funding for cspan2 comes in these television companies and more. including comcast. >> are you thinking this is just a committee center? it is way more than that comcast is part of the 1000 community centers to create wi-fi enabled so students from low-income families can get the tools they need to be ready for anything. >> comcast a right along with these television companies support cspan2 as a public service. >> u.s. court of appeals for the d.c. circuit years oral argument in the united states versus donald j trump on whether former president trump is immune from prosecution for his alleged role in the generally sixth attack on the u.s. capitol. watch or listen live tuesday morning they need at 9:30 a.m. eastern on c-span three. on the free c-span now app or online at c-span.org.

♪ a healthy democracy doesn't just look like this. it looks like this. americans can see democracy at work. citizens are truly informed. a republic thrives. get informed straight from the source on c-span. unfiltered, unbiased, word for word from the nation's capitol to wherever you are because the opinion that matters the most is your own. this is what democracy looks like. c-span, powered by cable. >> all right, good evening everyone. i am the executive director of the american conservative and i am pleased to welcome all of you both here in washington and watching us on c-span2 tonight's book launchh event for the latet much discussed booked how private power crushed american liberty and what to do about it.

tonight's gathering is organized by the foundation found at last year the bcf seeks to advance appreciation for roman law, greek philosophy judeo-christian religion asrn a triple foundatin of western civilization. a dentist by providing scholarships, offering educational programs foren students and young professionals, offering conferences like tonight's event. this event is sponsored by my organization the american conservative. the american conservative exist to advance a main street vision for conservatism. we pursue our mission primarily through our print magazine and online journalism as well as selects conferences and events like the one you are attending here tonight. we were founded in 2002, over 20 years ago now to reignite conversations with fellow conservatives had neglected for far too long. our magazine was air rare voice against the iraq war in the early days of that conflict. at a competitive foreign policy of restraint, continues to

animate our publication today. but our mission was broader than the one issue but we also wanted to return considerations ofs, faith and family, the civilizational foundation to the center of our political discourse. we felt they were too often paid lip service and then ignored with policymaking making. for most part it's a tonight's discussion we wanted to recalibrate the conversation around clinical economy on the political right. we wanted to advance the interest of american workers against increasingly globalized free trade regime that prioritizes corporate profits over the concerns of rural workers in the real economy. now if you read tierney inc. which i believe the "washington post" called anonymously offense about which they guess a complement. if you read it like the "washington post" did you'll find many stories of the rural workers attempting to navigate economic order that's often stacked against them. many ways the book echoes the disposition that animated our magazines pages for 21 years

now. the healthy skepticism in all forms preference for main street over wall street. we also welcome honest disagreement and debate about the best ways to advance those interests. i hope we will be able to get into some of these discussions sparked by the provocative prescription tierney inc. here eatonight. we've got a great lineup of speakers for you to do just that. so, before you start at once introduced tonight speakers before handing it over to the author of the book that bringsng us to tonight. first, as the founder and editor of compact magazine. contribute editor char publication and contributed writer for the. previously he spent nearly a decade at news corporation as it editor and columnist of the wall street journal in new york and london. the op-ed editor of the "new york post." his latest book which we are here to discuss is of course tierney inc. how private power crushed american liberty and what to dot about it just out

from penguin renting house but if you haven't picked up a copy yet please do next marco rubio's a senior u.s. senator from florida the author most recently of decades of decadence, our spoiled elites blew america's inheritance of liberty, security and prosperity which was published earlier this year. matthew is director of research of the american economic liberties project and author of goliath the hundred year war between monopoly power and democracy published by simon & schuster in 2 2019. he served as a policy adviser to the senate budget committee rates big newsletters on monopoly. as a labor unionist in baltimore contribute to compact magazine. last but certainly not least is my colleague inan the bradley devlin is our staff reported doing excellent work for us if you've read bradley'syo work you may think he's older than his years he's actually very young he's one of the jenn's ears note wrote members of the terrible day 21 years ago or 22 years ago just yesterday and can give us a

perspective of conservatives who have come of age and the height of much of the private tierney. so a quick couple notes here on how tonight's event will proceed. sohrab ahmari will start off with a few remarks for about 10 -- 15 minutes. after that with her remarks fromor senator rubio for another 10 or 15 minutes. and afterward i would buy the full panel to join us here on stage for discussion. if there is time and as you can see her schedules very tightly but if we have time will take one -- two questions from the audience at the very end bute either way it will close promptly at 7:45 p.m. so folks can move onto their own dinner plans i would note to pleased to remain in your seats after the panel to allow the speakers to leave first. so with that please join me in welcoming sohrab ahmari. [applause] >> myy friends, thank you all fr

being here. i should start by saying i am grateful to the foundation and the american conservative for cosponsoring this gathering. thanks especially for his steadfast support for my work. and thanksle to, to the other panelists. senator rubio who is shown genuine and rare leadership in pushing his party, my party to rethink some bits of political economic dogmas and has been kind enough to both endorse this book and take time out of a busy legislative scheduled to appear at this event. so, to begin i like to pan out to a global picture. for years now defenders of freedom have been warning of a democratic recession. beginning in the 1970s and then especially after the collapse of the soviet union thousands of societies built on coercion gave way to ones built

