DEBATE NIGHT: Charlie Kirk Vs. Atheist, Marxist Professor Ben Burgis
In a long-form, thought-provoking third installment of 'Debate Night' — Charlie is joined LIVE from HQ by self-avowed Marxist professor of Philosophy, Atheist apologist, and avid lover of the Post Office—Dr. Ben Burgis—to debate the big ideas surrounding what system of government is most conducive to living a good, free, and prosperous life in America. Coming from a perspective of conservative populism, Charlie takes on Dr. Burgis' full-throated defense of marxist socialism in a point-by-point, intellectual disagreement that spans a myriad of topics, from healthcare, to taxes, to schools, and much, much more. In the extended edition, presented exclusively here on The Charlie Kirk Show, Charlie and Ben dive deep into the meaning of life, religion and atheism, the existence of God, and so much more—available only to those of you who subscribe to the podcast. Tune in to 'Debate Night with Charlie Kirk' on TPUSA LIVE to watch these debates live as they air by going to TPUSA.com/LIVESupport the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Thanking Supporters for AmericaFest00:03:20
Hey everybody, today on the Charlie Kirk show, my conversation, my debate with a Democrat socialist, Dr. Burgess.
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This conversation is with a college professor.
We talk about a lot of different things.
I think I did rather well.
There's a couple of moments where I think I could have done better, but overall, I give myself a pretty good grade.
In fact, I think it was a very intellectual debate and fair debate.
It does not get nasty.
Out of all the debates we've done recently, this is the most, let's say, respectful.
I think both sides have been, unlike the circus that we had with the pro-abortion comedian a couple weeks ago.
He says very good things about the post office.
Kind of laughable.
We talk about God.
We talk about religion.
We talk about morality.
We talk about human nature.
It's a constructive debate.
I would love your thoughts from the debate.
I didn't want to interrupt him at some times, but I think it went very well.
I think it was illuminating about our differences and our potential similarities.
Again, thank you, thank you, thank you for supporting us at charliekirk.com/slash support.
I want to hear directly from you when you guys hear these episodes.
Freedom at charliekirk.com.
That's freedom at charliekirk.com.
Turning point USA, AmericaFest, December 18, 19, 2021.
And thank you again for supporting us at charliekirk.com/slash support.
My debate with a Democrat socialist post office-loving, pretty nice person, actually, I have to say.
He was a decent person.
Buckle up.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
His spirit is love of this country.
He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.
Turning point USA.
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
Striving for a Fairer Society00:06:59
That's why we are here.
With us tonight is Ben or Dr. Burgess or Ben Burgess, however you want to say it.
We're going to be debating, and we'll see where it leads us, Democrat socialism versus conservative populism.
Super thrilled that Ben is here tonight to have this discussion.
It'll start with some opening statements, and then we'll take it from there.
The two minutes is yours, Dr. Burgess.
Thank you, Mr. Kirk.
And thank you to Town Circle for setting this up.
So I'm a democratic socialist because I don't think anybody deserves to have less power or a dramatically worse life because of factors that are outside of their control.
So that's the first part.
That's the philosophical basis.
Concretely, I think it's obscene that we have an economic system where workers at Amazon warehouses skip bathroom breaks because they're worried about falling behind in their quotas and their boss literally owns his own spaceship.
Now, we can argue about what a fairer society would look like.
I can contrast what I would see as utopia with what you would, and I'm always up for that kind of thing.
I'm sure we'll get into some of it later.
But what I really like to start out with is not so much that end point as the baby steps towards justice that we could take right now.
Things like raising taxes on rich people to pay for social programs that would benefit the rest of us.
Things like raising the minimum wage for the working poor.
Things like making it easier for ordinary people to organize unions so they can have at least a little bit of a say at what happens in the workplaces where they spend half their waking lives.
And I got to say, what always confuses me about you, Charlie, is that I see you say that you're not like an old style kind of corporate Republican in the Reagan, Bush, William F. Buckley kind of mold.
And certainly the politicians you seem to be most enthusiastic about, people like Donald Trump or JD Vance now, make a big deal saying they're populists, they really want to help like struggling people in the heartland.
And if that's true, I don't really get why you don't support any of those things that I just mentioned.
Well, very good.
It's almost exactly two minutes.
So I'll respond.
First of all, thank you for being here.
And if we want to spend an extended period of time bashing Jeff Bezos, I'm all for that.
I think it's actually going to be really fun.
So let me just first kind of tell you what I believe and why we believe it.
It's kind of framed as conservative populism.
Put simply, we believe in the natural law.
We believe, as the Declaration of Independence says, the laws of nature are nature's God.
We believe in limitations on human beings, and we should believe there are limitations on power, both government power and, yes, of course, corporate power, as Barry Goldwater said in the 1960s.
We also believe America is strongest when families are flourishing, when there's a strong moral center, when middle-class work is respected and appreciated.
And the populist component to this is we need to be aware of what's happening around us, see when core institutions are failing, like the family, which has been failing over the last 60 years in America, which can be attributed to many different things.
I would attribute it to the rise of an aggressive social welfare state and an overindulgence in neoliberalism, that we must be willing to do something about it when the family starts to disintegrate, when our nation starts to fall apart, when our borders remain wide open.
And so we pair those two things together, conservative populism.
And the kind of philosophical basis for a lot of this is the willingness to act with prudence and wisdom to try and fix things that matter, things that objectively matter.
And I've been really looking forward to this discussion.
I think, I hope it's more of a discussion than a debate because we will disagree on plenty.
But when you talk about a untouchable oligarchy, I completely agree.
I think that there is an untouchable oligarchy in this country, both corporate and governmental, scientific and technological, that is crushing the everyday common man.
Where I think we're going to disagree is that I think the end goal, the thing that we must strive to, is family formation, family protection, and that strong moral center.
And conservative populism is a resurgence of focusing on these things and developing solutions to hopefully fix it.
All right.
Well, I guess what I would say is when you talk about limited power, right?
I get that.
That makes sense to me.
I think that absolutely, you know, I think oftentimes actually people get the relationship between these things really wrong and they'll think, well, the more you think that human nature is good and cooperative, you know, the more, you know, you might think that a fairer society is possible.
And the more you think that human nature is flawed and selfish and cruel, then the more, you know, you should think that, hey, we might as well just stick with free market capitalism.
But I think the opposite is true.
I think that the more you worry that given too much power over another, you know, one person over another, that person is going to treat the other the way that Walmart treats its employees, the way that Harvey Weinstein treated aspiring actresses, the more you're worried about that, the more you should want power to be distributed as evenly as at all possible.
And that's really why I'm a democratic socialist, that I think whether you're talking about Russia under Stalin or Amazon under our mutual friend Jeff Bezos, then any time you have one person having way too much power over another without democratic accountability, I think you're going to get really bad abuses.
So I think that's helpful.
Where I think we'll disagree, though, is the means of which we can represent individual people against oppressors or people that have power.
This is why I tend to defend markets.
And I want to be very clear.
Markets are a tool, something we set up to hopefully help human beings.
There are externalities.
There are jerks and dirtbags like Jeff Bezos that tend to con the system, not pay taxes, not treat their workers.
And one of the reasons why this has become an emphasis, I think, of conservatives is we're willing to use prudence in a non-dogmatic way and say, wait a second, if we're trying to conserve something that is eternal and beautiful and true, is it a good thing that this kind of, let's just use Bezos again, $200 billion of net worth while the average American family is struggling to pay off student loan debt or financial debt.
Where I think we're going to explore, I can't do this in the remaining 20 seconds I have though, is true decentralization must happen in a way that is consistent with both reigning in the administrative state and reigning in the technological and corporate power sources in our country.
And the ultimate form of decentralization is the family.
Strong families, strong households.
Family Formation and Economic Freedom00:15:15
All right.
So I guess when you talk about the family, sure, absolutely.
If people, you know, social institutions are making it harder to keep families together, that's a bad thing.
I think that, you know, I would point to the financial pressures that, you know, that people are often under as a huge source of problems within families, as a huge reason for relationships and marriages failing.
And that's something that I think would be helped by doing things like changing labor laws to make it easier to organize unions so people would be getting better wages and have more job stability, less of what employers like to call flexibility and everybody else calls precarity.
And so that might be one place to start exploring this is, I mean, maybe you'll surprise me here, right?
But I do not think we disagree.
We agree on that.
So, yeah, just am I good to respond?
Yeah, okay, good.
No, I just want to take any of your time.
So I want to get into the union argument.
I want to get into the minimum wage argument.
I want to get into the healthcare argument.
And I'm glad for you to say, and I really want to zero in on this, that family formation is a good thing because that is something that is debated amongst some Democrat socialist circles.
And once we kind of get into the back and forth, I want to ask you about that because certain activist organizations tend to disagree.
Some activist organizations will call the family oppressive, patriarchal, where I believe the family is beautiful and the ultimate social bedrock institution.
And every single statistic shows that when families are flourishing, divorce rates remain low, which they aren't currently, that crime goes down and literacy goes up and communities flourish.
And I think one thing we can agree on, and you said it a little bit differently than I would, I think it's wrong when corporations are making families choose between spending another 10 hours at some soulless job or spending a weekend with your kids.
I think the priority should be through our public policy and our laws should always be toward the development of children and families getting stronger.
Well, I think that if you want to have a traditional family, absolutely, you should be able to do that.
You talked about activist organizations.
I think that I would point to like, you know, the Working Families Party in New York, for example, as an activist organization that clearly has no problem with families.
Of course, if you want to live some other way, that's great true.
I think in a pluralistic society, I think everybody should be able to strive for their vision of the good life, and everybody should be free to live in the way that they want to be free.
And I think that this is one of the biggest problems.
You know, when we talk about things like healthcare, oftentimes people on my side will emphasize the fact that life expectancy is higher in places like Canada, the UK, where they have socialized health care and infant mortality.
And you want to talk about families, you know, people's babies are less likely to die in places like Canada, the UK than in the United States.
And mortality amenable to healthcare, which is a stats nerd way of saying that you're less likely to die from treatable diseases is lower in those places.
And I think all those are true and important, but I don't think it's the most important thing because most of us are not on the verge of dying most of the time.
Most of us are not worried that our babies are going to die most of the time.
The biggest way, I think, that not providing everybody with health care is a right affects the lives of most people is that it makes us less free.
Because people are a lot less likely to leave jobs that they hate if they're worried about, will I still have health insurance?
Will my family still have health insurance?
People stay in those jobs and don't pursue their dreams all the time because of that.
There are people, you know, I think people who are in good families and they want to keep them together, absolutely, they should be able to do that.
But there are also people who stay in bad or even abusive marriages because they cannot afford to lose their spousal health insurance.
And so I think that we get, we're not only happier and we not only live longer, but I think we're also freer if we take care of those things.
So that's an interesting point.
And what you're articulating before we get into the back and forth here is what Lyndon Baines-Johnson would call freedom from necessity, which is something I take exception with.
I do not believe the state should play an interventionist role in saying that it is the role of government to say that you should be free from wants or necessity.
I would argue that through a natural rights compact that you should be free to pursue virtue.
That's not to say you shouldn't have a social safety net, which far too often becomes a hammock at a social safety net.
But I think the design of government and the state, which is really what we're debating here, right?
What is the role of public policy should be supporting things that are objectively good for people, for children, for the nation, and for the country.
And so I'm happy to go into the kind of three categories that are common points of Democrat socialists next, healthcare, union membership, and kind of the development of unions.
All right, no more rules.
We can interrupt each other.
It's totally voluntary, unlike socialism.
I'm kidding.
That's my first socialist joke tonight.
So let me ask, so I want to ask you just kind of generally about Democrat socialism.
Let's do it.
Where would you point to as one, two, or three examples that you think are the best embodiment of the worldview that you hold?
Yeah.
So I think that all of the things that I want, you know, I do not think exist together right now in the world.
But if you want to talk about places where a lot of the policy goals that I'd support, you know, have been implemented.
I certainly don't think they're fully socialist societies by any stretch of the imagination.
But I think a lot of it has been implemented.
I would talk about the places you'd expect me to talk about.
Your Sweden's, your Finlands, your Denmarks, your Norways.
Now, these are complicated societies that there are right-wing parties win elections sometimes too, and they do things that I don't like.
But I think that these are places, broadly speaking, where a lot has been done to take certain things, like healthcare, for example, outside of the market so that people have that kind of freedom that I'm talking about, that they're not tied to jobs that they hate because they're worried that they and their families' basic needs aren't going to be taken care of if they don't stay in that subservient relationship.
And you talked earlier about how you want the state to support things that are objectively good.
It seems to me that living longer is objectively good.
Having lower infant mortality is objectively good.
And I would also say that having greater freedom to live your life how you want and not being tied to a particular job, I think that's also objectively good.
So job mobility is interesting.
I want to get into that.
So I'm not stunned you mentioned the Scandinavian countries.
Sure, yes.
So Denmark doesn't have a minimum wage.
Well, but you got to do the other half of that, that they don't have a minimum wage, but they have vastly more favorable terrain for unions than the United States does.
And so a lot of the wage floor is enforced that way.
It's still not just they get whatever the market says they get.
No, but no government-mandated minimum wage.
What I find interesting, and there are some aspects of the Scandinavian countries appeal to me.
