Welcome And The New Pitch

SPEAKER_01 0:07

Hi everyone, I'm Adam Brows. I'm Scott Moppen. And this is Solutions from a Multiverse, where we bring you a new unheard-of solution to the world's problems every episode.

SPEAKER_02 0:17

That's right, and we got a brand new one for you this week. Adam, what do you got? What's our solution today?

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Today we're going to I'm going to propose something that people who support socialism or the left wing, essentially, need to stop saying. Well, they can say socialism, but they need to say another word along with it all the time.

SPEAKER_02 0:43

Socialism rules. Is that what you're saying they need to say?

SPEAKER_01 0:48

Socialism, dang it. Uh no, they need to say market socialism. Okay. Because I think Yeah, we're going to talk about what that means. But that's that's that's really what all these democratic socialists socialists are actually advocating for.

SPEAKER_02 1:04

Yeah, because that's what I thought you were going to say. I thought you were going to say democratic socialism. That's the term I've done.

SPEAKER_01 1:09

That's the problem is they

Why The Word Choice Matters

SPEAKER_01 1:10

say that, and people still get they're just they're just basically handing over their loss. They're weakening their position enormously. Their opponents can instantly tackle them and win because they're just saying, here's my throat, slit it. Like they're just a branding issue. Yeah, it's a big problem.

SPEAKER_02 1:30

It's a softball.

SPEAKER_01 1:31

Okay. But if they say market socialism, it's gonna it's gonna scramble everybody's brains, and you you get to still you get to still win and be a socialist at the same time. I like that. I like that. So how do you think about the I'm a little bit of a market socialist? I'm a market socialist, which is really just to say socialist. So what I'm gonna argue here is that when you say you're a socialist, what you actually mean, what modern socialism is, is market socialism. And so to say market socialism is actually just a better way to say the word socialism in contemporary times, because that's what modern socialism is. Let's and then we can get it.

SPEAKER_02 2:09

Wait, now this seems like the opposite tactic that I normally hear, which is that people go, no, no, no, it's democratic socialism, it's not socialism. They're trying to space away from big S socialism.

SPEAKER_01 2:20

Yeah, they're trying to get away from authoritarian socialism. But the problem is, is kind of any kind of socialism is gonna be somewhat authoritarian, right? The government's gonna tax you and make industrial policies and you know, regulate industries. You know, there's there it's some, you know, there is always gonna be some kind of protection. Now you could say, well, it's gonna be you support only like worker co-ops and stuff, and and that's not authoritarian. So you could be arguing something like that. But the reality is if someone says I'm a socialist or they say I'm a democratic socialist, the democratic thing doesn't soften at all what their critics then come at them with. I would agree, which is like, yeah, you know, you're against the free market, right? That's the criticism. You're anti-free market. But if you know about socialism, if you actually are like up to date about socialism, which I am, I'm like an educated modern professor, read socialist, know what socialism is. You actually know that modern socialism has left completely in the rearview mirror for 40 years centrally planned economics. That's gone. That's been disproven. That's been proven that it does not work and that you cannot do it.

SPEAKER_02 3:33

Wait, slow it down for people who aren't economics.

SPEAKER_01 3:36

So people say, oh, you're socialists, you must want to centrally plan the economy. Like the government decides, you know, everything that gets produced and decides what's done and who does what and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No, modern socialists do not believe that. And I will say that there might be weird, some weirdos who are like full-blown, like they're in a bunker communists, and they think, oh, they for they don't realize that the last that this that the Cold War happened and that the Russia collapsed, the Soviet Union collapsed because it was a centrally planned economy, and that that didn't work. There are those people, but there are lots of people who believe all kinds of weird things. Major, everyday modern socialists do not believe in central planning. They do they believe in the free market. Socialists will make even more free markets than capitalists. That's the idea. That's that's what I'd propose.

SPEAKER_02 4:29

Oh. All right. So then that's where the market in market socialism comes from.

SPEAKER_01 4:35

Because if you're saying market social, yeah, go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 4:37

Well, you're not worried that going, but really what this means is actual socialism. Like to pull that like mask off of it and say, we're actually, does that make it a less marketable thing because people are scared of the word socialism, and that's why we're trying to put words in front of it anyway?

SPEAKER_01 4:55

Well, I think people are getting less scared of the word. I mean, we just we see these massive wins happening all over the country right now for democratic socialists. But I think they're just shooting themselves in the foot. They can call themselves democratic socialists, but I think it would be smarter to call themselves market socialists. And they could even say democratic market socialists or whatever. They could say whatever they want, but add the market in there is, you know.

SPEAKER_02 5:17

Well, especially in such a two-party system where if you say the word democrat and put even if you go democratic socialists, you're not winning over Republican votes, probably. You don't necessarily have that problem when you go market socialist, like we'll separate from the the the two-party deal. Why can I not think of the words partisan from the partisan system? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:39

I didn't realize that, yeah, because there's like a big D Democrat, but really they mean like low D Democratic socialists.

SPEAKER_02 5:45

There are my there's probably a whole group of people who have been conditioned to hate the word democratic anything. And so putting democratic in front of socialism, their life isn't hell. Then I double hate it. What are you talking about? Like that doesn't make me want to listen to your ideas.

SPEAKER_01 6:00

And also people don't really care. I think people aren't super like if you say it's a free market, but it's put in place by a dictator, right? So you can have authoritarian free market capitalism. That's like Pinochet in Chile was a dictator and he brought Milton Friedman down to Chile to build Chile's economy as a free

Modern Socialists Reject Central Planning

SPEAKER_01 6:20

market run by a dictator, or Singapore. Singapore is a free market run by dictate, like a dictatorial government, an autocratic government. And you know, if you ask Republicans, do you hate Chile? You know, Pinochet's Chile, they're probably like, no, it's free markets. They got Milton Friedman down there. And, you know, do you hate so they don't actually care about authoritarianism. So saying democratic socialism doesn't even they don't care. So like just to your point, like adding democratic before socialist doesn't really lessen the hatred from like the right wing or from like people who are independents or more free market focused people.