on consent. more recently however, coercion has made a depressing come back with many regions backsliding in to authoritarianism and ideological dictatorship. to see the severity of freedoms global funk consider a single new story from china with the cleaning democratic horizon opened up by earlier market reform have now been shuttered by shushing things regime. was in the spring of 2020, the height of the pandemic went aa meatpacker at eight massive slaughterhouse complex had had enough. the state owned firm suggests its workers to a digital tracking their every move. the communist party bosses make no bones about theos purpose of this all present surveillance it is to stoke a culture of fear reminding workers the government mois continuing to monitoring tm

and failure to make quota's or as they put it wasting the people'sre time results in dockd pay. at the outset of the pandemic chinese authorities identified slaughterhouses as essential enterprises, management or employees to putt in everett longer shifts with scant regard for the risk of viral a contagin at a moment when covid and mitigation were poorly understood. that cavalier attitude prompted our protagonist to acts. one day in april heat led a walkout of his colleagues. their demand was reasonable. they called simply for the complex to be temporarily closed and were stringently sanitized. he was terminated that very day. framing the walkout isat a violation of covid rules of general counsel denounced his actions as immoral, unacceptable and arguably illegal" and internal memos.

voicing dissent at a state owned firm in the people's republic of china never is easy could be framed as a sanitary threats but he remains unemployed in china continues to silence workers into fiercely resist efforts to organize them. allied sort of none of these things took place in the middle kingdom. i borrowed the language of my fake, but all too real news story almost from reporting about events that transpired right here, the united states. it a government owned chinese slaughterhouse that uses a digital panopticon to surveil its workers, punishing them for even minor lapses. and it wasn't a chinese slaughterhouse that terminated a worker for leading a walkout at the height of the pandemic over. the employer's careless attitude toward the novel coronavirus. no, that would be the u.s. conglomerate amazon, founded by jeff bezos, the real john ming is named christian smalls, an

expert here at amazon's jfk et warehouse on warehouse on staten island. at the height facility on staten island. at the height of the pandemic he became alarmed as hiss colleagus became sick. sethe human resources department dismissed his concerns telling another worker to keep her on the down low according to "the new york times." then the act for which he was on fired him. they described him and is not smart or articulate according to internal memos obtained by the magazine. at the forefront of the black lives matter activism and in the wake of george floyd's murder in minneapolis. since then he's fought to organize the workers at jfk despite ferocious activity typical of the firm including

confiscating prounion pamphlets in the room and surveilling the workers congregated on the sidewalks according to the time. we are used to thinking of coercion as something that happens over there by tyrannical systems that lack of checks and balances like our own and of course those ratios are as far as the state systems go far more coercive than ours but when we stopped thinking about things in these geographic terms in focus instead on who is meting out the coercion, we reach an unsettling new understanding. coercion is also common in societies like ours provided we pay attention to private power and admit the possibility of private tierney. the reigning economic ideology tells us that in the private sector no one can force us to do anything. competition and ensures we are always free to find a better

deal elsewhere. the central feature of the society is it prevents one person from interfering with another in respect of most of the activities. this utopian of thinking is idealistic and dangerous and as other modern utopias that came to legitimate in the previous century. the market utopianism shocked through with private coercion or white other democratic means of give and take precisely because it's labeled private. take the fact that a third of the 25 million americans

employed in the foodservice and retail receives less than a week's notice of the schedules according to the university of f california sociologist daniel snyder. just in time scheduling to shift associated with periods of low demand. in addition to the wage because you can never be sure if you have enough wages and financial instability, the workers treated this way report sleeping poorly and suffering mentally as a result into their children are more likely to show signs of anxiety and act out and misbehave in school and it doesn't take a rocket scientist, but the inability for the time with them. when you sign on the dotted line for a job, you agree to the new total surveillance ofin your lie including the confiscation of

the personal divisive to monitor the communications and even the recording of your voice and personal likeness for the commercial licensing that is no longer just about using your picture in the company for sure. naor consider commercial arbitration a process originally intended for resolving the disputes between the merchants of equal bargaining power and thanks mostly to the supreme court conservatives practically rewriting the 1925 federal arbitration act and to the mandatory arbitration agreements has exploded to 54% as of 2017 up from 2% in 1992. the employee rate and the privatized so-called courts is just 21% and only 38% in the state courts. corporations meanwhile enjoy

what scholars call repeat player advantage and it appears before the private arbitrator the less likely its employees are to prevail. arbitration frequently bars employees for joining forces to vindicateot rights they otherwie would enjoy under statutory law. even when going it alone. in one notorious case a low level employee of ernst and young would have to shell out some $200,000 if you're not disputed to recover roughly $4,000 for the fair labor standards act. justice writing for the majority upheld that outcome on the ground that the employee freely contracted his disputes. in fact they presented that the clause in an e-mail long after this employee had been hired and has the consent of the condition

of continued employment you agree to submit and according to a certain kind of classical economicul theory it's very popular among the judiciary but completely with real life at that point it's even more had the ability to renegotiate the agreement or press for better terms but in reality has most of you know what he really had to do is to show up to work the next day because he had to pay a mortgage and pay for the eldercare and childcare and so on. so these don't have to be this way. a better model would admit that the coercion in not least market activity. such coercion to be ameliorated by more robust political give and take between the asset rich few and many.

