of the work at the job, owners have a unilateral say of what happened afterward. this is under we are driving home but it is a simple point. i think is a point that even libertarians should not reject if they are thinking their perception of self ownership seriously. that is not a fair bargain, economic relations are not free and private if the contract was made under duress. the contracts we have today are contracts that undemocratically give some people tremendous power over others. if you want to talk about concrete, but still that, as look at existing societies like europe's welfare state. places where private property has been undermined through the regulation of capital. those societies, to some degree limit freedom for the people , that own private property, but the majority that don't, these people enjoy a greater range of choice and a greater chance to achieve their potential. they have this freedom not because private property is upheld but because the freedom for the minorities who own private property is limited. [applause] fundamentally, socialists believe in the rights of people to the fruit of their own labor. of course we believe in individual rights and individual freedom but have individuality can only be achieved in a society truly embodying the virtues of liberty and solidarity. of course, we believe in a system of law, we just believe in different law. ending private property is not just about government taking things but we also don't want the corporate bureaucracies to control our society. social and economic decisions must be made by the people they most affect. libertarians can't go far enough embracing the mars base a vision the vision of freedom, they can't go far enough to truly embrace the self ownership that nick was talking about. [applause] the idea that we get to define private property as a property that seems kind of yucky and we don't like, we have to put all of the post up that we really do like in a different basket of personal property, i think that is a fundamental misunderstanding of how those two things are barely tightly interrelated. if you like your stuff, if you want to be able to do what you want to do in your home, in your car, on your computer, this is all enabled by private property. if we are talking about civil liberties, they exist because we have faces carved out where people not only on their own bodies but also the physical space around them, they on the -- they own the media in which they communicate. this is more true than ever, it turns out that capitalism as it exists in the world does not result in a narrowing of the channels for communication. let us talk about free speech. it turns out that greedy corporations actually have made it incredibly easy, therefore liberated the ways for people to get together, shout at each other, express their opinions, do they want to do. that is predicated on our understanding of where the lines of free speech start. they are different in public spaces or private spaces. speech is freer in private spaces. this is something that you can tell by the fact that when you look on a corporate owned platform of any kind, using people shouting about how awful corporations are. that strikes me as evidence that corporations are not suppressing expression or personal liberty. furthermore, i want to say that private property as a precondition for political liberty does not mean businesses get to be in charge of the government. that is the opposite of the thing we're talking about, the moment big businesses and the government get together, everyone loses. socialist lose, libertarians lose, it is the inevitable endgame of socialism as it is proposed. >> thank you. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2017] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> the next question is what is the relationship between freedom and democracy. >> capitalism. >> capitalism and democracy. >> this is a historical question. i think we should be very clear about the answer to this question. capitalism has everywhere and always fought against the imitation of democracy. and the expansion of suffrage. no need to clap, is a sad thing and a historical fact. once we got them, capitalism has worked to undermined it. just enjoy the power it has with the potential it could have his -- is hemmed in. capitalists don't want to give up power to democratic processes. didn't want to do with engaging empowered voters. why were capitalists so worried about working in democratic society? it is simple, they thought that if working people could express their political rights and they wouldn't stop there, they would extend democracy into economic and social wellness. capitalists underestimated how resilient the system is. we do live in a democratic capitalist society. a society has been made more civilized. but this is because of the struggles of working-class movement and despite the resistance of capitalists. the fact is that we still live in a partial democracy, not a complete democracy, that is because of how much time we spend in our workplaces. a few ceos make decisions that affect millions of people. this tyranny bleeds over into other spheres of life, even if you are saying that the tirade ny at the work place is fine, it can be justified but we want democracy elsewhere. it doesn't work that way. it has been consistent for the icloud powers of capitalism undermining our political democracy. whatever noble and liberal dream we share of liberty and justice has been frustrated by how well and empowering it has been distributed. if we were to go forward, if we were to try to achieve a deeper democracy, and economic democracy, the