Sure.
According to the World Economic Freedom Index, every country outside of Norway is more economically free than the United States.
And so is that something that would interest you?
If economic freedom is the definition of your view, then I think that what I mean by economic freedom and what they mean by economic freedom are going to be very different.
I think oftentimes if you look at the methodology of those lists, it's very unclear.
Like you'll get like the Cato Institute or whoever in some cases will do these lists where they rank places by freedom.
And it's like, you know, the things that the things that they get points for, the things they don't get points for, abortion doesn't matter, whether you can have raw milk matters, you know, I think are at least unclear to me.
But I think this is the bigger philosophical thing.
Sure, right?
Like let's just do this rather than getting into the nitty-gritty about the lists.
I think that what those guys mean by economic freedom is how much business owners are free to conduct their business however they want, you know, without interference by the state.
What I would mean by freedom in an economic context is the right of ordinary people to live the kinds of lives that they want to live and not be under the thumb to the extent that people are in the United States of whatever some corporation wants to make them do.
Right.
And so just to clarify this, though, about some of the Scandinavian countries, they went through massive deregulation in the 1980s, right?
Many of these Scandinavian countries did, including Denmark.
Denmark has actually come out and has said, stop calling us socialist.
We are not socialist.
You've seen that quote.
Well, I have seen it.
But I would like to say something about this.
And people can check out.
I actually wrote something about this last summer for Arc Digital Media.
I think I read it.
Okay, well, there you go.
I know where you're going before you say that.
All right, well, beautiful.
Which audience doesn't know.
Hopefully, though, there are people who are watching who don't know.
So let's say it anyway.
So I think that saying that there's that, hey, here is this center-right kind of prime minister who says, no, no, no, no, these social gains have nothing to do with socialism.
And you say, oh, well, he says it, right?
So therefore, he must be speaking for Denmark as a whole, the Danish hive mind, I think is approximately equivalent to if the only two, you know, if you were from Denmark and the only two Americans you'd ever talk to were Bernie Sanders and me, and you said, well, here's what they say about what America is all about.
Here's what they say about Social Security or the post office.
This is the American point of view.
I think if you look at how long socialist parties were in power in Denmark and how many of those programs came about under them, I would not say that these are societies that have achieved socialism.
We could certainly talk about what that would mean to me.
But I would say that these are societies where socialist parties allied with strong unions have brought about really beneficial social reforms as an effort to move farther in that direction.
So let's talk about Norway.
Sure.
A country that I'm familiar with, you're familiar with.
Very wealthy country.
Yeah.
Why?
Because I think the biggest reason is that they have done something that I'm sure that you wouldn't support, which is nationalize their oil industry.
You mean used fossil fuels?
Not keep it in the ground like Bernie Sanders would be.
Bernie Sanders has tweeted, we need to keep all fossil fuels in the ground.
But Norway's built a trillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund after.
Okay.
So would you support that?
Nationalization?
No, but it's better than keeping it in the ground.
Okay.
I mean, look, I think ultimately we probably are better off transitioning to other energy sources.
But if we're going to use oil, I would much rather that that oil be in the hands of the people, that it fund generous social programs like a Norway.
And I often do kind of get a sense when conservatives say this.
It's like, oh, well, there's really nothing socialist about it.
They've just nationalized the oil industry and used the proceeds to fund all of these social programs.
I mean, if that's not socialist, can we at least have that not socialist thing?
That sounds nice to me.
Let me clarify: is that if there is wealth to be redistributed, there must be wealth to be redistributed.
Sure.
And Norway has the advantage of having some of the most strategic oil reserves in the country.
And I just pinpoint it in particular because there tends to be this anti-fossil fuel development movement.
It's something Norway and the United States have in common, is that we have a lot of oil.
Now, if you want to, again, I know you've said you don't want to do this.
Well, of course, I think the private ownership of minerals is a strategic advantage for the United States.
But let me ask you about what I think is one of the reasons why I think the Scandinavian country's pursuit of egalitarianism looks good on paper.
And this is strict immigration.
Now, this has changed in recent years because of a lot of the Syrian refugee crisis and more kind of left-wing governments taking over Sweden in particular.
But Norway, for example, takes in about 70 immigrants a day, even with their more relaxed policies.
America, much bigger country, albeit 2,740 legal immigrants, about 5,000 if you include the people going across the southern border.
Do you, as being a Democrat socialist, do you support closed borders and strict immigration?
No, I don't, and I'll tell you why.
So two reasons.
One is that I think that all of the economic data that I've seen says that having more immigrants actually increases the amount of wealth that society has to go around.
And the second is I would ask what the alternatives are, right?
So we can do, you know, like those families that you talk about, right?
You know, we can, you know, we can do things like separating, you know, separating families.
We can do things like raiding churches To drag out immigrants.
But I think we would really, really, really have to step up that by a factor of 100 to actually get rid of all the undocumented immigrants in the country.
Whereas I think a much better solution, if what you're worried about is, hey, here are people coming in who, yeah, they definitely contribute to economic growth, but here are people coming in who are willing to work for low wages or whatever.
I think a much better solution to that problem is for those people to have a pathway to citizenship so that they're not afraid to do things like join unions or they're not afraid to do things like take their employers to court when they violate labor laws.
I think that's a much better solution to that problem than the sort of heavy-handed police state kinds of tactics, which I think would be the only way that you're actually going to resolve the status quo in the other direction.
One of the things I like about Norway that you just said you don't like is to become a Norwegian citizen, you must speak the native language.
It's a non-negotiable.
You must have citizenship by birth is not applicable.
And you must have lived in Norway for at least eight out of the past 11 years.
And so maybe you can help clarify this for me, because the mascot you're wearing on your shirt has changed on this, whereas I would understand the position you're espousing more if you said, hey, we're going to close off the borders.
We're going to take care of our fellow countrymen.
We are going to reject these globalist institutions because Bernie Sanders used to say that.
In 2013, Bernie Sanders said, it does not make sense to me to bring hundreds of thousands of those workers into this country to work for minimum wage and compete with American kids.
Bernie Sanders said in 2007, six years prior, if poverty is increasing and if wages are going down, I don't know why we need millions of people to be coming into this country as guest workers.
What changed?
Well, I think that the main thing that changed is that the context of both of those quotes that you just read was not about whether there should be a pathway to citizenship.
Unemployment and Worker Competition00:13:23
It was about exactly the opposite.
It was about the Bush administration's interest in 2007 and then later revivals of it in 2013, attempts to create a guest worker program, which I think you rightly compared to legalized slavery.
A lot of immigrant rights groups were actually against those proposals for the same reasons because those are things that instead of giving people the rights of Americans so that they aren't afraid to do things like organize unions, those are things that would essentially just legalize the status quo.
This is a second tier of workers who are not going to have those citizenship rights, who it's much easier to, you know, who you can kick out of the country if their employer decides they don't like them anymore.
And I think that that is a completely different thing.
I think it could also, so I think in that case, I think there's less of a contradiction there than you think.
But hey, look, Bernie said, this isn't on my shirt because I think that the man is infallible.
I could rattle off a list of things that he's gotten wrong over the years.
But the reason he is, is that I think he's been the most important champion of doing things like raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, like giver to everybody health care, ending the wars, et cetera, that would actually really materially benefit the majority of the population.
And I guess I really struggle when I hear conservatives being interested in the welfare of the working class, suddenly when it's this issue of competition from low-wage workers, which is a question of pitting some workers over other workers, but when it's a question of doing things that would benefit workers in general, like raising the minimum wage, like giving everybody health care, then suddenly it seems to be a different story.
Suddenly it seems to be that this is too interventionist.
This is too administrative state.
I mean, kicking immigrants out seems like a big expansion of state power to me, too.
Well, I want a small yet strong government, strong in what it does, and foreign citizens, not foreign citizens, sure, or illegals in the country, should be deported, should be taken out.
And I think there's a cultural aspect to it that deep down you agree with, and that's what Norway gets right.
They realize if you don't speak the language, you don't have a shared culture, then there's something that all of a sudden makes it less like a nation and more like a colony or more like a temporary place for corporations to make money.
Let's talk about the minimum wage.
The reason why I don't want abrupt, quick, let's say increases the minimum wage is actually hurts workers.
Washington Post, a very credible news study on Seattle's $15 minimum wage, says the following.
Workers have seen cut payrolls, they've been put off hiring, reducing hours, or letting their workers go.
That is Seattle.
Another study from just Target, just because Target raised their wages abruptly in 2019, shows that workers say their hours were cut, leaving them struggling.
Another one.
Okay, so I wouldn't go through them.
Let's pause and do the first question.
Seattle, the same thing.
The first couple first, because in Seattle, there have been a bunch of different studies, including one from UC Berkeley, I know, that have, I don't know which one was published by Jeff Bezos' newspaper that you're referring to there.
I'm no fan of the Washington Post.
But there was another study from UC Berkeley say that actually it had no effect on the employment rate in the restaurant industry and it achieved its goals.
I know if you look at the Congressional Budget Office, which oftentimes people with your position love to cite, they said that if you raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and by the way, I thought it was interesting that you said abrupt because I'm interested in whether you'd be okay with it if you did it slowly.
I think moderately kept up with inflation done prudently, especially as we're about to have a mass inflation.
I think that coupled with a workers' tax cut and other pro-growth policies wouldn't be the worst thing for the economy.
No.
I think that's a moderate economic position.
But keeping up with inflation, right?
You know, like you still say the purchasing power of low-wage workers should be what it is now.
And I would say that if you want to run this argument that, well, it's actually going to hurt, you know, that's actually going to hurt workers more than help them.
The studies show that it has.
I don't think the studies do show that.
Well, so here's what I said.
So here's what I think.
I mean, like, I understand what you say, that the studies, the studies show, some of the studies show that minimum wage increases lead to increased unemployment.
That's the big claim that's usually made.
Sometimes people will also say that it leads to a reduction in hours, but the big one is usually increased unemployment.
And so I'd say two things about this.
First of all, the effect of minimum wage increases on employment is like the most studied thing in empirical economics in the last several decades.
And there are studies you can find that say yes.
There are a lot of studies that you can find that say no.
And a word I almost never hear from people who say that it's going to lead to unemployment increases is meta-study, right?
In other words, if you look at a bunch of studies over time and see like, you know, since you can have, you know, very small sample sizes and, you know, and making big conclusions from very small sample sizes is generally, and then like making a big deal about them in the press.
That's how people end up believing that plants can think and coffee cures cancer, you know, that they looked at like some study with some super small sample size.
But when you do the meta-study of a bunch of different studies, most of those show no.
But let's say for the sake of argument, yes.
Let's say that it does lead to some unemployment increase.
Because you agree, certain studies do show that.
Yes, certain studies do show that.
I think most of them, and especially meta-studies over time, say no, but sure, let's say yes.
So if yes, would that mean that it was going to hurt workers more than help them?
Well, we could look at like the Congressional Budget Office, what they said in 2019, which was that two-thirds confidence that you'd have a range of unemployment effects somewhere in between zero and 3.7 million.
And most likely they said 1.3 million people would lose their jobs.
No, that's bad.
I don't want 1.3 billion people to lose their jobs.
That's a lot of jobs.
But they also said that 27 million people would keep the jobs that they have right now and be paid more and would have more purchasing power.
And so we say, okay, we have 27 million people who are being lifted out of poverty by this.
We have 1.3 billion people out of jobs.
Now, even if there was nothing that you could do about that, I'd still say that treated this as a knockdown.
Well, this is going to help poor people, working poor people more than it's hurt them more than it's going to help them.
I don't think makes sense.
But also, I don't think we have to accept that those 1.3 million people, if that's the true estimate, have to be permanently out of the job.
We could have public works programs that could employ those 1.3 million people, give them dignified public sector jobs.
And if you don't think that there's plenty of work for those 1.3 million people to do in terms of federal public works, trust me, I could give you a long list of things that could be doing.
Let me build out the study and then I want to ask you a question.
So low-wage workers on average now clock 9% fewer hours, earn $125 less each month.
That's Seattle.
There's another one, New York City businesses struggle to keep up after a minimum wage increase.
Would you support eliminating the FICA contribution for workers?
That's a 7% tax on wages before we even talked about raising the minimum wage.
Well, I'd like to talk about raising the minimum wage with no preconditions, but why not the workers' tax cut?
That's what I always don't understand because we tax workers at 7%.
7% of our workers here lose their paycheck as half of their FICA contribution.
I never hear that from workers' rights advocates.
Why?
Well, I think that, first of all, the first question you'd have to ask is what's the money that's going to be generated by that for those workers?
Then the second question that you want to ask is what's going to be lost on the other end in terms of services if that's cut.
And I think that paying people a higher minimum wage, having those 27 million people get a living wage income.
I can give them a 7% wage increase tomorrow.
And what?
It's called cutting the FICA tax.
Every working person deserves 7% of their wages that are currently being taken by them by the government.
Why don't you instantaneously agree?
Agree.
So what are you going to, well, because I know what the other shoe is that's going to drop there.
What are you going to cut to pay for that tax?
Okay, so there's plenty.
I could name a whole litany of departments I think I would cut to try to pay for it.
But let's pretend that it's paid for, like everything Washington, D.C. says.
