>> weekends on c-span2 are an intellectual feast. every saturd american history tv documents america's story and on sunday, booktv gives you the latest on nonfiction books and authors. funding for c-span2 comes from these television companies and more including wow. >> the world has changed. today, fast reliable internet connection is something no one can live without so wow is there for our customers, speed, reliability, value and choice. now more than ever it starts with great internet. >> wow along with these telogen companies support c-span2 as a public service. [inaudible conversations].. the american conservative, and i'm pleased to welcome all of you both here in washington and watching us on c-span two, tonight's book launch event for

sohrab ahmari murray's latest much discussed book, tyranny inc, how private power crushed american liberty and what to do about it. tonight's gathering is organized by the bottom community foundation. founded last year, the bcf seeks to advance appreciation for roman law, greek philosophy and judeo-christian religion as the foundations of western civilization. it does this by promoting it does this by providing scholarship, offering educational programs for students and young professionals and offering conferences like tonight event. this event is also sponsored by my organization of the american conservatives. the american conservative exist to advance a mainstream vision for conservatism. we pursue ourug mission primariy through our print magazine and online journalism as well as select conferences and events like the one you are attending your tonight. we were founded in 2002, over 20 years ago now, to reignite

conversations with all conservatives had neglected for far too long. our magazine was a rare voice against the iraq war in the early days of of the conflicd commitment to foreign policy restraint and just animate our publication today. but our mission was broader than that one issue. we also wanted to return considerations of faith and family, though civilizational foundations to the center of our political discourse. we felt they were too often simply paid lip service and then ignored when policymaking. and perhaps most pertinent to two nights discussion we wanted to recalibrate the conversation around political economy on a political right people want to advance the interests of american workers against an increasingly globalized free-trade regime that prioritize corporate profits over the concerns of real workers in the real economy. now if you read "tyranny, inc." which only the "washington post" called anomalously sensible, which i guess as a compliment, but if you write it like the "washington post" did you will

find many stories of these real workers attempting to navigate and economic order that is often stacked against them. and in many ways the book echoes the disposition that is animate our magazines pages for 21 years now. a healthy skepticism of big news in all forms and a preference for main street over wall street. but we also welcome honest disagreement and debate about the best ways to advance those interests, so i hope will be able to get into some of these discussions sparked by sohrab's book tonight. we have a great lineup of speakers for you to do just that. so before we start i want to introduce to nights speakers before handing it over to the authorri of the book that brings us here tonight. first, sohrab ahmari is a founder and editor of compact magazine, contributing editor to our publication at the american conservative and a contributing writerpe to the new statesman. previously he spent nearly a decade at news corp as an editor and columnist with the "wall

street journal" in new york and and as a op-ed editor of the "new york post." his latest book which we had to discuss is of course "tyranny, inc.: how private power crushed american liberty - and what to do about it" just out from penguins random house. if you have picked up a copy yet please do. next marco rubio of course is the senior u.s. senator from florida and the author most recently of decades of decadence, how are spoiled elitist blue america's inheritance of liberty, security and prosperity, , which was published earlier this year. matthew stover is director of research at the american economic liberties project andf author of 1 the life of the 100 you war between monopoly power and democracy, published by simon & schuster in 2019. he has served as as a policy advisor to the senate budget committee and rights the big newsletter on monopoly. a. b. crowder is a labor unionist in baltimore and last but certainly not least is my colleague at the american conservative bradley devlin, our staff reporter doingex excellent work for us. if you've read his work you may

think he's bolder than is used -- older, one of those gen zers was no real memories of that terrible day 21 years ago got 22 years ago just yesterday and you canom give us a perspective of conservatives who have come of age during the height of much of the private tyranny in sohrab's book. a quick couple notes on how to make event will proceed. sohrabab will start us off in a few minutes you with some opening remarks drawing from his books core arguments for about ten to 15 minutes. after that we will do remark some senator rubio for another ten to 15 minutes and then afterward i will invite the full panel to join us here on stage for discussion. if there is time and as you get your schedule is very tightly packed butut if we do have timee will take one to two questions from the audience at the very end. either way though we were close probably at 7:45 p.m. so folks can move ontowo their own dinner plans and i would note though please 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] >> my friends, thank you all for being here. i should start to think that ungrateful to the foundation and the american conservative for cosponsoring this gathering. thanks especially to emile force steadfast work for my support and thanks to the other panelists, not least senator rubio who has shown genuine and real leadership in pushing his party got my party, to rethink some of its political economic dogmas, and who's been kind enough to take to bolster endorses book and to take time out of it is a legislative scheduled to appear at this event. so to begin i would like to pan out to a global picture. freedom have been warning of a democratic recession beginning

