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Cut Here: The Socialism Episode You Can Share With Your Dad · The Overlap

• 0:00
  The next 40 minutes of this episode, actually, they're not for you. I want to be clear about that up front. They are a tool. You're being handed something to use. Here's why I decided to make this. The word socialism has been defined for most of this country by people who have a direct financial interest in it being incorrectly defined.
• 0:23
  And that definition has been repeated so many times and in so many places that it's now just about like the weather. You can't argue with the weather. It just is. And if you're on the right side of politics, there is essentially zero chance you will ever look this up on your own. I get it. Like, I understand why. This topic has been made stupid. And you don't want to spend your evening reading about stupid things.
• 0:50
  So the second half of this episode is just the definition, plain and simple with the receipts attached. Now, I want to tell you about a decision I made while writing this script and publishing this episode, because I think it kind of matters.
• 1:06
  See, in the first version of this episode, it was not me. Like, it was physically me. It was technically me. But I was playing a character. A guy in his late 50s, 26 years as a millwright, ran his own electrical business, voted Reagan two times, somebody your uncle would actually listen to.
• 1:26
  And on paper, I think it was it was it was it was it was a bold choice. Then I actually like recorded it with an accent and vocal grit. And I played it back and saw what I'd actually done. I had invented a lifelong Republican with a working class job. So a conservative audience would trust him.
• 1:48
  I had embodied the definition of cringe. Here's the thing. I already have a lifelong Republican with a working class job for a conservative audience. It's me. The truth is, and I've talked about this on the podcast before, I was a Republican for 30 years.
• 2:07
  I mean, that is, if you don't count the non-voting years, it looks like more like, I don't know, 14 to make you feel better if you're if you're really worried about that. But I walked door to door for George W. Bush. I know. Soak it in. It's not great. I'm not proud of it. It's not a point of pride. But I left the Republican Party officially in 2016. I had been waffling for about five years before that.
• 2:33
  And I just, I realized I didn't need to fabricate this person with my own biography. And the fact that my first instinct was to create one out of thin air is just kind of, I don't know. It's just telling the truth about what goes on behind the scenes of this show.
• 2:53
  Because here's the thing. The entire argument of this episode is that somebody handed you a definition from a TV screen, from a Facebook post, something like that. And they did not mention they had a stake in it. If I invent a working class guy to carry that argument, I've basically done the exact same thing. And I would have done it badly. I mean, I listened to it. And it takes about nine seconds to search for a name and not find anything about this person.
• 3:23
  And the moment anybody caught it, I would just have this, I don't know, astroturfing lost the plot kind of scenario on my hands that it wouldn't have gone over well.
• 3:35
  I basically would have just handed them proof that people like me lie about who we are. And I have confirmed the thing they already suspect about us. So it's just me saying true things, including about myself. That's the trade.
• 3:52
  I give up the messenger who would have been easier to hear in exchange for every single thing in this episode being actually true. So here is what that does change. There are no like in jokes in the second half of this episode. There's no like dunking.
• 4:09
  I don't call anybody stupid or brainwashed or a rube. Not one time. I promise. And that's that's deliberate, right? Contempt has a conversion rate of zero. Everyone listening already knows that from their own family group chat or whatever over the last 10 years, the moment somebody feels mocked by the person handing them the information, the information stops landing.
• 4:32
  It doesn't matter how right you are or if the person listening is decided they're looked down on. But that's not a flaw in their reasoning. That's that's just how people work. I mean, that's psychology. And it's it's much harder to strip contempt out of an argument than to put it in.
• 4:49
  Because contempt, it feels good. It really does. It feels better to be angry at stupidity than than patience with misunderstanding or ignorance, the true word, not the not the dunk word. But if if the goal is actually reaching anybody, any person instead of performing for an audience that that already agrees with me, then you have to do the harder thing.
• 5:15
  So here is the actual instructions for this episode. Listen to the next part all the way through if you want to. But before you send it to anybody, you need to to cut it off right before the break. I'll actually release two versions of this episode. One that cuts the entire intro that I'm giving you right now and explaining the backstory and one that just starts at the second half. But yeah, I want you to send this to your weird uncle or the person who's going to be a weird uncle.
• 5:45
  who is arguing in good faith about democratic socialism or socialism in general. But but really, you could they're just so uninformed or or informed by a source that has a profit motive that I want them to hear this from just a normal person, what these things actually are and with real numbers with real receipts to back it up.
