Andrew Clavin dissects media hypocrisy through Jim Acosta’s absurd CNN defense, Michael Avenatti’s $50K bail after felony domestic violence, and celebrity exploitation of trauma—like Juliet Lewis praying to Britney Spears. He skewers leftist "feminists" like Weinstein and Avenatti while exposing Facebook’s pro-regulation lobbying double standards, then pivots to Oren Cass’s The Once and Future Worker, arguing automation should boost jobs, not stagnate them, by reforming education (vocational over college) and trade policies. Rejecting UBI, he frames work as the backbone of self-worth and societal stability, before detouring into Errol Flynn’s swashbuckling legacy. The episode exposes how media, politics, and economics collide—leaving labor and truth as the real casualties. [Automatically generated summary]
CNN is suing President Trump, claiming that he is interfering with their First Amendment right to spew a ceaseless cascade of total lies in the interest of destroying his presidency.
The lawsuit arose after the White House suspended the hard pass of crack make-believe journalist Jim Look at me.
I'm Jim Acosta.
Commenting on the suit to the full-length mirror in his bedroom closet, Acosta said, I hope that this lawsuit will cause everyone to look at me because I'm Jim Acosta, unquote.
He then opened several other closets in his bedroom, revealing several other full-length mirrors until there seemed to be dozens of Jim Acostas filling the room, all of them looking at the other Jim Acostas, so that Jim Acosta was able to bask in the attention of the only person who really matters to him, Jim Acosta.
Acosta's hard pass was suspended after a White House press conference during which he bent over and dropped his pants to expose his backside to the duly elected leader of the free world while screaming, quote, look at my backside.
This is Jim Acosta's backside, unquote.
He then ran in circles around the room, demanding that everyone look at Jim Acosta's backside.
And when a White House aide tried to take his microphone away, he strangled her to death, shrieking, quote, why don't you look at me?
Don't you know I'm Jim Acosta, unquote.
CNN's lawsuit claims Acosta's behavior was, quote, in the best tradition of journalism, or at least in the best tradition of journalism at CNN, or at least in the only tradition of journalism at CNN, if journalism is the word we want, unquote.
The Trump administration's action against Acosta was harsh but not unprecedented.
President Barack Obama suspended the pass of the New York Times White House correspondent in 2011, claiming he was no longer performing the usual sexual acts on the president just the way the president liked them.
The reporter's pass was soon restored.
So I guess they got that problem all worked out.
Software Advice Solutions00:02:24
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, we come to the end of the, what has almost been a clavenless week.
We're operating in battle conditions.
You can see I'm broadcasting once again from the overturned arc in my house.
And now we enter into the clavenless weekend.
But don't despair or despair, but also listen to Another Kingdom, which will be available to everybody tomorrow.
Another Kingdom.
It'll be episode seven already, The Secret of Horror Mansion.
There are only 10 episodes altogether, so get on board.
It's doing really great numbers.
And if you're listening on iTunes, don't forget to subscribe there and leave a five-star review because that really helps us out.
While you're there, you could do that for the Andrew Clavin show as well and just kill two birds with one stone.
Meanwhile, we have to talk about software advice.
And a lot of people say to me, what is software advice?
Well, software advice is software advice.
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I am a business, my writing business, and a lot of times I don't think, how can I solve this problem with better software?
With software advice, it is absolutely free.
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And you can just ask them any question like, how do you spell Clavin?
Why Violence Matters00:09:31
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
Michael Avenatti, the man Tucker Carlson christened creepy porn lawyer, Michael Avenatti, the guy who not only has been representing Stormy Daniels in her assault on Donald Trump's presidency, but also the woman sweatnick who was kind of discredited and sometimes blamed for ruining the left's assault on Brett Kavanaugh.
Michael Avenatti was arrested by the LAPD yesterday and charged with beating up a woman and then shouting, she hit me first.
So all across America today, jokes are writing themselves.
You know, with all the all the great employment news, all the jobs that President Trump has created, I think there's one sector of the economy where jobs are kind of scarce, and that is jokes about liberals, right?
None of the late night comedians will make them.
None of the comedians on Netflix will make them.
So there are long lines at the unemployment office of jokes about liberals sitting around going, gee, we're writing ourselves, but no one will hire us and no one will use us.
But this is, look, I think this is worth talking about.
I really do.
Everybody's burying the story for obvious reasons.
I mean, the irony is so thick, it's almost not worth talking about, and yet it is worth talking about.
And the important thing is, is I think the arrest of Michael Avenatti raises the following truly serious question.
Can't you save us, Brittany Spears?