SPEAKER_02 6:54

It doesn't seem to accomplish what the people who stress democratic socialism. What they're trying to accomplish with that.

SPEAKER_01 7:00

Yeah. So but if you say market socialist, I think it does. My experience is that it does. So I used to be I used to call myself a libertarian socialist. And people were like, that's stupid. And I was like, okay, okay, granted, granted, stupid.

SPEAKER_02 7:16

Why were they why were they saying that was stupid?

SPEAKER_01 7:17

Well, we were because it's a contradiction in terms, technically speaking, right? Like a libertarian is the opposite of a socialist. So say you're a libertarian socialist is sort of stupid, which is fine. I'm okay with that criticism. So I'm trying to go back to the drawing board, and I think, and I've tried market socialists, and that seems to work. Because what it does is it makes people go like, oh, cool, socialists. So you want like, you know, healthcare and you know, sense common sense regulation and taxation to make society more equitable. But market, okay, you want like markets to be like unfettered and working to like provide prices and to let people do, you know, business and trade and have you know jobs and the market.

SPEAKER_02 8:00

The big boogeyman is the government's gonna come in, take your money and then redistribute it to other people. And get rid of the free market. You know, not to the free market. Lead with here's the market that that people trust right now. I think probably I don't know if it's earned or not, but they trust the stock market or the free market more than the elected officials in the government. They're like, this is less uh corruptible, less mess-upable by outside forces, you know, shaping it in the ways that are not true. And so I think there's that's probably a good uh that's a good branding move to put onto socialism. And it yeah, and it cuts out that initial objection, I think.

SPEAKER_01 8:39

Yeah. I think that's the goal is to get it. So people basically, when they hear socialism, they think centrally planned economy, first of all, which is like I said, 50 years old. Nobody thinks that, except for like weirdos who are just stupid, who are like weirdo communist weirdos. They think oh, we should have essentially planned economy. No modern educated socialist thinks that. And the ones who do are just marginalizing themselves. I don't know why they marginalize themselves so enormously. Essentially planned economies don't really work. Uh they're they don't work. Uh prices are just pretty amazing. Like prices are amazing. Markets are really interesting that they create these things called prices and it's really awesome and you should use them. And socialist societies can use them. The other problem people have is they like the free market, and socialism is set up as the opposite of the free market. And if if socialists continue to preserve that dichotomy, that kind of contrariness, they're just handing over. First of all, it's false. Socialist societies are free markets and they have free markets inside of them.

SPEAKER_02 9:42

How can those coexist? Because I was just wondering, I'm like, would you have billionaires and you know, zillionaires? Like, how would that exist in a socialist system without it evening out somehow?

SPEAKER_01 9:52

Or so I would say billionaires come from the lack of free markets. This is pretty well documented. You know, most billionaires get their money from inheritance. That's not a free market. That's not a market process. That's just like feudalism. You know, that's just like titles being handed down by blood. That's not a market. A market is trade and inventing and producing, you know.

SPEAKER_02 10:13

Aaron Powell, because I keep seeing like I see things where it's like Bill Gates went from you know twelve billion dollars to five hundred billion dollars. You know, Elon Musk went from twenty billion dollars to one trillion dollars over the past, you know, X years.

SPEAKER_01 10:25

But I think that's large, yeah, those are all because of market capture through regulation. I mean, I uh so bar bill billionaires can only exist through shutting down the free market, really. So if you have a free market, there's competition, and competition just destroys the billionaires. And if you have a free market, things like inheritances. So for example, Adam Smith said to have a free market, we should eliminate inheritances. We should have inheritances all be taxed and then redistributed. Because that would actually make a free market. Like a market where in the market, money and wealth is only gained through producing things, selling things, you know, trade, not through, oh, my daddy just died and I just get money. That's not a free that's not a market transaction. That's just this like weird accumulation of wealth. That's that's not a free market.

SPEAKER_02 11:21

So I would say should we then support like billionaires would be unlikely.

SPEAKER_01 11:25

There may be a few if someone like really does an amazing thing. Like, like I don't know, maybe Jerry Seinfeld, he's a billionaire. He might still be a billionaire because he just made a sitcom that was really great and people love it, and they keep licensing it over and over and over and over again.

SPEAKER_02 11:39

Like a piece of pop culture or some sort of like he did such an amazing thing.

SPEAKER_01 11:44

But almost everything else, billionaires come from financial engineering, which is like illegal, but they do it anyways. It's just like fraud. Uh, that comes from inheritance mostly. It comes from government contracts, which is socialism. I mean, right? That's that's essentially planned economics. It's not free markets. Like Tesla is a hundred percent. Like they made all their money from having electric car subsidy and from grants from the federal government. SpaceX is all federal government contract, almost all federal government contracts. It's all government contracts. So Tesla, I mean he and I haven't even gotten ride on a spaceship yet.

SPEAKER_02 12:18

I'm paying for these SpaceX launches.

SPEAKER_01 12:20

You haven't waited in line and gotten on the spaceship. Is there a place to get it?

SPEAKER_02 12:23

Like they should let at least one person, like one rando, ride on each one of these just as a show of goodwill.