• 6:10
  So that's, I guess, I guess, I guess the whole thing. Everything before it is kind of their machinery. So if I send you the whole thing, the first 90 seconds tells them that the target of a campaign, and we've really lost them before the argument starts. So cut the episode here before you send it, don't send the the intro, send only what comes after the break or look for the version that was released on the same day. This is going to be released about about an hour.
• 6:37
  after the shorter version, the one that you should send is going to be released about an hour after this official version. So when you do send it to that person, maybe two, maybe three people, whatever, the one who argues in good faith and just has bad info, not the one who enjoys a fight, right, or the one who who debates for sport. And look, I'm guilty of that. But send it send it with no commentary. Don't caption it. No. See, I told you. So just let let the episode be the whole.
• 7:07
  message and then just go do something else. Right. So that's it. A couple of things before I do get started on that, though. I have to take care of the end of the episode right now because you guys are the ones who are actually supporting me and the ones who are listening to this episode. So I want to say a handful of things. We have grown as a podcast by almost 300% year over year this year. And that's been a super cool thing. It's been really neat to see that this podcast is reaching more people.
• 7:37
  And that is all incredibly wonderful things. And I'm so happy that you're here. But we survive and we keep getting spread and keep growing based upon your ability to share this with people that you think it's interesting or share this with people that you want to dunk on, because that's what most of our episodes actually are.
• 7:56
  Right. They're they're dunk episodes that show the inner workings of the machinery that is oppressing us all the the child crushing machine or the orphan orphan crushing machine. So thank you so much for sharing. If you already have, please do share if you have not ones that you think are interesting. Make sure you rate us on Apple podcasts and Spotify podcasts. We're not doing well on Spotify. I assume it has something to do with their algorithm.
• 8:25
  Most of our listeners actually listen to us through Apple podcasts or get our podcast directly from our website, like with podcast addict or some app on their phone. So send it to them and whatever means something to them. We have actually all of the ways to get in touch with us. If you just go to the website, fof.foundation, no.com, no anything. Just type in fof.foundation. That's friends of the future.foundation. And click on the link that supports your your podcasting app.
• 8:53
  It'll be on the right hand side, just below our name. But anyway, also want to mention Will is not again in this episode. I, you know, I don't I don't want to give away his business or anything like that. But but he's he's OK. I chat with him on a regular basis. So we miss him. But he is out there doing his thing. And we love that him for that. I assume he will be back sometime. All right, here we go.
• 9:18
  Let me read you a paycheck.
• 9:40
  Amazon warehouse job, Illinois, 40 hours a week at twenty two dollars an hour. Seems like an amazing job. And it seems like the one that you might want for your kids or for your nephew who is complaining about the economy, complaining about the person who's currently in the office of the president. But that's the real wage right now. Twenty two dollars an hour. That is a job that you could actually get in Illinois.
• 10:09
  I checked the job listings 40 hours. So that's eight hundred and eighty dollars before any money comes out of your paycheck in a week. So eight hundred and eighty bucks for a week. Sounds pretty decent. Those numbers are built from the actual wage and the actual insurance costs that employers report. So you can you can check them. I'm not making them up. I'm not like averaging across 10 years of old information. This is what the number is right now.
• 10:39
  Let me break down the deductions because this is the whole conversation right here. Social security taxes comes out of that. Fifty four dollars and eighty cents. That's six point two percent of the gross. Medicare comes out. That's twelve dollars and seventy six cents. That's one point four or five percent. Federal income tax withholding, depending on their filing status and whether they have dependents, is roughly a hundred dollars per week.
• 11:06
  That is already one hundred and sixty seven dollars and fifty six cents gone before they have health insurance before they have anything else.
• 11:14
  Then the health insurance. The company typically contributes part of it and the company calculates as part of your total compensation. But the employee share still comes from the paycheck for basic coverage. Not not great coverage. Just basic coverage. The American average of one thousand eight hundred and eighty six dollars as a deductible.
• 11:35
  Not including the twenty percent coinsurance on anything that you need medical help with. That's about sixty dollars per week out of the employee's take home. So out of eight hundred and eighty dollars gross, we've taken out two hundred and twenty seven dollars in taxes and health insurance. That leaves about six hundred and fifty two dollars and forty four cents per week.
• 12:00
  That's a person working forty hours per week taking home six hundred and fifty two dollars. We're going to cut off the forty four cents because let's be honest, we all learned the old way of doing math and it's a lot easier to put numbers together when you cut out everything behind the decimal. And what can forty four cents buy you anyway?