Can we be saved?
why is satan controlling me juliette lewis Juliet Lewis on Instagram, Can You Save Us, Britney Spears?
And then she said, why is Satan controlling the universe?
And then she dances to the music of Britney Spears.
Now, I don't know what she was on or whether that's just mental illness we're seeing.
And at one level, I don't mean to make fun of her, but on another, that Instagram piece wins for me the Oscar for the first piece of Instagram video that qualifies as art.
And I'm actually not kidding about this.
Here it is a celebrity praying to a celebrity to save us while demonstrating what celebrities are in herself, because Juliet Lewis is a celebrity.
If you don't know her, she's an actress who's always playing, kind of used to play all these kind of sexy teens, you know, kind of alluring.
And here she is appealing for salvation to Britney Spears, a celebrity, while demonstrating that celebrities are not always the people you want to turn to for life advice.
I mean, look, I say this as a creative guy, a guy who has been in the arts my whole life.
Art is not a healthy lifestyle.
Making art is not a healthy lifestyle.
I write about this in my book, The Great Good Thing, that you are constantly, constantly, and let me say what I have to say first and then just put on a little bit of a proviso there.
You are constantly opening old wounds to get at old feelings and old pain that you can put on the page or put into your performance as an actor.
I mean, this is almost what acting is, is opening old wounds.
It is not a healthy way to live, okay?
And I don't say that.
What I want to point out is I'm not saying that, oh, it's what a heroic thing it is to be an artist.
It's kind of a sick thing to be an artist.
It could be argued that being an artist is a reaction to trauma.
When people have trauma and they don't heal their trauma, they keep repeating the trauma over and over again.
You've probably noticed this in yourself.
Some little thing that you keep doing that you wish you stopped doing probably relates to some trauma in your early life.
And what artists do is they're constantly, especially actors, more actors than writers, but writers also, they're constantly opening up these wounds that they have and bleeding onto the page or bleeding onto the screen.
People like me, to whom it's important to be sane, work very hard to manage our sanity while we're doing this.
Really, it really is a full-time effort.
My wife and I have a joke about it because sometimes I'll come in after particularly finishing a particularly hard book and I'll say I'll never write another novel.
And she says the same thing.
It's dinner time, sit down and eat.
She doesn't believe me because it's a kind of addiction.
So all I'm saying is that celebrities are kind of crazy, okay?
So when celebrities are telling you to do something or telling you to live in a certain way, you should be thinking, oh, look, there's a person on the street who's living in a homeless shelter who's screaming at the sky that the Venusians are talking through his teeth, giving me a piece of advice, accepting her or his Oscar, and then telling me who I should vote for.
That's the way you should think of celebrities.
And celebrity lawyer Michael Avenatti is no exception.
Now, here's the story from TMZ.
Now, you may laugh that people are quoting TMZ, and apparently Avenati is shouting that TMZ should not be taken seriously.
But in fact, they have excellent sources in the LAPD.
Avenatti was arrested Wednesday after a woman filed a felony domestic violence report.
We are told, this is TMZ speaking, we're told her face was swollen and bruised with red marks on both cheeks.
Our sources say the alleged incident occurred Tuesday night, but there was another confrontation Wednesday between the two at an exclusive apartment building in the Century City area of LA.
We're told Wednesday afternoon the woman was on the sidewalk on her cell phone with sunglasses covering her eyes and covering the bruises, presumably sobbing and screaming on the phone, I can't believe you did this to me.
I'm going to get a restraining order against you.
It was originally reported that this was his estranged wife, but it wasn't.
We're told, TMZ says, we're told security brought her inside the building, took her upstairs, and Michael showed up five minutes later and ran into the building.
He screamed repeatedly.
She hit me first.
She hit me first.
And we're told he angrily added a bunch of obscenities.
This is bull.
We're told he tried getting into the elevator, but security denied him access.
The cop showed up.
They talked to him for five to 10 minutes.
Then they took him into custody and he was released on, I think it was $50,000 bail.
A law enforcement source says on Tuesday, Avenati kicked the woman out of the apartment, and that's when the alleged domestic violence occurred.
And we're told she went back to the apartment on Wednesday to retrieve her belongings and call police to stand by in case things got heated.
Now, this is, it's important to note that this is a felony domestic violence, not a misdemeanor domestic violence, which means there were visible bruises, and she had to file a report under penalty of perjury.
So she signed a piece of paper saying this happened under penalty of perjury.
But here, because we believe, of course, we believe in due process, and we don't always believe all women, you know, even we don't believe survivors, we will let Avenati have his say.
Here's Avenatti's response.
