The event was build socialism versus capitalism. I'm going to go in that order. So, Fosker. Oh, sure. Well, first of all, thank you very much to our hosts and to Steamboat Institute. This is, they've allowed me to speak for three, four hours so far over the last few days in defense of socialism, with so far no back room coercion or whatnot. It might be that I'm just here to throw the game. I don't even know it. But I think to begin with, I want to define capitalism and socialism. We'll use the terms maybe in slightly different ways. So at least we have a barometer of consistency. So capitalism is not the market. The market existed before capitalism. And in my vision of socialism, the market will exist after capitalism as well. Capitalism is, in my mind, a phenomenon that has a lifespan. It began a few hundred years ago. It's created tremendous wealth and progress in this world. It's been a historically progressive force. But it has also created a way out of the dilemmas that it confronts us with. The dream of the Enlightenment, the dream of liberty, of equality, of fraternity, these were dreams that were made possible by the opening up of capitalism. But it's also forestalled us from actually accomplishing these goals. So capitalism to me is fundamentally about the division of society into people who own the places where goods and services are produced and those who are forced to work at those places in order to survive. Of course, are they forced by coercion the same way a slave is forced to work? No. But it's a contract signed under duress, under a work or starve bargain. And it's a contract that I think we could go beyond. So for me, at the minimum, what socialism means is establishing a situation where we can guarantee the basics of life. We could guarantee everyone's right to basic education. We could guarantee their right to have access to housing, access to nutrition, access to health care, and the other fundamental building blocks of life, not so that we're taking away their power or autonomy of choice, but so that they could reach their potential, so that we could enhance their choice. So when we talk about coercion, when we talk about the erosion of private rights, often we assume that this means by nature an erosion of personal autonomy and personal rights. In fact, I believe there's a sphere of life that the state or no collective body, no matter how democratic, should touch. There's a bedrock of unable rights. Our right to speech, our right to protest, our right to worship, and so on. Now, think about your situation if you're in your late 20s and you have a kid and you have to take care of your kid at work, but you also want to pursue higher education. But you realize that you can't pay for both childcare and higher education at the same time. Now, having a state guarantee to free public education would mean, in fact, there would be in a certain definition more coercion. Maybe there'll be higher income taxes paid by people who have more wealth. I'm not saying it's not a trade-off, but what will it mean for the ordinary person, for the ordinary person, it would mean a greater choice of freedom that you could pursue this opportunity if you so want. So socialism, to me, at a minimum means expanding the bedrock of fundamental rights not to crush individual freedom, but to make sure the individual choice and our ability to reach our potential is maximized as human beings. Now, there have been societies that have moved in the direction of what I just described. These societies, Nordic social democracies were, in fact, attempts by socialists, often in parties with Marxist ideology, labor-based parties that harness the power of sectoral bargaining and whatnot, to administer doses of socialism within capitalism. They weren't societies that were able to go beyond capitalism, but we saw in those societies how, through the erosion of private property rights, which, in my terminology, I'm distinguishing from personal property, your toothbrush, your home, your car, those other things, private property rights, the rights of the people who owned the places where goods and services are produced, by diminishing their rights, they were able to guarantee social outcomes that allowed people across Northern Europe to live in more peace, prosperity, and, yes, indeed, choice than we have today, and we enjoy today in the United States. Now, what does it mean to go beyond social democracy into what I would consider democratic socialism? Well, that's to take the logic of democracy and to start thinking that, well, if democracy is a good thing in the ballot box, why do we allow our workplaces to be run as tyrannies from nine to five? Now, in the old socialist jargon, in our propaganda, you might call capitalist parasites or leeches, you know, labor's creating all the wealth, and there's a few people who, just by virtue of ownership, are taking all the wealth. Well, in fact, capitalists do produce useful things that are necessary to the running of the societies we live in today, entrepreneurial risk, to create the places where new goods and services are produced, for example. Their own abilities as managers and conveners of production. My argument is not that these progressive functions do not exist. My argument is that workers collectively can take on these functions by electing their own managements, by deciding on what terms their divisional labor will take place. Will this mean there will be constant democracy every single day with every single decision? No, not at all. You know, we live in societies largely governed by represented democracies. In big firms, you could elect the management to terms and you could have a hierarchy that might be necessary in a society with a complex division of labor to exist, but to be held to democratic account and transparency. And as far as incentives, this sphere, beyond this bedrock of decommodified social rights, in which, yes, the market would be eroded, this sphere could indeed be a place where there could be competition and firm failure. I don't think you could have a functioning socialism without firm failure, which solves both incentive problems and calculation problems. So in other words, I don't believe that you should have to shop around for health insurance. I believe in Medicare for all. Just like I don't believe that if there's a fire in your apartment, you should have to shop around for your local private fire brigades and see who has the best ratings. Now, I do believe that it's just to have two different manufacturers of forks that compete with each other. If the penalty for failure isn't destitution, but it's landing on this bedrock of a decommodified welfare estate and bouncing through active labor market policies to a more dynamic sector. So I think we can harness certain positive aspects of the market while diminishing hierarchy and diminishing exploitation. We can enhance the spare of freedom. Some of our greatest geniuses are people who have lived and died in sweatshops and plantations. In a democratic social society, that wouldn't be the case. So Boscov presents a image of socialism that is very appealing and pleasant and nice. And we all vote and we make the CEO, the CEO and periodically we replace him. And he gets to choose that there's no competition in healthcare that's all provided by government. But forks, we can compete. I guess iPhones, we can compete. The unimportant stuff we can compete, but the important stuff is centrally planned and provided to us by the authorities, by the state. And he might change his mind tomorrow. He might decide that iPhones are actually a crucial feature of human life and maybe now we have to have the state provide those as well. This is completely cherry picking and random in terms of what he would have as competition, he says, and what he would have as completely centrally planned. But there is an underlying fundamental flaw here and the flaw actually comes out in every single experiment socialism has had in human history. Socialism has been tried. Communal farming has been tried. They voted on what crops to grow. They voted who should manage the process. They voted on every aspect of how they run their farms. And the result was starvation. It's not funny, it's horrific because people died, whether it's 60 million in China, 20 million in Ukraine. Now, who knows how many people in Venezuela collectivizing even a simple industry like farming and notice