Yes, if you could cut workers' wages and not workers wages, this is the same thing.
The taxes on workers' wages, if you could cut that and on the other end, there would be absolutely no loss in anything that's a beneficial thing that's going to make workers' lives better, then sure, why not?
But I think you should still raise, I think you should still raise the minimum wage because I think, again, having those 27 million people now having a living wage, having the ripple effects for lots of people who are already making more than minimum wage, it's going to increase their wages.
And then 1.3 million people need new jobs.
Trust me, we can take care of that.
So you're obviously no fan of President Trump or his administration.
During his presidency, the bottom 10% of workers actually had an income grow faster than the top 10% of workers.
And so what we saw was a real blue-collar boom over the prior administration.
I mean, I think what we...
Without having to abruptly raise the minimum wage.
And the reason was, let me just finish, is an emphasis on entrepreneurship is this is an indicator that I don't hear talked about a lot, which is how many new businesses are being started.
And when you raise the minimum wage, it's harder for the deli owner, the dry cleaner to enter into the market because all of a sudden the labor pool is like, man, $15 an hour, I could barely pay to keep the lights on.
So if we want new business, and you agree, entrepreneurship is a good thing, right?
I think it's good to have new businesses.
I'd like more of them to be organized as worker cooperatives.
We're going to talk about unions in the United States.
We can get into that.
I want to get deep into unions.
But I do just want to say on what you're claiming about the Trump economy, because I think this is an important point, right?
So, yes, sure.
What explains those numbers that you just mentioned?
You'd say it's a new emphasis on entrepreneurship.
I'd say it's too much.
I could go through other things.
It's including an energy renovation.
But I think the primary things are two things.
One, that quite a few states during that time period actually did raise their minimum wage, and I think that had a big effect on that.
Two, sure, that employment increases give workers more bargaining power, which a lot of conservatives now object to.
They say, oh, nobody wants to work.
But employment increases give workers more bargaining power in the labor market, and that's a good thing.
But that's not really this new emphasis on entrepreneurship that Trump was doing.
If you look at all the employment figures, whether you're looking at the overall civilian employment rate in the United States or whether you're breaking it down, black, white, Hispanic, whatever, all of those, you see the same trend, which is that in 2009, at the beginning of the Obama presidency, when the effects of the 2008 crash were really coming in, all of those were way up here.
You have 10% unemployment over the course of the eight years of Obama.
It goes from 10% to 4.7% overall civilian unemployment.
And then sure, under the four years of Trump, we'll give him a pass for the COVID part, but under those years of Trump, then you go from 4.7 to 3.5.
So that is a continuation at an overall slower rate, but a continuation of what had happened before.
And the reason I'm bringing that up is not that I'm a big Obama guy.
I mean, look.
No, I know you're not.
As you know, I'm a Bernie Sanders would be a good start guy.
But...
And I want to get into that.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Because I think you are cleverly cloaking your radicalism in three issues that are agreement.
I don't.
We're going to keep it.
I don't think so.
I think I front-loaded the radicalism and said these would be baby steps in the right direction.
And I'm very confused about how you could be a populist without supporting those babies.
We're all Hegelians now, I suppose.
But I do want to finish the point because I think it's an important one, right?
That it's not that I think Obama is great.
It's that I think that if you're going to say the populist thing about Trump economics, even though this is a guy who appointed hardcore union busters to the National Labor Relations Board, this is a guy who tried to throw millions of people off of health care in terms of going against the Medicaid expansion.
This is a guy who tried to make it a lot harder to qualify for food aid for those families you talked about.
That the big populist thing is that he oversaw economic growth and hence job growth.
Well, hey, if that's enough to be a populist, Barack Obama was a better populist than he was.
And Bill Clinton was a big populist because he oversaw lots of economic what I am saying, though, is that it's mischaracterized that the people that you say you care about, the lower workers, actually did really well under those four years.
I think Trump could have been more conservative, more populist in certain things.
And just to clarify on the food stamp issue, millions of people got off of food stamps under Trump voluntarily because their wages went up.
But I don't want to get too bogged down.
I really don't want to get too bogged down on the street.
Yeah, you had that extra one percentage change of unemployment going down, which is a continuation of previous trends.
So let me kind of ask you more broadly.
I guess we could go into some of these other aspects of the pressure.
I have a question I'd love to ask you in a minute, by the way, but go for it.
Yeah, you're free to do that too, by the way.
The Power of the Administrative State00:15:25
Do you trust the government?
Do I trust the government?
Do I trust the government to to tell me the truth, to do things that, no, the government, by and large, that I think that those millionaires and billionaires, the guy in the shirt likes to talk about, exert vastly too much influence.
But here's where I think people often go wrong from that true premise that the government is untrustworthy.
I think premise is fine, but the conclusion, therefore we should have less government in the sense of we should have less expansive social services.
We shouldn't give everybody health care.
I think that that's a fundamental confusion because I think that there's a difference between talking about what the government can do to you.
And there we're talking about police, ICE, you know, the expansion of the national security state and what the government has a legal obligation to do for you in terms of supporting what I would see as fundamental human rights like health care and education.
Let me tell you where I think there's a flaw in this.
And I really want you to talk about this.
You say healthcare and education.
There must be bureaucrats to enforce these things.
You need the administrative state.
So then you get the CDC, you get the NIH, you get unregulated agencies that you as being someone who focuses on democracy, focuses on the power of the people.
Where is the check and balance against the CDC, the NIH, HHS?
For every government program, you need hundreds of thousands of desk workers, which is where the word bureaucrat comes from in French.
So you say you don't trust the government, yet you support expanding the social services, which will then necessarily expand government.
Why do you want to expand something you don't trust?
Well, first of all, congratulations on the French vocabulary.
I like it.
I have other words too.
We could opre no les deluge, which means after me the flood.
We could talk about all my favorite French terms if you'd like.
We could do a whole thing.
You write for the Jacobin magazine, for goodness sake, so we could exchange notes on Rochester and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
I've only read the confessions once.
Go ahead.
Okay.
Well, I'd be happy to do all of that, although my French is like Duolingo.
I can't do that much.
Endeavour to concept.
No, I'm done, I promise.
But I would say that if you don't want bureaucrats to have more power, if that's the big objection.
No, that's not.
That's part of the objection.
That's an element of it.
Sure.
So let's start with that element.
So if you don't want bureaucrats to have more power, then the thing that you should really object to, right?
Because you said earlier, you think we've got to have some kind of social safety net.
So we're agreeing that there are some social services programs.
We're arguing about how expansive they should be and how they should work.
Generous versus limited.
Sure.
Okay.
But this is the thing.
If you want those bureaucrats to have less power, you don't want limited.
That's the last thing that you want.
You want generous.
And here's why.
Here's why.
You're going to have to convince me.
I know.
I know.
Like, I really liked what you just did there.
Like, that was some good, you know.
So to restrain their power, you must give them a lot of power.
No, you're not giving them any power.
You're taking away their power.
It's a really simple argument.
Here's how it goes.
That means-tested programs give power to bureaucrats.
When you say you have to jump through all these poops to qualify for something, and there's some bureaucrat who gets to decide whether you get it or not, bureaucrats have more power.
Whereas when you say this is a legal right that every single person has as a citizen, no Canadian is having a bureaucrat decide whether they qualify for health care.
Or in Finland, you talked about all of the policies that, you know, in Norway that you thought would be an issue for me.
Finland is the poorest.
Okay, I don't think it's because of this, but in Finland, where they don't even have private schools, and certainly you have a right to higher education as a citizen the way that the way that you have historically in lots of countries.
And I think it's worked very well.
But when you have that, you don't have students jumping through financial aid, bureaucracy, hurdles.
And does this person qualify to get schooled?
Does that person qualify to school?
Where bureaucrats have the power to decide what's up?
Because that's the case where bureaucrats have power over you.
If everybody gets something as a right of citizenship, bureaucrats have no power in that circumstances.
But let me ask you something, though.
So you want Medicare for all.
Yet HHS is the largest civilian branch of our government.
So as we have expanded Medicare, as we have expanded Medicaid, it hasn't been means tested as you want.
We have hundreds of thousands of desk workers that are doing the means testing.
Are you qualified?
Medicare reimbursements.
And so even under your example, it's a good idea.
Well, but Medicaid.
It's hopefully idealistic.
The point is Medicaid is a means test.
You cannot have a generous social program without a massive bureaucratic and, dare I say, corrupt administrative state.
Woodrow Wilson would even say that.
Well, you need the administration.
You think I like Woodrow Wilson, the guy who's a college professor.
Okay, well, and a college president.
So he's kind of in your world.
Well, okay, trust me, neither of those things earn any points for me.
But I think that Woodrow Wilson is the guy who resegregated the federal bureaucracy after integrated.
He put Eugene Javi Debs in jail.
Nobody on the left is going to see Woodrow Wilson as a hero.
Liberals.
Nobody on the left.
But I was just going to say.
I know plenty of people that would, but that's fine.
I don't think you're going to find a lot of CR, LBJ, John Dewey, all these people believed in a strong administrative state.
Well, I mean, you're rattling off a bunch of liberals, but that's okay.
We don't need to argue about the historical figures.
Let's just say this.
If you're talking about administrative state bureaucracy, well, your example is Medicaid, which is a means-tested program.
And even at that, even despite the means testing, which is the part that gives the bureaucrats their power, which is also the part I'm objecting to, even despite that, we're talking about bureaucracies.
As I think you mentioned earlier, the government has no monopoly of bureaucracy.
There's plenty of bureaucracies in the private sector.
And if you want to know which programs have the smallest overhead, right?
Even Medicaid, even despite the means testing, Medicaid, Medicare, all of those have much smaller administrative overhead than any of the private insurance companies because the private insurance companies, one, they have to plan out their strategy for competing with each other.
And two, the private insurance companies have a vast bureaucracy that is dedicated to finding ways to deny people's claims because they've always got one eye on the bottom line for shareholders.
And one question I'm very curious about, by the way, is, you know, you object for all of these reasons.
You think it's too interventionist.
You think it's too much administrative state to just providing everybody with health care.
These are all elements of the critique.
Providing people with health care is a human right so that you can have like what people I know in the UK always tell me, which is, hey, would I, you know, when whatever, my mom got cancer, when whatever the situation is, people will say, the only person I ever talked about this was with a doctor, which is very different from Americans' experience with healthcare.
If you're going to object to that on the grounds that that's too much big government, I am really curious whether you'd say the same thing for like fire services.
Like, would you be okay with it if we didn't have public fire services?
Absolutely not.
As I said, small but strong.
Okay.
The government exists, as it says in the preamble of the Constitution, amongst many other things, to secure the blessings of liberty, to ensure domestic tranquility.
And Hamilton said it best that you need a nimble yet effective federal government, good at what it does, but not overreaching.
And that's the whole idea of conservative populism is within this constitutional republic framework.
I'm a big fan of firefighters, police officers.
I'm a big fan of Border Patrol.
I'm a big fan of all these sort of things.
But when all of a sudden I believe you get outside of the constitutional limits, is where you birth this fourth branch of government.
And our mutual hatred of Woodrow Wilson is a perfect example of this because he really believed the state, this is a Hegelian idea, will usher in that utopia, that the state is God, that through the mechanisms of the state, we will be able to turn the chapter and with it, remake man.
He wasn't the only person that believed that FDR did.
Lyndon Baines Johnson did as well.
Where we as conservatives and conservative populists say, hold on a second, that is not what the state is there to do for.
Let me just say one last thing, which is that the state is there to preserve the natural law with prudence and wisdom to hopefully develop families and foster children, not to try to remake human beings.
When it comes to health care, not only do I have a moral complaint that it's not the role of government, it's also not good at doing it.
And it also hurts the everyday common man.
So I have two.
I don't think either of those things are true.
But I have a moral argument, and I also have utilitarian arguments.
I just want to make sure that's the problem.
Let's start with the moral argument because I am very unclear on this.
Because why is it that having public firefighters or public police is not overreached, but having public health care is?
Why would it be objectionable if instead of having public fire services that everybody gets to use, you had everybody just having to have private fire insurance?
And if you had a better private fire insurance plan, they'd probably put out your fire faster.
Or maybe we had public fire insurance, but only for people, the poorest people or the oldest people, which would be the exact equivalent for health care, or the same thing for policing, the equivalent for security insurance.
Because all of these things seem very similar to me because having your house burned down, being victimized by a crime, or needing chemotherapy, those are all cases where your life and limb is in danger.
Like these seem pretty parallel to me.
What do you see as the big disanalogy?
So the first problem is mostly local, police and fire, so therefore it's more accountable.
So the dollars don't go to some sort of albatross to the kingdom of Washington, D.C., of unelected, unknown, kind of just unchecked bureaucrats.
That's number one.
Number two, we do have a system in the country, despite what you're saying, where if you need health care, you will be taken care of.
Is it broken?
Is it inadequate?
It's said though, right?
Hold on a second.
It's already, I'm saying it is illegal to deny someone service of care.
Illegal.
Now, do we have problems with our health care system?
Do you think if you could put me in a room and I could strike a huge bargain with you?
I think that there are elements of the German system that are admirable.
I will say that.
Where you have a public system and a private system.