First of all, I want to thank the hardworking men and women of the LAPD for their professionalism and their work today.
They had no option in light of the allegations.
Secondly, I have never struck a woman.
I never will strike a woman.
I have been an advocate for women's rights my entire career, and I'm going to continue to be an advocate.
I am not going to be intimidated from stopping what I am doing.
I am a father to two beautiful, smart daughters.
I would never disrespect them by touching a woman inappropriately or striking a woman.
I am looking forward to a full investigation, at which point I am confident that I will be fully exonerated.
I also want to thank everyone for their support that has reached out.
You know my character.
You know me as a man, and I appreciate it.
All right, we're going to get back to that in a minute.
But first, I know you're thinking it's too distracting because you're thinking, how do you look so great?
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Stephen Colbert's Irony Comment00:15:29
When Michael Avenatt comes forward and says he's been wrongly accused by a woman, the irony is thick on the ground, so thick you almost don't have to mention it.
But important to remember, it's important to remember that this guy was part of an effort to push charges against Brett Kavanaugh for the political purposes without due process.
Remember people shouting at Ted Cruz in the restaurant, we believe survivors, we believe survivors.
Well, this is the thing.
And it's not just Avenati.
I mean, Avenati is a small part of this.
It's the entire infrastructure that supported him.
He was on CNN so many times that now CNN is sitting around going, what do we do?
They're just staring at the camera at CNN.
Without Michael Avenatti to come on and accuse Donald Trump without proof, they're just staring at the camera.
Without him to bring on, I think her name was Julie Julia Swetnik to make these absurd comments that they went with without any kind of corroboration.
Blaisey Ford, who testified, had no corroboration.
All the people she named said it didn't happen.
And yet, and yet we heard again and again.
Well, let me show you what we heard.
Stephen Colbert was among the people who brought Avenatti on his show to basically kind of glorify him and make him a character.
I mean, Stephen Colbert has turned his audience into a mob.
They scream and cheer every time he mentions impeaching the president.
This isn't healthy.
It isn't healthy that an entertainer, a guy who's supposed to make us laugh, who's supposed to make all of us laugh, has now focused in on, again, another celebrity.
Can you save us Britney Spears?
Can you save us Stephen Colbert?
And now he brings on Lady Gaga, right?
She's Lady Gaga, and this is nothing against her.
It's nothing against her talent or anything like that.
She must have been promoting her movie, A Star Is Born.
Colbert brings her on to discuss Christine Blasey Ford's charges about Brett Kavanaugh.
I want you to remember this.
He not only brought on Michael Avenatti, but he brought on Lady Gaga to talk about this.
Here's the cut.
It's cut six.
I will tell you something because I am a sexual assault survivor.
And the truth is that, you know, like Trump the other day was speaking in a rally and he said, she has no memory of how she got to the party.
You know, should we trust that she remembers the assault?
And the answer is, yes.
Can't you save us, Brittany Spears?
Can we be saved?
God, why is Satan controlling the universe?
Stephen Colbert should have Satan on, so Satan can control.
That's the thing.
Lady Gaga comes on, uses the power of her celebrity, the sympathy, the empathy that she's a sexual assault victim, which we all empathize with, right?
There is no constituency for sexual assault in America.
She uses that, and Stephen Colbert uses that, to slander Brett Kavanaugh, to say of Brett Kavanaugh does not deserve due process, simple due process, because she was attacked.
Therefore, we should believe Christine Blaseyford.
It makes no sense.
It makes no sense to believe all survivors, or as we should say, it makes no sense to believe all accusers.
Yet here are these celebrities, Stephen Colbert and Lady Gaga, trying to affect your mind when we see from the Juliet Lewis Instagram art what celebrities really are, damaged people working out their damage through creating art.
Hey, it's a good use for your damage.
We're all damaged in some way.
It is a good use to create art with it, but it doesn't make you an expert on jack diddly squats.
Stephen Colbert, every day in the New York Times, it says, what are the late night comedians saying?
Well, since they're all saying the same thing, and since they're all saying the same thing that the New York Times is saying, who cares what they're saying?
Who cares what a comedian says?
Who cares?
Why should Michael Avenatti, a guy who is a lawyer who will say anything for his client to defend his client, be allowed to come on CNN 500 times just because they hate the president?
I mean, we should be asking ourselves these things.
And luckily, a lot of people are asking themselves these things.
You know, the Federalist had a story about the fact that it says, as voting data pours in, this is by Angelo Moribito in the Federalist.
As voting data pours in, a trend emerges.
Celebrities are great at getting press attention.
They're great at getting people to the polls.