SPEAKER_01 12:30

So I mean, I don't want to jump all the way to billionaires either. Like that's a bit of an extreme thing. I think most people aren't really worried about billionaires. They're worried that they're not gonna be able to have choices, right? They feel like their freedom's gonna be lost, their income's gonna be lost. But if you say it's a market socialism, then you're already leading with how you're gonna continue to abide by further allow people to start businesses,

Why “Democratic” Does Not Help

SPEAKER_01 12:55

to have whatever job they want, to, you know, move wherever they want, like be in a marketplace, you know, enjoy those freedoms. And then on top of that, or underneath it, you're gonna layer uh, you know, a way that people don't end up destitute, which is really the whole point of socialism, is to just make it so people don't end up suffering in the gutter, totally destitute, uh, or even you know, struggle with very little money and crying babies on your shoulders and you can't do your, you know, like socialism will be.

SPEAKER_02 13:25

It feels like the free market, the purpose of it is to make sure that there's no ceiling on there keeping you from growth. But the you're right, the purpose of socialism is to make sure that there's a floor there to make sure that you don't fall through to the to the sub-levels.

SPEAKER_01 13:41

To the sewers below, right. Yeah, and both of them together. If you say you're a market socialist, you can say, yeah, there can be wealthy people. We love wealthy people. Be wealthy. But you got but all your wealth was gained through trade and production in a fair and free market. Not wealthy because you did financial engineering, because you tricked people, because you scammed people, because you grifted people, because you got a monopolistic business practices. You know, all that should clearly that's that's all inhibiting a free market. We should get rid of those and regulate those out of existence and then let people in a meritocratic way soar as high as they want. And but the socialism comes in at the bottom to bring up the bottom, so nobody is living in a destitute or horrible way of life. You know, drug addiction is a disease. People can get medical care for that. Access to housing is not hard. We have 16 million homes in the United States that are empty every night and only 500,000 homeless people. Like there's enough homes for everyone.

SPEAKER_02 14:42

You know, healthcare becomes a thing that we work on as a health insurance, you know, make sure everyone has health insurance.

SPEAKER_01 14:49

Right. Yeah. Like uh, and actually we save money from doing that because healthcare is double the cost here than it is in Canada, and Canada has universal health care. We have, you know, this crappy system that's everyone knows is crappy. I mean, even the wealthy, you know, they look and say, Oh, this is totally awful. You know, it's a shit crap system, you know. So yeah, I think this is a cool way for people to and I mean I say this too because you know they just like did a the con like Democrats in Congress proposed this like resolution against socialism, which is like really weird. What is that?

SPEAKER_02 15:22

That sounds weird, right?

SPEAKER_01 15:23

Yeah, it was a really weird they came out and just were passing a resolution against socialism, and it wasn't even like really even they didn't define socialism. Yeah, so it won 220 to 192. Almost all Republicans, alongside eight Democrats, voted for it, and 192 Democrats voted against it. Okay, so that's good. Like 192 Democrats did vote against it, but eight Democrats voted with it, and it says it condemns socialism in all of its forms, so it didn't even define socialism. It just said we don't like socialism in all of the words.

SPEAKER_02 16:00

You know, which is in whatever we think that it probably means without actually knowing or defining it.

SPEAKER_01 16:06

Yeah. Just like whatever it feels like to you, you know. But but you know, social security is socialism. That does that mean all the Republicans condemn Social Security? Are they gonna they don't like socialism? I mean, it has social right in the name.

SPEAKER_02 16:19

Social security socialism, you know? Firefighters, we we don't like them. Do we like it?

SPEAKER_01 16:24

Oh bad. People might fight about firefighters, but social security is social security. It's socialism, it's what it is, you know. So, you know, so these Republicans, it's kind of a mask-off moment to say they want to get rid of Social Security, they want to get rid of Medicare, you know. These are things that uh 40 million elderly people who are voters rely on every day, and they're just saying, yeah, we deliberately have a resolution to get rid of these things. We just signed it, you know.

SPEAKER_02 16:52

That's wild.

SPEAKER_01 16:52

Isn't that wild? Yeah. But I think it's also where Thasan Piker is getting this kind of, you know, this sort of constantly getting smeared and constantly being brought up across the media ecosystem. And with Mamdani kind of being really great and Al-Sayed just winning his thing. There's a lot of, you know, interest in socialism and this kind of ends Bernie kind of having a moment where people are going back to his policies and interests. And then the the opponents have this, they just have this easy response, which is like, ah, you're against the free market, you know? And and that's just wrong. And the for some reason, the socialists they don't update people's learning. They don't say, well, actually, no socialist for 40 years has believed in central planning. That's silly, or at least 35 years, you know, since the wall came down. Socialists have all moved on from that to say, no, there's no central planning. You should have markets. Markets are great. There's nothing, there's nothing wrong with having markets in a socialist society. Start businesses, hire people, make money, be rich, be ri be really rich, you know. Like, yeah, make a lot of money. Who cares? Try to become a billionaire. I mean, I I I don't think free markets almost ever produce billionaires, but try. Try if you can.

SPEAKER_02 18:05

Encourage your parents to get more money so that you can inherit money because that's inherited.

SPEAKER_01 18:09

See, that's the thing. We need to get rid of these.

SPEAKER_02 18:11

Oh, that's not what you meant try to get it.

SPEAKER_01 18:13

Well, this is the other thing. This is the other thing, is I think a socialist.

SPEAKER_02 18:16

Dad, it's your fault I'm not a billionaire. It's your dad, it's your fault. That actually is true, probably.

SPEAKER_01 18:22

I mean, it is your parents' fault that you're not a billionaire, because most billionaires just are rich.

SPEAKER_02 18:26

Thank you for having this. Now I can send this to them and tell them.