this is a promise of what i call political exchange capitalism. it underpinned the new deal generating the prosperity to define a three decades after world war ii both from eisenhower to nixon. it describes the world as it really is but the machine driven economy characterized dominating most industries. it's the absence of the real

price competition thathe is the one thing supposedly under the classical economic theory to prevent thete private coercion. with that pattern had emerged by the late 19th century and has hardened sins. they rule over the markets would bring tears of embarrassment to the eyes of any gilded age tycoon. if there are only a handful in the typical industry, it follows that privately exercised economic power is less the exception than the rule. instead of waiving competition against coercion, political exchange capitalism strengthens the handste of those subjugatedy the power especially in the labor market thus the new dealers results to make it easier to mount what a famously called countervailing power after decades in which the government hinder them from doing so.

countervailing power is similar to competition only here the counter pressure is exerted not on the sameve side of the given market, not between producers or employees and so on but on the other side of the market. not with competitors but customers and suppliers.el in this way private economic power is held in check by the countervailing power of those who are subjugated. the first big gets the second and as the competition sometimes requires the action, something even seven labor markets promoting countervailing power requires government backing to offset the asymmetry that is otherwise created by employees going up against a few employers ootherwise most employees rationally choose to put up with a bully boss or suffer hours and low wages rather than take the risk associated with collective action. this was the logic behind 1935 nationalso labor relations act

that sought to encourage unionization and collective bargaining andch the 1938 fair t that created federal minimum wage and overtime production. the results, union membership peaks in 1945 at 33% up from 2.7% at the turn of the 20th century and remained highou throughout the 1950s and 60s. under the pre- new deal conditions the asset lists went along to survive or intends battles post new deal they could channel the demand through recognized unions and mass political parties. this made explicit with ordinary people already knew economic life involves coercion but also gave a measure of power to negotiate the coercion to which they had long been subjected. restoring political exchange capitalism foremost requires the

union density. today the figure has sunk to 6% in the private economy following the long decline that began in the 1970s. apologists for the current state of affairs claim this is because they've lost their luster among the employees or because automation and globalization shifted manufacturing out of the united states. yet organized laboror is supposedly the lousy reputation belied by the recent polls showing they are more popular now than they have been in a half a century. the desire to be represented has steadily increased among the nonunion workers since the 1970s with one study finding nearly half of the nonunion labor force would vote to join the union if given the choice meeting that roughly 58 million americans are currently underrepresented. whether what about the explanation that is overstated

as the labor economists and the co-authors note in the 2020 study manufacturing union coverage who are either union members or covered by collective bargaining agreements fell by 74% by 1977 to 2019. in the non-manufacturing coverage fell by a comparable 60% over the same period. you can explain the manufacturing drop by pointing to china but you struggle to explain the comfortable drop in the non-manufacturing sectors. statistical analysis shows overall union coverage only marginallyth changes if we transpose today's the industrialized position or to putay it another way, saving manufacturing wouldn't have necessarily saved the union. so as american workers want to unionize into the loss of manufacturing is in the main thn obstacle, what accounts for the current. of the answer is the same sort

of private coercion that characterizes other dimensions of our economy all made possible by political choices and if they are made by possible choices than they can be reversed. in the nearly 90 years since the passage of the wegner act, lawmakers, courts and often gop dominated the boards of effectively nullified large chunks of the original wall from creating a free speech rate firm to campaign against as if the two sides enjoy symmetrical power in the workplace to begin with to effectively abolishing cardrd tricks debarring union representatives and workers themselves from speaking and captive audience hearings designed to terrify employees, bigdi business into the politicl and media allies undermine the purpose to encourage union organizing and collective bargaining. despite these obstacles, the affirmative union action is sweeping the market. d starbucks marines does, delta flight employees and factory

hands, dockworkers, screenwriters and many other groups have organized or to been winter contracts under the bargaining agreements. in april, 2022, two years after the determination, a majority of workers at the jfk voted to have his independent labor union represent them in collective bargaining. america finally is into china. in china.our political tradition cherishes human dignity and a popular popular counter pressure against elite power. while the united states has always been a market society, the country is also given rise to honorable traditions that have sought to bring the system under humane democratic control from the jacksonians to progressive farmers to populists today roosevelt to franklin roosevelt and to nixon and fdr, i'm sorry, nixon and eisenhower, these traditions played a decisive role in forging the first version of the political

capitalism in the previous century. and once more it is up to the workers to drag the leaders into a new consensus. on their vigilance, our vigilance it depends on the prosperity and checks against private tyranny without which there can be no land of the free. thank you and i am delightedto o welcome senator rubio. [applause] thank you. i apologize. i will tell you what i was doing. i was text screaming at my son for getting a parking ticket school. university of florida. anyway, thanks first of all for writing this and for the work

you've done. maybe i will come from my perspective because i think you touched on something. i was on a video conference today with some legislators from georgia and they asked about the tech companies and with the federal government can do and it struck me and i said to them years and example and i think it's true in all the countries there's generally one power company no matter where you live. it's the utility and theype are allowed to operate in a monopoly space, guaranteed to profit but the profits are limited and they get to go to the public service commission it isay a this is how much it costs to generate power and how much i have to charge in order to make my protected profit but they control how much money you make but they are a monopoly. so imagine if the electric company decides one day i am not going to provide electricity for people who believe this or people who are in this line of work or this line of business.