They're not great, however, at driving the electoral outcomes they want.
In Texas, Georgia, and Tennessee, the three states with the most noticeable celebrity involvement all saw their highest midterm voter turnout levels.
But the voters in all three states chose the unflashy Republicans over the celebrity-backed Democratic candidates.
So the irony here is twofold.
First of all, I should mention, by the way, the Stormy Daniels released a statement on Michael Avenatti's arrest saying these are serious and obviously very troubling allegations, but right now that's all they are.
Allegations.
We should all reserve judgment until the investigation, an investigation Michael has said he welcomes is complete and that's what I'm going to do.
So suddenly everybody on the left is withholding judgment.
But the irony is also something else.
The irony is how often, how often men who say they are feminists end up in a jam over women.
Harvey Weinstein, one of the big spokesmen for women, Bill Clinton, one of the big spokesmen for women, the other day, the guy who allegedly shouted filthy obscenities at Tucker Carlson's 19-year-old daughter.
Remember, she was in the country club and she went to the ladies' room.
And as she was coming back, this guy at the bar, a middle-aged man at the bar, started, said, is that, do you know Tucker Carlson?
She said, that's my dad.
And he started spewing this hideous filth at her.
And remember, just get that in your mind, right?
This is a grown-up man shouting at a 19-year-old girl, spewing filth at a 19-year-old girl.
So it turns out this guy serves on the board of directors of a women's mental health group called the Women's Initiative.
How often does this happen?
And I think the reason is, is that feminism itself is a destructive force for women.
It is a destructive force against women.
One of the great propaganda campaigns in American history is the way that feminism has convinced women that it means its dictionary definition is things that are good for women, right?
What is good for women is free market, free minds.
What is good for women is being included in the promises of the Declaration of Independence, the idea that not just all men are created equal, but all women also are created equal, which it has come to mean as well it should.
What is good for women is that kind of liberalism, what is called classical liberalism.
Feminism itself is just a mess, and it's not an accident that so many male feminists turn out to be abusers.
You know, it is so strange.
It's so strange.
I was talking yesterday about the way everything the Democrats say, or liberals say, I should say, comes out, results in the opposite of what they say they intend.
And another way you see this is with corporations.
You know, the left has a point about corporations.
The left traditionally was always shouting about corporations and the right was always defending them.
But the left has a point about corporations is that corporations can become so powerful that they become a pseudo-state.
They become more powerful than the state.
And we've seen a million Hollywood movies about this where the evil corporation is hunting people down.
But that is a fair, it's a fair danger, at least in the imagination.
A corporation can become so powerful, so rich, that it controls the government itself, or at least becomes a proxy government.
And we should watch for that.
There are monopoly laws on the books where we can break them up and there should be laws where they're held accountable.
But suddenly, like the left has just become the pal of corporations.
I mean, when you think about there's a big story in the New York Times today, the New York Times, a former newspaper, a big story about Facebook and how they've been misbehaving.
And we'll talk about that in just a second.
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So there's this big story in the New York Times about how Facebook covered up when it was accused of pushing fake news and letting the Russians get on there and letting all these people get on there.
And they did terrible things.
I mean, Mark Zuckerberg and what's her name?
The COO of Cheryl, sorry, Cheryl Sandberg, the CEO of Facebook.
They took this aggressive lobbying campaign to combat their critics.
This is from the New York Times.
They wanted to shift public anger toward rival companies, ward off damaging regulation.
Facebook employed a Republican opposition research firm to discredit activist protesters in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros.
So Zuckerberg is attacking George Soros to get Republicans on his side.
It also tapped its business relations and lobbied a Jewish civil rights group to cast criticism as anti-Semitic.
And this is at the same time New York and Virginia, the bastions of left-wingery, are paying Amazon to move in.
I mean, here's a thing where, what's her name, Google Eyes Cortez, is actually right.
She says she was outraged that they paid out all this money to Amazon to get them to move to New York.
Governor Cuomo in New York said he had to offer subsidies to Amazon to compete against states that don't have an income tax.
Why didn't he just rescind the New York income tax and then bring more business in?
In other words, if you own a little store in New York, you've got to pay these outrageous taxes to support Amazon coming in.
So suddenly the left has become the party of big corporations.
I've said this repeatedly, that big corporations love big government because little guys can't compete.
They can't compete with the red tape.
They can't compete with the legal work.
All of this is to say, all of this is to say that the people who are lecturing us about morals are the last people who should be lecturing us.
You know, Selena Zito, the woman who wrote that book about Trump voters and who they really are, she has a piece about the meaning of the midterms.
And she says, you know, too many people, too many people take the midterms as confirming their biases.