SPEAKER_01 18:29

Right. It's not your fault. Definitely not. It's true. At least if you look at the data. But my my point is uh what people don't and the socialists could go stronger than that. They could go the these mar they could say, look,

Billionaires, Inheritance, And Market Capture

SPEAKER_01 18:40

a socialist free market is more free than a capitalist free market if you call a capitalist free market what we have today in America. Because if you look at the actual economics of free markets, Adam Smith, Ricardo, say, anybody, all these anybody who's a free market economist, not Milton Friedman, because he's an idiot, but if you look at the actual classical free market economists, they treat things like monopolies as a damage to a free market, as preventing the freedom of a market because the monopolist shuts down all competition in that arena. And that's the end of the free market in that department, right? Inheritance, like I said, Adam Smith, inheritance is not a free market. If you have huge inheritances just going down into, you know, down and down and down the ages, that's just feudalism. That's just like a title of nobility being, you know, handed down through the blood of your family, you know. That's not a free market. Likewise, any kind of coercive business practices, like where somebody goes on Amazon, they start selling a lot of mops or brooms or something, and then Amazon copies their exact product, makes it in China for cheap, and then sells the Amazon Basics version, and then shunts all their customers over to the Amazon Basics product when someone searches broom or whatever. That is not a free market. And and and those kinds of things are exactly what a socialist who is managing a free market would make illegal in order to make the market more free than what you could call a capitalist, what we have now, a capitalist market. So I actually think that a socialist market would be more free.

SPEAKER_02 20:21

Is that like regulation? Would that be different than regulation on regulate markets or to make sure it doesn't get out of hand in some crazy like because that's what I would worry too is if you just let it completely free markets go, then you're gonna get the big rich people buying out the competition or whatever that we've seen some places, but not without someone being able to say, no, you can't reach that sort of giant big fish level where you eat every other fish. We need to have a in an ecosystem where there are all sizes of everything here.

SPEAKER_01 20:52

Yeah, I mean it's just in a free market, would you call it a free if there was 12 companies that were making or let's say there was 25 companies that were making newspapers, would it be a freer market or a less free market if they all combined into four companies? Yeah, less free market. It's clearly a less free market, right? So if a so if so if somebody, if a market socialist says, you know what, I run the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, we can approve or disapprove mergers of large large American companies. We're just gonna disapprove all these mergers, and you guys just have to stay 25 companies. That's what a socialist would do. That's what Lena Kahn, who now is the chair of the New York City Economic Development Corporation as of January 2026. She was Biden's FTC Federal Trade Commission chair. She's definitely like a social, like a market socialist, like I'm describing. And she was shutting down all these mergers and acquisitions and preventing these things from happening. Great. She was supporting a free market. And that's exactly what I think socialists, market socialists, especially if they really realize. This reality that modern socialists embrace free markets and run and govern free markets very well, better than the capitalists, then we can actually have lots of free market activity. You got startups and you know whatever you want.

SPEAKER_02 22:15

Do they do you think this is a system that's sort of going on in some of the the Scandinavian or European countries that have adopted more socialist practices? Is this working out for them? Are you seeing like you know prototypes of what you're imagining?

SPEAKER_01 22:30

Sort of, but I would be really critical of the Nordic socialists. So there's I think there's two major camps. There's Sweden and Norway. They're very different. They both are doing a form of Sortan naming socialism, but the sweet they have that what in common they have is they have social safety nets, really strong social safety nets. They have virtually no poverty, they have virtually no crime. They're paradises to live in. You know, there's no way to fall through the cracks. You can oh, you know, if you get sick or you whatever, any problem you have, you can get aid and help until you just are comfortable, you know. But they're also incredibly wealthy countries with huge entrepreneurship and economic growth, and you know, they're very successful economies.

SPEAKER_02 23:12

I was gonna say, you know what they say about living in Scandinavia? It's very affiordable. How about I cram that into your into your quad lobby?

SPEAKER_01 23:24

We have an infjorability crisis. But yeah, but my criticism of them would be they are not market socialists. The Norwegians, I think the Norwegians are more market socialists than Scandinavians, but what are then Swedish? Because the Swedish are like what are called what I would call labor socialists. So that basically means the labor unions have like they put together their own furniture, they do their own put all their furniture together at home.

SPEAKER_02 23:52

That's where that ethos comes from. They're like, we're labor socialists, you you build your own bag. You you put the furniture together. You want to show you. We'll build like the little metal tools.

SPEAKER_01 24:01

It's not a little bit. And so all the regulations basically try to benefit labor, which is not terrible, but it doesn't really it's not free market, you know, because labor can really add a lot of frictions to starting new businesses and like doing trade and doing new things. Norway is more, they also have very strong labor unions, but they're more of a market socialism in the sense that they have like more market-driven ways that they try to achieve social outcomes. Like they have like a scan, like a sovereign wealth fund that basically runs like a hedge fund, like a free market hedge fund, but it's all public money, and they make like trillions of dollars from that sovereign wealth fund. And they put all their oil, they nationalize their oil. Okay. But they started a for-profit oil business to extract the oil. So it's sort of a market. You see how that's like a market socialism? Like they didn't make a they didn't make a government arm that extracts the oil. That's like what Venezuela did in his crap because the government isn't very good at like doing something like extracting oil. Instead, they made the people own the oil and then they pay a for-profit corporation to extract the oil. And then sort of the client is the people of Norway. Yes, yes. And then the profits go into the sovereign wealth fund that then gets invested around the world and in Norway and grows because it just grows with its investments because it's a good investment. And then the the payment, what the sovereign wealth fund earns pays for social welfare. So it lowers everyone's taxes. So they're very market. Norwegians are like very market form socialism, but it's really hard to start a business there. It's really hard to like just freely, you know, change jobs. There's a lot of union like frictions that slow everything down, and you can't really like find it.