• 12:17
  So that's two thousand six hundred and fifty six hundred and fifty six hundred and sixty three dollars per month before rent before food before a car payment before anything.
• 12:27
  The national average rent for a one bedroom, one bedroom, one bathroom apartment in August twenty twenty six is about one thousand six hundred and sixty three dollars per month.
• 12:38
  Sixteen sixty three. Now, if you remove the ten largest U.S.
• 12:43
  Cities, which is what we've done, where rents are for similar units, one bedroom, one bath or often exceeding thirty five hundred dollars.
• 12:51
  They're what the cities that you'd think of there. There are actually four of them in Texas, New York City, Chicago, Phoenix, Arizona, San Diego, San Francisco, the big top ten most expensive cities in the entire country.
• 13:03
  I remove that from the entire list. The average rent for a one bedroom, one bath apartment is one thousand six hundred and sixty three.
• 13:10
  So that typically brings the average down once you remove it to fourteen or fifteen hundred dollars, depending on whether a median or mean average is used.
• 13:21
  So let's say they find an apartment for sixteen hundred bucks. That's that's the number I have in my mind.
• 13:28
  Certainly when I was in college and when I was a younger person with a one bedroom, one bathroom apartment.
• 13:33
  Sixteen hundred bucks was about the going rate for rent now.
• 13:36
  So that leaves a single person by themselves in a one bedroom, one bath apartment with one thousand ten dollars left for the entire month.
• 13:45
  Back in twenty twenty five, just feeding yourself costs anywhere from two hundred and forty five to five hundred dollars every month.
• 13:53
  And that was before the grocery index climbed another two point seven percent in twenty twenty six.
• 14:00
  That's the CPI. It keeps track of the most common things that we buy and gives them a general price throughout the national average.
• 14:09
  Again, they're using swapping between mean and median and they arrived to a two point seven percent increase on CPI.
• 14:18
  But those broad averages don't tell the whole story of what happens at the register.
• 14:23
  They hide the actual math of a shopping trip.
• 14:26
  In fact, if you like coffee, just a good cup of black coffee like I do.
• 14:32
  Coffee prices spiked by thirty three to thirty five percent.
• 14:36
  And if you want to have a hamburger or I don't know, a beef sausage in the morning with a little bit of oatmeal or something, ground beef went up twenty two percent year over year.
• 14:49
  But there is good news.
• 14:51
  There was one grocery staple that did drop thirty percent.
• 14:55
  Eggs.
• 14:56
  Everything else has been consistently higher month to month at the grocery store.
• 15:01
  That is what we're working with.
• 15:03
  Keep that number.
• 15:04
  The entire conversation is about whether that person can live on it and what makes that possible or impossible.
• 15:11
  Now let me tell you who's talking because you should weigh it.
• 15:16
  My name is Joshua.
• 15:18
  In most of my life, I am the computer guy.
• 15:21
  I'm the one you call when your email stops working or when your iPhone starts doing something it did not used to do and you can't figure out what changed.
• 15:29
  I come over.
• 15:30
  I fix it.
• 15:31
  I don't make you feel stupid about it.
• 15:33
  I mention that because this is the same job.
• 15:37
  Somebody hands you a machine and a story about how it works.
• 15:41
  And sometimes the story is wrong and somebody has to sit down and go through it with you without being a jerk about it.
• 15:48
  Here's the other part.
• 15:49
  And it's the part that matters for weighing what I'm about to say.
• 15:53
  I was a Republican for thirty years.
• 15:55
  Not casually.
• 15:57
  I walked door to door for George W. Bush two times.
• 16:01
  Once, before I was old enough to vote, I knocked on strangers' doors in the heat living in Louisiana and made the case.
• 16:08
  I believed it.
• 16:10
  If you and I had talked politics in 2004, I would have argued with you from the other direction.
• 16:16
  And I would have been good at it.
• 16:18
  I left the party officially in 2016.
• 16:21
  I'm not going to perform pride or shame about that.
• 16:24
  It's just what happened.
• 16:26
  And I ended up well to the left of where I started, which I also am not going to hide because you would find that out in about a minute anyway.
• 16:34
  And then nothing else I said for the rest of this episode would you actually listen to.
• 16:41
  I'm telling you all of this in the first minute instead of the last one because the whole point here is that you should not have to take anybody's word for anything, including mine.
• 16:53
  Every number I just read and every number I am about to read is public information.
• 16:59
  I will tell you where each one comes from and you can go and check them.