Where I start to all of a sudden say timeout, no-go, no-fly zone, is where I hear people like Bernie Sanders, and I'm paraphrasing, who want to get rid of private insurance as we know it.
That's a big mistake.
Here's how I think the biggest problem with health care is: it's not individualized.
It's way too bureaucratic, way too top-down.
And yes, we have pharmaceutical companies that are addicting people to drugs that they should not be addicted to.
We have a sick care problem in our country.
And I agree with a lot of people on the left with this on this.
Maybe we'll agree that we have an obesity problem.
We have a problem of how we get our food.
We have a corporate farming problem.
I agree with all those things.
Do I think that a government-run system of health care that will be more similar to how the IRS or how the Postal Service works, that's somehow going to be the solution to that?
Absolutely not.
The Postal Service is amazing, and I do not think that again.
The Postal Service is amazing.
It has been an engine of upward mobility.
It has been an engine of racial equality.
If you building the black middle class, massively an engine of that.
Have you ever been a postal service?
I have.
And the Postal Service will carry a letter from here to Alaska for no, not for the same price.
And they're certainly not going to serve.
You know it's going to get there.
No, I do not know that.
And it's certainly not going to do it.
It's never going to get there with as much service to out-of-the-way rural areas.
I got to give you credit.
Anything.
I've never heard anyone defend the postal.
Like it's cheap.
Well, you need to talk to more people because like the post office is an amazing institution and it should be massively expanded.
In fact, one of the best things I think they have in some of those Scandinavian countries is postal banking, which if we did that, Bernie Sanders' proposal would immediately put out of business all the payday loan vampires that prey on unbanked people, would create millions of new, good, unionized jobs.
Postal services.
So great.
But I do want to go back because I don't want this to get lost.
I don't want this to get lost.
The post office lost hundreds of thousands of packages and was six months late.
That's who you want to run our health care system?
I think that, well, first of all, I think that if you actually have a fair look at the numbers, I think the Postal Service does do a really good job.
I think that oftentimes when people say no, they are not using the same metrics to evaluate it, they'd use to evaluate everything else.
But if you want to know something that would be very much like what Medicare for All would be like if we had it in the United States, then I'd say looking at delivery of packages is probably not what you want to do.
What you probably want to look at is countries like Canada, where they already have Medicare for All, Great Britain, where they've gone further.
And the hospitals are publicly owned.
Let's talk about that.
Well, okay, but those are places where people live longer, where fewer of their babies die, where the rate of mortality of medical to health care is way better.
Or look, you said you want it to be local, you know, that you don't like the fact.
Super localized.
Sure, sure, local, great.
So if all the hospitals were municipally owned, you'd be cool with that?
All the hospitals, it would be, well, first of all, that's actually the case in a lot of places.
There's county-run hospitals all across the country.
I'm not denying their category.
That's calculated.
Okay.
So you wouldn't be okay with that.
So it really has nothing to do with centralization.
No, it does.
Trust me, the city of Chicago can be equally, if not more corrupt than the Kingdom of Washington, D.C. Is it going to be more corrupt than the private insurance companies?
I mean, that's a good question.
Okay, but you did also say, right?
And I really want to make sure we're doing that.
That locally is generally better, but I'm not going to die on the Cook County as a greater case.
This does go back to what you said earlier, though, when I asked you about fire protection, because you said, well, the difference is that nobody could be turned out for the hospital.
That is a law.
Yes, that is a law.
I'm glad that it's a law.
I am too.
Okay, good.
Wonderful.
We agree on that.
That is a good government intervention to stop the private sector from doing what it would otherwise do and did otherwise do before that law was passed.
But also, I would say, do the equivalent for the fire services, that the only people who get it without having to pay at the point of service are the poorest people, are the oldest people.
Everybody else has to rely on private fire insurance, which varies wildly in quality.
And if you don't have private fire insurance, you're not poor enough to qualify for the means-tested bureaucrat-enabling system for poor people, and you're not old enough for the other one, and you end up having to have the fire department come and save you anyway, then you have a giant bill that's going to bankrupt you.
Do you think that sounds like a fair system?
No.
So let me ask you a question.
Rewarding Personal Responsibility00:05:02
So is that here's where, how do you define health care?
This is a very important question, right?
Because healthcare could be, hey, I just got a gunshot wound.
I need to be taken care of.
Absolutely.
Or healthcare could be, I'm 800 pounds overweight.
I'm eating terribly.
I have no sort of interest to exercise or eat well.
Why all of a sudden should that person be put into the same exact level of care of someone that has saved money and taken care of their health?
Why should someone who's 800 pounds overweight be given in this sort of realm?
Why should human agency and choice have zero emphasis on what you're what you're describing?
The only difference between that and what already exists in the United States is that we would have to add, and they're rich enough that they can afford really high-quality medical care.
Right now, somebody who's 800 pounds, who doesn't watch their diet, who chain smokes, et cetera.
I agree.
Yes.
But you could add chain smoking up.
But sure.
Yeah, all those things, all those things.
You think that's not actually given a preference?
Well, here's what I'm saying: that I think the system that we have right now, somebody who checks every single one of those boxes, but is rich enough to afford the best medical care skips in line ahead of the person who takes care of their health, exercises every day, doesn't smoke, eats well, but lost their job or just is cobbling together four part-time jobs like so many Americans are and thus doesn't have employees.
It's an interesting question.
So you believe just because you have better money, you shouldn't be able to have better stuff.
I believe.
Or more money, better stuff.
I believe that when it comes to something like health care, no.
That's a very broad job.
I do not believe that people should get life-saving services preferentially because of how much money they have.
So how much money they've saved.
How about someone saved their whole life and they said, in case there's a disaster, I'm going to put $500 away a month.
They get to age 45 and all of a sudden they realize that they have some sort of health complication.
They shouldn't be able to take advantage of the money they've saved for their entire life.
Well, this actually goes back to the very first thing that I said, like the opening couple of years.
What is justice, I guess?
That I said.
Because what I said is that I don't want some people to have dramatically worse lives than others because of factors outside of their control.
Now, if we control, though.
Well, if we live.
Like saving.
If we lived in a world where all economic inequality was due to thrift versus indolence or laziness versus industriousness, I would have much less objection to this stuff that I do in the world where we actually live,
where somebody who saved up their whole lives, but then they have unexpected medical expenses that bankrupt them, which happens all the time, that they have, you know, is going to get worse health care than somebody who has never saved at all.
But as somebody like, you know, if somebody like if Hunter Biden had some massive medical bill tomorrow.
He would probably have, I mean, yeah, considering his lifestyle.
Sure, sure, right?
So if Hunter Biden had that huge medical bill tomorrow, then he would get in line ahead of people for multiple reasons, both access to power and also money.
Sure.
So that's a good example.
Those are both bad things, but they have largely unearned, and I agree.
Sure.
So, and I would say the same thing about the Walton children.
I would say the same thing about anybody who is inherited.
Money.
When you go to the hospital or you go to buy insurance, they don't ask you, did this money come from being thrifty and saving your whole life?
Let me ask you a question.
Or did this money come from stock ownership?
Or did this money come from inheritance?
They just ask, do you have the money to afford it?
And that's part of markets, right?
Is that you're not able to make a moral claim for every dollar bill.
But generally, markets will go towards value and value creation.
I actually want to close this thought on one thing because it goes to your other thing that you're going to be doing.
Actually, can I, I mean, if you'll indulge me, could I ask you like a 30-second question?
Sure, because I really want to clarify.
I know we're coming up to it, but I'm so fascinated by this, right?
So we agree to.
It's not the firefighter thing again?
It's not the firefighter.
Okay.
Okay.
Although, you know, I think there's more to discuss.
I'm very anti-fire.
Well, that's good.
You should be equally anti-cancer.
And then just like we have fire departments, we should have that.
That's why I think people who eat well and don't smoke and make good decisions should be rewarded for human agency.
Yeah, which is not at all what we're doing.
Because the inverse of your statement, I just want to make sure this is clear.
The inverse is you say that people should not be penalized for factors outside of their control.
The inverse is that I think people should be rewarded for factors inside of their control.
Yeah, and most of what we've got for human action is not about rewards people for good choices.
Okay.
So here's what I wanted to ask.
Real, real true.
Sure, I promise.
A Positive View of Karl Marx00:05:38
So we established earlier how much we both liked Jeff Bezos.
Yes.
Dislike best Jeff.
You didn't ask me, should I raise his taxes?
Well, because this is why I'm curious about it.
Because I saw in 2019 with Kyle Kalinsky.
Yeah, and he asked you, would you be willing to raise Jeff Bezos' taxes by like 1% to provide housing for every single homeless veteran?
And your response at that time was that you'd hope he'd do it voluntarily.
And I think at this point, we've established that's not going to happen.
He'd prefer to buy a spaceship.
That's probably true.
Yeah.
So if you put a gun to my head, would I raise his taxes?
I mean, I guess if I was a representative, I guess, yes.
This is progress.
I'm so proud of you.
Let me tell you, I say, I guess, conditionally, if all of a sudden there would be a comparable piece of legislation alongside of it that would actually value and prioritize things I cared about.
If it was just to raise his taxes to go into the current albatross of the administrative state, I'd rather have him buy spaceships than give money to founders.
But if it was earmarked for a housing for homeless veterans and you would say yes to the money.
The answer is yes, because I think Jeff Bezos from it from a million years ago.
This is such good progress.
But let me tell you why.
Let me clarify why.
Jeff Bezos games your favorite department, the Postal Service.
He games the corporate tax loophole system.
Jeff Bezos has a total disregard for what I consider to be the American way of life.
And he has this weird fascination of going into orbit.
And guess what?
I hope he stays there.
Okay.
Well, I congratulate you on this progress.
Well, I mean, you could call it progress.
You could also call it a commitment to prudence.
I want to ask you a question.
I will get back to the other question I want.
I want to ask you what, and I want to get more into philosophy here.
What's your view of Karl Marx?
My view of Karl Marx is pretty positive.
I think that you can certainly find things like anybody who's writing the mid-19th century that, you know, if there's nothing that you think he's wrong about 100, you know, whatever, 150 years later, then like something has gone very wrong, right?
You know, there should be ways that you can say, no, this part no longer makes sense.
You've got to rethink that.
I think you have to look at it all apart.
But I think that Karl Marx is a basically positive figure.
I think that the theory of history is mostly right.
And I also, so, yeah, I see you smiling.
Happy to get into it.
I'm happy to debate the Hegelian dialectic and the phenomenology of spirit.
Oh, okay.
No, not debate, but it's discussing.
Not where I thought this was going, but that's cool.
No, I mean, that's basically what you mean by the theory.
Well, I don't think it is.
I think there's a big difference there.
He was the head of the young Hegelians.
Well, he started out as a Hegelian, and then he rejected it in favor of what in some ways structurally is similar, but in some ways is the opposite because it's based on materialism.
But here's what I do think when we talk about Marx, because I think that there's an interesting thing that happens here.
That when people talk about Marx, they tend to say, well, any dictator who existed in the 20th century who claimed to be inspired by Marx, people who were born decades after he died, that discredits everything that Marx said.
But then when we're talking about a philosopher like John Locke, who a lot of...
Love John Locke.
Yeah, right.
But then like John Locke, you know, the man both philosophically justified and was personally involved in the slave trade, given his role, you know, formulating the Constitution of the South Carolina colony, the man philosophically justified the genocidal dispossession of Native Americans.
That's a misinformation.
I think so, right?
Because like his view is they don't really have property rights because they're not using the land properly.
And so they haven't mixed their labor with it in the right way to establish a right to it.
Whereas not only did Marx never not praise any dictatorships that were alive, you know, when he was alive, his model for what he thought a transition to socialism would look like was the Paris Commune, which was ultra-democratic.
And the only head of state anywhere in the world who he liked enough to send a friendly telegram to was the democratically elected Abraham Lincoln, who he liked for anti-slavery reasons.
So there's a lot of things I want to get into.
So with the Paris Commune.
Yeah, sure.
Are you your favorable view of that?
You do write for the Jacobin magazine, so I imagine.
Do you think that I guess this is a question about human nature?
Sure.
Do you take a Rassoian view of human nature?
Do you think man is born free and remains the rest of his life in chains?
Or do you believe in tabula rasa, like the blank slate?
Or what is your view of human nature?
Sure.
Because I think that's actually instructive.
Sure, so we covered this a little bit earlier, but I'm happy to go back into it.
So I think that as far as human nature goes, are people fundamentally kind and decent and cooperative?
Are people fundamentally selfish and cruel?
I think that to fully answer that, you need to get really deep into evolutionary psychology and a lot of other things.
And the answer is incredibly murky.
I think the only really honest thing you can say about it is what David Humbes says in his essay on the afterlife when he says that it would be really hard to sort out who deserved to go to heaven and who goes to hell because most of us float somewhere between vice and virtue.
But what I think is that almost everybody gets the relationship between the human nature issue and the capitalism and socialism issue exactly wrong.
So tell me why.
You touched on this earlier.
I did touch on this earlier.
Okay, because if you have a Hobbesian view of human nature, you think that you should actually want big government.
I'm happy to get into it.
So I think that...
Which I guess which is what Hobbes believes.
Well, yes.
I certainly don't want big government in Hobbes' sense.
This gets back.