that would be pretty dramatic if they were able to do that. maybe i shouldn't speak this tomorrow somebody might get a bright idea of the companies and utilities should be doing. we are not that far off in many spaces. it strikes me tomorrow there's b going to be this artificial intelligencef meeting in the senate where apparently mark zuckerberg is supposed to be there and elon musk. we might have a fight as well. there's this fight that supposed to have and whatever. it struck me if you think about it it's nothing personal against them per se but in a room with up to, 100 senators into the to most powerful people in that room will not be members elected by the public, but to heads of important companies one in particular, meta. and it's not because of wealth but because they control what is a utility in the 21st century.

if four or five companies, a,amazon, google, apple, if they all get together let's say the firstt four or five get together and you know what we are going to do we are going to destroy so andot so. business or individual. could they not deny just about everybody a space in the public square, destroy your business if they provide services? this is an extraordinary amount of power in the private sector and it can be useful with people presume to be noble reasons and so forth but it can also be used under tremendous public pressure to target political opponents and those who fall out of line and may not agree with. and it can be used to threaten you. how many people today are not afraid to openly express their views onon a topic or take a public position on either side of a debate although it seems to be one side of the debates

because they are afraid of the impact it could have not just by reputation but in many ways economically. i think that is what youwe sortf touched upon. we are not built to think of the private square, private companies holding that amount of power. but that's how consolidated those industries have become. aware that sort ofnt leads is an area that i spend most of my time. i've touched on some of the things you've written about but primarily what is this a product of and it almost attracts well with my adult life i graduated in high school and graduated as a term of art. i wasn't a good student in fact i didn't become a good studentor and i've been paying for it or should i say borrowing. then i started carrying a lot more about schooling things of that nature. i graduated in 89. i am a graduate from the university of florida in 93. so just to the world change

between was quite dramatic. i grew up in an era where remember the movie the day after where the world was supposed to and.ck peremember where matthew broderk hacked into the pentagon and started a war, so i grew up in that world the united states versus the soviet union, reagan versus these devils and then it all just fell apart like the berlin wall collapses and i remember even though i was in college and i will admit it wasn't the predominant thing on my mind at the time. i was aware of it and i knew it was a pretty big deal and i thought about it, but the rest of the world did. we emerged with two things. first of all a feeling that we one, free enterprise democracy had one, communism and marxism defeated and naturally it was over and everyone was going to become a free enterprise economy and everyone was going to become a democracy. you might say to yourself that

was a noble endeavor and is something we should have aspired to, but we made decisions on the presumption and now somehow the global economy and economic congress would replace the nationstate. i don't know who to attribute it to but i id know that it was ot there because i heard it at the time. never have two countries of mcdonald's going to war with each other. that obviously sounds silly but am i right, i don't care what does it matter anymore. but i'm sure because i've heard it. theretr you go. i don't know who to attribute it to. the point being this idea that somehow the commerce now between the nationstates or between people would now replace the nationstates and no matter what it matter. youll couldn't fight with each other and it would work out that way. a second assumption that was

made is now that the world was sort of at this utopia that we had reached, not only with the ntglobal commerce replace the nationstate and interest as a result but in fact that we were nothing more at this point not citizens or of a country or a community, we were all either investors and/or consumers in a global marketplace. the third assumption that was made as a result of all of this the natural order of thingsel should be the market outcome would always deliver if it is allowed to work it will deliver the mostst sufficient outcome ad that would drive investment. so, who cares. the factory in your town or the employer that had been the anger of the community closed down because it was cheaper to do what you used to do somewhere else not just because of automation but the cheap labor. it's going to go over there and that means lower prices. you will pay less even though

it's made halfway around the world. but here is the great thing.g. a better job is coming. it will replace the job that was wiped out and pay more. you will be happier and that was another assumption made in the laboratory. but we all know thatt is not how it worked out and what we've learned and i say this to you by the way as someone basically raised him grew up in the ranks of the free enterprise orthodoxy of the republican party and center-right and one of the reasons why is other people on other sides of the debate were either socialist or communist or a combination thereof and i felt they are wrong and crazy, these things are bad for the world so i'm the opposite of whatever that is communis of these assumptions sort of guided the public policy and somehow build a consensus, so that's why you get to 2001 and it's like sure terrain to get the wto. yes they are going to cheat and steal jobs from us but they are going to get rich and when they

do they will become just like us tohe stop cheating. why were these things wrong? the assumptions are wrong for couple of reasons. the nationstatete will always matter because the most essential, human nature will never change. fifty-five years of history teaches us that and that's why it repeats itself. now we change the way we live aland address and speak, all kis of things but human nature will never change and one of thes ce elements of human nature is this desire to belong and that's why anyone in the world you put people together, to word and they immediately want to join something and band together to do something. it's a natural thing and one of those in the modern era and, i mean, in the last three or 400, place and belonging matters. that's the first reason. now the idea that we have that there would no longer matter, citizens of the global economy and world that was a fantasy people adopted that theyha could afford to adopt and who had