• 17:03
  If I have one wrong, I want to know.
• 17:05
  You can send me an email.
• 17:06
  It's the overlap at fof dot foundation.
• 17:10
  No dot com at the very end.
• 17:13
  Just the overlap at fof dot foundation.
• 17:20
  I'm not here to convert you.
• 17:21
  I spent 30 years on the other side of this and nobody ever converted me by winning an argument.
• 17:28
  Not one time.
• 17:30
  I changed my mind slowly by myself over years after the facts stopped fitting the story that I had.
• 17:38
  That is the only way it has ever worked for anybody.
• 17:43
  What I can actually do is hand you the definition of a phrase as the people who hold the position actually use it instead of the version that circulates on your favorite mainstream media channel.
• 17:55
  That's the whole job.
• 17:57
  So here is the phrase.
• 17:59
  Democratic socialism means the workers and the community have a say in who owns and who controls the things they depend on to live.
• 18:12
  A power plant.
• 18:13
  A water system.
• 18:15
  A hospital.
• 18:16
  A utility.
• 18:18
  Who owns it.
• 18:19
  Who runs it.
• 18:20
  And whether a fund in another state gets to buy the factory in your town, strip it for parts, lay off 500 people, and disappear.
• 18:29
  That is what the phrase means.
• 18:32
  Not that the government seizes things.
• 18:35
  Not that you own nothing.
• 18:38
  A say.
• 18:39
  A vote.
• 18:40
  A seat at the table when decisions that determine your life get made.
• 18:45
  Let me be also very clear about what it does not mean.
• 18:49
  Because this is where the conversation got hijacked.
• 18:52
  It does not mean communism.
• 18:55
  Communism says the state owns everything.
• 18:58
  And you cannot vote that out.
• 19:01
  Ever.
• 19:02
  Democratic socialism says you vote.
• 19:05
  And if you do not like it, you vote it out.
• 19:08
  That is the entire difference.
• 19:11
  Elections.
• 19:11
  That phrase is load-bearing.
• 19:14
  And it's the one that never survives the trip to television.
• 19:18
  It does not mean the government takes your house.
• 19:21
  Or your truck.
• 19:22
  Or your gun.
• 19:24
  It means the community decides who owns the water system.
• 19:28
  And the power lines.
• 19:30
  Shared infrastructure.
• 19:31
  Not personal property.
• 19:33
  Those are different categories.
• 19:35
  And they get deliberately blurred.
• 19:38
  It does not mean that nobody works.
• 19:41
  The one I want to spend a minute on.
• 19:42
  Because it's exactly backwards from the history.
• 19:46
  Eugene Debs was a railroad man.
• 19:49
  Fireman on a locomotive at 19.
• 19:51
  He helped build the American Railway Union.
• 19:55
  In 1918, he gave a speech in Canton, Ohio, against the draft.
• 20:01
  And the federal government convicted him under the Espionage Act and sent him to the Atlanta Penitentiary.
• 20:08
  He was inmate number 2253.
• 20:11
  And in 1920, from inside that cell, he ran for president of the United States of America and got 914,000 votes.
• 20:22
  Think about what that number means.
• 20:23
  Almost 1 million Americans, most of whom would never have called themselves radicals, voted for a man in federal prison.
• 20:33
  Not because they had read theory.
• 20:35
  Because they remembered the coal mines.
• 20:38
  They remembered 12-hour shifts in the mills seven days a week.
• 20:42
  They remembered men worked until they died and then replaced on Monday.
• 20:48
  The demand those people were making was not that nobody should work.
• 20:53
  The slogan was eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.
• 20:59
  They wanted a life on the other side of the shift.
• 21:03
  And they won it in pieces over 40 years.
• 21:07
  The Adamson Act in 1916 gave railroad workers the first federally mandated eight-hour day.
• 21:14
  The Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938 established the 40-hour work week and the minimum wage.
• 21:23
  Your weekend came from that fight.
• 21:26
  Overtime pay came from that fight.
• 21:29
  If you have ever gotten time and a half, you have collected on a debt that those people paid, sometimes with their lives.
• 21:37
  That is not nobody working.
• 21:39
  That is everybody working.
• 21:41
  And not having your entire life be your job.
• 21:44
  And here's the part I want you to sit with because it's the one that got me.
• 21:48
  There is a decade a lot of people on the right point back to as when this country worked.
• 21:53
  One income could carry a house and a family.
• 21:57
  A man could get hired at a plant at 20 and retire from it.