They look at the results and they say, oh, everything I said was true.
But she said, really, we should all learn something new from our losses.
And she said, one of the things that Donald Trump should learn is that he treated his base as if they were racist by appealing to their fear of Mexicans at the border.
She said they would have listened to him more in the suburbs.
The suburban men who have helped him get elected would have listened to him more if he had said, just emphasize security at the border without being hammering the invasion idea so hard that that may have served his base, but it didn't serve him to broaden his appeal.
Democrats, she said, had to learn that socialism doesn't work.
She said the only people who like socialism are kids and billionaires.
Those are the only people who like socialism.
It was moderate Democrat candidates who won, and they don't want to, candidates who shouldn't be pushing socialism.
So if it's true, if Selena Zito is right, and if it's true that ordinary people reject racism and they reject socialism, then maybe, maybe from now on, we should be listening to the people who live next door to us instead of the people who live as celebrities on our computers and our television sets.
Can't you save us, Brittany Spears?
Can we be saved?
Is Satan controlling me?
We have coming up an interview.
Now, we're not going to take a break this time, but that's a good reason, all the more reason, why you should be subscribing to DailyWire.com.
You should go to dailywire.com and subscribe to make sure that you get all the good stuff we have.
And we have so much good stuff at this point.
It is ridiculous.
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We have the mailbag.
We have all kinds of things that you can get.
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It is just a lousy 10 bucks.
And then you get everything we have.
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Now this interview with Oren Cass, he's the author of a book, The Once and Future Worker, A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America.
It's a groundbreaking reevaluation of American society, economics, and public policy.
And he's also a senior fellow with my friends at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.
This interview, this book has been going around, as I say to him in the interview.
We've been arguing about it at the Daily Wire.
The interview is a little bit wonky, but listen closely because he's talking about something really important about how we organize our economy, whether we organize it for consumers or for employment.
Take a listen to Oren Cass.
Orin Cass, thank you very much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
My pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
Well, your book, The Once in Future Worker, a Vision for the Renewal of Work in America, has been passed around the Daily Wire, and we've been fighting over it.
It has caused a lot of discussion and arguments.
So lay out, first of all, the thesis, your thesis begins with a theory of the economy that you disagree with.
So lay that out first.
Yeah, sure.
So I start with what I call economic piety, which is this idea that the economy is a pie, and our goal is to grow the pie.
And as long as the pie keeps getting bigger, we can cut it up however we need and everybody can have enough.
That's really how left of center, right of center, how most economists, policymakers, politicians have talked about prosperity and what we're trying to achieve for a very long time.
And on those terms, we've achieved it.
GDP keeps growing.
The safety net and the way we redistribute keeps expanding.
And yet, we have some very serious problems.
The Labor Market's Productivity Paradox00:15:02
People don't seem to be very happy with the result.
No, I mean, there does seem to be this actual malaise spreading out, the opiate addiction and all that.
So what's the cause?
What's the reason?
So my argument is that all of that is entirely consumer focused.
We're measuring your welfare by how much you get to consume.
And certainly that's nice and material living standards are important, but much more fundamental to people's own life satisfaction, to the strength of their families and their communities, is their capacity as producers, as workers who actually have a role to play in society, who are making a constructive contribution, who are achieving self-sufficiency and passing on opportunity.
And the economic pie view ignores that, to stretch the metaphor too far, it doesn't care who bakes the pie.
And so you get this view where even if ever fewer people are really becoming the centers of all the economic activity and producing all the wealth, everyone should still be happy as long as we mail enough checks around at the end of the day.
And we're seeing the result of that, which is you can mail an awful lot of checks around and still have people who are not happy, who aren't finding a way to constructively engage in society, who aren't building strong families and communities.
And that puts you in a spiral that's headed in the wrong direction.
But can anything be done about this?
I mean, don't jobs basically, aren't they created by the economy naturally?
Isn't there creative destruction and capitalism that's just going to get rid of certain jobs?
And that's absolutely true, and that's fine.
I don't think that that's the problem.
And I don't think that's something that we should resist.
I think what's happened in the view that we've taken is we've said, you know, the labor market is a market.
It's where we create and find jobs.
And just like any other market, we're going to let it find its efficient outcome.
And that's going to be best for our growth and our consumption.
And that's true, but what it misses is that there's nothing in economics that says the labor market is going to settle somewhere where everyone can find good work.
That would allow them to support a family.
If we actually have a substantive social preference for what we want the labor market to do, we actually care where wages settle.
We care how many jobs are available, what kind of jobs, then we can't just say the free market outcome is sufficient.