that farming we won competition. Well, why? Because we've seen it fails. Well, what's gonna happen when we socialize healthcare and that fails and people die? Oh, then we'll privatize it again. These are experiments that are based on a fundamental flaw. And the fundamental flaw is the idea that we should organize society, not to preserve the individual's right to live his life as he see fit, not to preserve the ability of individuals to pursue their happiness, to organize society around the principle that the individual is just a cog. Individual doesn't matter. We can vote his rights away anytime. As long as he sacrifices to the group, to whatever the group wants, to whatever group votes on on any given day, the individual doesn't matter. We can talk a good game about we want the individuals to prosper out of socialism, but we don't really care about the individual. It is the voter, which means the majority that counts for everything. The fundamental question when you talk about society, when you talk about politics, when you talk about economics, is how do we organize, for whom do we organize society? Do we organize society on the principle that what matters is the group, what matters is the tribe, what matters is the collective. And the individual is just there to serve that group, to serve that collective. We can take this stuff away when we need it, when we want to. We can redistribute it, we can tell them what his job should be, when we want to. We can leave him free when we want to, but enslave him when we want to. Which is the social system we as human beings, by the way, have chosen for 99% of our history. For 99% of our history, individuals didn't matter. What mattered was the group. Your life did not belong to you. Your life belonged to a king, a queen, God, the tribe, the tribal leader, the council, somebody else. And you followed orders. You were told what to do. Even in Athens, where you got the beginnings of freedom, you had democracy. And in Athens, they decided that Socrates, you know, was corrupting the youth, and they didn't like what he was saying. And you can talk the talk of free speech, but once you allowed democracy, once you allowed voting to affect every aspect of our life, why not speech? Why not vote Socrates to death when he's corrupting the youth? Which is exactly what Athens did. So for most of our history, the individual hasn't mattered. His rights haven't mattered. His life hasn't really mattered. What has mattered is the group. And the enlightenment, which I think is the most important period in modern history, is a period in which that assumption was questioned. And suddenly, this idea of inalienable individual rights, that we have a right to our own life. And what does that mean to have a right to our life? It means you were free. You were free to act in pursuit of your values. The values you rationally deemed necessary for your life. And nobody has a right to intervene. Nobody has a right to use force against you. Nobody has a right to curse you, to pursue a different path.  And it's up to you to guide it. And the idea of individual rights, the idea of the enlightenment, the idea that we all possess the capacity to reason, we all possess the capacity to take care of ourselves, to live our lives, to make choices in pursuit of our lives. That is the idea that freed us up and made possible. The astronomical wealth and success that we live with today. In the United States, this country was founded on those principles. It is indeed the number one achievement of the enlightenment. And with all the flaws of the founding of this country, and certainly slavery is a massive flaw, the United States of America is the first country in history to be founded on a principle, on a moral principle. And a moral principle is your life is yours. It's not the groups. It's not the majorities. It's not the kings. It's yours. And the only role of government, the only role of government is to protect your life, to protect your liberty, and to give you that freedom from coercion so that you as an individual can pursue your happiness. This country was founded on that principle of freedom and that principle of freedom, freedom from coercion, freedom from force, freedom from authority telling you what to think and what to do and how to behave, whether that force comes from a king or from the majority is what unleashed the forces of capitalism. Capitalism is just a system where the government protects our rights and leaves us alone, leaves us free to pursue our lives that respect private property because we need property in order to survive. It's a human need without property. Without property, we do not act to create. We do not act to build. We do not act to better our lives and by doing so bettering the lives of those around us. So capitalism is an outgrowth of the spirit of individualism and on the belief and understanding that reason is our means of survival and reason requires freedom. Our thinking requires us to be free. It is that freedom to think, to innovate, to produce, to act, to build, to make in spite of the fact that we offended people, in spite of the fact that we undid the status quo that what made us as rich as we are, but not just rich, healthy. We're healthier now than we've ever been in all of human history. We live longer than we've ever lived in human history. We have more leisure time than we've ever had in human history. In every aspect of human life, we are today better off than at any point in time and that's a result of the little capitalism we have had over the last 250 years. Thank you. All right. I'm going to call on you for a minute. Now each debater will have the opportunity to, for two minutes, have a rebuttal to the opening remarks of the opposite side. So, Fosker, two minutes. Well, the thing, oh, we're all Americans. So no matter where we are in the political spectrum, we all use a language of freedom, right? So you have to parse through who really means what when they say freedom and who really means what when they say coercion. Now for me, when I look at society today, when I look at a class society as brutally unequal as the United States, I see coercion all around me. Now what is the average American workplace but coercion? You're coerced into working because you're forced to work to survive. Again, we need to have places of business, places that produce goods and services, but under what conditions are we producing? Now, I do cherry pick, by the way. Why do I cherry pick? Because my ideology isn't an ideology that was just written down in the 19th century and that I've followed through to the teeth. It's an ideology that's been built on the experience of watching what happens in successful countries across Europe that developed welfare states that have produced better social outcomes than what we have today. And my counter to what he's presenting is his vision, which is essentially the society that we've lived in in the 19th century. So this is the two contrasting visions. I'm not here defending 20th century visions of authoritarian communism, but he is defending a totally unregulated system that gave us child labor, that gave us no recourse from the collective and it gave us and said the petty tyrannies and coercions of our boss. Instead, what I want to do is unleash the creative power within every single American, with every single citizen and worker to contribute more deeply into their society, that to take true ownership stake instead of getting paid an hourly wage, get a dividend from your firm, take part in the governance of your firm. That's what I want, to extend democracy, to not live in a society where just by accidents of birth, our life outcomes are radically determined. Karen? So I mean, these bottles are hard because I'd like to critique every single sentence he said. I'm sure he'd like to critique every single sentence I have. So we have to cherry-pick what we critique. But let me take on this idea. Well, let me just say, I mean, the idea that capitalism created child labor is a little funny. What did children do before there was capitalism? Work or starve, those are only two options. They worked on the farm or they starved. They usually did both, work on the farm and starve. But that's history, that you can go and look it up. No children got an education before capitalism or very few children got an education before capitalism.  