• 22:01
  You could buy a home on a factory wage.
• 22:04
  That was the middle of the 1950s.
• 22:06
  And in 1954, union membership in the American workforce hit its all-time peak, right around a third of every worker in the United States.
• 22:18
  Those two facts are the same fact.
• 22:21
  The era people are nostalgic for is the era with the highest union density in American history, the strongest labor law, and the top tax rates of this century.
• 22:35
  That is not a coincidence.
• 22:37
  And it is not a coincidence anybody wants to explain to you.
• 22:40
  Because the moment that you notice it, a lot of what is on television stops making sense.
• 22:47
  It does not mean that Venezuela or Cuba or the Soviet Union.
• 22:52
  Those were disasters, dictatorships, no real elections, and millions dead.
• 22:59
  I am not going to soften that or walk around it, and I understand completely why those are the places that come to mind when you hear the phrase.
• 23:07
  Those governments used the word and betrayed it by making sure no one could vote them out.
• 23:14
  That is not democratic.
• 23:16
  And that is not democratic socialism.
• 23:18
  That is the opposite of it.
• 23:20
  And the thing that makes it the opposite is the elections.
• 23:24
  I will say this very plainly because it cuts both directions.
• 23:29
  Plenty of people who use the word socialism in this country are insufferable.
• 23:35
  You know the type, university types, campus types who have never had a job, who use the word as a costume, and could not tell you what a shop steward does.
• 23:47
  They exist.
• 23:48
  They are annoying.
• 23:49
  They are also not who I am describing.
• 23:52
  They are not who wrote any of the history that I just gave you.
• 23:58
  But anybody who argues against socialism, using only Venezuela, without ever mentioning Denmark or Norway, is picking examples that serve them.
• 24:09
  If the claim is that it does not work, then explain Denmark.
• 24:13
  Then explain Norway.
• 24:16
  Explain why those countries have higher wages.
• 24:19
  Shorter work weeks.
• 24:20
  Shorter work weeks.
• 24:21
  Better health outcomes.
• 24:23
  Longer lives.
• 24:24
  And functioning economies with shining examples of capitalism working within their system.
• 24:30
  GLP-1s, semaglutide, terzepatide, are a perfect example of that.
• 24:34
  An honest argument points at all of them.
• 24:38
  Now here is the part that I think actually matters, and this is not theoretical.
• 24:42
  It already exists here.
• 24:44
  You already use it.
• 24:45
  You already like it.
• 24:48
  Medicare.
• 24:48
  Medicare.
• 24:49
  That's not capitalism.
• 24:51
  You do not buy Medicare on an open market.
• 24:54
  There is no Medicare store.
• 24:56
  No company competes to sell it to you.
• 24:59
  You pay over your working life.
• 25:02
  And then when you turn 65, it's there.
• 25:05
  You do not have to hope your employer still offers coverage.
• 25:09
  You do not have to fear losing it.
• 25:11
  Who pays for it?
• 25:13
  Workers through taxes.
• 25:15
  Who owns it?
• 25:16
  All of us.
• 25:17
  Who does it serve?
• 25:18
  Everyone over 65.
• 25:20
  That is public ownership and democratic control.
• 25:25
  The VA.
• 25:25
  Veterans Affairs.
• 25:27
  Veterans Affairs.
• 25:27
  Funded by taxes.
• 25:29
  Run by the government.
• 25:30
  Serving people who served.
• 25:33
  It has real problems and gets overstretched.
• 25:36
  And in a number of measurable areas, it still posts better patient outcomes than private hospitals.
• 25:44
  Who pays?
• 25:45
  Taxpayers.
• 25:47
  Who owns it?
• 25:48
  The public.
• 25:49
  The interstate highway system.
• 25:52
  Eisenhower, a Republican general, built it.
• 25:55
  Paid for it with gas taxes.
• 25:57
  Built by public works.
• 25:59
  Maintained by public agencies.
• 26:02
  Every truck carrying goods across the country runs on it.
• 26:06
  If a company owned the highways and charged by the mile, commerce would be slower and more expensive.
• 26:13
  Who owns it?
• 26:14
  The public.
• 26:15
  Who does it serve?
• 26:17
  Everyone.
• 26:18
  The fire department.
• 26:19
  Funded by property taxes.
• 26:21
  Staffed by public employees.
• 26:24
  It shows up whether you can afford it or not.
• 26:27
  Your house is on fire.
• 26:28
  They come.
• 26:30
  Nobody asks about your insurance.