Spreading Power in Politics and Economy00:11:59
This gets back to the distinction between the things that government could do to you, like break up families and deport people, and the things that government is under a legal obligation to do for you.
Do you really think that government has the ability to restrain itself from saying, you know, this is what I can do, what we can do for you?
You think government can have this dividing line between benevolence and malevolence?
You don't think the government could restrain itself?
I thought you were all about limited government.
Well, constitutionally, absolutely.
Okay, so you think the government could obey restraints about what it's supposed to do?
Only with the fierce limits of courts and not even establishing those departments in the first place.
The best way to limit government is to not create those departments or those means to do it.
Not have a spy agency domestically, for example.
Like, oh, we're only going to spy in a couple of years.
Well, okay.
So I think that might be the first thing.
What I'm saying is once you introduce that power, it will be abused.
Other than your hatred of Jeff Bezos and Hunter Biden, I think the first thing we've agreed on tonight is that we shouldn't have domestic spy agencies.
But I think that if...
Including the Postal Service, which spies on our citizens.
Well, I think that the primary effect of the Postal Service.
I don't think that's because you're too busy losing my mail.
Of the Postal Service.
I think that the Postal Service, given how cheaply people are.
I feel sorry if you meant.
You don't have to do that.
Well, I don't think you should attack the Postal Service.
I think that it's been a tremendous economic benefit to many millions of Americans.
We don't have to have a stay bogged down on that.
But I do think, but on the philosophical question, that's where you want to go.
I think that the more you're worried that one person given too much power over another is going to treat that other like a little kid might treat a fly trapped in a jar, the more what you should want in both politics and the economy is to have power be spread as evenly as possible.
So earlier, and I want to make sure I'm addressing this because I wouldn't want anybody to think I was avoiding the subject.
Earlier you were saying that I was like hiding my radicalism by talking about the things that we could do immediately, which is, I've got to say, a little bit funny because I do spend a lot of time writing about the more radical long-term.
Like banning private beaches and letting in the entire country of Afghanistan.
Yeah, I think that the, well, first of all, I don't think the entire country of Afghanistan wants to come.
I think a lot of the entire country of Afghanistan.
Supports the Taliban.
I think refugees fleeing from the crisis that we created absolutely should come in.
But yeah, I do write all the time about the radical stuff.
Those things are not uncontroversial.
I don't think I'm afraid to talk about it.
But I think that when you talk about the really radical long-term goals, you say a lot of times you like to just talk about the value of markets.
And I do agree.
Markets are good at some things.
Good, we agree on that.
Yeah.
They have a, I think that if that if what you're concerned with is coordinating production of consumer goods with what people want, I think markets are good at that.
I think that there's a difference between markets in consumer goods and the labor market.
And I think the difference is that the labor market, you know, people's need for a job and people's need to keep the job they have is vastly less elastic than their need for a given consumer good because it's much harder for people to replace a job than to just start consuming one thing than another thing.
And I think that the workplace is really a site of authoritarianism.
And so, sure, do we need some markets?
Absolutely.
I think that there are domains in which we've proven empirically, like I would argue healthcare, we were going back and forth on that earlier, that taking those things out of the market could actually be much better.
But are there domains you need markets in?
Sure.
I would say that for those domains that you need markets in, you can at least have those markets be worker-controlled firms.
So I think that like if you look at Mondragon in Spain, you know, employ, you know, 80,000 people, extremely successful company, does lots of research and development stuff and is worker-owned.
People get to elect management.
People have operated agreements.
They're like the equivalent of a union contract, but with no separate boss on the other side of the bargaining table.
And so if you say, should we have as a goal of government policy that the private sector be more like Mondragon or should it be more like Amazon or Walmart?
I'd say it should be more like Mondragon.
And one reason I think that is precisely that the more you worry that human nature is selfish and cruel, the less power you should want one person to have over another in the workplace or in society as a whole, which is why I want democracy in both cases.
So first of all, we have, I understand the argument of employers, employers, employees owning companies.
We have that in America too.
Public grocery state chains is a great example in Florida.
That could still happen in a market.
But I guess this is, and you haven't taken a position on human nature, which I think is fine.
Well, I mean, I think I've taken a position, to be clear.
There's some ambiguity in this.
But my position is...
Because you said, if you believe this, then you're going to be able to do that.
My position is that human nature is a mess, that there's a lot of truth to both pessimistic people.
I think that's fair and that's more accounts.
But I also think that to the extent that you worry about the bad stuff, that gives you a reason to want to distribute power evenly.
Right.
So the best way to distribute power evenly, in the opinion of a conservative, would be first and foremost to empower the family and to allow not just workers, but entrepreneurs to create new companies and allow workers to be able to have abundant choices in the workforce or in the workplace.
The best competition, the best way to empower people is choice, is competition, is not to say that we are now going to mandate that you need some sort of labor designation on your board.
That's been the opposite of choice.
I'll give you an example, which is that if you have a very specific skill and you work for Ford, right now, Ford Motor Company, you have to be unionized to work for the United Auto Workers, right?
It's mandated.
Whereas if you had more competition, then maybe there might be non-labor there.
So this is what always confuses me about that point, because I hear conservatives saying this all the time, that if there's a union contract in place that says that to be hired for this job, you have to be a member of the union or really is usually you have to either be a member of the union or pay an agency fee, but whatever.
We can just say be a member of the union.
That if you have that, that this is an unfreedom, that workers are being forced to do something against their will.
But what confuses me about that is that any condition for hiring, you could say, is forcing workers to do something against their will, because obviously there's this wildly unequal bargaining power.
Workers need the job way more than a company usually.
I think you're misrepresenting any given business.
I really do.
Any given worker, that's, by and large, it's much easier to replace a worker than it is for a worker to replace a job.
And given that, sure, I agree that anytime you make something, you can only have this job or you can only keep this job if you do X, that's a case where you're limiting people's freedom.
But if you really go with that principle, then that should go for everything at a job.
And I would say out of all the things that people are forced to do for certain jobs, the one that's least objectionable is you have to have this thing that actually protects, makes it harder to fire you, that helps you keep more of the wealth you generate for the company in your pocket, that gives you some sort of say because you get to vote in a union contract.
That's way less objectionable than all the other stuff you're forced to do to have a job.
Like what?
Like what?
Well, I mean, I think if you were...
Like not show up drunk.
No, I think we could agree that that one's reasonable.
And if that was the extent of workplace authoritarianism in the United States.
Hold on.
I really want to zero on this.
I'd be much less concerned about this.
I want to zero on this because.
I'm just concerned about it.
Well, I want to zero on this because I'll agree that there's some externalities and some jerks and some dirtbags.
Do you really believe, let's say a majority?
Sure.
A majority of workers are being exploited by their bosses and that the owners of production, you really think that in America?
What do you mean by exploited?
You used the word.
You said exploitation or workplace authoritarianism.
That is your term.
The word I used was authoritarianism, not exploitation, but I'd be happy to talk about it.
But let's say, do you think that a majority of workers, to use your terms, are living under a workplace autocrat or form of such right now in America?
Let's say a majority, 50 plus one.
Yeah, much more than that.
So we're going to definitely disagree on that.
Sure.
So if you're saying, do the vast majority of people who work for a living in the United States work at workplaces where...
They're living under some sort of tyranny without them realizing it?
So, okay, let's be clear about what we're talking about here.
So they have a, that the vast majority of workers go to work in workplaces where they don't get to make any sort of managerial decisions.
Those are made with it for them.
And why?
And let's be fair.
Why is it?
Because someone took a risk to start a company and those workers didn't.
Because they decided to go into their savings, to go to a bank, to take out a line of credit, to take a risk to start something new.
Do you think everybody has the equal ability to do that?
Of course not.
I mean, absolutely not.
Does everyone have an equal ability to go dunk a basketball or to become a decathlete?
Of course not.
I mean, does everyone have an equal ability to become a college professor?
Of course not.
Sure.
I mean, that's a silly argument.
But this is the point.
Are some people going to create better widgets and gizmos than somebody else's?
But what people do have an equal ability to do is they have an equal ability to take the risk.
There are plenty of people that couldn't split the atom that work extra hours.
That go into their settings account.
That's not going to equal ability to take the risk.
Hold on.
Why is that?
Why isn't that so important?
Millions of people start new businesses every year in our country.
That's completely consistent with this.
The reason that most that people don't all have an equal ability to take the risk is that what would be risked is very different depending on your initial financial situation.
No, but there's plenty of people that...
Equal ability meaning this, meaning that do you have the freedom to do that?
Do you have the willingness to lever yourself up, to go to the bank and say, you know what?
I want to take out a second mortgage on my home, and I'm going to go start some sort of shoe company on the side of the street.
But hold on.
But then all of a sudden you're saying that the five people that are working in that cobbler store are being oppressed by the guy that might have gone two years up paying himself just to be able to start that small business.
And so here's where I'm starting to just like.
So I wish you'd give a little more appreciation.
I would like to separate a couple of issues.
To how capital is deployed.
I would like to separate a couple issues here because I think a lot of different things are being run together.
First of all, on the subject of whether everybody has the equal ability to take entrepreneurial risk, I think that it's really interesting that in your example, you said, oh, you can take out a second mortgage on your home.
So what does that suggest?
That you own a home and your finances are generally good enough that that would be approved, which obviously is a situation that tens of millions of Americans are not in.
So I think we're coming to a good disagreement.
But also, I would say that when you talk about entrepreneurial risk, you say, well, it's not reasonable to say that workplaces where the people who are making decisions don't have any sort of democratic accountability to the overall workforce, that that's not authoritarian because people, you know, in some cases, certainly not all cases, got in that position by taking entrepreneurial risk.
I think that there are two different issues that are being conflated there, which is one, is it authoritarian, right?
And that's just a question of what's the structure of the firm.
Teacher Unions and Precarious Work00:02:44
And the second, is it a job voluntarily?
They weren't stormed out of the house and put a gun to their head and say, now you must go work for Home Depot.
They showed up and filled out a job application and wanted and hoped to get the job.
So are there examples where that is the case where they're not going to be able to do that?
I noticed that everything that you just said applies to agreeing to work at a company that's a closed shop.
And so your contract specifies that you have to join the union.
Nobody forced them at gunpoint to go apply for that job at a closed shop, that they could, if they want to find an open shop where they don't have to join a union, good luck to them.
They could find it.
No, I agree with that, that you can go work for a non-union shop, but you cannot be a public sector teacher in the state of California without being part of the national education system.
But you just said public sector teacher.
You could be a private sector teacher.
So how is it that?
I agree, but why should the taxpayer subsidize a union project?
Well, I think that what the taxpayers are subsidizing is, first of all, a better quality of education.
Do you think public schools are superior to private schools?
I think that Finland has some of the best schools.
You know, America.
You think public schools?
Well, no, no.
But I mean, like, Finland and America aren't like such radically different societies that what's going to happen.
Because they are 7 million people, one is going to be 335 people.
Okay, wait a second.
Why is it that what works at 7 million in this case is not going to work with the 300 and some million people?
I could name a lot of examples why.
Why?
First of all, we have way more different cultures.
We have a different state-based model.
And let me just say this one thing.
First of all, Sweden has full school choice, and one in five families in Sweden send their kids to private school.
So we could talk about Scandinavia as much as we want.
But anyway, let's go back to the other side.
But which country has better schools, Finland or Sweden?
Finland does.
And that's with no private schools.
And they also have very strict immigration.
Well, I don't think that's why, but I think that you have, but I think that you are going to get a better quality of education when people are less precarious, they can really commit to it.
They have a, you know, they're getting paid more, so you're going to attract better applicants.
And also, I think that the teachers count too.
I think that teachers deserve to have those things, and I'm all in favor of it.
But the larger point was if you're going to say that something isn't, something isn't unfree or autocratic forcing you at gunpoint to do it, then that should apply just as much to your objections to contracts that make people join unions.
So I want to go back.
I'm going to talk about unions in circles, where I think if you want to join a union, fine, go ahead.
Justifying Wealth Redistribution00:14:27
Public sector unions are not given that sort of choice.
And by the way, FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, warned us about public sector unions.
He said all government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into public service.
He warned about the public sector union differentiation between private sector union differentiation.
But I want to zero in on this because I think we have a really interesting point philosophically.
Do you think if someone takes a risk in America, they should be able to keep the reward?
Not entirely, no.
I mean, you don't think entirely.
I mean, like the only way you could think entirely is if you were an anarchist and you didn't think that we should.
But what are the limitations on that then?
I mean, again, I think that the question that you want to ask, if the question is, is some transfer of wealth justified?
Because I think that's the real question, right?
When are transfers of wealth justified?
You know, and it's, and I think that you need to go back to what are the principles that justify what you think a distribution of wealth in the first place should be.
Now, you could think that whatever kind of distribution you get, letting the chips fall where they may in a free market, that that's what's justified.
I don't think that.
I think that the distribution of wealth that we have, and I think taxation and redistribution, even in the sort of market socialist system that I was advocated earlier, I think you'd still need those things.
But I think that the distribution of wealth that's justified is the one that would emerge from a social contract that people would agree to under certain circumstances.
So I guess it all comes down to numbers, I guess.
Well, no, I mean, that's this isn't a claim about numbers.