kind that would allow the majority to win and live in freer and happier lives, we would see capitalists as a barrier to that event. we see it everywhere. this, to me, is history. so the only recourse they have is to defend his history and say that the emerald against democracy were justified or go on. but this libertarian temptation to both play services to the democracy is unsustainable. [applause] defining whatrth we mean by democracy. democracy is majority rule. how many of you are republicans? how many of you want absolute democracy now that the republicans on the white house and both houses of congress? is anybody out there? this whole idea did that democracy is an absolute good is [beep]. we all know that, the single achievement of the past 500 years in western political philosophy has been limiting the state. there are certain things that the state does not own of you, from your because of you. we all believe in fedored democracy. nancy mclean recently wrote a democracy in chains book about how the evil koch brothers will work democracy. i should point out that the koch brothers are donors to reason and thank god. we believe that there are individual rights, including the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that a majority of dollars from republicans can vote to take away from the rest of us. so let's get that straight, democracy is not an unfettered the good. it is deeply problematic. there is a wide range of the shared activities of which majority can vote and we can decide this for that within a certain range but nobody wants unfettered democracy. ocracy. mob the question then is what is the relationship between capitalism and democracy. to the extent that there are social goods that we agree that we want to fund and if you're a liberal, a libertarian in today's parlance, classic liberal in years past, that might be something like public education. i will speak for catherine because as libertarians we are not allowed to speak for each other, i'm not even allowed to speak for myself. i usually am not quite sure what i think about something. take public education. that is something where we might tax people. we will not take all of their income, we tax people and give it to people so they can participate more fully in society, develop themselves, have more autonomy, etc. ok, let's do that. it doesn't need to be absolute. we need tax money, you get tax money from markets and commercial transactions of things that people actually want , as catherine was talking about. capitalism or the economic application of liberal, political philosophy gives you the money you can use in taxes to help people participate more fully in society. that is not such a bad thing, we might argue in terms of -- i know one thing that is good is that they are market socialists so they miss a public education -- they might say public education would be better if it was based on charter schools and schools of choice within a system. rather than mandatory schools that are a lot like prisons. >> for the record, it is funny. that last part was just li bel. it is funny that they make mention the koch brothers and i appreciate the disclaimer. does anyone know where the family got rich? catherine has brought up the specter of stalinism and socialism practice a little bit. they got rich making deals in the ussr. not the brothers themselves, but part of the family was established from there. this was the time when anti-stalinist were announcing early late 1920's and 1930's that stalinism, we should not have -- forward this capitalist interest were. there had to drop their ideology and do business with who they could. now let's take the example of public education. if they're conceding that, i actually agree that most conservatives and libertarians would concede that a child has the right to be literate and the -- learn basic mathematics and it is really unequal. but we have public education in this country. if they have this right is a social right, what is more fundamental than housing and then having three meals a day? isn't that even more fundamental than education? why don't we enjoy all those things as social rights? as far as democracy, i want to stress, of course we leave -- believe in civil rights.of course we believe in the rights of minorities . the question is how to take those paper rights and turn them into a reality. the historical record is very important for american socialist. we fought for the eight hour suffrage, women's reproductive rights, the fight for gay marriage and on and on. this is our history, this our legacy and what our actual relationship to democracy and practice is. [applause] >> this is the last question for the formal part of the debate. does capitalism allow people to reach their full potential? >> this one seems easy, it is having access to resources that allows people to reach their full potential and as you just heard, the jackson post was said at the way that we give people access to basic step they need is socialism. we cited against the capital system to shove all the stuff around and in fact, i will come back to the song i've been singing all along. in the last 25 years, there has been a spectacular, unprecedented, my blowing large growth in the number of people who have access to the basics. i do not think anybody in this room would disagree that if there is any economic insight, this is capitalism, this is a very fundamental fact which plays to our point of agreement, people need stuff to do they want to do. capitalism generates stuff. it also generates an incredible amount of stuff. -- amount of stuff for the poorest people. i think what you always your in