We actually have to say, no, we have a preference for how the labor market should behave.
And the way to affect that isn't to do what the left tends to do, which is say, well, we'll just yell at it until it does something else.
That's a good way to get an even worse outcome, but it's to look at the conditions.
It's to say a market just takes the conditions it's operating in and spits out a result.
If we're not happy with the result, then we have to pay attention to the conditions, to the regulatory context that determines what kind of businesses form, to the education system that determines what kind of workers we're preparing, to trade and immigration, which determine how we draw the line around who gets to be in the labor market.
Organized labor, taxes.
There are all of these different ways that if we cared about what actually happens in the labor market, we would do things very differently than we've been doing them.
Okay, let's talk about this how it looks in real life.
I mean, it's just how it looks in detail.
You know, the worry with government intervention, any kind of intervention in the job market is kind of what they used to call the buggy whip idea, that the buggy whip industry goes out of business and the politicians say, oh, we cannot let our great traditional industry of buggy whips go out of business and we wind up subsidizing an industry that we don't need at all, which is essentially what Barack Obama was saying to people when he said, some of these jobs aren't coming back.
Manufacturing jobs are just going to go away.
What can you actually do in real life that is going to replace jobs that have been taken away, say, by automation?
So, you know, I think the buggy whip example is exactly what we shouldn't be resisting.
We don't need to subsidize people making buggy whips.
But there are still other things people want to make, and that people want to buy that need to get made.
You know, as you look at how our economy evolves as people get richer, we can see what the richest people in society now are consuming, and it's a lot of made stuff.
It's not digital downloads.
It's not yoga lessons.
It's a little bit of those things, but it's mostly bigger houses, more cars, more furniture.
It's stuff that also has to get made.
And so there's no shortage of need for that kind of economic activity in the economy.
And in fact, automation is a force for good in that respect.
Automation is just a word we use for people becoming more productive, for being able to make more with less hours of work.
And that's the exact formula by which wages rise.
That's the exact formula by which workers across the economy can become more productive and more prosperous over time.
What's happened isn't that automation is wiping out all the jobs.
It's actually exactly the opposite.
Productivity growth has slowed down.
We're making it possible for workers to do more with less more slowly.
That's a lot of mores and lesses in one sentence.
But the way to think about it is in the past, what has happened is workers became more productive.
We still needed all the workers and they made more stuff.
What's been happening over the last couple of decades is that as workers become more productive, we just keep making the same amount of stuff and use less workers to do it.
That's the concerning trend.
It's not the automation.
It's why have we stopped actually expanding our manufacturing and industrial economy in ways that would create more opportunities to produce stuff.
And so it's not about protecting the buggy whip manufacturer.
It's about saying, how do we make sure that investment in our economy, our preparation of workers for the economy, move in directions that are actually going to create opportunities for people to work.
And how do you do that?
Well, so one good example on what I would call the supply side, so preparation of workers for the labor market, is to look at what kind of preparation we actually give people, which right now is focused almost entirely on a pipeline through college.
So we say the goal is everyone should get a college degree.
Our high schools are essentially college prep academies for the most part.
And if you fall out somewhere along the way, we don't really have much for you besides a shrug.
And yet the vast majority of people fall out somewhere along the way.
Less than one in five go smoothly high school to college to career.
So instead of saying, well, that should be the goal, and those people who make it through are going to produce a lot of wealth for everybody, we can say, no, actually, it's the people who don't make it through and aren't likely to succeed in college who are our top priority.
And our education system really needs to be oriented at least as much around a high school experience that's going to prepare them for the job that they're headed for, not toward college.
And at least as much money as we're spending on subsidizing higher education for people who are going to be the winners in the economy, really that money we should be spending on subsidizing work-based initial jobs, on-the-job training for the people who are right now struggling to find work.
And so you need a track that's nothing like the college track.
That's additional years of high school education, but then technical training, subsidized on-the-job training.
And ideally, you get someone to about age 20 with multiple years of job experience, an industry credential, a job, earnings already in the bank, and for less than we're spending on college, you can even also give them a savings account, either to get them on a sound financial footing or for future training that they might need.
That's a much better approach, and it's not buggy whip subsidizing, right?
We're not picking who should win in the economy.
We're saying what are the conditions we want our labor market to operate in?
And one of those has to be one where we're investing especially in making sure everyone has the tools they need to participate in the labor market, which isn't something we do right now.
So what about globalization?
If we want our iPhones to be affordable, we have to have them manufactured out of the country where people have fewer unions, fewer rights, fewer added-on expenses.