So this is coercion. That's really what you're gonna face. Not in the world in which we live, not in the world of abundance that capitalism created. You have multiple opportunities to find jobs.  You have many choices. That's exactly what capitalism creates. It creates the choices that you have. And it's the fact that it is a choice.  You can still go and grow your own food. Indeed, you don't have to be an employee. You can start your own business. You want employee-owned companies? Great, star one. Capitalism doesn't prevent you from starting an employee-owned business. It just turns out that those businesses don't do very well. They can't compete. They lose. So even voluntary, voluntary attempts at socialism at this idea of each according to, farming each according to his ability, to each according to the need, fail. And if you want an example of that, ask me about these really kibbutz. All right, let's just start it with some, yes. I've got some discussion questions for the two debaters. And after we talk about socialism and capitalism for a while, we're going to ask the audience for your questions. So be thinking of those. If I don't cover it, I'm sure I won't in just 20 minutes of discussion. We could be here all night, but I'm gonna turn the questions over to you after I ask a few. My first question is for Iran. So why not do as Bhaskar is suggesting and simply move towards what the Nordic countries are doing with more generous welfare programs and higher taxes, but it seems like a pretty straightforward trade-off. Well, because it's a miserable trade-off and the Nordic countries are not a model for anything. And one has to know a little bit of history about the Nordic countries. So if you go back to the 19th century, Sweden, for example, and you can take any one of the Nordic countries, this is true, Sweden was one of the poorest, if not the poorest country in Europe. It was an agrarian country and it was good poor while a lot of Swedes landed up immigrating to the United States. And about 1870, Sweden passed laws that basically made it the freest country in Europe from a capitalist perspective. They became a capitalist nation in the economic freedom index. They would have ranked as one of the freest countries in the world. And indeed, they maintained that situation from 1870 until the mid 20th century until about 1960. And they were both free capitalist and relatively capitalist. And at the same time, they became the wealthiest country in Europe. Sweden during those periods was on a per capita GDP basis, one of the wealthiest countries in Europe. And about 1960, they adopted socialism. And from 1960 on, they dropped in terms of wealth per capita dramatically. They lost all their industries. Indeed, industries left Sweden unmasked to the point where I think in 1979, the largest industry in Sweden was, ABBA, remember ABBA? Yeah, because industry is gone. And by 1994, Sweden was bankrupt. They had basically taken all the wealth that they had created during the capitalist period and redistributed. And now they had none. They were bankrupt. And since 1994, in which direction is Sweden gone? Not far enough, in my view, but they have gone towards reducing benefits. They have gone towards massively deregulating the economy, privatizing those sections of the economy that were nationalized. And today, Sweden on the Economic Freedom Index ranks relatively high. It is not. And when Buddy Sanders a few years ago said, I want socialism like Denmark. He was the prime minister of Denmark who came out and said, we're not socialists. There's no socialism in Scandinavia. Their markets are free. They are less regulated than we are. Now, they're not capitalist, but then America's not capitalist either. We were capitalist a long time ago. And yes, I'd love to answer a question about the 19th century. And but we're not free anymore. We're mixed economies. Sweden is mixed. They redistribute more, but they regulate less than we do. We regulate more and we redistribute less. Okay, I want Ambassador to respond. Almost every single date and fact that he just gave is incorrect. And you can look on Wikipedia, look on just Wikipedia, Sweden, and you could do the brief history, and you'll see the 1870s part was right. But after that, no, Swedish politics is dominated from the 1920s onward by social Democrats, by a quite radical version of social democracy, which was tied to the parties of the second international, the second international that Engels was at in 1889 for the presiding over. Sweden was indeed one of the most unequal countries in Europe, but then the social Democrats, this workers party that represented this isolated and alienated class created by massive increases in this late industrialization period of the 1870s onward, was able to take political party power and ruled uninterrupted from the early 1930s until 1976 when they lost an election and they were back in power in the early 1980s. So the chronology is completely wrong. Some of the biggest advances, the most important date in the development of Swedish social democracy is 1938, when the LO, the massive trade union in Sweden, forced the Employers Federation to sign a basic agreement. Then on the basis of sectoral bargaining, the Swedish system emerged in 1940s and 50s. It peaked in terms of the size of the state sector in the 1960s and early 70s. But it was always a system that was drawn primarily by sectoral bargaining by the social democratic labor movement and it reached its peak in the early post-war period. So the 1960s number just comes from nowhere. And then obviously, yeah, those are just, Volvo and Saab, all these other big industries were in Sweden and were highly efficient and were productive. Why the sectoral bargaining? In other words, taking the principle of equal pay for equal work. So let's say the three of us are car companies and Euron is GM and I'm Ford and you're Chrysler. Now, what sectoral bargaining would do is it would set wage patterns on the basis of the middle firm, Chrysler. And that would allow GM, the most efficient firm, to accumulate excess profit and to expand its production and to invest in capital saving technology. And it would force Chrysler, sorry, I don't know, Ford out of business. So in other words, the wage pressure was actually made in a more dynamic system based on firm failure. But the displaced workers would then bounce on this cushy welfare state, be retrained into expanding sectors. So in the end, what you ended up with was a more advanced economy with a higher value added economy. You had a more dynamic economy not because of the absence of the state or absence of regulation, but because of powerful unions and a powerful state that allowed capital to be dynamic, but shaped outcomes. So I love this discussion about Sweden, but in the, for the sake of time, I wanna bring us back to the here and now in the United States. I hear Bosker talk, actually both of our debaters will talk some about inequality. So I wanna ask Bosker a question about inequality. I think in today's society, most people think inequality, bad. Is that what you think? Is inequality bad? And if so, why? Believe it or not, I am, sorry, just swallowed water, break down my windpipe, and I was hoping that your question drove her longer. Sorry. So in, believe it or not, I'm less concerned with inequalities of income so much of inequalities in power. If an inequality in income is derived from the fact that I wanna work of longer hours of my job or I wanna be in this more demanding sector or I'm doing this work that is so socially undesirable, like, but still socially valuable, like sanitation, that in a just society with a strong welfare state, you might need to pay more, people more to work that shift, to work the graveyard shift or whatnot. That's not an inequality that's derived from exploitation. So that inequality in income is fine. What I have a problem with is inequalities of power derive from just mere facts of ownership. And that's where a lot of our inequality comes from. So we are at a point where it just, it's not possible for most people to, from working class families, to advance, to start their own business, to actually access this opportunity because they're locked into a very hierarchical and backward society in that respect. So I would say that's the inequality that I think socialism aims to address. So by, at the minimum, providing a base level of decommodified social goods, but then also within the