This is a claim about basic moral principles.
I think that the question is, if you were the best version of something like contract theory, if you were behind John Rawls' veil of ignorance.
Which I totally reject.
Sure, I'd be.
I mean, of course you totally reject it.
I'm happy to get into the Rawlsian theory of justice.
I don't believe any of the things that you believed if you didn't reject it.
But I actually, I'm going to ask you about the veil of ignorance.
But if you're asking about what I think, I don't think that there's some magic number that, like, oh, you can tax up to this, you can't tax up to that.
I think that if you want to know whether a tax system is just, generally a system of how property works is just, you should ask, if you knew that you had to live in the society, but you didn't know who you're going to be in the society, would you agree to it?
And the same way that if you didn't know whether you're going to be black or white, you wouldn't agree to racial discrimination being part of the rules of your society.
If you didn't know whether you're going to be born into a poor family or a rich one, if you didn't know whether you'd have the particular skills to help you climb up the educational or career ladders of the professional managerial class, if you didn't know any of those things, how would you want the rules of society to work?
And I think that's going to be the answer that's going to tell you when redistribution of wealth is justified.
I would want the rules of society to value action over favoritism, hard work over complacency, family creation over licentiousness, right?
Liberty and the pursuit of virtue.
Those things are right and wrong regardless of what veil of ignorance, if I would be born in a lower class or a higher class.
Those things are objectively good.
And so to use Rawl's own thought experiment.
So you talked about, so you talked about hard work there.
So if you're industrious.
If you have a basic value to industriousness, if you have a basic objection to people getting things that you don't work for, here are two things that you should be against.
Okay.
Inheritance and stock ownership.
So let's talk about both of them.
Stock ownership, you might be able to get me to agree.
Inheritance, I think, is really cliche.
Why do most people take big risks to create wealth?
Which also goes to this question, how is wealth created?
Wealth is created by workers.
Those are the ones who create.
Oh, no, no, no, You know, the straw man that people usually trot out at this point in the argument is they say, oh, when you say workers are creating wealth, you're saying that there's a one-to-one how hard you work, you know, to how much wealth is created.
And of course, there are a million other factors that decide it.
But everything that's being done, whether you're talking about ideas, which by the way, big companies, that's going to be workers in the R ⁇ D department, much more than CEOs in most of those cases, or whether you're talking about who is making the products, who is selling the products, those are the people who are creating it.
And I would say, if you want to say that the only incentive that you can get, that you cannot have a thriving dynamic economy without people being able to leave billions of dollars to their descendants, then I would say that it's very confusing, first of all, that even within traditional capitalist companies, you have plenty of childless people who are motivated to do that.
No, I think that's totally true.
But secondly, that you have cases like Mondragon, that you have very economically effective worker cooperatives.
Nobody is creating some giant pile of wealth that they'll be able to pass on to their descendants, but people are still motivated to work, and these companies could still be very successful.
And look, you might be able to get me to agree on like 500 million, a billion.
But again, the reason I wouldn't agree with it.
500 million, not like 5 million.
But like, you should be able to pass it.
But the reason I don't agree with it is that where is it going to go?
To go find, but go fund some spy agency so that you could go spy on Americans through some private future.
The point is that if you want to say abolish the spy agency, every time that there's this, like, would you raise tax to do this?
The default answer is no, because we're funding every, like that money would then be transferred away from some private utility to something that I consider to be a government that is doing a lot of harm and very little good.
And so, but I guess there's this question of wealth being created and we're kind of that's a really interesting objection.
But if you would say, hey, it goes to charity instead of the IRS, then I might be able to agree at that, which is what we're doing at this debate, by the way, which goes that, you know, this is so great.
I do have a question for you, actually, as a sidebar.
Why is it when you challenge me to debate, why didn't you say that all the proceeds would go to the IRS and to a private charity?
Well, I think that...
Does private charity do a better job?
No, I actually don't think that.
So, first of all, the reason the debate hosting website, the way that that works was already there.
I have nothing against private charity.
I am fine with doing that.
I obviously participated in doing that in this case.
Is it preferential to government?
I do not think that private charity can be a substitute for collective government action.
The empirical track record is very clear that you're not going to get private charity that's going to be as effective.
So for example, and we also need to talk about what we mean by effective here, because this is a really crucial point.
So there are a few different questions.
One, are you going to get, like, is there some amount of private charity that you could give for medical expenses that's going to get you to a point where our rate of mortality amenable to health care is as low as it is in Canada or the UK?
I don't think so.
I think that the, I think we've got to run that experiment.
Second point is part of what I mean by effective is giving people freedom and a dignified life in ways that they don't have if they're worried about quitting jobs they hate because they'll lose their health insurance or if they're doing things like starting GoFundMes to buy their insulin, which means that they have to craft, do you have enough of a tear jerker story that you'll stand out from the other 10,000 GoFundMes?
I think people are far freer.
I think people have far more dignity if they just get these things as rights just by virtue of being part of a society.
Yeah, that's where we're going to totally disagree.
Where that private charity not only involves themselves in the person life to hopefully be able to break them out of their economic circumstances, I would argue it's much more efficient in a variety of different ways.
The $500 billion Americans give the charity every single year, I would argue, does a far better job of offering a social safety net than the multi-trillions of dollars that we spend on social welfare.
In a variety of different ways.
How about the $500 billion we spend on charity?
Take the part of it that's spent, for example, on health care and compare that to comparable, you know, economically comparable countries where health care is provided as a right to everybody outside of the market.
Which one does a better job?
America, where you have to, you know, if you don't have health insurance and you don't qualify, you know, for Medicaid or Medicare, you have to beg on GoFundMe or countries like Canada and the UK, which it seems like by all the obvious metrics, who lives longer, who has a lower rate of infant mortality, who has a lower rate of mortality amedable to health care, all of those obvious metrics, it seems like those government health care programs do way better.
You won't hear me bragging on many aspects of the American healthcare system.
Many of it is very cronyistic and corrupt, but to say we're not spending government money on it is just not.
Well, did I say that we're not going to be able to do it?
No, but you're implying it.
I mean, we're spending it.
I mean, I don't think I said or implied.
Trillions and trillions of dollars we spend on government-run healthcare.
Sure.
I think it would actually be vastly more efficient if you look at how much is being spent for what results.
I don't think there's any question that Canada, the UK are getting way more bang for their buck in terms of government spending on healthcare.
So the UK has a total...
So you would have the government take over hospitals.
Yeah, ultimately, I think that would be better.
I don't think...
So where would medical innovation come from?
Well, medical innovation would come from exactly where it comes from right now, which is mostly the public sector.
If you look at pharmaceuticals, and this is really good, I really like this argument because this is something people often trot out in defense of private health insurance.
Well, you need that, so you have these incentives to develop pharmaceuticals.
If you look at NMEs.
Not just pharmaceuticals, treatments.
You know, new molecular entities, you know, which are genuinely new drugs, not just you tweak it a little bit and you slap your corporate brand on it.
75% of those are developed already in government-funded labs.
I think this idea that there's a lot of private innovation in there, I think is at the very least wildly overstated.
I think that you can absolutely have healthcare innovation without it being the case that within hospitals or when people need to pay for treatment, you have this element of private profit, which I think has been a disaster in the healthcare system.
Do you think there's a reason why America has the highest quality health care?
Not for the most amount of people, but the highest quality health care in the world?
Why do you think that is?
Well, I think that I think.
Because that is inarguable.
If you can afford it, it is the best health care on the planet.
Sure.
I mean, if something is that if you can skip to the head of the line by having enough money, then absolutely, you can get world-class health care.
But the question I'm interested in is not, are well-off people who are really well-offed.
It's a segue to my next question.
Well, okay, but the question I'm interested in is not, are they going to have better health care than the average person in Canada or the UK?
What I'm interested in is: is the average person in the United States going to have a better experience with the health care system and have better health care outcomes than those other systems deliver?
And that's just inarguable.
But they have better outcomes.
The question is then, how do you get something that a few people have to have a lot of people have?
More government intervention or market forces applied that allow things to be cheaper and faster delivered and better delivered.
Market forces do a better job for that all the time.
Whether it be in technology, I think that there's a structural reason why market forces are not going to be as effective in healthcare as they are going to be in many other areas.
And that structural reason is not some special radical Marxist thing that I think.
That structural reason is something that you'll find in your wildly pro-capitalist, neoclassical Econ 101 textbook, which is that supply and demand are going to do a much better job of shaping things in the direction of consumer preferences for things that are pretty elastic.
You drive past one gas station, you see, ah, that looks a little bit too expensive.
You drive a few blocks more, you get to another gas station.
Those market forces are going to do a much better job of delivering for the consumer there than in cases like health insurance, which is wildly inelastic.
For one thing, if you need heart surgery, you will pay any amount that is in your power to get it for the same reason that if we didn't have, I'm sorry, public fire services.
It was just like in ancient Rome where like Crassus would go around with slaves with buckets of water and offer to buy people's homes for his prior service fan out.
Yeah, people are going to sell for whatever price you're going to pay in those circumstances.
People are going to pay whatever you're demanding to get heart surgery.
And even when it comes to less dramatic uses of the health insurance system, like just let's say all you need from the healthcare system is once every 90 days, you need your doctor to sign off on some prescription you've been on for 10 years.
It's still a giant stressful pain to switch providers that, you know, you'd have to find something.
I'm not defending every detail of the American system.
But the point isn't about the details.
The point is that this is a structural reason that our demand for health care is way less elastic than our demand.
I think there are other consumer American health care systems.
Which means that market forces are going to be less than 100%.
It's hardly in the market, though.
We don't have price transparency.
We have an oligarchy of the hospitals.
We don't have health savings accounts in most states.
We don't allow health insurance across state lines.
Now, while I agree that there is this, that at times there can be externalities of where the profit motive is not a perfect fit, where it's like, oh, I want to go buy a t-shirt.
Like, okay, yeah, I have leukemia.
Like, that's not the same thing.
I get that.
Where the charts and the graphs can't explain all of that.
Generally, the best fit line, though, of market principles can help for the vast majority of things that are not in that 10% category of life-saving treatments.
Because, and you know this, the vast majority of people going to the doctor are not like, I have a gunshot wound, I've leukemia.
Hospital Oligarchy and Price Transparency00:13:01
Oh, absolutely.
Or cancer.
That's what I just said.
Well, I know, but market forces in those cases, you could agree, could be very, very instructive and very helpful.
Well, I think empowering the consumer and price transparency and bringing down prices.
So, I think that here are the things that we know.
That as a matter of fact, market forces are right now, we could argue about the diagnosis, but right now, you know, they are creating lousy outcomes.
But I would argue in the American healthcare system we hardly have market forces in most healthcare.
Like, most hospitals are nonprofit government-run agencies.
This is what it sounds like to me.
Like, when you say that, that they have all I can think is this sounds like nothing so much as some ultra-leftists saying, well, look, sure, Soviet economic planning had a lot of problems, but that's because it wasn't communist enough.
They still had money.
I'm arguing that.
Because if we look at the systems that actually exist, then the United States has one of the most marketized healthcare systems in the entire world.
And certainly relative to developed rich countries, we have some of the worst outcomes.
And if you want to say, well, if we made it even marketized, more marketized, we would actually have better outcomes than all of the systems that are socialized.
I think that's a leap.
Let me give you a great example.
So you want to empower regular people, consumers.
Would you agree that there should be a federal law to mandate hospitals publicly publish their prices, price transparency?
Yeah, sure, I'm all for that.
Okay, that's a market fix.
We want people to have the information because what they have right now is they're driving down the street.
They don't even see the gas prices.
They don't even know what price anything is.
And so that's just an example of how hospitals and being kind of this oligopoly of nonprofit profit mixture, which is incredibly corrupt, that they are hiding behind this idea to not empower the consumer.
What I'm saying, and I think there's some middle ground here, that we want to empower patients to know, like, wait a second, you're going to charge me $45 for a Tylenol?
Like, that's dumb.
Yeah, I agree that price transparency would be better, but what would be even better?
And by the way, that's not every conservative agrees with me.
Some are like, they can do whatever they want.
I think that's silly.
Okay, well, that's good.
Put that alongside the progress of the business.
Hunter Biden, Jeff Bezos, and price transparency, right?
So I don't want to spend all of our time on that.
But let me just say one of the things that we're going to do.
There's so much more I want to get to that.
Sure, but let me say one last thing about that.
What would be even better than having transparency on what you're paying for things that you badly need, which doesn't have to be as dramatic as a gunshot would.
Insulin is something that people badly need.
Psychiatric medication is often something people badly need.
And if they get off it without proper medical circumstances, that's going to be a disaster for them.
That what would be even better than price transparency is not treating those things as commodities.
And if we look at the systems in the world today, the ones that seem to do a lot better at the very least go much further.
I'm not going to get into it.
I'm not going to get into waiting lines in Canada or any of that because some of that stuff is very happy to get into it.
Some of that is very much disputed.
And quite honestly, I'm not prepared to go into that as much.
So I just kind of want to.
Okay, I would say I'll let you have one comment on that because I'm not.
Sure, sure, sure.
One comment.
And I'll allow people to do their own research on Canadian waiting lines, but yes.
Sure.
I think that if you want to talk about Canadian waiting.