these debates is the inequality point. not irrelevant. it is born from the political perspective because people respond to what yields fair. at the same time, the poorest people, while the gaps between them and the richest people is growing, the poorest people are getting richer at a spectacular rate. if your apprentice is that too self-actualized, two floors, people need to have some basics and go out and do their thing, capitalism is the best way to provide as basics and i think everything else is essentially clouding the issue. if we have private property, people have their own space and their self ownership to do they want to do. we have capitalism even in the garbage and imperfect way it is existing in the world, people are rich enough to get a hold of the basics. the amount of people's income they spend on food has plummeted dramatically. the amount they spend on housing has plummeted to medically. plummeted dramatically. it is an american truth. it is so easy to gloss over, that is why want to say over and over like a broken record. people have enough my to buy the -- enough money to buy the basic stuff and there is no amount of handwaving and talking about the workers and talking about the capitalists that can make that untrue. the idea that we are looking for something else for self-actualization is totally misguided. people should be able to choose what their own best lip looks -- life looks like. they are maximizing the area for personal choice and it starts with providing the basics and that is what capitalism does. [applause] >> the answer is no, it can't. this is my time you are taking up. a couple of factual issues here, i want to respond to two factual issues quickly that nick and catherine brought up. this idea that there has been a massive decrease in poverty rates around the world, this is driven by china. it is a little misleading, i don't want to be the point he ad professor here. it is a little misleading what they're saying and china is a country in which 50% of the revenue is still controlled by the state. if that is your vision of capitalism, it is not quite where you wanted to be. secondly, this is more important. you can't be serious when you're talking about the united states. three out of four americans are better off now than they were 30 years ago, actually untrue. even outside in new york, it seems misleading but outside the country, even in the last 20 years, the poor are better off. ? absolutely untrue. we are living through the first. -- in history in the last 40 years in the united states, the bottom 50% of the country has not seen his wages or income rise and this is from stanford, study after study you are showing this. why does it matter? we think that capitalism doesn't have bargaining. quite the contrary, it absolutely has bargaining, the point is the bargain itself between employer and employee is what is resulting in stagnated incomes for the bottom. why has it resulted in this? the trade unions are supporting institutions for the state to dismantle and what we have is a complete despotism of the employers. this is not an aberration, this is capitalism. this is what you get when you take away the support from working people. address the question very carefully. you work tot capacity? yes, if you're on top. if you are wealthy. what does take for you to develop this? autonomy. you should have the freedom to decide what you want to do. time, to develop them and in the end, money. for the bulk of the working time of a working american, they are presiding in a tyranny. a private tyranny that is called the workplace. catherine, you said civil liberties are enhanced whenever there is private property, you can't be serious. the one place in america are you do not have full right to speech is in the workplace, a place that is the essence of private property. if you want to organize a union, you are fired. these are called employment rights and these are encroachments on people's autonomy. secondly, time. do you know that 80% of americans feel stressed? they are underpaid and overworked. overworked means you are killing yourself at work and what happens when you are away? you are just recovering to like go back to work. what autonomy? what flourishing? >> thank you. [applause] here is the question. as catherine pointed out and is -- has underscored, we are not talking about perfection, capitalist perfection. we're talking about -- versus a socialist paradise. i'm not a religious person but i believe in original sin. we live in a fallen world. china is more capitalist than it was 15 or 20 years ago. it has a long way to go to where it would even be similar living in mississippi but to the extent that it is more capitalistic, fewer people are starving to death. that is also true of the continent of africa where between 2000 and 2015, two-way trade between the united states and africa more than doubled and extreme poverty rate, which is generally defined as living on a or less, it has massively declined. it is more capitalistic than it was, there's more commerce, is more trade, there were more goods that i owned that i sell to you. you buy and use only something back. -- and you sell me something back. also, what i said was that if you look and this is scholarship done by scott winship, drawing up the panel survey of income it is not controversial in the field of income ability. three out of four people, by the time you turn 40 you are doing better off than your parents were. it is an old song and a really nice on to keep saying this is the first generation in america that will live at a lower rate than before. think about it yourself, and was the last time you bought