workplace, allowing certain levels of rights and guarantees and allowing more participation. What do you think about inequality, Your Honor? Well, I mean, I don't care about inequality as long as it is a product of freedom. If you leave people free, then they will be unequal. People work different levels. People have different abilities. People have different interests. Some of us become professors. We know we're never gonna be rich. And you could argue we're pretty smart. So maybe we could have chosen a different profession where we could have made money. We have different inclinations. We have different propensities. So I'm not worried about inequality of outcome or inequality that is generated from freedom. I am worried about inequality that's generated from cronyism. And from manipulating the system in your favor. And I think we're using the government to do that. And I think that all status systems, that's what generates the inequality. It's the ability to manipulate the system in your favor. And cronyism is a feature of statism. It's a feature of socialism. It's a feature of fascism. It's a feature of every system that places the state above the individual. In capitalism, my capitalism, the kind of capitalism, I think the only kind of capitalism that should exist. There is a complete separation between state and economics. The state doesn't get involved in economics. It doesn't regulate, it doesn't control. So there's no lobbying. There's no power seeking because the state has no power over business. It's only because the state is so involved. And the bigger the state, the more involved the state, the more unlimited the state, the more lobbying happens. But notice also about the inequality. Vaska talks about socially this kind of jobs and socially that kind of job. How do you measure these things? What's socially acceptable job and what's a socially unacceptable job? Who gets to decide these things?  Again, disastrous. And at the end of the day, the people who are really unequal from an income and a wealth perspective, other people that are not mentioned, are entrepreneurs, the builders, the creators, the makers of the modern world, the businessmen who have made this country, but the West, everywhere, the people who started Volvo, the people who started these Apple and so on. It's the entrepreneurs that are the greatest benefactors of the human race, more benefactors than any philanthropists, greater benefactors than any politician, greater benefactors than any military leader. These are the people that have built the wealth, that we all enjoy, all of us enjoy, including those who are relatively poor. Everybody enjoys the benefits of the great wealth created by business in this country. And one of the great tragedies is how we all treat businessmen, but particularly how the status, the socialists, the interventionists, view businessmen as dispensable. Anybody could do their job. We'll just vote somebody to replace them. Bhaskar, I want to ask you about... Yes. I want to ask you because the way the two of you are describing the relationship between, to use shorthand, the employer and the employee, you're the person who owns the capital and the person who does the wage labor, you're describing these relationships very differently. Iran says the person who creates, to use a trite expression, a rising tide lifts all boats. And when he creates, then the rest of society benefits, because of this free exchange. And Bhaskar's description sounds more like a tug of war. And I don't want to describe that inaccurately, but what do you think about the idea that a rising tide lifts all boats? Is it not possible that in a free market society or in a capitalistic system, when someone creates something and there's an exchange, then you said capitalism's good or has been good in the past because it's brought all this prosperity, but would it continue to bring prosperity if the employee-employer relationship was one where the employer was creating for the good of society? Well, I don't want the employer to create for the good of society. So begin with, obviously, economic exchange and production is not a zero sum game. New weapons being created. Otherwise, what I said at the beginning in that sentence wouldn't apply. Now, in my description of what I tried to lay out was a society in which worker-controlled firms were producing for production in the interests of profit, maximization, and a regulated economy. So they're not producing for the good of society. And again, in this analogy of market exchange, in that for most consumer goods, you could have competition, have firm failures, have people who might not be able to access some consumer goods at certain moments, and that would be fine. For other goods, that would be a ridiculous proposition. I think it's ridiculous that someone who needs to see a doctor, who needs that access to insulin, doesn't have access to insulin, or needs to cross the border to Canada to get access to affordable insulin. I mean, that's the argument. And I think that in a different sort of society, people will be more compelled to contribute to the direction of their firms, to work harder, because it'll be more incentivized to do so. They'll get a larger share of the proceeds of their firms. And I do think that as a society as a whole, as we push ourselves in the direction of increasing our productivity in this different framework, we'll be making different calculations. So right now, if there's a new sort of technology that's gonna double your average worker productivity, the way our system has been constructed, especially since unions have been decimated in this country and abroad, our wage increases are not keeping up with productivity increases. In a different sort of society, maybe workers would decide to make a trade-off. And they'll be able to say, well, in fact, even though in a capitalist firm, the goal is maximization of total profits, because in our firm, the goal is maximization of profit per worker owner, then maybe we won't do this particular expansion or we'll decide to cut our hours back instead, because the key is to have both voice within the workplace but the ability to exit work. And if someone can form a union even within a capitalist society and negotiate a new wage, a new conditions of work and go from working 45 hours to 35 hours, that's work time that we spend with our families, building our communities, in our civic groups, our church groups, whatever else, that to me is freedom as well, and that's one of our goals of a justice society. So since you mentioned it, you mentioned healthcare, I have to ask a question about healthcare. Can I answer that question? Go ahead and answer about weightism. So first, it seems like people have picked up on this idea that you repeat something often enough, everybody accepts it as true. Let's be clear, and I encourage everybody to go to the latest economic literature and look this up. This idea that wages and productivity have separated is nonsense, I'll be nice.  When you adjust correctly for the different factors, including how we adjust inflation, I mean, I won't bore you with economics of it, wages have kept upward productivity. And this is a law of economics, it's like gravity. It doesn't work otherwise, it can't work otherwise. So it's just not true that this gap has increased. I know they keep showing the same graph over and over again but nobody talks about all the critiques in the economic literature of the graph showing that it's just not right. But let me take this employer-employee relationship. So how do firms get started? How do firms actually create it? Well, some of you might be entrepreneurs or intend to be entrepreneurs. Usually you take somebody with a great idea, with an idea. They have an idea and then they go around and they have to invest. They have to raise capital. They have to build plant and equipment and it's usually one guy, maybe a small team of three or four people and they have this idea and they're not getting paid in the meantime. They're raising capital, they're building a plant and equipment. And then they have the idea of a product and they hire people. Now they hire people and they promise to pay them. Now they don't profit. It's not a dollar of profit. And sometimes this goes on for 10, 15 years where they're no profits. And the workers get paid. Sometimes the workers are biotech scientists. Workers doesn't mean manual labor. But