• 26:32
  Nobody bills you for the water.
• 26:35
  That is what a public service is.
• 26:37
  A county road crew that salts the roads when there's ice or snow.
• 26:41
  Crop insurance.
• 26:43
  That carries farmers through a bad year.
• 26:46
  Rural electric co-ops.
• 26:47
  Which are owned by the members who use them.
• 26:49
  And when they run a surplus, it goes back to members as lower rates.
• 26:54
  Instead of out to a shareholder who has never been to the county.
• 26:58
  The Tennessee Valley Authority brought power to seven states in the 1930s.
• 27:04
  Tennessee.
• 27:05
  Alabama.
• 27:05
  Alabama.
• 27:06
  Kentucky.
• 27:06
  Kentucky.
• 27:07
  Mississippi.
• 27:08
  North Carolina.
• 27:10
  Georgia.
• 27:10
  And Virginia.
• 27:11
  Before that, fewer than one in ten rural homes had electricity.
• 27:18
  People were living like it was 1880.
• 27:20
  No power.
• 27:21
  No refrigeration.
• 27:22
  No modern tools.
• 27:24
  Your CPAP didn't work.
• 27:26
  And your diabetes medication could not be refrigerated.
• 27:30
  Private companies had already looked at it and said, no, it's not profitable.
• 27:36
  That was communities deciding some things are too important to leave to profit.
• 27:41
  So we will own it, we will run it, and we will decide together what happens to it.
• 27:48
  Every one of those falls into the same category.
• 27:51
  Public or community ownership.
• 27:54
  Democratic control.
• 27:56
  No outside fund extracting value.
• 27:58
  They have been working for 50, 70, 90 years.
• 28:03
  Your family depends on several of them right now.
• 28:07
  And nobody calls them socialism.
• 28:10
  Because nobody ever had an interest in making you afraid of the word when it's attached to something you like.
• 28:17
  So what democratic socialism asks for is not something different from Medicare or the fire department.
• 28:24
  It's the same thing.
• 28:26
  It's just applied more broadly.
• 28:28
  It asks, who owns the hospital?
• 28:31
  Right now, a lot of them are owned by private equity.
• 28:34
  And they're buying more every single month.
• 28:38
  Let's give a specific example because this is real and recent.
• 28:43
  And I want you to look up every single part of it.
• 28:46
  Anchor Hawking.
• 28:47
  Glass.
• 28:49
  Charleroy, Pennsylvania in Washington County.
• 28:52
  That plant had been running in that town for 132 years.
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  Multiple generations of the same families worked there.
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  Learned the trade from their fathers.
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  Passed it to their kids.
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  Around 300 people had employed jobs there.
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  Decent wages for the area, too.
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  Plenty of benefits.
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  An employee union.
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  Stability in a town that does not have a lot of stability.
• 29:16
  In February of 2024, Center Lane Partners, a private equity firm, acquired that business.
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  By the end of 2024, the Charleroy plant was closing.
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  300 jobs.
• 29:29
  The firm that bought it was not in the business of making glass.
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  They looked at the assets and the property and the inventory and came to the conclusion that it was worth more shut down and moved than running.
• 29:42
  The Pennsylvania Attorney General filed an antitrust complaint that October to stop it.
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  And a federal judge ruled the closure could proceed.
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  The people in Charleroy did not get to vote in any of that.
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  The workers had no seat at the table.
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  They didn't ask the community.
• 30:02
  132 years ended because a hedge fund in another state decided that was the best use of the asset.
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  It's happening now all across the country with data centers.
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  And if that feels like something new, like some modern private equity invention, it is not.
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  It happened on that same river.
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  And it's worth knowing how because it explains why nobody wanted a seat at that table in the first place.
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  Homestead, Pennsylvania.
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  20-some miles up the...
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  I'm going to mispronounce this, but...
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  Monangahela from Charleroy.
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  July of 1892.
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  Carnegie Steel.
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  The most productive steelworks in the country.
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  And the men in it belonged to the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steelworkers.
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  Which was then the strongest union in America.
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  Andrew Carnegie wanted the union out.
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  He also wanted to be in Scotland while it happened.
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  So he left it to his chairman, Henry Clay Frick.
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  And Frick did it thoroughly.
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  He built a fence around the plant three miles long with barbed wire on top.
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  And holes cut in it at rifle height.
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  The men called it Fort Frick.
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  He locked them out.
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  Cut the wage.
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  And hired 300 Pinkerton agents.
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  On July 6th, he floated those Pinkertons up the river on barges in the dark.