SPEAKER_02 26:06

It's the labor socialism you're talking about there.

SPEAKER_01 26:08

And they still have that a little bit. So what I think we should explore in America is building a real market socialism where labor unions, I mean, I love labor unions, but if I were going to try to make people's lives better and I had all the levers I could pull, I would pull labor union stuff probably later or never or last or something. Because labor unions really slow down the ability for people to like start and do and make and change and up, you know, upgrade and downgrade. And, you know, you want to keep things flexible and so I'd rather have people just have universal programs. You know, you lose your job because something downsizes and they need to change and you're fired. Well, it doesn't matter because we have really generous unemployment benefits, we have cash welfare, we have universal health care, we have housing support. Like, you see what I mean? You don't need a union if you have no negative effect that being, you know, losing your job.

SPEAKER_02 27:00

Right. The protections that your labor union are fighting for and working for are often in line with the protections, the universal protections that like a market

Making Markets Freer With Antitrust

SPEAKER_02 27:10

socialist would want for everybody. And so it kind of cancels it out. And it's like we don't need the double, you know, if we've got it setting up, there's no need for that push anymore. And we can you you're also more free to change jobs or move around because that floor is there, that you know, you've got the ability to take more chances and maybe not feel lost in the world.

SPEAKER_01 27:30

And start businesses. Like I had a guest uh that stayed in my my house for a little bit, that they were like from Sweden and they were like, Oh, we're so impressed with how you all start businesses in America and like how you're all so entrepreneurial. And I was like, Yeah, like how why don't like what if you started a business in like Gotting, Gottingham, Nor, you know, Sweden? And they're like, oh no, that would be impossible. That would be impossible. These were like smart people, like professionals, and they were like, it would be impossible to start a business in Sweden. I was like, Whoa, isn't Skype from Sweden? Like, I guess some people still start businesses in Scandinavian countries, but it is very hard just in terms of doing it and all the permits and the processes and the blah, blah, blah. That's horrible. If you want to be a market socialist, you should get rid of all that. You should make it easy to people to start businesses, get out there and try things, you know. And then if they fail, then they fail. It's a free market, you know. Don't prop people up. Don't, you know, just let businesses take place like a free market, but provide a socialist support for the people who are safety net. So people are comfortable and safe and living in dignity. And by the way, there's no poverty, there's no crime, there's no, which are horrible for everyone else, right? To have to endure the crime and the the dangers of poverty that maybe our family members or neighbors or communities or people suffer from. So I I think, yeah, there's this opportunity to carve out this new form of socialism. I don't want America to become a Nordic socialist country. Barf. Barf. I want to start new businesses, I want to build new stuff, I want to invent stuff and in two weeks, two weeks get a business and LLC and start and start shipping it around the country. Like you can't do that in Sweden and Norway, but you could do it in a market socialist country, which they do kind of exist. Holland and Ireland are the two closest things. Canada also is sort of a market socialist country, but I still think it could be way better. There could be much freer market and much better, more uh efficient socialist policies.

SPEAKER_02 29:34

Holland and Ireland seem like smaller, smaller versions, but if it's being pulled off there with success, then you can take and expand and like be like, yeah, let's implement those things. Let me ask you about the branding about the name, because I'm having a thought. Because what we had National Socialism, and that got shortened to Nazis. Now market socialism, we don't want it to get shortened to mozzis.

SPEAKER_01 29:59

Why not hilarious mozzies? I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_02 30:02

I was going to say you could go a different direction. You go Mar Socialism, you go Marceau. You call people Marsos to try and get ahead of people calling you mozzies.

SPEAKER_01 30:12

Or we could we do ket ketzism? No, ketzos. Why quetzos? Ketzos, Market. Oh, ketzos. Market socialism.

SPEAKER_02 30:23

That sounds like that sounds like we're uh advocating for ketamine for ketos. Ketchup like a bunch of ketzos. Or ketchup socialism. That now that I could get behind. Hot dogs, ketchup. French fries, ketchup. Do you know about sewer socialism? Why first of all, how dare you that you think that you look at me and you go, this is a guy who knows about sewer socialism. How dare you? But no, I have not heard of that before. Why don't you tell me what it is?

SPEAKER_01 30:48

Sewer socialism was from the 60s, 70s. Sometime in the in American recent history, there were all these mayors in the Midwest that were all socialists, and they were like, I'm a socialist. But then what they did is they just went in and made their cities awesome. They would, and this is what Mamdani is a so he he's called a sewer socialist because he is, he is a sewer socialist. And what that means is that he doesn't do he just like fills potholes and like makes the city really great. That's called a that's what it that's a sewer socialist. It's like a socialist who doesn't try to create like big programs, doesn't try to like, you know, doesn't really fight with the wealthy, really, just kind of like makes the city way better for people to live in. That's like a sewer socialist. And that's an interesting brand of socialism. That's good.

SPEAKER_02 31:34

It doesn't give off the uh the uh pleasing image in my mind when I think of a sewer. I want the whole world to be like this sewer. I want to spread the sewer vibes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:47

I think it was meant to sort of make them sound bad. Like I think the right wing, you know, the right wing is always trying to take digs at socialists. But in a way, I think it kind of is endearing, and so it sort of became a positive, like, oh, as a sewer socialist. Like basically it means they're harmless.

SPEAKER_02 32:02

You're just focused on, you know, fixing potholes and making the sewers better and so people don't have clogged up toilets.

SPEAKER_01 32:08

You're like, yes. I think also the reason that they're considered sort of harmless is they explicit sewer socialists explicitly are not, you know, they're not really trying to like go, you know, confiscatorily take money from the wealthy or stop the wealthy from being so wealthy. They're just taking what levers they have and just like fixing things so that the city is just like nicer to live in and better for people. And people love them. They win elections. The sewer socialists were very successful politically because people are like, oh my God, the city runs so well.