the fact is those workers work, get paid for 10 years. And the people who provided the capital, the entrepreneur who's risking everything, they don't get paid. They've got stock. One day if the company becomes profitable they'll get something back. A lot back, hopefully. But how many of those companies actually become profitable? If you go to Silicon Valley, how many of the startups actually become profitable? Well, of the ones funded by venture capital, six go under. Three do okay. One becomes a mega hit. The workers in the meantime all got paid. Every single one of them, by the way, in Silicon Valley, in many modern technology companies workers get stocks. So they get a share of the profits. This idea that workers don't share the profits is old. We've now, and the fact is that if in every industry if we gave stock to the workers and they really worked harder and they became more productive and our profits increased then more business will do that because it's in their self-interest to do that. So some industries it's appropriate to give workers a share of the profits. Other industries it doesn't indeed motivate them to work harder and therefore become more productive. We don't. So the beauty of the market is you create different models for different industries in different circumstances and what works survive and what doesn't work doesn't survive. You don't need to, but the idea behind what Baskar's talking about is the elimination of private property, the elimination of the ability of the entrepreneur to start this company, to hire people and pay them a salary. Indeed, I wonder what would happen if I under his system actually did that when I go to jail because he's against it's immoral exploitation to have an employer employee relationship. So if somebody actually voluntarily as we all do engage in such a relationship, would that be grounds? I violated the law. I guess I would go to jail. It's wrong to hire somebody voluntarily to work from. I want to move on to healthcare with just a note to everyone that these guys disagree about whether wages have kept track with the productivity and they disagree about the history of Swedish politics, but you guys can do your own research on that later and decide what you think. I wanna ask about healthcare because I've also heard the fire brigade mention and the post office mention and Iran did a nice job explaining the entrepreneurial method of starting a new firm and I think Americans are pretty decided on those things. We think we're starting a new business sounds nice and having a public post office and fire brigade, we've accepted those things. Maybe Iran has it, but most, I would say most Americans have, I think where the heart of the debate is today is about things like healthcare and education, whether the government should play a bigger role in providing those services to people. So I wanna start with Iran and ask why your system capitalism would be better for providing those things. Because I think Basker said, he likes the idea of firms but he really wants the government to provide a safety net on certain things like healthcare and education. So tell me why capitalism is better for those things. How many of you, if you had to get a letter urgently somewhere and you really wanna deliver it and you wanna make sure it got there, we'd use the post office versus FedEx or UPS?  But yet, you're very comfortable using the post office for your healthcare and you're very comfortable using the post office for your education. It's the same bureaucracy, it's the same incentive structure, it's the same type of organization and both all are failures. They're failures everywhere, they're tried. The only thing that keeps healthcare, not just in the United States but globally, moving forward is the fact that there's a piece of the healthcare industry in the United States. Call it 30 to 40%, maybe less than that, which is somewhat free, somewhat heavily regulated, but still basically a private transaction. Because the government today spends well over 50% of all the dollars in healthcare, that's being nationalized. All that's left is this little sliver but that's where innovation happens. That's where experimentation happens, that's where choice happens. That's where progress happens. Somewhere between two thirds to 75% of all medical innovation and progress and the application to patients happen in this country and then it gets exported elsewhere. Why did the Canadians get cheap insulin or cheap drugs in the United States though? Because they negotiate prices so low that the drug companies make no profits and therefore don't, can't fund R&D. So what do we pay? We're paying to subsidize the Canadians and the Europeans. We fund all the R&D, the only two countries in the world that do R&D in drug manufacturing, Switzerland and the United States, the two countries that have basically private healthcare or some semblance of private healthcare systems and private drug companies. But it is freedom that advances, that creates a technology that allows us to have new products. It is the profit motive that incentivizes people to invest in biotech companies. You know, people talk about capitalism as short-term. People have lived in Silicon Valley. Capitalism is not short-term. Capitalism is about the long-term. Investing in a biotech company is a long-term, highly risky investment that almost nobody in their right mind would do. You're wrong. I'm gonna let Bosker respond about healthcare. So that's why I think healthcare is way too important to give to the government.  I'm gonna let Bosker respond on healthcare and then we're gonna go to audience Q&A after he talks about healthcare. So have your questions ready. I believe we're doing mics on either side of the room. One in the middle, I'm sorry. One in the middle, let's come together. All in the middle. So we're going to form a line. Very, you know, reasonably, respectfully and orderly line. So, Bosker, healthcare. So, on the issue of healthcare, I mean, this is a great place for the terrain to shift for a socialist because there's all this litany of crimes and abuses and tyrannies that have happened in the name of socialism in the 20th century. All these failures were the National Health Services in one of them. And the type of health insurance that exists in almost every major country on earth isn't one of them either. The case has been made so fundamentally that even center-right parties in Europe have given up the causes. And they're some of the most fervent defenders of their welfare system when it comes to health insurance. Americans pay more and as a share of our GDP, we pay more for worse outcomes. A lot of our extra dollars are being spent in billing. How many times, I'm sure, everyone or most people in this room have the experience of getting an extra bill from their health insurance companies and you have to write them back.  You have this exchange, multiply that a million times over. So there's certain things that the state cannot do well. Now, you could think of it like a hand with thumbs and other fingers. Where there's certain things like the production of consumer goods, iPhones, and I don't wanna keep talking about forks. Where in fact you want competition and innovation and dynamic effects. There's other things where in fact we could do predictive outcomes. We in fact can, most medical procedures are routine. Our bodies are pretty similar. We can actually plan to large degrees medical outcome. But what I'm proposing, what's the demand of the American left, isn't a government takeover of our hospitals and doctors becoming just government employees. The immediate demand on the table, which I believe will be brought to fruition in the next five to 10 years, is Medicare for All, which is expanding Medicare. So if you're a senior and you're ready to use Medicare, you'll have that, but it'll also cover prescription drugs and dental. And by the way, I'm pretty sure, insulin is a particularly unusual example to make. Because insulin is a drug that was, whose curators were ideologues much like myself. I believe one of them was actually Canadian. That one, you have to double check. So in other words, you have in fact other ways in which our pharmaceutical companies spend money on marketing, that money can go into R&D. The state sector provides a lot of a base level R&D that goes into these drugs. Anyway, I just find it the health argument to be one place where even I think the majority of people who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 are starting to come around to the idea that we need some sort of base level health insurance in this country to be guaranteed as a right by the federal government. Okay. We could have a debate just on that issue for hours. There's no one standing at the mic. Is anyone gonna come stand at the mic and ask a question? All right, here they come. Here they come. Good. Ooh, I'm relieved. Cause I have more questions, but I'd rather hear from you guys. Thank you. There'll be no shorties or questions. Never is. May I ask Mr. Brook for one to each of them? In your short list of medical research, would you include Israel or are they government funded? Israel is the sector that produces the innovation is not government funded. It is privately funded. Biotech companies in Israel are privately funded, but since you raised Israel, there's one healthcare.  