a tv? when was the last time you paid more in dollar amounts, not accounting for inflation for better features, things have been getting cheaper and cheaper in nominal dollars and also in the amount of work that the average worker has to do in order to do it. things are getting better, where they need to get better still is to remove restraint on individual rights so we are not locking people up, not for nonviolent drugs and things like that. a lot of it has place for improvement but economic , stagnation is not actually what we are talking about here. >> now we are going to move into something a little more informal. what i want to know, is it your position that just because capitalism has given us a world crap that theth inequalities that that creates -- the kind of desperate stories that we are all familiar with from our health care system, the people who have these inhumane scheduling systems that defeat any attempt at family life or stability, all this just-in-time scheduling, is it your position that that is basically worth it for the war world full of -- for the world full of crap that capitalism creates? a couple -- >> a couple of things. the first is that those things, first, those horrors of working life are a thing that are more common in poor societies. in that sense, yes, we are saying those things are -- that the world full of crap corresponds to fewer of those things in the world. we are not saying that the world full of crap is contingent on those things. i think it is likely that the next 20 years will see a heck of a lot more crap and a lot less of the kind of abusive practices that we hear about all the time that workers experience. that will be in part because political advocacy also be because of this year society. the cause we have more money and the luxury goods that we consume is moral goodness. we actually consume -- we in the united states as we have gotten richer, we commit less, we are more conscious about our environment of footprint, that is because we have the luxury to do that because we are rich. you see that and lots of other areas. >> if that is true, i mean the united states is richer than a lot of scandinavian countries but you have a abuse of workers here, people being bankrupted by the health care system, yet you have people being bankrupted by childbirth that we don't have in countries that aren't as rich as us but they devoted themselves to a more equitable system. >> one of those things is that when people are richer, the benefits of that, the change by which those riches make our lives better changes from sector to sector. in the united states that health care and education are two places that are heavily dominated by the public sector. these are not places where they let the market get in and improve people's tuitions, we had not actually realized a system of free labor, people are much more trapped in a health job for a government job where teaching job than i would argue in a lot of other sectors. >> so against the example of scandinavian and social democracy, when you talk about socialism and market socialism, how is that different? how does the system you're proposing different than a european welfare state? >> i would say that we start at a certain level thinking about what we want to see in a society, what are we against in capitalism, i think that socialists, especially those with marxist background like to have very scientific protections, this is called scientific socialism for that reason. this is a more ethical complaint. we are against exportation, we are against hierarchy to whatever extent it can be abated, you want that sort of society. we have seen the struggles of the workers movement in much of europe and scandinavia but also elsewhere. they have built welfare states that have given people a greater range of choices and opportunities. we see that working. the system also has a bit of an achilles' heel. even though to put workers in a commanding position of power compared to almost anywhere else, it caps investment decisions in the hands of capitalists. that allowed them to slow the desk slowly undermined and wrote all of that. that's why i think if you want a sustainable long-term socialism then you need to go beyond social democracy and socialize investment. it comes to market or not markets, i want what works. i think this is something where we can say that given our experience has on the path of central planning, that model is broken and the future with computing and other things, maybe a more participatory system would work. maybe we will still have questions of calculations where we might need the market, to me, that is a question that has to be decided, not high priority but in the process of struggle. we envision society without class, a society after capitalism, not just socialism within capitalism. >> most of us would agree that capitalism has to answer for the sins of actually existing. you can just talk about it as this theoretical abstraction. why shouldn't the very well-documented cores of communism impact how people think about the possibility of socialism and why shouldn't it make them weary about something that goes beyond social democracy? [applause] >> it should impact the thinking of any thinking person. any history or past experience, you can't ignore, it has to factor in. in the same way when we talk about reason model, no one has mentioned franco, these are obviously different things. i think it is suffice to say, in the historical record of the 20th century, you have seen democratic experiment and socialism. you have seen movements that have attained great power and even state power and honored and respected