passports and to travel all over the world. butev for most, that was never true but it was especially not for the leaders of china and russia and other countries that said we are going to stay with the nation state interest thank you. we will continue to focus on the nationstate but the other is about the jobs. the mistake that was made was the belief that jobs will simply like the place that provides you a paycheck and it's about a lot more than a paycheck. the job is not just a job. there are jobs and then there are stable jobs. there are jobs and within those you can actually raise a family on. our economic numbers don't mention that. it almost i always think to myself every time i hear the monthly report and hundred thousand new jobs created they don't tell you what kind of jobs are they going to be around in six months? do they pay enough at a minimum

so you can afford to raise a family, be a member of a community? can you rely on it existing three or four years from now to become a member of the community? so that is the first thing. a second is about underemployment. i don't know what the percentages up to now have these degrees and can't find a job and they borrowed money but now they can't k find a job. these are the kind of jobs and the other point is when you yank jobs away from people you don't just rob them of their dignity and purpose but you have a corrosive effect on family formation and community because if you think about the community, the anchor is both stable, reliable jobs because unless you have stable and reliable jobs you don't have little leaguee group presidents for the pta or the civic organization that holds the country together one of the notions that was lost his america is not an economy. it's not a government.

america is a nation and the glue, the fiber of the nation is not the government. it's what creates walls and protects us. but it's not the country. and it's not an economy. our country, the fiber and the basic elements are family and community the two most important and i don't care how wealthy you are, how much your gdp grows, how geopolitically influential your government f may be if you don't have family and community your country will not be strong it will be weak and divided into those are the economic implications. as with the struggle now for people into the sort of realization i don't think there's anything wrong with her learning and adopting what you learn to what's before you end beginning in about 2014 and 2015, part of that happens to be on the presidential trail. if america is doing so well why is everybody so kissed off at each other into the world in general and there's a lot of that. it was shocking to meer because

i'm are product of the american dream. my mom was a stock clerk at kmart. my dad was a bartender and they owned a home and retired with dignity and left their kids better off and i'm in the senate running for president. why isn't everybody is happy about it. i worked in this place for 30 years. first they cut my pay and then they got up and left now what do i do? cane. find a job that replaces that one. why don't you learn to code and move back to san francisco. this is when people still lived in san francisco. they said that doesn't work for me. itth completely disconnected thm and so itmu disconnects them frm family and community and all the things that make life worth living. so we lost that perspective and the challenge then became i think socialism is failure everywhere it's been tried if you look at the southern border

in the united states a substantial number of the people come from socialist countries. it's failed everywhere. communism failed, marxism. you know why i believe in the market? i believe in the marketing of capitalism because it is the one model capable of creating not just prosperity, but widespread prosperity that allows you economic growth and wealth and that's important. you can't have good stable good paying jobs without wealth creation and economic success at the corporate level. but you can't just have that alone. it has to be the kind of growth that creates wealth and

prosperity but also creates good paying jobs for as many people as possible. americans in our case. that is the perspective that wae national interest and not our people to serve the market. and it really gets complicated is when the most efficient outcome is not good for your country. and there are people that will still with you to this day, that's impossible that never happens. it most certainly does the market says it's more efficient to buy 88% of the active ingredients in our

pharmaceuticals in china because they subsidize it, because they steal, because they have lower labor, whatever it may be. is it in our national interest to depend on a foreign competitor adversary for 88% of the active ingredients in our pharmaceutical, or to corner 80% of the rare earth minerals on earth or any of these other industrial capable cities? what about during covid? i was freaking out because we couldn't make masks and we couldn't make this. and now, you know, maybe we didn't need that many masks, i suppose. but maybe you know, at the time and all these panic that was going on about the way we react for the first time, we came face to face with the industrial ization and the national interest component of it. and it's easy to talk about deindustrialization simply from wouldn't it be great if we had more factories? the feels like the good old days. i'm not talking about going back to the fifties. what i'm saying to you is that that lack of industrial capacity has a national security component to it, a national economic security, but it also has a job component. i published a report a week ago talked about the the standing of men in the workplace and in

particular, what i would focus on are men without college degrees. why are men without college degrees college degrees. why are men without college degrees struggling to find jobs? because the jobs that largely supported the more industrial types and they advanced as well. we could go on and on but we've come to the point the two choices are not the market is always right, whatever it reaches is the right one or let them take over the means of production and pour a bunch of government money into every endeavor. those are two. choices. but we have to return to the era that we understand the proper role of the market and the certain nation and at every level we should not be -- that doesn't make you a nationalist. i don't only care about america. i do care about america before

anything else. not because i'm inhumane, but because of an american official law of the american national interest is the first topic behind

united states we have the luxury of playing in every conflict or everything going on in the world we can care about all of them and try to help where we can but by and large we do have to pick our flights more than ever because there is as great and powerful there isn't unlimited power or unlimited reach. i will close with one last observation. i'm a firm believer that you t cannot hold back technological advances no matter how hard you try. technological advances are going to happen. speaking out about artificial intelligence there's a couple of points if artificial intelligence is going to become something that, and nobody knows the answer to this, but is it

going to be a technology that links to make humans do what they do better or is it going to be a technology that replaces humans? is it going to be automation that allows one workers do the t work of five or something that actually takes the human element out of completely? we don't know the answer to that but what strikes me there's a lot more going on about ai right now, which isn't really yet on top of us and that the levelsor that it could be much more than it was about automation. some of the things, don't worry about automation that's going to be good because there will be less workers but they will make more money. or don't worry about the deindustrialization because we will all be software engineers making money but now the same people are freaking out because for the first time we have a massive disruptive technological advance that threatens not the blue-collar worker, not the $40,000 a year worker but it threatens the people making a lot of money and realizingng thy may not need me anymore.