You know, Steven Pinker has a line where he says, well, yes, our middle-class workers are sinking back, but poor workers in other countries are coming up.
And therefore, as a citizen of the world, we should all be very happy.
I'm not very happy about that.
I want American workers to do well.
What's the answer?
Yeah, I think there are two really important points there.
One is the economic question about globalization.
And one is the political question about who should we even be prioritizing when we make our policy.
So to start on the economic side, I think globalization is really where the rubber meets the road a lot of times in this question of are we consumers or are we workers?
Because from the perspective of consumers, the economic theory is fantastic.
More free trade really always does make sense.
If someone else can make something cheaper, obviously that's good for you as a consumer.
If a country like China wants to send us stuff on credit, we don't send them anything back.
We just send them treasury bonds back.
All the better, right?
If our trade with China is China sends us iPhones and we send China treasury bills, we're literally sending pieces of paper that say we will send money later in return for stuff.
And as consumers, we might be thrilled with that.
If we're concerned with our interests as workers, that doesn't work.
Trade can still be very constructive and we want China making things that we can buy and we want to make things that China will buy, but we have to care about the balance.
We have to care that the trade relationship is one where we are making and selling as much stuff to other people as they are making and selling to us.
So Trump is right about this.
I think on that point, Trump is absolutely right, that there are serious problems in our trading relationships and that the end result has been especially costly to the less skilled workers who are competing, where I think Trump goes astray in the question of what to do about it.
Because as with we were just talking about the labor market generally, you can't just come in and subsidize buggy whip manufacturers.
When it comes to the international economy, it turns out not to work especially well to just come in and say, well, we're just going to slap some tariff on China or especially on Canada or Europe or a lot of things we're doing.
If you want the international economy to behave differently, you again have to look at the conditions it's operating in.
Why is it that we have this imbalance with China?
Part of the problem is that China is doing a lot of really unfair things that distort the market, and we need to compel them to change those behaviors.
A tariff could be part of a way to do that.
It would be much better to impose costs on them that don't also impose costs on us.
So for instance, I'd love to see us use our higher education system as a real pain point.
I'd love to see us say to China, look, until you're ready to behave appropriately into the international economy, we're going to restrict and eventually cut off student visas.
We have plenty of other international students who would love to be in our schools and would do very well and enrich our schools as well.
And we're not interested in really offering a lot of places to an elite in a foreign country that's essentially trying to undermine our own economic health.
So something like that could have a similar objective to a tariff, right?
What can we do that's going to try to force China to change its behavior, but in a way that doesn't in the process sort of backfire on us as well.
You know, I read a lot of people now, they talk about a universal income, a guaranteed universal income, and people like Pinker and others who have basically said this idea that work provides meaning is a romantic idea, that most people's work is drudgery, that it's not really meaningful to them, and they would find other things to do that would provide meaning.
Can you respond to that?
Yeah, you know, universal basic income is sort of the ultimate end point of economic piety, right?
It says we're going to just keep growing the pie bigger.
We acknowledge that most people aren't going to get to participate in making it, and we're just going to send them all a piece of pie.
And the problem with that is that Pinker and others who say the idea of work is romantic are just wrong.
The value of work isn't some sort of kind of archaic or nostalgic thing that we cling to.
People want to be productive actors who are contributing to their communities.
And this matters on a lot of dimensions.
It matters for individuals.
We know that having a job is important to self-esteem.
It's important to mental health.
It's important to life satisfaction and happiness.
And this is especially telling, you know, I think surveys of how happy are you, do what you will with that.
The good ones look at one person over time because then you have a baseline.
And most things that happen to someone in life cause temporary blips, but they return to whatever their pre-existing sort of natural state is.
So marriage, divorce, birth, death, permanent disability.
You see a change in your reported level of happiness, but it returns back to where it was.
The only thing we've found that that's not the case for is unemployment.
People never get used to not having productive work.
They end up at a permanently lower state of well-being.
And so for people, and for their own economic opportunity, it's important.
You're never going to move up to that second job if you're not in the first job.
So when you say, why don't you just take the basic income instead, you're consigning someone to never climbing onto the economic ladder in the first place, because they're not going to go from basic income up to that fifth step or wherever you might hope they'd eventually reach.
So it's important to individuals.
It's also critical to families.
And here it's especially important for men, it turns out, that men having work, both in economics and social terms, is really important to families forming in the first place.
Unemployment is a huge driver of divorce, again, specifically for men.
And then when you look at children, outcomes for children are much better in households where people are working.
And again, this isn't just because they have more income.
It's because it's the work itself.
And even more strikingly, just being in a community where people are working.