SPEAKER_02 32:41

And it sounds like the exact uh job description of a public servant, what they're supposed to be doing with their elected position. So yeah, I would hope so.

SPEAKER_01 32:51

But you might think that an elected official, you know, might you might be an idealist and or and you say, you know, an elected official should actually bring about justice. And maybe there needs to be greater economic justice. But sewer socialists don't really they care about justice, but they're they're fixing the justice by kind of bringing up the bottom instead of trying to like do something to the top or limit, you know, the wealth of the of the wealthy or whatever. So yeah, so Mamdani is a sewer socialist, except for maybe his pea- de tear tax, which is a his only thing really that that that's all right.

SPEAKER_02 33:20

You're gonna make me ask again. What's a p de tear tax?

SPEAKER_01 33:23

P de tear. P-Tare tax. It's a type of property tax. It's technically annual property surcharge on high-value secondary homes that are not used as a primary residence. So, like imagine I'm like wealthy and I own a five million dollar condo in Manhattan, but I live in San Francisco more than six months of the year. I'm in San Francisco, I'm not in New York. Then I would have to pay the Pieditaire surcharge tax on my property.

SPEAKER_02 33:51

You can tell I haven't run into it with my several properties spaced out around the country.

SPEAKER_01 33:56

Yeah, you you've dodged it.

SPEAKER_02 33:58

I've done somehow I've missed this uh term.

SPEAKER_01 34:01

Yeah. So they're so anyways, that's one where he's like taxing the rich. I mean, he's just taxing the rich. And he got the state to adopt it. So it wasn't just him. It was he got, you know, Hokel, the mayor, the governor of New York, and you know, they passed this law that said, Yeah, we're gonna do this Pietetier tax. And I think also what it is is it's trying to claw back tax revenue from people who left the state to be like snowbirds in Florida, and they stay six months and one day in Florida, and then they come back to New York, and then they claim that they're that they don't have to, you know, they claim no income tax in New York State.

unknown 34:34

Right.

SPEAKER_01 34:34

And then they pay only Florida doesn't have an income tax.

SPEAKER_02 34:37

So then they do what they can to contribute the least and take the most from the Right.

SPEAKER_01 34:43

And this is why the state was like, okay, we'll do this, because these people are really using our services five months and 29 days out of the year, but they're claiming that

Sweden Vs Norway On Socialism

SPEAKER_01 34:55

they live in Florida and then they're not paying income tax in New York. We're gonna hit them with a pied de terre tax. So I think the state was willing to kind of play ball. So it wasn't just totally like Zoran, like tax the rich. It was like the state trying to like claw back some of these taxes that they kind of feel entitled to because they're like still providing all these services. So that was that's the only thing where he kind of departed from being like a sewer socialist. But I think the market socialist isn't is a new, I mean, this podcast is all about new ideas, new solutions. This is a new solution for socialists to say, hey, you know what I am? I'm not a Nordic socialist to hell with that. I don't want to live in a Nordic socialist country where I have to like ask permission to take a shit. You know, I don't want to, I don't want to do that. I want to fill out 40 forms to like start a lemonade stand on my front porch. Like I just want to be a in a free market. I want to be able to make an invention or make a product and then just hang out my shingle and blamo. I'm I'm a businessman. You know, it should be default, you know, just work. Anyways, that's I feel like that I'm an American by government.

SPEAKER_02 35:57

I don't want to be hindered by government in any way. Right.

SPEAKER_01 36:00

Right. I don't want to be hindered, I want to be helped to do things on my own and be free to do those things. Well, that is not against socialism. And the socialists who don't come out and say that are hurting their position, because that's a what I'm describing as a very popular position, especially in America. And it's also just like, why shoot yourself in the foot? Just say the truth, which is that socialism, since the wall came down, and you know, and we proved that central planning failed and did not work and does not work, socialists abandoned central planning. It's not that socialism failed, it's that socialists abandoned central planning and focused on the other parts of socialism. Welfare, democracy at work, like co-ops. Those are the two main ones.

SPEAKER_02 36:49

But I would say co-op is benefit the civilians. Yeah, benefit the people who live in it.

SPEAKER_01 36:53

Yeah. Right. More and more interesting ways to do welfare, more and more interesting ways to just improve social life, you know, improve life for everybody. Environmentalism, socialists focus a lot on environmentalism, but they don't focus on central planning. They say central planning is stupid and doesn't work. Let's use markets to do it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 37:12

Regulated, good, incentivize behavior by following the normal trends that, you know, like have been working for thousands of years. Like let's use these levers.

SPEAKER_01 37:23

When people say things like markets are natural, and you know, they're right. The socialists should not fight with them on those points. Markets are natural. Human beings have stuff, and then they see other people and then they say, Oh, well, let's trade our stuff. Like that's fine. That's not against socialism. Socialism is all about that. Socialism just stops, first of all, it stops like criminals coming and taking your stuff. Socialists are getting stop that. And it's a monopolation of force, you know, the government might come and tax your stuff, but they're not, but the criminals aren't gonna come and steal it from you, right? Threaten you. And then it's going to make it so that as a system, people aren't destroyed you know, harmed and left out in the cold when there's enough to go around for everyone. Right. So it sets a kind of baseline for people to be safe and comfortable. And and that helps everybody. Like, did you read about the woman who just was killed in Times Square? No. Who was the head of she was Bank of America, she was like one of the top VPs at Bank of America. Oh, I did see about this. Yeah, yeah. And she was just stabbed on her first day back from maternity leave. She was just stabbed on Times Square. Rich people are harmed by allowing poverty to continue to exist in our society. This is a market socialist perspective. A market socialist says you absolutely can become wealthy. That's great. Go start successful businesses, go make Seinfeld, go make a TV show. Everyone wants to constantly watch and license so that you make billions of dollars. That's great. That's fine. But don't but you're not going to become destitute. You're not going to become destitute. And that's because the wealthy are harmed by having poverty in their own society. Their children get killed by drunk drivers. Their friends and family get addicted to opioids. You know, like the things happen that are bad that could be eliminated, that then would help everyone.