in the 1970s and then especially after the collapse of the soviet union. dozens of societies built coercion gave way to ones built on consent. more recently, however, coercion has made a comeback with regions backsliding into club authoritarianism and ideological dictatorship to. see the severity of freedom's global funk. consider a single news story from china where the gleaming democratic horizon opened up by earlier market reforms have now been shuttered by xi jinping's regime. it was in the spring of 2020, the height of the pandemic. jean mink, a meatpacker at a massive slaughterhouse complex. nanjing, had had enough. the state owned firm subjects its workers to a digital panopticon, tracking their every move. communist party bosses make no bones about the purpose of this.

all present surveillance. it's to stoke a culture of reminding workers that the government is continually monitoring them and failure to meet quotas, or, as they put it, wasting the people's time results in docked pay at the outset of, the pandemic, chinese authorities identified slaughterhouses as essential enterprise, as management ordered employees to put in ever longer shifts with scant regard for the risk of viral contagion. at a moment when covid and its mitigation were poorly understood, that cavalier attitude prompted zhang, our protagonist, to act. one day in april, he led a walkout of his colleagues. their demand was reasonable. they called simply for the complex to be temporary, early closed and more stringently sanitize. zhang was terminated that very day, framing the walkout as a violation of covid rules. the firm's general counsel

denounced zhang's actions as unacceptable and arguably illegal and, quote in internal memos voicing dissent, a state owned firm in the people's republic never exactly easy could now be framed as a sanitary threat. zhang remains unemployed and china continues to silence dissident workers. and too fiercely resist efforts to them actually 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 of the pandemic, he became alarmed as his colleagues became sick. the human resources department dismissed his concerns, telling another worker to keep illness on the down low. according to the new york times. then he led his walkout. the act for amazon fired him. amazon's lawyer described smalls, whose african american as, quote, not smart or articulate. according to internal memos obtained by vice magazine vice news, i apologize. this from the same company that a few months later would elbow way to the fore forefront of corporate black lives matter activism in the wake of george floyd's murder in minneapolis.

since then, smalls has fought organize the 8000 workers at jfk, eight, despite ferocious anti-union activity typical of the firm, including, quote, confiscating pro-union pamphlets left in the break room and where workers congregated on the sidewalk. according to the times, we're used to thinking of coercion as something that happens over there by training systems that lack checks and balances our own. and of course, those regimes are as far as their state systems go, far more coercive than ours. but when we stop thinking about things in just purely geographic terms and focus instead on who is meting out the coercion we reach an unsettling new understand. coercion is all too common in supposedly societies like ours provided we pay attention to private power and admit the of private tyranny, our reigning

economic ideology tells us that in the private sector, no one can force us to do anything. competition ensures that we're always free to find a better deal elsewhere. the arch laissez faire theorist f.a. hayek, for example, had hailed, quote, competition as the only method by which our activist use can be adjusted to each other without coercive authority and, quote milton friedman likewise insisted that the central feature market society is that it prevents one person from interfering with another in respect of most of his activities and quotes. but this is utopian in some ways as idealist and dangerous and as other modern utopias that came to legitimate real world repression in the previous century. market utopianism has yielded a society shot through with private coercion coercion that we can't contest at the ballot box or in the system, or by