one of the cornerstones ist screenwriters don't want to be replaced by machine or a fake avatar whatever is going to replace them so you think about it and now we are seeing a disruption that impacts white collar, highly educated or higher standard of livingfr workers and now all of a sudden they are freaked out by some revolutionary change going on in society. but that interest didn't exist when it came to the american worker and whether it was out of malice, greedt or stupidity. when we were the country that needed to create jobs to employ as many as possible into stable wage, we did damage to the country in the national fiber. the reason i know this is true is because it isn't just y happening to us. virtually every industrialized country in the world particularly in the west is going through similar domestic upheavals whether it is immigration or the state of their economy or government policies on climate and the like because they are all feeling the

exact same thing. these decisions and assumptions that have led this world into the country were a mistake and now we have to confront that and hopefully reverse it and it'spey personal hope although i thinkn you are more pessimistic than i am the republican party will be the home of the movement but it won't be easy because there are a lot of deep roots that go into everything from much of the traditional center-right institutions, but there is change and we've made a lot of progress. a lot more work to do and ihe thank you for the invitation to talk about it because i do think that what you discuss as a byproduct economic decisions that empower the centralization article integration of certain industries thatt have extraordinary power at the time when we all felt as long as it is a private sector don't worry about it because there will be one out there that will regulate. there is no competitor for amazon work for google.

there really isn't. and so right now, we reap what we sow. anyway, thank you for the chance to talk about all of this and i will yields. back. >> i want to invite ourur panelists now to join us appear on stage.

i want to start with of the question of where this book fits on the political spectrum. a man of the right you mentioned the conservatives and a longtime commentator in the conservative space. the book has gotten a lot of criticism from the right so i just want to start on that note. there's a point in your book

where you kind of retail the narrative you mentioned in your remark about the sort of political economic history of the country. especially in the post-depression era. there is one you said to me. part of what drove the prosperity that we saw in the middle of the past century was the commitment to limit and that's been a theme of a lot of things i've written about from the conservative perspective so i want to give you this. opportunity to answer how are you not a full socialist quite yet? >> great question. so, the smartest reviews of this book has come from marxists and they've argued that what it puts forward is a fundamentally conservative project whereas often when i'm dealing with center-right or centerleft broadcasters or reviewers they say it seems like your brain is right-wing when it comes to abortion but you have more of a

leftist stream mentality when it comes to the economy and how do you reconcile the two. in fact a commitment to a market that exists within the limits of the common good arises from thea same place. it's informed by my catholic faith and social teaching which as earlyly as the 19th century e post-recognized that unhindered markets were creating mass disparities in power and wealth and that the wayy to combat tht is one of the ways of course is by allowing workers, encouraging them to organize and bargain collectively and in other places for the state to intervene and markets to ensure you wouldn't have catastrophic situations of market failure. so it's not as if i shut down my conservative brain when i become a writer on political economy and thenk turn it back on wheni turn to let's say cultural issues. it all comes from the same i place.

and it is very important to know that the new deal project into andthe new deal order and what preceded it, herbert hoover laid down many of the frameworks that were then subsequently formalized or given much greater scale by fdr. but the idea of the compromise was seen as a conservative thing to do in the face of market disruption and in the face of social unrest that was coming about because the workers didn't earn enough to afford the goods they were producing and the social instability. so this model of what you might call class compromise is not class antagonism. seems to reconcile the classes rather than take the antagonism all the way into the sort of abolition of one class by the other. so yeah. nothing contradictory about being conservative in a supporting a kind of socially managed capitalist revision.

one quick follow-up for senator rubio before we bring in the rest of the panel. you touched on this at the end of your remarks that you were perhaps more optimistic about remaking the gop as a working class party. ii wonder first if you can expad on that a little bit, that optimism and number two, what do you think are some of the mainti barriers to achieve that sort of political realignment? >> i think that is where the party writ large, it's one of the things when i ran for president, how different people -- like i would go camping somewhere in here nafta sucks. the economy, these people are sending our jobs overseas. then you go somewhere where the donors live different lives and experiences and you realize there was already a mess of disconnect between the donor base into the voter base. and i think as much as anything else, the trump campaign sort of exposed that because he challenged all sorts of orthodoxies in his campaign and is would've revealed what the

donors tell you is a good idea. not every donor. i think that is unfair but generally speaking one of the traditions of the parties and the voters were dramatically different so the demand is there someone is going to be the voic of that group and one of thest things, the challenges at least from my perspective is the traditional political spectrum as we've identified in the 25 or 30 years and we think somehow if you or your 150 years ago the center, the right, the left, the political party, they looked very different. there wasn't an era in the country where there were conservative to the goods and quite liberal republicans. so we've had multiple realignments in the invention of how the parties align and so forth. i think polarization has driven people into two camps. so where is the home that says i don't want socialism or the government controlling the means of production. i don't want to be a government employee or telling me what to do with my life. but i do want public policy officials that, number one, care about creating an economy where