Healthcare rationing, because it's not unlimited, therefore you have to prioritize who gets it, right?
No healthcare system is unlimited.
But the question is always, if there's a limit, what is the principle that you use to decide what would you say that is the youngest?
And I would say that absolutely the worst way to do it is for it to be made not by doctors making decisions about, okay, what do we think is going to pay off realistically?
How long can we keep this person alive versus any of those things?
The worst way to do it is to ration it by money, which is what we do.
So, what I think about Canadian waiting lines is there is some truth to it.
There are some things.
Thank you for saying you do.
Not everyone says that you do have longer wait times for I don't think it's as dramatic as people say it is.
You might be right.
I hear both of them.
But there are some things that you have longer waiting times for.
But I think one, that part of the reason you have longer waiting times is that more people are in line.
We don't exclude people from the line because they can't afford it.
And I think as a matter of basic human rights, that's good not to exclude people from the line.
And two, if the reason we're worried about it is because we think that people will die waiting, I think we can look at all those statistics comparatively between the United States and Canada.
And I know a lot of people want to say that all of that's just lifestyle stuff.
But I grew up right by the Canadian border in Michigan.
All the Canadians I know.
In the Upper Peninsula?
No, in the Lower Peninsula, but I actually had to drive south to get to the nearest Canadian border, Detroit, Windsor.
Oh, wow.
Okay, you were near the Canadian border.
And all the Canadians I know love beer and hockey and Tim Horton's donuts.
I don't think that the reason that they have these better health care outcomes is that they're that much healthier than Americans.
And certainly, I think the infant mortality differences, the lifestyle of infants is very similar everywhere.
They just kind of lie there.
And you could say there are certain factors, parent behaviors that create differences there.
But I think even there, like way more Brits smoke than Americans.
The rate of drinking is higher.
That is definitely true.
I think that the and those are the things that are most immediately going to impact that.
And then especially, I think the one you're going to have the hardest time explaining is mortality amenable to healthcare.
Yeah, let me just make my position clear.
Why I think some of your critiques are actually very valid and helpful.
Where you totally lose me is government takeover of hospitals.
And because let me ask you a question.
Okay, okay, could we at least do government takeover of insurance?
Well, let's just do hospitals because that really is the question, right?
Sure.
So let me just ask you a question because I didn't want to spend this much time on it, but now you've got me interested.
Do you think the VA works well?
So I think that I would say two things about that.
So the first is that if you actually look at surveys of people, and sometimes defenders of private health insurance love to do that because they say, hey, look at these surveys where most people say they're happy with their health insurance.
I think that's very unclear what that means.
Or do you think, does that mean that you're happier with it than you would be with not having to pay for it and actually saving money like most people would with Medicare for All, even according to the Mercatus Institute?
But like the people who are most likely to say that they're happy with it are seniors on Medicare and veterans and active duty military personnel who are the ones who are living under the British system.
But are there cases where people have to wait way too long for certainly like psychiatric care for me?
I'm not sure if that's the same thing.
The VA is a mess in a lot of surveys.
But I think that I think unfortunately there's a cycle sometimes where conservatives are successful in getting funding for things cut or certainly not increased the way it should be.
And then they use the results of that to undermine it.
But I think one big difference, if you accept for the sake of argument, that despite those surveys that I just gave, that overall it's way worse, then the question is, what's the difference between the NHS in Britain and the VA?
And I think that the biggest difference, why the NHS has all these great outcomes, certainly compared to the U.S. healthcare system, I think the difference is that the NHS is for everybody.
Only a small minority of Americans are veterans.
So what goes on in the VA is not really something that's on most people's radar most of the time.
Let me ask you another question.
So there's a lot less political incentive to care about.
Usually, typically, in urban areas, are the county-run hospitals the best?
I'm sure they're not.
They have a because I think that oftentimes they're severely underfunded, that it's certainly.
You get what I'm getting at here, though.
So I get what you're getting at.
Usually a disaster.
But I think the question is, why, let's accept that, right?
Like, I'm certainly not going to pretend like I have a bunch of stats that are memorized.
Yeah, and even if Atlanta, the Emory Hospital is way better on county.
And I could say for personal experience, it's just the Emory Hospital is far superior to just county.
But here's what I think is the more relevant point of comparison.
Not when it's a municipality which is often cash-starved in general, and it's going to be, I think, actually much less efficient than doing it.
But they do receive a lot of funding.
But why is it then that you think that in Britain or in some Scandinavian countries where most hospitals are publicly owned, their health care outcomes are so much better?
That's a very fair question.
I have my own personal opinions of it.
Not every healthcare outcome is better.
We have a higher cancer survivability rate for certain sort of treatments.
We have a higher quality of care for certain people.
There are some people that conjecture in the healthcare field, it could be because of many different underlying health conditions of how obese America is, where we are more obese than these other comparable countries, also our diet, nutrition.
But it's going to be difficult to kind of pinpoint a cause.
If your argument is it's because that they're run the government is running it, I reject the argument simply and totally because I know the government runs almost nothing efficiently and correctly.
But I guess that's that's the crux of the argument that you're saying that seems to be that you're trying to sell me that in a multivariate analysis, you put all those other things aside.
Oh, it's because some guys on government.
I don't put all those things aside.
We just went through a detailed detailed argument about why this is a more plausible explanation.
Now, it's fine to be not convinced by that argument, but I think describing it as, oh, I'm just dismissing everything else rather than giving you reasons why those explanations make a lot less sense.
I mean, what is the biggest difference between the U.S. and Canada?
What's the biggest difference between the United States and the United Kingdom?
It's not that we're much healthier.
As you say, a lot of things that are relevant here, like drinking, are actually.
We are a little bit more obese.
Or actually, yeah, a little bit more, but if you look at it, I don't think it's dramatic enough to make this the big distinction.
And also, I think the healthcare outcomes where you think they, you know, I mean, look, 36% obesity is worse than 30% obesity, but I don't think that's going to explain everything we're talking about.
That's a big deal.
Sure.
I mean, I am all in favor.
And I will say this completely.
We can talk about what we're doing.
You'll agree with this.
If you want to think, if I want to go to the final thing that we'll agree on with this, the biggest difference is I think the praying pharmaceutical companies in our country.
Well, that is certainly one of the things.
But let's put the hospital thing aside and delivery of care and all that stuff.
Well, I was just going to say that.
I think pharmaceutical companies, and so I'm just going to say this because I think it actually is the best argument to say that market principles, and I would have made this argument if I were you, but you didn't.
That's okay.
Well, I mean, I don't know.
You kind of did.
I would just say that if you're Pfizer, the money is in the middle of keeping someone not healed, but keeping back as an annuity to keep buying your drug, right?
And this comes as someone who can't stand the major pharmaceutical companies that tries to be more homeopathic and kind of solutions and all of this, where, not conservatives don't talk about that enough.
If there was a difference, I would say that AstraZeneca, I don't even know if AstraZeneca is an American company.
But Johnson ⁇ Johnson, Pfizer, and BioINTEC, which was an originally Israeli company.
Yeah, but those are the vaccine manufacturers.
Which, by the way, is a perfect example of what I'm talking about with the pharmaceutical companies because most of that research was government-funded.
Which might have had questionable outcomes.
We'll see.
So I guess we're not going to get into that.
That's too much fun for right now.
Let me ask you another question.
Well, the point I was trying to make, just for the record, is the outcomes where you say that the U.S. is bad.
And not every metric, but it's fair.
I'm not defending the U.S.
I understand you're not defending.
We can go to Singapore.
We can go to other places that have.
Singapore is much less free market than the U.S. system.
Decentralized.
Well, they're more economically free.
But again, I'm not a defense lawyer for the American healthcare system.
Singapore's healthcare system is like Obamacare.
But trying to convince the American public, what you're trying to do is say, hey, let's nationalize the hospitals, nationalize the private industry, private insurance, which is what you eventually want to get to do, is obviously done in a rival with me.
And I think a majority of Americans, for a good reason.
Sure, but what I was going to say was those metrics where you say that we do better are things that I think a big part of the reason that we're going to do better on those is those aren't about overall outcomes for everybody.
They're about specific kinds of services that not everybody's going to get in the first place.
And that goes back to what we were saying earlier: that sure, if you can afford it, absolutely.
So you have to stand there.
The final thing I'll say, because I want to get on these other topics, is we know how to get things cheaper and better, and that's usually market forces with some externalities being handled.
So I'll give you one example.
I'm going to agree on Hunter Biden, Bezos, price transparency.
And I don't think pharmaceutical companies should be allowed to advertise.
Objective Truth Beyond Metaphysics00:15:23
I think it's the weirdest thing ever.
They're running.
Ask your doctor about this.
Like, if you need it, then your doctor should tell you about it.
You shouldn't be propagandized by the company.
If you're asking your doctor if this is right for you, that's a drug dealer, not a doctor.
I agree.
But I think that's because it hurts the family.
All right, so I want to get to this next thing because we can keep on going in circles about all this, which is: okay, this could go forever, and we'll wrap it up eventually, I promise.
Do you believe in absolute truth?
Sure.
Okay, just interesting.
I mean, let me make sure I understand what you're asking.
So when you say absolute truth, do you just mean that whether things in general about any subject are true or false?
Yeah, I guess what I'm getting at, and I hate to use like the cliche word, is would you consider yourself a postmodernist, that truth is relative?
No, absolutely not.
So that's good.
Do you think that postmodernism and that kind of movement is harmful or helpful to the American left?
I think it's harmful.
I don't think that's a good idea.
That's interesting.
I'll elaborate that.
I don't think we should believe in alternative facts any more than anybody else should.
I think that what's true is I think that what's true, generally speaking, it depends a little bit, you know, what we're talking about.
And I'm not saying the only reason I'm saying like Newtonian physics, like force equals mass acceleration.
Sure.
Well, yeah, I mean, I mean, technically, Newtonian physics is a good enough approximation for like mid-sized dry goods.
The real stuff is like quantum physics, relative physics.
Of course, but you understand what I'm saying.
But I understand what you're saying.
And I agree, right?
Absolutely.
I think that truth is objective.
I think if you want to get into an argument about who in practice who has political power is actually denied that more than others.
Yeah, I don't think there'll actually be much fruit in that discussion.
Then we could get into it.
He said he said it.
But if your question is whether truth is objective, that I think it is, I did, if I could slip one in.
You can ask me questions.
It is a little bit, it's a little bit off the track of most of what we've been talking about, but I have been wondering about this, right?
Sure.
Because I have seen, you know, I have seen some of your previous debates, and something's come up at a couple of them.
It's not a politics question at all, at least directly.
Is it more metaphysics?
Yeah.
Okay, there you go.
It's more about a physical question.
I've seen you make this claim that you'll say things like, well, there's no social contract.
Our rights come from God.
So first thing is, could you elaborate a little bit on what you mean by that?
Yeah, just as the founders did, as they said in the Declaration, the laws of nature and nature is God, where whether you believe it's an actual being of a triune God like I would, or kind of more of a deistic type God, that you have rights and something gave it to you, and that the social contract that we have recognizes a transcendent order.
So if something gave it to you, I assume that what you mean by something gave it to you.
I would believe an omniscient, omnipotent being, but I'm not proselytizing you to believe.
Well, no, no, I'm not, I don't think you are.
I mean, I was the one who brought it up.
I'm sure.
So if you know, because when you say that something gave it to you, you could read that at least two different ways.
So one of them is, which, and I assume this is not what you think, but like, you know, one of them is that like literally in a cause and effect way, we have certain legal rights because of like the intervention of God.
But of course, it's clearly not the case that God is like stopping China from putting dissidents in jail.
I assume what you mean is that we morally have a right to those things because God gave it to you.
That's correct.
But if you're asking, do I believe that in a God that can intervene supernaturally?
I do.
Sure, you can, but I'm able to.
And has.
But I'm happy to get into that.
Sure.
No, fair enough, right?
I don't think that would be.
I don't think that's actually relevant to the question.
Trust me, whatever else I am, I'm a huge philosophy nerd.
I'm always happy to talk about that.
But I have a question about Christopher Hitchens for you.
Sure, awesome.
Because I know you wrote a book on that.
I did.
Just finished a couple weeks ago.
But I'd like to, thank you.
But if you say that God is the moral, you know, is the reason why morally we should have these rights.
The unmoved movement.
That I don't understand how that's going to get around like the Euthyphro problem.
Like if you say, okay, so Euthyphro, there's this dialogue written by Plato where Socrates is arguing with this ancient Greek holy man named Euthyphro, and they talk about the definition of holiness.
And it's going to take just a second, but I promise I'm going to get through this quickly and we'll get to the point.
So they're arguing about the definition of holiness, and Euthyphro says the holy is that which the gods love.
And Socrates asks him this simple question.
Do the gods love it because it is holy, or is it holy because the gods love it?
So translate into what we're talking about here, the question would be, is it morally just that, you know, these rights be recognized because that's what God wants, or does God want it because it would be morally unjust to deny them?
Because if you say both, okay, well, that's a really interesting answer.
Never heard that one before.
I want to get into it.