I grew up there, was born there. My father's a doctor in socialized medicine. God help us. God help us.  And Israel, if my dad had a patient who could afford it and was sick, he'd put him on a plane and bring him to the US. And this is a country with more doctors per capita than any country in the world, the country of the Jews after all. And, but it's still being here because you know what? You know, we don't appreciate what we have, but we have, if you have health insurance, which most people here at a university do, if you have health insurance, you have the best healthcare in the world. You really do. And you have to go to see the NHS in England to see what it's like. Oh my God. Oh my God. It's a disaster. And the NHS is being, they're talking about privatizing elements of it because they can't function. Okay, next. And thank you. And what was the other gentleman's name? Basker. Basker. At the very beginning of your thing where you say that workers are coerced into needing to make a living, even without capitalism, that's absolutely true. And it's mother nature doing the coercion. So why do you think it's fair to shift that blame from her to capitalism? Thank you. What I'm saying is that this sector that he says should be unregulated is in fact a sector that we're forced to be in. So there's some sort of mandate for some social regulation of it. And when it comes to coercion, I think you're right that in any system, unless we're living in a world of fully automated hyperabundance and 500 years in the future, there will be a need for people to work productively. But we also need more avenues to exit and retraining and to find other options. And those are the avenues that a decommodified welfare state does. So I gave the example of a parent being able to pursue education while at the same time juggling childcare. It was also the example of someone suffering from medical debt or student debt and being forced into certain outcomes where in fact they would have a more socially useful and more personally fulfilling a role doing something else if they didn't have to deal with that. Okay. I have a question for both of you. What do you think should be done about private monopolies? Well, I think his answer, well, I actually don't know enough about, so in fact, yeah, I mean the question of monopolies and what kind of antitrust regulation we should have is not really a socialist versus capitalist question. So a lot of monopolies that exist because of collusion, I'm not sure. And in a different sort of system, I wouldn't necessarily mind more larger companies because in fact, with those economies of scale, there might be efficiencies. So I don't really know enough to answer that question, but it's not really, you know, I think a left versus right kind of socialist, you know. Well, I mean, socialists want to create monopolies. They want to create monopolies over healthcare. They want to create monopolies over education. They want to create monopolies over whatever they happen to cherry pick they want to create monopolies over. I believe that in a true free market, and let me be clear, the United States is not a free market. It's not capitalist. It's a heavy regulated mixed economy. In a real free market, there's no such thing as a monopoly. That is that even when you have a large, like Rockefeller at 92% of all the old production, although over finding capacity in the 1870s, prices go down every year. Quality goes up every single year. So he doesn't behave like what you were taught in economics class. By the way, that whole section of economics where they teach you perfect competition and monopolies, rip it out of the book. It's useless.  I apologize to professors in the room, but it's a waste of the student's time because nobody behaves that way. And when you look at companies, right, what they try to do is they're trying to maximize their profitability over the long term. And to do that, you lower prices, you raise quality and every so-called monopolist in American history has not behaved like the textbook said they would behave. So who competed Rockefeller out of the business of lighting? Edison did. Who would have thought of that? It's a replacement product, right? Because kerosene was replaced by electricity. Markets, I can't overestimate how beautiful they are in that they produce results that are unimaginable in advance to central planners or to anybody else. Thank you. Yes, I'd like, for you, sir, I can't remember. Baskar. Baskar. Please expand higher taxes. And please, could you make a counter offer as far as what you think higher taxes are? No one quantifies what are higher taxes. And I don't mean a rate. I mean a percentage. Are taxes going to go up 10%, 20%, 30%? Because if you say, oh, well, your tax rate will go up 3% or 4%. As a percentage of what? If you're paying 50%, your taxes go up 5%. Do you see what I'm saying? Well, OK, so what rate will taxes go up and will they be as progressive as they are now? So right now, let's say if you're talking about the immediate demands of a program like Medicare for all, a large segment of the savings will be founded administrative savings and whatnot. But you can't have me cost administrative savings from cutting billing departments and whatnot. I mean, this is creating a bureaucracy. You already have a bureaucracy in existence. And by the way, most he's doing a disservice to most conservatives, because most conservatives agree there's such a thing as certain natural. I am not a conservative. Well, most people on the right would agree there's such a thing as a natural monopoly in certain sectors that, in fact, it makes sense to have a state monopoly on roads, for instance, and so on. But my primary emphasis is about power, is about kind of the question of how we transition from an economy driven by private capitalists and turning it into an economy driven by worker owners. What is the taxes? How much is it going to cost? It doesn't matter. A worker-owned firm could, in fact, have a flat tax system of 20%. You have to decide, well, how big is the country? The hypothetical country you're talking about. How young is the population? What social services? If the country is older, then, in fact, these firms might need to be taxed at a higher rate.  