people just not can get rich would go to stable jobs. there's a market for that and people like i care for what's happening in the world but at the end of the day, we always have to do what is in america's national interest first and foremost and how we react around the world and domestically.at that market is going to be met by some political movement. it won't be easy because as i said there's a tremendous amount of infrastructure, over 25 or 30 years it's been built on the traditional paradigm. but i think it is an inevitable evolution particularly i think the republican party right now is the only light can run home with it because the social radicalization of the democratic party makes it impossible for it to be this hostile environment o to the working class voter whose sort of looking for afl commonsense balance and politics that reflect not just their economic needs but the general preferences for themselves and their family and future of their

country.th i certainly think that is where it is going to wind up. >> i want to bring matt in on that because it is fair to say you are a man of the west, left-wing perspective on this panel. and as you know and i'm sure the audience knows we recently launched a new magazine, compact magazine under theha sort of hypothesis that there is enough voices on the left and right at that we need to highlight and emphasize in this new journal. i'm curious first your response to the optimism on a gop working class party and number two, where you think some of the limits to that of left and right cooperation might apply. >> yeah, so i look at it -- sorry i'm not a democrat and progressive democrat. i kind of look at the problem as sort of both parties are in nerve written. who's going to find the voices

that speak to that angry frustrated person out there who esjust seems how disconnected te political elites are and to give it a quick example where both parties could do it, today is the first day of the google antitrust which has been brought by trump in 2020 and has been continued by biden. either party could in their states involved, either party could win and become the nominated governing party. what i think is happening and your book is about is a specific language of moral reform that you're rejecting which is the language of efficiency becausenc the language of efficiency andmi of economics, modern economics is a language reform that has taken over both parties, the corporate world, think tank world, and it traps us in this

power. both different parties, the different philosophies of how to be, once you are removed from that sort of world where there is no power, a utopian world which is a trap, all of a sudden the possibility of building a society opens up and what you see, when i've seen this happen to me, and i think it happens to everyone who sort of one day they seeke power and the next. but there are many ways to. we just have to choose to do it. and i think the party that decides to do that first is the party that is going to be sort of dominant over a generation. >> bradley, you are a young conservative on the panel. it struck me that perhaps some of the most praised all the right at least has come from younger conservatives. there's a lot of this work with ifolder generations. but if you are looking for praise from the right it's going rato be the younger generation. i wonder why that is especially

based on your experience as a young conservative. >> yeah, it has been from younger conservatives not the old guard types that are continually turning out white papers on why we need another corporate tax cut and spend another four years in the republican administration pursuing that. some statistics in the book that most everyone in the audience probably knows, the wages set th stagnant since 73. the productivity of the labor going up 75% since the same year and yet the real wages have only gone up 9%. and then if you look at that data you see the wages are stagnant and it's concentrated among those wage earners above the 75th percentile. how did he get there? education. education has increased 200%

over the same time period. a lot of necessary goods that we consider necessary for family formation. healthcare, college. we've seen a rapid increase in those types of prizes and time and time again when young people are talked to about this. they say yes my student loan debt did factor into me delaying getting married, delayed buying aa home, delaying having children. so there's the same time this argument if you're educated you can actually get into the wage labor that are seeing those gains. while, since 2000, the average salaries wage for college graduates have been prettyer volatile and is currently on a downswing. there's a slight downward progression. so what actually pulls people out ofof the sand young people haven't got any good answer from two political parties that are

focused on appeasing corporate power and setting up were continuing that neoliberal structure. young conservatives i think aren seeing this fallacy in their own lives. everyone thinks it's okay until it hits their wallets. young people are seeing those in all of these realizing that there's an incorrect anthropology that pushes family to the side and focuses on this

at willl contracting. they might not articulate it in a direct way but they see that that kind of arrangement that so much of the party consensus rests on a school's so they are pursuing other forms of conservatism that harkens back to g the time before the goldwar years. you look at the history of the republican party. for the longest time the republican party was founded on till the roosevelt task spread by the number one issue. you will see in an exhibit a brochure that says democratic free-trade leads to poverty and despair, republican protectionism leads to the prosperity and good well to all. men or something like that.

and that's the tradition that more young conservatives are rediscovering and trying to navigate out of these problems that the neoliberal consensus. so i want to turn to perhaps the chief remedy which is union membership and the need to support. there's many statistics thatoi show a lot of workers do want to join unions but i think another statistic that is helpful to put this into the light is a survey done by the american compass which asks why potential union members would not want to be part of the union and the top sort of reasons why were the union political involvement. member dues, corruption and then way down the list at number nine was fear of retaliation from the

company. so i want to bring you in on this because i know you've done a lot of work on the labor movement. i'm curious to get your thoughts on sort of why potential union members won't join unions and this is a great antidote to a lot of the issues we are seeing in the political economy how we can encourage them more. >> it bears keeping in mind so the way somebody becomes a union member it's not like becoming a member of the nra or the democratic socialists of america or something like that. the main way people become union members is kind of incidental. it's by becoming an employee in a shop that's already organized. sfor those -- were the second-largest way is actually by people who are the first to form a union and elect a labor organization at their workplace. so, for those cases i think successful campaigns are going to be built around the issue is that actually matter to those employees who elect a union.