SPEAKER_02 39:25

And you see people give some sort of like a moral moralizing on so where it's like, well, if you can't help yourself, then you don't deserve to, you know, you don't deserve anything. It's kind of like, but that's in our system right now, where like if my brother can't find his way through or a job or something happens, then instead of him having that safety net from the country, maybe now I have to help out or I have to like take care of that person because they're falling through the cracks of society. And when we don't have cracks in society that people fall through, everybody sort of benefits from that. The people, the direct people who benefit from it, and all the people, the ancillary people around them who don't have to take up the slack and help out and like look out for that, or you know, the the things that you hear about where it's like heartful, inspiring things with people helping each other, but it's like you shouldn't have to you we should live in a country where they don't have to have a GoFundMe for your cancer treatment or you know, whatever it is. Like if bad things happen to people, we should be able to have a country that's robust enough to withstand that without people without it breaking. Yeah. Without it breaking.

SPEAKER_01 40:32

It's also just not, it's actually cheaper. So this is another market socialist perspective. Wait, what's that? Poverty costs more than the solutions to poverty. Yeah. No, no doubt, no question, no question. This is like not even close. Poverty costs an enormous amount to just keep and maintain in your society. The cost of having criminals who do crimes and then having to pay all the police to like fight and prosecute the lawyers and the judges and the prisons. Prisoners, you pay $35,000 a year to keep a prisoner in prison every year. Yeah. This is insane. This is mental. Just the cost of just eliminating poverty is much cheaper than poverty. So Mark talks about that where it's like a regular socialist, you know, these kind of democratic socialists, they do, they lean into how it's a moral issue. And it is a moral issue. But a market socialist can say, you know, it's a moral issue, but it's also just a fiscal issue. Too expensive. It's just too expensive. You know, we like poverty, we want to have it, but it's just too expensive. How are you going to pay for it? You know, poverty is just too expensive.

SPEAKER_02 41:40

And we've talked about it before. People, it's so hard to switch your mindset to be like preventative. If you can do something preventative instead of dealing with the ramifications of the aftermath, that's going to be a way better cost. Uh like your return on investment is way higher if you're able to do that. And we just don't, we're so short-sighted as a culture that we're like, no, no, no. Well, I'd rather go after I'm injured and sick and deal with that instead of deal with the stuff that would prevent me from doing

Safety Nets Without Union Friction

SPEAKER_02 42:05

that. Or I'd rather deal with the ramifications of poverty instead of what you're saying, which is like smartly just get rid of it. Yeah, smartly set it up so that we don't have to deal with that because we're eliminating it at the source.

SPEAKER_01 42:17

Right. Like the cost of homelessness, right, which is policing the homeless, the fear that everyone has of like a homeless person who's going to be, you know, disorderly or kind of the just having to build all of our resources, like all public spaces are like built and designed so that like homeless people can't like camp there and live there. And all that cost, it costs a huge amount. There's only like a few thousand homeless people in San Francisco. If you just house them, it would be done. There would, and then it would cost, you know, the housing 8,000 people, what is that? Like maybe $1,500 a month. It's not very expensive. You know, that's like maybe a couple million bucks a month. It's like a vanishingly small cost. If you then think, well, then we don't have to do all the costs that go along with homelessness. We don't have to provide all the homelessness services. We don't need those because they have homes now. You know, we don't have to redesign everything so that homeless people can't live there and like aggressive architecture or whatever it's called. We don't need to do any of that. You can just build beautiful spaces anywhere.

SPEAKER_02 43:18

The and the argument I hear against that, the the fear is they go, well, if we do that, if we make it a homeless paradise, then all the homeless are gonna come here and flood it and gonna make it so that it's not sustained sustainable. But the argument against that is if everywhere has that sort of uh mentality, if all cities do this, then there's not a giant flight to one place to overburden it. It's everywhere, and it takes, you know, you take care of your pockets of homeless situation in each area instead of having to worry about like, oh, we're gonna be a create a magnet for a larger problem down the down the road. Because if it's if it's one city that's just being nice, that doesn't work as well as if it's everywhere being nice, then it all of a sudden like. It works. We work together. You know, it's this is the core of socialism, right? Is everybody works together to achieve a good goal through collective power. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 44:08

Market socialism. Market socialists. And I and I think this really is new. You know, I think people are going to say, oh, you're just sewer socialism, or it's it's some other Canadian socialism.

SPEAKER_02 44:17

It's a way better term than sewer socialism. No, yeah. Well, I'd rather hang out in a market than a sewer.