But who pays corporate tax? We pay corporate tax. The question's well taken. Let's hear your perspective on taxes. So it's not relevant here, because under his system, there's no wealth being created. There's nothing to tax. It's true. We become much, much poorer. I'm not joking. We become much, much poorer. The tax rate in Venezuela doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what the tax rate is. Nobody has anything to pay the taxes with. Now, the tax rate in some way that's Sweden is excess of 50%, right? But it's less progressive than the United States. Indeed, Sweden is much less progressive than the US, because everybody pays taxes. When the US, there's a vast number of people who don't pay any taxes. But the point really is that when you have a system that is, when you take away the incentive, when you take away capitalism, when you take away capitalists, when you take away the corporation, the business, the creation, you're not going to be left with much. We're not going to be left with much. So there's nothing to redistribute. There's nothing out there. Next question. I'd like to hear each of you better distinguish your position from just modern welfare statism, especially because a socialist is not really defending a classical Marxist view of socialism. So what do you think the socialists, what do you think we would get by moving beyond a welfare state based on, especially since people are free to set up whatever kind of corporate structure they want today? And the capitalist is a welfare state part of capitalism, and whether or not it is, do you want to move beyond that in some way? So fundamentally, the socialist ideological part of what I'm saying is that at a normative level, I think that hierarchy and exploitation are wrong and should be diminished to whatever extent is possible. Now, we know that social democracy works and functions. Now, we do not know whether we could go beyond social democracy and could de-perform industrial and economic democracy. So we start from the base level of social democracy, and from that point, we try to create a society in which we take certain vital functions of capitalist and a capitalist society and bring those functions to worker owners. And in fact, if that's successful, and that works, and people decide to stick with it. So in the case of constructing social democracy, it took winning consecutive elections, sometimes in coalitions, sometimes with outright majorities, from the 1930s until the mid-1970s to construct those democracies. By the way, the crisis in 1990 and 1991 and in 2004, the financial system in Sweden, was created by deregulation and kind of the creation of cheap and easy credit and a housing bubble. It's very similar to our 2008 crisis. We would, in fact, be able to live in a society in which there's no distinction between workers and owners. There is still going to be distinctions in people's job functions and whatnot. But because we all have a stake in the society, it'll be the first time since maybe the Neolithic Revolution that humanity has lived in a society of that class, which I think is a classically Marxist goal. But I am fundamentally a pragmatist who sees as my goal the erosion of forms of hierarchy and exploitation in a context where there's certain basic guarantees to people. And right now, the last thing I'll say that I've been going on, is that we take for granted the fact that a kid born in one zip code, a kid born in Fairfield, Connecticut, is going to have a radically different life outcome than someone born in Hartford, Connecticut. It's not from the Northeast. All my analogies are from there, too. That's not the case in either even other advanced capitalist nations. And that's because of the course of power of our capitalist class and the way in which our unions and working people in this country have been continually had their rights eroded the last 30, 40 years. So I don't consider social democracy in Europe a success. They are relatively poor as compared to the United States. They eat most social democratic states in Europe rank in the 40s in terms of wealth per capita relative to American states when you adjust for cost of living and things like that. So they're not particularly successful. They're not particularly richer than Mississippi. They're certainly poorer than Colorado is if Germany was a state or if Sweden was a state, it would be significantly poorer than Colorado. Swedes and Danes who live in America do far better by every measure than do Swedes and Danes who stayed in Sweden and Denmark. So I don't see some amazing model over there. And by the way, most of these European countries have very large populist, right wing, dangerous political parties that are on the rise because of, to a large extent, because of their frustration with the welfare state. Now, I'm not on that side. I'm just saying, even they are now rejecting the social democratic state. So let's see where this all evolves. I don't think it's going to look pretty in a few years. In terms of the actual, the question to me, as I said, I believe that capitalism represents a complete separation of state and economics. And this is radical. I'm not going to, you know, we'll see and we'll slowly move there. I know what works. What works is leaving people free. I know what doesn't work. Corrosion, force, putting a gun to people's head and taxes, regulations are putting guns to people's heads. So I want freedom, not a little bit, not some, not 80%, 100%. I want a government that all it does is protect us from the use of force by other people and from foreigners and invaders and terrorists and so on. I want a complete separation of state. That means no welfare state. You want a safety net? Great. Create one. Voluntarily. It's called charity. And there are plenty of opportunities to be creative and innovative in creating those things. You know, so I believe what holds back education is the fact that it's government-run. I think what holds back, I mean, imagine the promise of personalized medicine, of actually evaluating your DNA and figuring out what actually is appropriate for you as an individual. That is a promise that can only happen under capitalism and it would be tragic if we abandoned that path towards being able to live maybe 200 years old, to really flourish at an old age in the name of some socialist utopia of Medicare-for-all, which would be a disaster for American healthcare systems. OK, I'm... Would you like to skip closing statements and take more questions? Yeah, I mean, I'm trying to get to as many questions as we can. I got the time signal that we need to go to closing arguments, but these... Can we go over a little time? Generous gentlemen want to answer more questions instead of doing closing arguments. So if that's OK with you guys, there's a long line, I think it's, you know... Thank you. We're going to put more people in. But for this to work, we will try to give short answers. Try to give shorter answers. If you have to give short questions. All right, short my best. Short question. To Yaren, you mentioned that we are the healthiest we have ever been at any point in time. However, this is the third consecutive year in America that the life expectancy has gone down and rates of deaths from preventable diseases such as diabetes are on the rise due to inadequate health care for monetization of the medical industry. I am curious... Can I skip? Because I know what the question is, right? Sure. So let me say two things. The reason life expectancy in the US is going down is primarily low middle class white males who are committing suicide and who are because of the opioid epidemic. That is that you can read the studies. The economists who wrote that study, I know and I've read the study. Those are the two causes. Those are the two causes of a declining... Also gun violence. We can talk about gun violence. But that is the primary reason because it's only the last three years where this is the case and it's got to do with the opioid crisis, it's got to do with suicide rates, which are a real problem. Now, the world in which we live right now in America is not my ideal. There are many, many problems in the world we live in today which I blame on too much statism and too much government. The issue of diabetes has much more to do with our lifestyle and the choices we all make in terms of the amount of sugar we're eating and the amount of carbs we're eating than they do have to do with our medical system. So if you want to be healthy, it's a choice you get to make. Thank you. When it comes to the question of defining life expectancy, well at least in some of the areas hit hardest by the opioid crisis, which is a contributing factor, these are areas that have seen massive disinvestment from capital. Why? Because it was cheaper and easier to produce elsewhere. Why? Because capital's motive, and I'm saying it should have a different motive, but capital's motive in the way the system is constructed is the maximization of profits. If you are nicer to your employees than your competitor, you're gonna get undercut and your competitor's gonna expand and that's why Walmart's around, but CalDoors isn't around. I don't know, CalDoors. Is that another Northeast thing? I don't know. I don't get out much. I don't, but imagine an economy based on worker-owned firms. You wouldn't have issues of capital flight. If in fact, capital flight means, am I gonna outsource myself to China? Am I going to outsource myself? Would you believe in competition? No, of course there'll be competition. There'll be firm failure and there'll be way to move to, but with a society that has a larger role