democracy while absent a social and economic rights. this is most sweden and norway and a host of other places including central america in nicaragua. this is were less movements have participated in peaceful transfers of power. you have also seen in other instances, gross violations of people's dignity and rights, you see that on both sides. both socialism and capitalism are capable of democratic and authoritarian forms. i think people should keep these things out of their mind. i think it is important but also it is important to know that the democratic socialist tradition of the united states is long-standing farber for the soviet union, it exists now afterwards and many of these people were the most intelligent critics of stalinism and political systems. our knowledge, even the worst stalin and the weight is used to describe it came from the democratic left. >> i will ask you guys one more question before we turn to the final proposition. to me have a poor person in the united states going to a bad public school, being bored with substandard medical care, how is that for some more free than a person born into a european country with cradle-to-grave welfare states? >> we should recognize that they can move to america where they can come here. while we are talking about a place that is generally hostile to immigration, it has been historically and continues to be. i say this to somebody i am an , open borders person. anybody who wants to come to the united states should be allowed to enter. that is not a small thing on the left that is usually meant that i am somehow trying to stoke the reserve army of the unemployed to drive down wages so that capitalists can get more wealthy, even wealthier still by having low wages, what it means is that people can come here and flourish in a way that europe, because of socialism -- and this is generally true, the heart the -- higher the social worker state, the more homogeneous the population tends to be. they don't like immigrants, this is one of the reasons why donald trump is not really stupid but profoundly evil. even he is within a few generations of emigrating, he would close off america, many people on the left would do that as well, many people on the right. i think it is a big mistake. when you talk about what it means to be poor in america, clearly there are people were are born in bad circumstances. the way you fix that is not by started to talk about democratic socialism and investing socially, it is that you free them from a public school system which, despite increases in people spending, never seems to help people that need to have the most. themree them -- you free from that system. that is why they been very forward in the school choice moment. is where people have more choices within whatever limits are placed in front of them, you do the same thing with health care, liberate the health care system from a place where $.50 to every dollar is being spent by the government, it doesn't work very well, there is no reason why health care and education can't be delivered much more cheaply and innovatively by a flourishing free market. but to say wouldn't it be great if we were all born middle class in denmark, maybe. but that is not the world we live in, the question is why we have the poor with us everywhere, how do we have the fewer of them and how do we have more options? i would argue that is limiting the government and providing a basic social safety net and then looking to civil society as well as market socialism within those areas that we agree going to be under public purview like education and health. >> about immigration, it seems that the one thing that america actually has historically done better than most countries in europe is integrate immigrants and part of the backlash against immigrants in the european social democracy is that people don't like paying all this money for people that they see as then -- as them. and the one thing that makes me despair about the social democratic system that underlie seems ideal is that it doesn't seem to -- it seems to crack under the strain of diversity. >> that is not true at all. a couple of points, let me say something, what nick said is really important. he says the health care system is working and that we need to free it up because we see there's too much money being public -- public money being spent on it. it is being freed up because they are clearly failing and they need to get them more choice by bringing markets in. it is important because too often in the net estate, in these debates, when it find something in the -- and it is working, here's the thing, health care in europe is provided at better quality at lower costs and with greater scope through the public system. it is not private health care. an american debates, you you americans know that the rest of the world exists? let us look at public schools. yes, public schools are failing because they have been choked because the funding to them has been choked. there is stealth privatization of public education because of linear financed. the result is not to further advertisements of the poor get trapped in these apartheid the neighborhoods of theirs, these are increasingly balanced schools with kids with michael get to lead, the option is to genuinely fund them and get the money the way there given money and other advanced industrial countries. privatizing is a kind of extortion. public support is on the table so either you stay in the crack houses we are giving you and that is not fair to me. >> think the socialists should be reminded that denmark exists. >> let me answer your observation that the abuses that are going on