SPEAKER_01 44:22

But the ideology doesn't exist. This ideology is absent from the left. But it's I believe it's so popular. I I actually believe it is the main reason that Mamdani got elected was because even though he didn't say these words and really embrace this idea and say it, he intimated that this was how he was going to govern. And people heard him and in their minds they thought this guy is a free market type socialist. Like he wants me to start a business, he wants me to start. He always talked about small businesses and you know, rappers, which rappers are like small business people, artists, you know, being free. He always talked about that. So, in a way, I think the the the wins that's coming to these democratic socialists can be attributed to the fact that they are tapping into an undermet ideolog ideological camp, which is market socialists, who actually I think is a huge number of Americans. A huge number of Americans are market socialists. And they may not know that because the word socialism has always been affiliated with central planning and the absence of a free market. And they may not know that because socialists don't talk about this because for some reason they aren't excited about the free market. I'm excited by the free market and I'm a socialist. I think the free market's freaking awesome. It's like the coolest, like a goose that lays the golden egg like all day long, every day 24-7. It's amazing, you know? So why would you want to kill that? You don't want to kill that. But what you want to do is take some of those golden eggs and make sure everyone has fucking housing and health care. Yeah, right. Like that's all I'm saying. That's all I'm saying. The goose lays 30 golden eggs a month. We're gonna take three of those eggs and we're gonna make sure there's no power. Keep people from freezing to death. It's not complicated. It's not. And I want to run a business. I want to be successful, I want to be wealthy. That's fine. You can be wealthy. We just don't want anyone to be poor. And we don't want people to have wealth because they stole it or they did financial engineering or they just inherited it, and now there's this overclass of billionaires who take over the society democratically. That's awful. So we have to prevent that too. But that doesn't in for even one second shut down the free market. Not even one second. It actually makes the market more free if you do that. I think that you've got

Sewer Socialism And The Pied A Terre Tax

SPEAKER_01 46:35

it. I can't do a mic drop because the microphone is here, but drop the mic.

SPEAKER_02 46:39

These are expensive microphones. You don't want to drop every week. That would be too much.

SPEAKER_01 46:47

You can put a sound effect in there if you want, but that's too much work, too much work to do. It's a challenge. I won't try to do the best sound effect I can. I was like, I should do that.

SPEAKER_02 46:57

Welcome to our sound effects podcast where we do our we'll be like that guy in Police Academy who can do all the different the different Yeah, or the Noise Boys. Do you ever listen to the Noise Boys? No.

SPEAKER_01 47:09

Is this a pro a plug for the noise boys? There's this episode, there's this thing on comedy uh on dropout TV, which is like and they have a they have a show that's called Make Some Noise. And then there's they did one episode, was all it was all men. It was three men were the contestants, and they and it was so good, and people remembered it, that now those guys are called the noise boys, and when they they do reunions or they do an episode every year or two, they'll do a noise boys episode. And they did things like uh like they'd say like they'd have to do an improv prompt, but the prompts were just noises, and so like one of them was like fox, and then these guys did the most realistic fox noises you've ever thought of. Like, what does a fox really sound like? Like, you know?

SPEAKER_02 47:59

You're you're asking, what does the fox say? Is this what you're asking me to say? That's right, that's right.

SPEAKER_01 48:04

And I think the answer is bop, bop, bop, bop, pop, pop, bing, t.

SPEAKER_02 48:08

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 48:12

Well, cool. I offer this as a free political consulting for anybody. If you want to get out there and you want to be a socialist, but you want to be more of a purple socialist, and you want to get a lot more people, Democrat, and maybe some independents, maybe even some Republicans on your side. Yeah, just call yourself a market socialist. It'll it'll make people go, huh? You know, and they'll go what? And and when you get on some TV show or journalist, they'll have to say something like, You call yourself a market socialist. And that's a much better position to be in than you call yourself a socialist, but isn't the free market just the best thing in the world? Aren't you just dumb, dumb, dummyhead, dumb, dumb? It's way better to have them be like, you call yourself a market socialist. What do you mean by that? Or like, how can that be? That seems like a contradiction in terms. That's a stronger position to be in.

SPEAKER_02 49:01

It's an opening to then say what you mean, and then also say, and I learned about it from solutions from the multiverse.

SPEAKER_01 49:07

You do have to plug us at that point. At that moment, at that key moment in your campaign, you need to stop the bus and give us a interviewer goes dumb dumb to dumb to dum dumb.

SPEAKER_02 49:18

And then they say solutions for the multiverse.

SPEAKER_01 49:21

Oh, that's what the fox says. I gotta Yeah, yeah, that's what the fox says. You know, noise. Noise points. All right. We got it, Adam. I love it. All right, we got this one.

SPEAKER_02 49:32

Market socializes.

SPEAKER_01 49:34

Okay. Come back next time. Like and subscribe, smash that subscribe button. Smash it. Support us, share us. I hope you if you want to leave a comment about our unhinged thumbnails on the YouTube, everyone needs to go look at how unhinged our AI generated thumbnails are.

SPEAKER_02 49:51

They are disturbing. I'm not if you were just listening to this on audio, we are putting a big video effort right now. I don't know if it's a good video effort, but we're putting a big video effort.

SPEAKER_01 50:02

It's a good, it's a big, bad video effort. You should check out and see

Poverty Costs More Than Fixing It

SPEAKER_01 50:05

what's going on. I think we are ironically using these, they are ironic, right? They're so crazy. It's ironic. I sure let's lean into that. It's completely ironic. It's fast, it's convenient. They I think they perform, like they catch your eye because they're so unhinged. It's better than nothing. Better than for sure. And better than evaluating ourselves, man.

SPEAKER_02 50:26

Who are these who are these weirdos? Who are these wackos?

SPEAKER_01 50:29

It makes me look especially wacko. I did I don't think I look like that. I hope that's a lot of people.

SPEAKER_02 50:34

This is why we can't trust the robots, because they're gonna make us look subtle subtly more weird. And you're like, hey, what are you doing? They're like, not even weird.

SPEAKER_00 50:41

I thought just it's just just you know, just doing my thing.

SPEAKER_01 50:44

I thought your skin was made of wax and plugs of cherry juice. Robots would love it if our skin was made of wax. They'd love that so much. Drink that up. Okay, everyone. Thank you so much for hanging loose with us, and uh, we'll see you again. We'll see you next time. Next time. Bye. Bye.