So dive in your own parents.
communities that have more people working turn out to have higher levels of upward mobility for kids.
So it's better for the individuals, it's better for the families.
And then when you step back and think about what that means for our economy, it comes down to a question of sustainability.
And that word has now become sort of captured and run off as this environmental thing.
But sustainability is a much broader concept.
It's about whether or not we're nurturing the endowments that let us enjoy the things we care about.
And having those strong capacity to work, those strong families, passing opportunity on to children, that's critical to the sustainability of our society.
And if you take work away, which is what we've started doing, that falls apart.
And I think that's what we're seeing.
Orin Cass, the book is The Once in Future Worker, a Vision for the Renewal of Work in America.
Sustainability Matters00:05:07
I'm telling you, we've been fighting over this book for weeks and probably will continue to do it.
I really appreciate your coming on.
Thanks very much.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you for having me.
All right, Stuff I Like.
That's Claire Green.
Our latest contribution to the introduction to Stuff I Like.
You know, yesterday, somebody asked me a great question, a question about overlooked masterpieces, overlooked literature.
And I started talking about Raphael Sabatini.
I said I've been selling him to Shapiro because Shapiro, like me, enjoys swashbuckling adventure books.
And he wrote these wonderful, wonderful novels, Scaramouche and Captain Blood, and I think a sequel to Captain Blood.
Scaramouche begins with one of my favorite first lines in all of literature.
He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad, which I think I may have put on my headstone.
These were made, Captain Blood was made into a movie with Errol Flynn, and I just, it made me think about the fact that Errol Flynn is not somebody we really turn to too much anymore.
His movies are sometimes thought of as corny, but they were really spectacular.
They were really wonderful.
He was one of the actors of that era who was able to play characters who are larger than life.
And we don't really have actors who can do that anymore.
We have some characters like superheroes who are larger than life, but really the actors are elevated by the parts rather than the actors suiting the parts and being fitted to the parts.
But Errol Flynn lived an epic life with many things that people have objected to.
Among them, he was one of the great womanizers of his time, so much so that the phrase in like Flynn became a saying among GIs during the war.
If you were in like Flynn, you had just made it easy, and that was because he was such a great seducer, very handsome guy.
His role in Captain Blood is great.
Robin Hood, The Adventures of Robin Hood, a picture you should not miss.
It is the best Robin Hood movie, far, far better than anything that has been made ever since.
The Adventures of Don Juan was another one.
That ends with one of my favorite lines in all of movies where he says there's a little bit of Don Juan in every man.
And since I am Don Juan, there must be more of it in me.
I'd also like that on my headstone, but I don't think that's one that's going to make the cut.
But let's just take a quick look at Captain Blood.
Captain Blood is a story of a doctor who is sold into slavery.
He's captured and sold into slavery, and he escapes and becomes a buccaneer.
And here is a scene where Olivia de Havilland was often in the love interest in Errol Flynn's films.
And here's a scene where he finds that Olivia de Havilland has been captured and is being sold into slavery.
And he decides to buy her back from the wonderful villain of all great swashbuckling movies, Basil Rathbone.
And he's going to buy her back.
And it's a wonderful scene because it's kind of sexy that he's buying this beautiful woman as a slave.
But what makes it really sexy is we know, we know that he will never treat her as a slave.
And that's why he's the hero of the film.
Let's just take a quick look at Captain Blood based on the novel by Raphael Sabatini.
Can't you save us, Brittany Spears?
Can we be saved?
I don't think that was it.
I don't think that was actually Captain Blood or Rafael Blood.
All right, play the right one.
You want the girl?
Why not?
And I'm willing to pay for what I want.
Come Zach, you boast a knowledge of pearls.
But what do you value each of those?
Oh, a thousand pieces each.
They're worth rather more.
But very well.
Here are 12.
For three-fifths the value of the prize due to your ship for having made the capture.
for the shared you my men i make myself responsible will you be so kind as to take my property aboard And that settles that, my captain partner.
No, you don't.
Fuck your pass.
Come back.
Wait!
Do not take her while I live.
Then I'll take her when you're dead.
Great stuff.
He was just, he was the great swashbuckling actor.
All right, that's it for the week.
The Clavenless weekend begins.
Do not forget, do not forget Another Kingdom.
Its new episode, episode 7, is available to everybody tomorrow.
That is the secret of Horror Mansion.
It's really powerful stuff.
After that, though, you're on your own into the Clavenless weekend you go.
Survivors gather here on Monday.
The Clavenless Weekend Begins00:00:38
I'm Andrew Clavin.
is The Andrew Klavan Show.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
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Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
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The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing Production.