so these sort of abstract surveys i think are interesting insofar as they sort of point to kind of reputations that unions have that are built up in certain ways. what was the top reason that you said? >> reason not to join the union's political involvement. >> political involvements. so, for the reasons i was talking about, actual political orientation of the union members are a lot of union members are republicans already so different unions are going to have different sort of makeups and some are going to be more conservative than others. look at the diversity that exists in the labor movement now. if you see the demonstrations of some pilots now they sort of all get together and stand in a lion and very conservative holding a scion in the same way at the

same level. this is a labor demonstration in the same way that one is much more boisterous. so, you know i think even thougl the labor movement is small and i want it to get a lot bigger, it's quite diverse and there is room in it for all kinds of people who want to join together and have a say at work and negotiating their contract with their workers and their employer and having something that's very important that is touched on in the book and that is not being that employee and this hit song with senator rubio was talkingbe about, having stability in your job and being able to count on it, reliability, stability that you can't be dismissed for no reason or for anything that is not illegal. >> one more thought on the question of unions being perceived. not wrongly by many workers as being politicized and simply politicized on the side of the

democratic party.t our friend michael points out in his most recent book that at one point, you know, he just visited the page of the leader of the afl-cio and her tweet was something like, and i'm paraphrasing, but we stand for maximum reproductive freedoms. and as michael said, lots of workers who are covered by the afl-cio or would want to be covered don't share those views so what that's reflecting is the degree to which organized labor has become very much a part of the democratic party. but one thing -- one major reason for that is over the pasb two generations, the labor movement has often, more often than not gotten the back of the hand from the republican party and so it's been forced to shift to the democrats i think by a political necessity and

therefore even the workers who blare coming to the republican party as voters, they don't have an organized vote voice within the republican party in the same way that organized labor is an organized part of the coalition. but if we had a republican partl that was more friendly to the labor organizations, then i think you would see labor becoming more independent because it's not so dependent on one party knowing that the other one will be hostile at every stage for the relation boards will just be kind of made up of unions and so on. >> i want to turn it to the audience. we have time for one, maybe two questions. if you have a question, raise your hand and we will do what we can. ..

working for a publication that pushes the liberal dogma. tax cuts, free trade over everything else. but it seems the more i read the post teachings on social issues on catholic teachings the less the attempt to synthesize the policies they met tenable. neil mentioned limits the centrality of limits. the classical interest condition. liberating aspectc and having a catholic view on things. if you look at a market you fantasize the market and are completely turn away from it.

at subject to the imperative of the common good. tthat attitude of respect for limits is at the heart of my political economic thinking. >> can i ask one thing on here? >> one thing that sounds very interesting about the reviews that were critical the catholic social teaching and some of the liberal theorist often use similar language. but they are getting it somewhat different things. that is the fallacy that i alluded to the rents not just due to neoliberalism and that choice oriented consensus at will contracting oriented

mindset that is completely foreign to the entire western canon free 15th or 16th century. and for me with equality and qud freedom and human dignity. most off the freedom and dignity we are talking that were motivating these questions. of this day and age. >> have spoken on this before thec pastor. the catholic social doctrine is incredibly fascinating intellectually deep. it's rooted in basic principles the individual is a dignity word to derive the dignity from? is the image of the creator. but also if opportunity to do. but acquisition of wealth,

status, have eight material possessions. it is from out of its fundamenta' core, it argues man was made to work. and so would it argues that human beings have an obligation toto work. on a functioning economy people have an obligation to work for public policy makers have an obligation to foster an economy that creates network. two sides of the same coin. also have to have an economy that produces the work. i can just produce the work that has a human dignity has a simple definition for the role of civil efficiency. thus to promote the commoner go. with capitalism and the arguments of what's in the common good is what it's all about there's fundamental principles that there is broad agreementt on when one is a ned

to have economic policies that create work for those we are expecting to work in the kind of a work that allows you to things through life worth living. like family formation. you just go, get a degree that 66 or seven years. our estimate doesn't matter you'll make itt. back. it's a formula today a handful of jobs you figure out to do this. you figure out how to invent this page on the internet people can connect with each other you can become a billionaire. other than that sort of thing what d is the guarantee? i don't guarantee you're going to be wealth that you're going to find you're willing to do x you will at least find a job that pays you enough you do not have to step a night word you're going to get laid off at any moment. going to lose everything you can andy then pay to raise these kids. why should i be involved inav a

community if i'm bored how to move every two and half years to find a job it's comparable but we don't have an answer. we are on the verge of becoming the first american to lead the next generation better off. things are actually living it. from personal expense and anecdotal numbers to back it up. members of my family are at least 10 years behindd where i was in terms of homeownership career and the like. when i was 30 as 10 years ahead of where they are today that has a dramatic impact on the country moving forwardi. i don't think we have fully get absorbed. >> just briefly mapped. >> it is important to realize neoliberalism is based on faith. it's resilience zealotry. i will just beat really quick senator hawley has a user he cap which gets introduced periodically. and the level of angry towards a that.

there is a physical rage like how dare you? that's what you find when you have new ideas to criticism of their religion. that is what is important. >> had dare you. that needs to go to machines. >> you monster. i mentioned at the outset we are on a really short timeline. if you close it notes the part first of all if you've not already gone and bought tierney inc. please doan it's a really important and provocative book. second t you keep up with everything we've been doing in that magazine as well as the weeklyly column at the american conservative go check us out as well. the last housekeeping note is immense at the outset please save youre dude to the speakers that had a chance to leave the room. thank you to all of our panelists when thank you please

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