But just to just to finish up with what the problem is, if you say that God wants you to have those rights because it would be morally unjust to deny it to you, that that suggests that it's morally unjust for some reason other than God wanting it, and that the God part, at least on the moral question, is going to be sort of beside the point, that they have a, that like whatever the reason is why it would be,
God thinks it would be unjust is a reason that's going to be just as available to the atheist or the agnostic.
Whereas if you say it's morally unjust because God doesn't want it and God doesn't have some reason why it would be morally unjust, then it's just like lucky for us, I guess, that God wants us to have free speech and freedom of religion, equal rights for women, because he could just as easily want us to organize a society like the Taliban did.
Right.
So a lot to impact there.
I would say both because through divine revelation and through reason, especially through many of the writings of the early church fathers, we believe in a metaphysical God that not just gave us the law and this interpretation of natural rights because he believes there's a certain way we should live, right?
But also, because of divine revelation, we release, we realize what is morally just than unjust.
So, believing in the Christian God or the geo-Christian God, we would reject what the Taliban is doing for a variety of different reasons.
But I understand how you can say that through divine revelation, you can figure out what God thinks.
Sure.
Right.
And going off, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Augustine.
Well, I mean, this is, you know, we're talking about the Plato's objection to the world.
Yeah, I'm happy to go through Aristotle's ethics and metaphysics with you too.
Sure.
That sounds fun.
So I think that I understand how you say through divine revelation, we find out what God thinks is just or unjust, but that's a slightly different question from what makes it just.
I just want to show I'm understanding your question.
Just can you clarify it a little bit?
So the question is: you know, the answer that you, the question you answer with both is: does God want us to have these rights because it would be unjust if we didn't have them?
Yes.
Or would it be unjust if we didn't?
Or is the only reason it would be unjust if we didn't have them because God doesn't want to?
The answer is both.
And the answer is in self-evident, is that you can find it both in the Word of God and through self-evident exploration of the natural world.
But those are answers to the question of how you find out what God wants.
Yes.
But that's a little bit different from saying, why does God want that thing?
Oh, okay, good.
God wants us these things because He wants us to live fruitful and multiply, as He says in the scriptures.
God does not want us to live oppressively.
He doesn't want us to fail or to...
And my own biblical theological interpretation, which you can feel free to mock and dismiss.
But my answer.
Trust me, I'm not going to mock it.
We had a whole fun little thing last night.
I have tremendous respect for Christian socialists like Cordell West or Dr. Martin Luther King.
Well, definitely not going to find me as one of those.
Or to pick a third example of a progressive Christian, just at random pick one out of the hat, my wife Jennifer, they have, I have tremendous respect for all of these people, but God wants us to live freely.
So, okay, so if God wants us to live fruitfully, to flourish.
Be fruitful and multiply.
Sure.
So occupy till I come.
Be salt and light throughout every corner of the earth.
Okay.
So would it still, if the reason that God wants us to be fruitful, if the reason that God wants us to live flourishing lives, whatever, is because it's objectively good to live flourishing lives, this is, so it would still be, if hypothetically it turned out somehow, right, there was some magic way of checking this, right?
That there wasn't a God, it would still be the case that it was objectively, morally good to be able to do it.
That's correct.
Yes.
So God's law in our interpretation of natural rights is true regardless if you recognize it's granted by God or not.
So I'll give you an example, the Decalogue, right?
The Ten Commandments or the Ten Statements that were given to Moses.
If you follow those 10 things as an atheist or Christopher Hitchens fan, you're going to live a good life.
Not lying, not stealing, not murdering, honoring your parents, you're not committing adultery.
Those are things that are built into the natural law.
That's an easy 10 examples to give.
Now, but also those things are true if you recognize they're given to you by God, of which I believe.
So those are both independently true.
So, because you say, like, you said two things here, and I'm not sure how long we would have sped at this, but just short, but you're saying two things.
I hope you're enjoying this.
No, I am enjoying this.
I just also realize that this is a little self-indulgent, that I was really curious about this thing that's a little off topic.
I hope it's clarifying you, not confusing you.
Okay, well, here's the part that I do still unfortunately find a little bit confusing.
So you're saying two things about this, but I don't quite see how they fit together.
One of them is that it would be objectively morally good for us to live flourishing lives whether God existed or not.
than the other is that God grants us these rights in the sense that, you know, the reason why that God somehow is the reason why morally these are good, these are things that we should have a right to.
Yes, both of those things.
So if there's someone right now in some country, island country, and they independently come to the conclusion in the natural law that they should marry and have children, not murder and not kill, regardless of them becoming in contact with the word of God or where that came from, they're going to live flourishing lives.
So that's what we mean by the natural law.
So don't know that someone in Papua New Guinea or in Paris will equally succeed if they do these things.
Sure, I understand, but...
Maybe I'm not answering the question.
I'm not trying to dodge it.
Sure.
But what you're talking about seems like, forgive me if this is a slightly pretentious way to put it, but it seems like what you're talking about isn't really metaphysics.
In other words, what makes something true, right?
What you're talking about is really epistemology, how we find out that it's true.
I'm happy to go into the metaphysics.
Sure, but the question is just like, I understand that if God's granting us these rights is what makes it morally good for us to have these rights, then it can still be morally good for people to have these rights, even if they don't know about that, right?
I understand that part.
But that's a little bit of a different question from if it objectively weren't true that if it were objectively not true that God exists, would it still be the case that these would be morally good?
God is.
I understand the question.
I reject the premise.
Well, I mean, I understand.
I understand you think that's not the case.
It's asking in like a hypothetical world if like there is no unmoved mover and like some create, you know, some creator.
Sure.
So I guess what you're saying is what I value as the natural law, if there was no natural lawgiver, would the natural law still be true?
To be consistent, I guess.
Okay.
Yes.
But I just reject the premise because you're asking me to believe something.
Oh, I'm not asking you to believe it.
Or to entertain something I so to answer your question, I guess, would the natural law be true if God did not write the natural law?
Yeah.
Okay.
But I think that the natural law is true because it's epistemologically correct, teleologically correct in our purpose and our driven, theologically correct and spiritually correct.
Okay, but that still seems like we've traveled some distance from saying that God gave us these rights in the sense that the reason it's morally good that we have these rights is that God wants us to have them.
And I believe that is true.
Okay.
Because our existence is breathed into by a creator.
Sure, but I think you could think three things were all true.
One is that the reason we exist is because of God.
Yes.
And you can even think that the reason maybe there are certain natural facts about the way that people are such that certain things are good for us and help us live flourishing lives, and that the reason for those natural facts is that God created it that way.
You can believe those two things while also believing that what makes it morally good that we do these things and live flourishing lives is both.
Yeah, I said that.
Well, okay, but I don't understand.
It's both because God commanded it and because God created it and God ordained it, and also that it's good for human existence through the moral construct that we all simultaneously true.
So, I mean, maybe this is another thing where I'm asking you to entertain something you don't want to entertain, but like.
If God was dead?
No, if God had commanded something different, would that thing therefore be good?
So it's a premise and a presupposition that...
Well, I understand you don't think that's like saying, is...
Actually, the Bible deals with this, right?
So the Bible deals with this in the story of Abraham and Isaac.
Or is it Isaac and Jacob when he brings up his son to sacrifice?
Yeah.
Abraham and Isaac, where God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his child.
Come on, Charlie.
I'm the atheist.
Yeah, exactly.
I wanted to make sure I was precise.
When God actually never commanded him to do that, it was a test of his faith, right?
At the very moment, he delivered a replacement sacrifice at the very least.
So this is a perfect example.
That's a question of obedience to God.
Do you do something that is against the moral law if God commands you to do it?
So you think that if hypothetically God had wanted him to go through with it, that the right thing to do would be to go through with it.
Yeah, if you believe in an omniscient, omnipotent, unmoved mover, but this text doesn't show that.
Yes.
I mean, the answer, even for an atheist, would be a yes, if you believe there was a God.
I don't think that follows.
I think that it could be if there was an omniscient and omnipotent but morally bad reason being that created the universe, then I would have a self-interested reason.
Why the Fine-Tuning Argument Fails00:03:42
I think that's a fair thing to say.
I would have a self-interested reason to go along with it the same way that if I was living under Stalin, I would have a self-interested reason to go along with what Stalin wanted, but that wouldn't mean I would have a moral.
But under the Christian text and the Bible, there is not a commandment that is against what we would consider as moral in the Western tradition.
Oh, I think.
And you would probably totally disagree.
Let me ask you a question about Christopher Hitchens.
Sure, let's say.
Okay, because we have five minutes left.
Sure, sure, sure.
I want to be respectful of it.
I am delighted to do five minutes of Hitchens.
Help me give the best argument.
Because what are your metaphysics?
Are you an atheist?
Yeah.
Okay.
Do you hope you're wrong?
Do I hope I'm wrong?
I hope it depends on what that would mean.
I mean, if...
Do you hope there's a God?
I certainly don't hope there's a God who's going to send me to hell for me to an atheist.
That wouldn't be a good outcome.
Do you want eternal life?
Do I depends what kind of eternal life is?
Like eternal bliss.
Eternal bliss, if that were.
Seeing your loved ones.
Sure, sure.
If that were on offer, I would take it.
I respect that answer because not every atheist answers that way.
Some atheists say no.
They want to be right more than what is good.
Sure.
There are a lot of things that standard theologically Orthodox Christians believe is God.
About God, I would not be happy to be true, but that one I would definitely be happy to trust.
Okay, an acceptance of a savior that could give you eternal life.
So the fine-tuning argument.
I don't think that's exactly what I said, but it's probably not worth doing.
The fine-tuning argument.
Fine-tuning, which is Christopher Hitchens said, is the best argument for those people that believe in a creator.
The fine-tuning argument is that we live in a planet that's perfectly positioned.
You could do better than I could.
How do you personally wrestle with and unpack the fine-tuning argument?
Do you ever have doubts that there is a God?
Honestly, I kind of wish that I could say yes because it makes me sound more reasonable.
It sounds dogmatic if I said no, but honestly, I think no is the honest answer.
I think that, so why the fine-tuning argument doesn't move me very much?
Because it didn't move Hitchens, but it piqued his curiosity.
I mean, I might even go along with the comparative claim that it might be better than the other arguments.
But the reason that I find the fine-tuning argument unconvincing is that I don't think we can move backwards from it would be really improbable, like given a certain setup, this outcome would be really improbable.
This outcome happened, therefore that setup is wrong.
So just a small example that I think makes vivid why I don't find that plausible.
If you shuffle a deck of 52 cards and you deal out the ace of spades, it's clearly a bad argument to say, well, if the person was cheating.
Yeah, the deck has more than 52 cards, though.
They were doing sure.
Because the probability of the fine tuning is a card.
But I think the point of principle is that the same reason why it would be unreasonable to say, well, There's only a one in 52 chance that a fair shuffle would have gotten me this, and this happened, therefore it wasn't a fair shuffle, is that you could run that argument for any card, that it would be much more likely that if you had the dealer was cheating to give you the three of hearts, you get the three of hearts that if it was random.
And I think that no matter how big you make the deck, the same point is going to apply.
That if it's one out of 500 trillion or whatever, that the chance of this, well, sure.
It's the fact that this outcome is the one that happens, you could say would be more likely if there was a being who wanted it to happen, but you could also say the same thing about all but one of the other 500 trillion.
So let me ask you a question, like the minute in 10 seconds we have remaining, which is not that teleological argument.
The Teleological Argument for God00:02:32
What's the purpose of life?
So, okay.
So I think that that I definitely cannot do in 10 seconds, but if I could have like an extra 45 or so, I could take a run at it.
What is the purpose?
What is the telos?
What is the place you're aiming for?
So I think the teleological argument for the existence of God is a slightly different thing.
No, I'm just saying, what is your teleological being?
Okay, all right.
Because if you said teleological argument, we could get into why I don't think that works.
But I think that the purpose of being, if you mean the moral purpose, you know, what makes it like morally good to live life in a certain way.
We could certainly talk about what counts as personal virtue.
We could certainly talk about what counts as moral justice.
I think a good, thriving life is one where you can pursue what you regard as a good and fulfilling life, which I got to say, I think you're enabled to do if you have the kind of economic supports that make you not stay in jobs you hate, et cetera.
I cannot resist throwing that in there.
That's okay.
I really enjoyed this.
Maybe we could do it again.
And it was fun to explore ideas everywhere from metaphysics to ethics to post office adoration.
Is that fair to say?
Defense?
Yes.
Strong, stronger.
We agreed on Hunter Biden.
Jeff Bezos, Price Transparency, and Pharmaceutical Commercials.
Besides that, it's a bunch of really good disagreements, but we have clarity in that agreement, which I hope we have more of.
Thank you.
Anything you want to plug in closing?
Your new book on Christopher Hitchens.
New book on Christopher Hitchens.
Christopher Hitchens, What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why Still Matters should be out in December.
The show is called GTA, Give Them an Argument.
And I guess the last thing I would just say is that I, as much as I do disagree with you about, I guess you just gave the list of exceptions.
Metaphysics, the point of existence.
You know, eternity.
All of those things.
I really do appreciate the fact that you're willing to do this.
A lot of conservatives are not.
Hey, it was fun.
We're always, we want to have dialogue, which means through reason.
The original word.
Thank you, Ben.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you, Charlie.
Thanks.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.
God bless you guys.
Speak to you soon.
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