in the workplace of the united states are something that occurs in poor countries so let's talk about these poor countries. why do they occur in poor countries? poor countries is what victorian england was in the 19th century, the reason you don't see these abuses occurring in europe right now is not because there's something magical about rich countries. in all these countries, their trade unions and political parties that defend workers and it makes it hard for employees to have what they have in the united states. it is not about rich and poor, it is because in more developed countries there is a history of trade unionism. united states stands alone in having a protection from workers organizations with those workers and that is why in the u.s. today, it is a parallel to what you find in poor countries when these two parts of the world have no petition from workers and the unbridled power of employers, that is why. that is not denmark, that is the best of the world. >> what they stand up for is workers to the exclusion of people who would hope that they could someday be workers in the countries. quite against immigrants they stand up for workers. they stand up against people who want to work for lower wages, they want to make that illegal. those people don't have jobs at all, i honestly think that standing up for workers is and i examined sentence that should be more closely examined, there are workers that need our help. let me try to systematically answer what michelle raised. i'm sorry i did not hear everything you said. it is true that in europe right now, there is a kind of backlash against immigration amongst certain sections of the population. let us keep something else in mind. the wave of migrants and immigrants that came out of the middle east, iraq and syria over the last 12 years is quite extraordinary how in europe they were welcomed. in the midst of that, there's been a backlash. that is not an artifact of the welfare state. since the establishment of the european union, wages have stagnated, england has gone through its worst. wages worst period of stagnation. what they say is that our mainstream parties, our own states are doing nothing to defend our wages while our benefits are being cut. the reason they point to that e immigrants is not because of social democracy, it is because all the establishment is telling them is that there is nothing we are going to do to improve your economic luck. europe has been in unrelenting austerity for almost 15 years. the far right comes in and says to them, here is why you are stagnating, these people are coming in and taken it away. there is no other political it party that is addressing the is issue other than the far right. immigration has not been an issue in europe. it has become one because of the fact of the stagnating standards of living and that is all because of the increasing power of the right, the increasing power of corporations any increasing insecurity that we are feeling that has nothing to do with social democracy, it has to do with the altered balance of power. [applause] >> we have to move on to the final question. is capitalism the best way to improve standards of living ensure political and economic , freedom and provide , opportunities? >> before i respond, i would like to thank everyone for participating. i sent catherine and email and she responded within a couple of hours. libertarians see market opportunities i will give them , that. thank you for both sides being so respectful. please keep it there, i can't imagine what the offspring of socialist and libertarian would be. probably the most inept human being. this question itself is a bit unfair, it is too easy for us simply because we can't compare a theoretical system with an existing one in good faith. i can tell you socialism would be way better and give all sorts of assertions but that would be fair in a debate. what we can do is start with the reality, where we are right now and think about what a just society would look like. we think a just society would be one in which everyone is reaching a potential, the social scientists, even jay gould used to say about einstein that he was a certain, is interested and impressed with his brain, people equal talent lived and died in sweatshops in cotton fields. if the system is allowing people to reach their potential, i think we would all in it that it is not. it is still filled with amazing wealth, also, exploitation of poverty and all sorts of terrible misery, how can we make it better? we can try to tame the system at first. we can try to build the welfare straight to get the basics. we are all unique and different, we can all only develop these unique abilities in a society with a different order priority. a place where in equities are tackled so we all truly have a fair shot at life. this would mean that society will be able to socially provide people with the necessities, food, housing, education, i'm glad we only got one of them, health care, shall care to allow for him to do it. then we look in and say can we go further? can we go beyond it will burst into a more democratic, but it does -- but does the tory society. this is an open question, we notice the social democracy works, we also know it has limits, then we can go beyond it. this is a lot of my work on the idea that we can but we did so by testing and pushing the boundaries, it is a democratic process that can move forward but also one that can move backward. i imagine in a capital society that there will be plenty of room for nick and catherine to have a party of the 3% or 4% on the fringe of society. honestly it would not be much of a change for