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  Armed.
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  To take the plant.
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  The town was waiting.
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  What happened next was not a labor dispute.
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  It was a gunfight on a riverbank that went most of the day and left men dead on both sides.
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  The Pinkertons surrendered.
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  And the workers won.
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  They won for six days.
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  Then the governor sent 8,000 state militia.
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  And that was the end of it.
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  The plant reopened without the union.
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  And union steel in that valley did not come back for 40 years.
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  Now hold these two things next to each other.
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  Homestead in 1892.
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  And Charleroi in 2024.
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  Same river.
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  Same question.
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  Who decides what happens to the place where 300 people work?
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  And do the 300 people get a say in it?
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  In 1892, the answer arrived on a barge with rifles.
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  In 2024, it arrived as a filing.
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  Nobody had to fire a shot in Charleroi.
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  Because nobody there had any mechanism to say no.
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  That is the whole difference.
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  It's not the kind of progress it sounds like.
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  Democratic socialism says no.
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  It says when you own a plant in our town and employ our people, the workers and the community get a voice in what happens to it.
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  Now, not necessarily a veto.
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  A voice.
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  A union contract with real teeth.
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  A mechanism where the people who eat the consequences have input into the decision.
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  It says the water system cannot be a cash extraction machine.
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  For a hedge fund.
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  For a hedge fund.
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  It says a hospital cannot be a thing you buy, squeeze for five years and flip.
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  It says the power grid.
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  It says the power grid is a utility that has to work, not a stock to trade.
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  And it says a working person who works 40 hours a week should be able to live.
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  The warehouse worker we started with at $2,610 a month.
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  Not survive.
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  Live.
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  Make rent.
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  Have food.
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  A vehicle that gets them to and from their job.
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  Take a kid to the doctor without it being a financial event.
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  That is what the argument is actually about.
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  Now, the honest part, and I'm going to be straight with you rather than sell you something.
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  It costs money.
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  Somebody has to pay for it.
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  I'm not going to pretend public systems are free or that they don't require taxes because they do.
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  That is real.
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  And anybody who tells you different is selling you something.
• 34:13
  And government does run things badly sometimes.
• 34:18
  I have sat at the DMV like everyone else.
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  Public programs have waste in them.
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  They have people being paid to move paper instead of solving the problem.
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  I understand exactly why that makes you nervous because it makes me nervous too.
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  And I'm not going to insult you by pretending that the concern is irrational.
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  It is not.
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  But here's my actual answer to it.
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  The comparison being offered to you is the worst of government against a gleaming vision of private business that exists in theory.
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  In practice, private systems have enormous waste too.
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  They also have people moving paper instead of solving problems.
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  The difference is you do not see it.
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  Because it's buried in premiums and executive compensation and marketing budgets, it comes out before the bill ever reaches you.
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  But that is still your money.
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  The question is not whether or not there will be waste.
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  There will be.
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  The question is whether the waste is serving you or extracting from you.
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  So let me put real numbers on it.
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  An ambulance ride in this country.
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  Ten minutes.
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  Local transport.
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  That runs you roughly $1,000 out of pocket.
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  $1,000 for ten minutes in a vehicle with lights on the roof.
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  Air transport.
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  A medical emergency needing a helicopter.
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  The government accountability office looked at this.
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  You are talking tens of thousands of dollars and a large share of those flights are out of network, which means your insurance covers part.
• 35:58
  And you get billed for the rest.
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  People have gotten bills over $20,000 for a helicopter ride when they were unconscious and did not choose it.
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  In Norway, that ride does not generate a bill.
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  Neither does the ambulance.
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  They pay for it in taxes.
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  And yes, their taxes are higher.
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  I'm not going to pretend that they're not.
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  But nobody in Norway gets a $20,000 bill for a helicopter because that is not how they decided to build it.
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  And they decided it democratically.
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  Here is the big number.
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  The United States spends $14,781 per person per year on healthcare.
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  That is everything.
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  Your share.
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  Your employer's share.
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  The government's share.
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  Every year, whether you go to a doctor or not.
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  Denmark spends $7,071 per person.
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  That is roughly half.
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  Not somewhat less.
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  Half.
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  And the Danes work fewer hours, take more vacation, live longer, and have lower infant mortality.
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  Half the money, better outcomes.
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  That is not an opinion.
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  That is spending data from countries doing it right now.
• 37:23
  So the question is this.
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  Do you want the water system owned by a fund looking to maximize extraction over five years before selling it to another hedge fund?