for medium and long-term planning, which should be directed by the state, I think you could solve a lot of these issues because something like NAFTA might, in the abstract, have benefited Americans as consumers, but it harmed particularly certain people and certain communities in such a way that there's gonna be a backlash and it's a justified backlash and the response from the professional middle class and elites of both the Democratic and Republican Party has been, FD, we don't need you. And I think that's one of the driving issues in our society right now. All right, question? So you're on asked a kind of side note question to Bhaskar, which was, what happens to the owner who voluntarily arranges an employer-owner relationship with somebody and they continue to own the property? Does that person go to jail? Yeah, yeah, yeah, so I think in other words, in my vision of a just society, there would not be wage labor. Do I think under any circumstance that person should be thrown in jail? No, the same way in which if you don't pay your unemployment insurance bill, you get a fine or whatnot. I think for nonviolent crimes, we shouldn't be throwing people in jail. I think that we should have a state that limits its infringements on personal autonomy and so on, but obviously my main argument about why if we get to the point where we move beyond social democracy into democratic social, it would be a viable system, it has to be viable because it's popular. If it's not popular, it would be rolled back, it would be defeated as it should be. There's a reason why in the United States of America, all of us are free today. Afterwards, we want to get together for a monarchist party. We could form a party whose mission is the destruction of the Republican equation of monarchy. We do not do that. And if such a party arose, it would get no popularity. And I think if a society is working as a successor system to capitalism, it would, rolling it back would not be popular. And if it was, then in fact, that system needs to be abolished. It needs to go away. But so what if somebody refuses, right? What if they were, you said you'd fine them, just like, you know, if you don't pay your bill or something, but what if they refuse? Well, I mean, there's ways and ways you could, you could through the finding and therefore if someone falling to debt, they wouldn't be able to expand their firm. They wouldn't be able to hire more late-wage labor. So there's ways of, yes, coercion that exists, but that are not physical acts of direct coercion that involves imprisonment. Thank you. And any regulated market, which is, by the way, any functioning capitalism or a market socialism would require certain acts of coercion. We just have to figure out where we draw the line for coercion. Any law should have to be democratically passed and have judicial review and so on. This isn't a year-zero break. This isn't some sort of leap into the unknown. This is building off the best parts of our society that we exist today. Let's hear from the next question. I have a question on the side of capitalism. You emphasized freedom a lot along in the same question about inequality. You mentioned that entrepreneurs, including people like in Apple, how they're gifts to our society. And I just had a question about how, or more clarification on how that, that freedom applies to the lower class when it comes to taxes, because you see people like Amazon who makes $11 billion in their 2018 revenue but don't pay a single dollar in taxes and that goes down to the lower class, which you have a... So, I get it. Who pays corporate taxes? When corporations pay taxes, who pays them? Again, simple question in economics. Consumers and employees. Every single study shows this. It's about 60 to 80% consumers, 20 to 40% of their employees are getting paid less and consumers are paying higher. So the best and the only legitimate corporate tax rate is zero because corporations don't exist. They're just contracts.  That's because of the corporate tax cut. And if they cut it to zero, it's the poor that would benefit the most. The poor would benefit the most from a corporate tax of zero. So I celebrate. Every time Amazon announces it's not paying taxes. I think that's fantastic, good for them. I wish I could... Well, I have found a way not to do it as well. I've moved to Puerto Rico and I encourage everybody to figure out a way not to legally not to pay taxes because when you don't pay taxes, you're actually deploying your capital more productively and I think the government would do it and you're helping poor people. You're not hurting them. Thank you. Yeah. Hi, I have a question for the gentleman right there. My first heartbroken that you say inequality does not concern you and I hope capitalism is not what that stands for. My question for you is the efficiency of capitalism and how you think the effects are of people starving around the world, which I contribute to be the inefficiency of capitalism. Recently, the United Nations have published a report in the Global Report saying that inequality and climate change and all these things that would leave us dead in no time. Because we're out of time. So let me answer. So first about inequality, there's only one form of equality that I believe in and that is equality before the law. Equality of liberty, equality of rights, equality of freedom. We're all free. We're not determined by class. We're not determined by including aristocrats. We're not determined by class.  That's the equality I believe in. I don't believe equality of outcome matters. Now, with regard to poor around the world, it's a stunning question because the fact is that over the last 30 to 40 years, the number of people according to the UN, not an organization they usually cite, but here the numbers are interesting. According to the UN, the number of people who live in what's called extreme poverty, starvation or close to it, has dropped. So my question is that you're not answering. Let me answer. Let me answer. Let him ask it first. Let me ask my question and start because I know you're a very smart talker, by the way. But I try. Yeah. But I'm just saying that a capitalist, what it has done to the world today. That's what I'm answering. Okay. And you saying that is the best form that we've got? Yeah, I'm answering. Let me answer. Let me answer and then you can comment. Over the last 30 years, the number of extremely poor people around the world in Africa, Asia, everywhere, has gone from 30% to eight. I agree. To eight. Why? Because of capitalism. Because of a little bit of capitalism in India since 1992, because of a little bit of capitalism in China since 1978, because of a little bit of capitalism in South Korea and Taiwan and Hong Kong and Singapore and Thailand and Indonesia and all these places. It is capitalism that's brought these people out of poverty. Only capitalism. Okay, sorry. Only capitalism makes people out of poverty. I would say that we should distinguish between ills that are born out of capitalism and ills that are born out of under development. In other words, there's an old kind of Marxist cliché which is the only thing worse than being exploited under capitalism is not being exploited under capitalism. So, but the examples that you've used, and in fact, even though this has been a period of, in my view, the client in large parts of this country for the last 20, 30 years, that have lifted up people out of poverty in the global South have happened under state-led development that has had markets and competition in capitalism, but it's had a large role for the state. You're talking about Taiwan and South Korea had very strong developmental states, very strong states that used carrots and sticks and formed a coercion that I would not, not even a bye-bye to produce outcomes. In Brazil, the first two terms of the Peite government under Lula were tremendous success stories. You know, this isn't the laissez-faire vision of development. This has been states deciding what sectors to expose competitive pressure, what sectors to protect and so on. This is the way countries actually develop. I have three things. We're gonna close up now. My first thing is I'm sorry to everyone who's in line because we're done, we're out of time. My second thing is to say thank you, to see you Denver. Thank you to the Steamboat Institute. And my last thing is I'm gonna take another flash poll. I'm gonna...