anybody. but where we end up, wherever we end up, it will not be a utopia. it will still be a place where we can get our heartbroken, we may be depressed and feel lonely, it won't cure your stomach ache, your nausea, indigestion, all that stuff, in the process of getting that i think we will solve a few of our animal problems. we begin to start tackling our human ones. socialists know that the old system isn't working and we know that a democratic one allows people to live more free and independent lives. that is the claim i can make and if you're interested in these ideas, i think it will be part of a long, multigenerational unit of movements. it will perhaps one day make the earth a homeland rather than a d exile. >> it is funny what you said just now, your system won't stop you from being heartbroken or lonely, it will cure your heartburnt hear your or your stomachache. capitalism does do those things actually. i'm sure all of you have been on tindr, i'm sure all of you have bought pepto-bismol, those are the gifts of capitalism and it sounds silly but it is true. >> capitalism as it exists in the world is imperfect, i appreciate the extent to which we managed to curb both of our impulses to compare real to imaginary and vice versa in this discussion, it has been an absolute pleasure, a rare one. i think what i want to wrap up is just to say that the virtues that capitalism fosters are not sexy ones. it does not martial courage and solidarity, the ridges of capitalism are prudence and politeness and to be the guide who is fighting for politeness is not a great place to be but i think it is the right place to be. a world where people are fundamentally basically decent to each other because they are going to engage in voluntary market transactions to get the stuff they need in which people can find love and secure their stomachache and go down to the duane reade, head over some money and whatever you need, thank you, whatever build out they wanted, it is an underrated miracle that capitalism has provided, the free-market enterprise embedded in capitalism, embedded in modern liberalism has provided. i think the idea of separating the craft from the broader the broader system is misguided. the crap is the system and the system is awesome. it is not as exists in the real world, perfect. i'll say that a million times over. reason magazine publishes 80 pages about how the current system is nothing magical capitalist system we would like to see. but, what i want to say is that if we are try to create a world where people can make their own choices about their own lives, capitalism does better than socialism, even more so than the whimpy capitalism socialism that these guys keep flogging. i think the reason that is true and is because it actually is a powerful force for bringing poor people into more access and basic income, fundamentals of life, just because rich people get richer doesn't mean the poor people are not dramatically better off and freer under a capitalist system. that was the last 20 years that show that, i think we can show in the developing world, only if we would let it. >> this really went by fast, i thought we were just getting warmed up. you whoo thank all of came here. jason furman has not been mentioned yet and he did incredible work. you may not know this but for all his radical talk, he runs a magazine and jason is one of his workers so for michelle of course, thank you for coming here and this does not going to my three minutes by the way. i would like for nick to think about this and address this, because nick said that capitalism, what it is is an authorization of the political philosophy and what would you suggest is capitalism is completely inconsistent with liberal and political philosophy. if you really do take liberty and freedom seriously, you have to be a socialist. there is no way around that, let me tell you why. the essence of liberal and political philosophy is not the protection of property, this is something that was foisted onto it in the 20th century because of liberalism's fear of socialism. the essence of liberalism from the moment of its founding through all of them, the essence was to treat people as equals. the moral equality of human beings, not equal treatment, not to give people money or equal income but to recognize the essential moral equality, the intrinsic worth of human beings. that is liberalism. it gets better. capitalism is a system, what it is is a system which systematically forces subordination, the willing subordination of the majority of the population to an unbridled authority. that forces them to subordinate every other one of their longings for artistic expression, love, health, whatever they want to do to the imperative of the job. it puts them against each other, it forces people to treat each other as means, not as ends. it forces every worker to see the other worker as a potential threat to his job. e leftaid this is -- th calls it an army of labor. it is. it is not the left's fault. that is capitalism's fault. when people are moving from one part of the world to the other, they are forced to view one another as rivals. that is how the labor market works. you cannot have a vision of the world in which you insist that people treat each other with respect, while you live in a system that is built on power, hierarchy, on war against all, that is the essence of capitalism and what motivated socialists from the start is to try to open up a space where people can have mutual respect and treat each other as ends, not as means. we have made progress in capitalism. it is true. all that progress has come from battles of the poor, led by