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  Or owned by a fund looking to maximize the money?
• 37:40
  That is the actual vote.
• 37:41
  I want to say one more thing and I'll get out of your way.
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  Some profit is fine.
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  Investment requires return.
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  Building something requires a reason to build it.
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  I am not confused about that.
• 37:54
  And I'm not arguing against business existing.
• 37:59
  What I am arguing, again, is that what happens when profit becomes the only thing we care about.
• 38:08
  When a pension gets looted by a fund manager two states away who has never met a single worker and has no reason to care whether they can put food on the table at 70 years old.
• 38:20
  When a utility is run to pull value out now instead of maintaining the lines for the next 50 years.
• 38:29
  When a hospital gets treated like a playing card or a trading card.
• 38:35
  That's not really capitalism anymore.
• 38:38
  That is extraction.
• 38:39
  And you can tell the difference because extraction never builds anything.
• 38:45
  We have done it the other way before.
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  In living memory.
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  In this country.
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  The New Deal.
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  Rural electrification.
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  The 40 hour work week.
• 38:55
  The VA.
• 38:56
  Medicare.
• 38:57
  All of those things exist.
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  They are imperfect.
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  But they work.
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  And they work because they were built on one idea.
• 39:06
  Some things are too important to leave it to a profit motive.
• 39:11
  So we own them together.
• 39:13
  And we decide together.
• 39:15
  Now back to our person.
• 39:17
  The warehouse associate in Illinois.
• 39:19
  40 hours.
• 39:20
  $2,610 a month.
• 39:23
  Right now between premiums.
• 39:25
  Co-pays.
• 39:26
  Deductibles.
• 39:27
  Co-insurance.
• 39:27
  That household is losing several hundred dollars a month to health coverage.
• 39:32
  Before anyone actually gets sick.
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  Under a system built the way Denmark or Norway built theirs.
• 39:39
  Most of that becomes tax.
• 39:41
  At roughly half the total per person cost.
• 39:44
  What is left over is not a rounding error to somebody at that income.
• 39:48
  It's the dentist.
• 39:50
  It's a car that starts.
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  It's winter boots that are not held together with duct tape.
• 39:55
  Will it take more taxes?
• 39:57
  Yes.
• 39:57
  The question is whether you would rather pay through taxes.
• 40:01
  Into a system designed to serve you.
• 40:04
  Or through premiums and deductibles.
• 40:07
  And surprise bills from out of network anesthesiologists.
• 40:11
  Into a system designed to extract money from you.
• 40:15
  You're already paying for it.
• 40:18
  That's the part that gets left out.
• 40:20
  You are already paying.
• 40:22
  And paying more.
• 40:24
  For less.
• 40:25
  You're going to keep hearing this word.
• 40:27
  This phrase.
• 40:29
  Democratic socialism.
• 40:30
  And it's going to get thrown at you on television.
• 40:32
  And in arguments.
• 40:33
  And by people running for office.
• 40:36
  But now you know what it actually means.
• 40:38
  You know how it differs from communism.
• 40:41
  And that the difference is elections.
• 40:44
  You know why Venezuela is not the comparison.
• 40:48
  And why Denmark is.
• 40:50
  And you know you already use several pieces of it every week.
• 40:55
  So when somebody uses the word at you.
• 40:57
  You can tell whether they know what they're talking about.
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  If they tell you it means the government seizes your house.
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  They're either lying to you.
• 41:06
  Or they read it somewhere and never checked.
• 41:09
  If they tell you it means that nobody works.
• 41:12
  They do not know what a union is.
• 41:15
  Or what the labor movement actually won.
• 41:18
  If they bring up Venezuela.
• 41:20
  And never once mention Denmark.
• 41:23
  They're cherry picking their examples.
• 41:26
  That is what I wanted to hand you.
• 41:28
  Not a conclusion.
• 41:29
  Just the actual definition of democratic socialism.
• 41:33
  And the receipts.
• 41:34
  So that next time it comes up.
• 41:36
  You are arguing about the real thing.
• 41:39
  Instead of a caricature you were sold.
• 41:42
  You can disagree with all of it.
• 41:44
  Plenty of people do.
• 41:45
  And some of them are rather good at arguing it.
• 41:48
  But now.
• 41:50
  You can disagree with what it is.
• 41:52
  Not something that it's not.
• 41:55
  That is worth something.
• 41:57
  Thank you.
• 41:57
  Thank you.
• 42:27
  Thank you.