socialists who try to tame these barbaric aspects of an inhuman system. [applause] >> so the question was put that if i really wanted to take liberalism seriously, i would have to be a socialist. i don't think so. i thought it over and among other things, the history of liberalism is bizarre in that it does not actually begin with beginning of liberalism which predates locke a couple hundred years before he was talking about it. it was about equality under the law. it was very important to understand that what religious fighters were fighting that is that we are all equal under the eyes of god and that a ruler does not have an absolute claim to any of our stuff, especially our lives. in that limitation of government power and state power or as the collective in the face or body of the king. that is where liberalism was from and it is about limiting government based on the idea that we are all not means to an end, i would argue that capitalism is a system that does a better job of actually implementing that vision. it does it in a lot of ways by releasing us from marbach -- mobocracy/ whether in the name of the king or the spirit or anything like that. capitalism as we have been talking about it and we can quibble with definitions, it is not perfect. it does cost of the need to be adjusted, but of the great things of what the lefties to lament about capitalism before they started going back to talking about lake capitalism rather than invest capitalism is that capitalism is infinitely malleable and takes on all this criticism and puts it in the system and get people more time off. kids did not stop working because of eugene b debs. they stop working because technological innovation and capital production that a point where we didn't need kids in order to grow food or make so cks. we produce more stuff with less time and less resources, that is good for all of us. that gives us time to watch netflix, that is also a product of capitalism, not of socialism. our lives are getting better, our food and culture are getting better, our lives are getting longer. this is not accidental to capitalism, this is because of hope it's, netflix, amazon, apple, dreadful pharmaceutical companies. and in pursuing the profit motive of mostly going out of business and going bankrupt but every once in a while coming up with pepto-bismol or antidepressants or all sorts of things like viagra, you name it, it is out there, the contraceptive pill was not a socialist fantasy, it was a capitalist reality, it is a good thing. capitalism helps us grow, it helps us energize ourselves and live our life to a full or -- fuller potential. what we do need is not to debate capitalism but take the wheels off of things, we have to stop shooting wars and we have to stop wars on drugs. we have to allow people to become or free, not just from -- become more free not just , from the state but from society in a way that says we don't like the way that you want to live, with only the way you look, we don't want you to live there and get rid of those impediments which come primarily from the state and vested, certainly not from capitalists were happy to sell anybody, anywhere, anything they want. >> thank you so much. [applause] [applause] >> join us tonight on the debate of the boycott insentient movements, a campaign to change is real's policy -- israel's policy in the palestinians. posted by the debate center at all parklands in dallas tonight at 8:00 p.m. eastern here on c-span. also tonight, american history tv is in primetime. we will show the u.s. capital historical society ceremony, honoring the actor and writer of hamilton. beginning at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span3. american history tv on c-span3. this week in primetime starting at 8:00 p.m. eastern. u.s. armyght, detachment stationed in berlin, germany during the cold war. >> they remained in the city just to give the russians any strength our time. destroy critical targets, like radio stations in power plants. the guys who cross over the walls. railyards. black voter night, suppression in the 1940's. during the debate, representative luis let go said what a travesty. negros by theding multiplied thousands to die and fight for freedom by telling them they still have no parcel of freedom at home. >> thursday night, president andrew jackson's political struggle to challenge and cripple the powerful bank of the united states. 1829, when he was president all of three months, ritingn was w friends that feeling thing to prevent our liberties to be crushed by the bank and influence would be to kill the bank. >> friday night, an interview with senator john mccain on the vietnam war's impact on his life and the country. >> i do not hold a grudge against the north vietnamese. and do not like them. there is some i would never want to see again. at the same time, i was part of a conflict, ok? and i thought they were some of the meanest people i have ever met in my life. there will several that were good people and that were kind to me. that is why was much easier for me to support, along with president clinton and others, the normalization of the relations between our two countries. >> watch american history tv this week in primetime on c-span3. >> washington journal is featuring authors of key books. join us for a live conversation about their popular books. ,oming up tuesday morning, republican like me, how i left the liberal bubble and learned to love the rights. on wednesday, angela j davis olicing theok, "p black man." former representative cliff stearns with his book. 29, on friday, december "digital world

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