other democratic means, and give and take precise sleep because it's labeled private. take the fact that a third of the 25 million americans employed in food service and retail received less than a week's notice of their upcoming schedules. according to university of california sociologist daniel schneider and courier kristen hartnett. just in time, scheduling is intended to shift the downsides associated with periods of low demand onto employees. in addition to wage precarity, because you can never be sure if you have enough wages and financial instability that results from that. workers treated this report sleeping poorly and suffering mentally as a result, and their children are more likely to show signs of anxiety and to act out and misbehave in school. and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to connect the causal dots. it's a predictable result of their parents to spend regular time with them. then there are today's lopsided employment agreements. these days, when you sign the

dotted line for a new job, you agree to a near-total surveillance of your digital life, including the confiscation of your personal devices, the use of keylogger software to monitor communications and even the recording of your voice and personal likeness. for commercial licensing, it's no longer just about, you know, using your picture in a company or consider commercial arbitration a process originally intended resolving disputes between merchants of relatively equal bargaining power. thanks mostly to supreme conservatives, i might say practically rewriting the 1925 federal arbitration act, the share of nonunion firms subjected their workers to mandatory arbitration has exploded to 54% as of 2017, up from 2% in 1992, according to scholars kathryn stone and alexander colvin, the employee win rates in these privatize so-called courts is just 21%,

which is 59%, as is as often as in federal courts, and only 38% as often in state. corporations, meanwhile enjoy what scholars call repeat player advantage. the more often a firm appears before a private arbitrator, the less likely its employees are to prevail. arbitrary clauses, moreover, frequently bar employees from joining forces to vindicate they otherwise would enjoy under statutory law even when going it alone would be manifestly unjust, not to mention irrational. in one notorious case, a low level employee of accounting, ernst and young, would have had shell out some $200,000, a figure not disputed by ernst and young in expenses to recover roughly $4,000 for wage underpayment under the fair labor standards act. justice neil gorsuch for a narrow high court majority, upheld that outcome on the grounds that the employee had freely contracted to arbitrate his disputes.

in fact, ernst and young presented the arbitration clause in an email long after this employee, stephen morris, as his name, had been hired and he had to consent as a condition of continued employment. in other words, he was told, if you show up to work, the next day going forward, you agree to submit your disputes to arbitration. and according to a certain kind of classical economic theory that's very popular among the judiciary, but completely with real life. at that point, stephen morris had the ability renegotiate his agreement or or press for better. but in reality, as most of you know, what he really had to do was the only choice is to show up to work the next day because he had to pay a mortgage and pay for elder care and child care and so on. so things have to be this way. a better model would admit that coercion is inevitable in all human affairs, least in market activity. it would recognize that unchecked private coercion makes a mockery of our democratic

ideals, and it would insist such coercion be ameliorated by more robust political give and take between the asset rich few and the asset less many. this is the promise of what i call private. sorry, what i call political exchange capital ism. it was the philosophy that underpinned the new deal generating the mass prosperity that defined the three decades after world two and crucially, it formed a bipartisan consensus winning the allegiance, not just of progressives. but an earlier generation of conservatives. from eisenhower to nixon. these men weren't starry eyed socialists, but hard nose realists whom experience had alerted to the dangers of unchecked market power. political exchange capitalism describes world as it really is not the pre-industrial arcadia of yeoman farmers and independent. the premise for much market utopian ideology, but a machine driven economy characterized a

few colossal firms dominating most industries. its chief aspect as the economist john kenneth noted, is the absence of real price competition. that is the one thing supposedly needful under classical economic theory to prevent private coercion. that pattern had emerged by the late 19th century and has hardened since big tech rule ad markets, for example, would bring tears of embarrassment to the monocle. the eyes of any gilded age tycoon. galbraith wrote, if there are only a handful of firms in a typical industry, it follows that privately economic, economic power is less the exception than the rule. instead of waving competition as a talisman against political exchange, capitalism strengthens the hands of those subjugated by private, private power, especially in the labor market. thus, the new dealers resolved to make it easier for workers to mount what karl galbraith

famously called countervailing power. after decades in which government had hindered them from doing so, sometimes with brutal violence, countervailing power is similar to competition. only here, the counter pressure is exerted on the same side of a given market, not between producers or between employees and so on, but on the other side of a market not with competitors, but with customers and suppliers. as galbraith explained in this way, private economic is held in check by the counter veiling power of those who are subjugated to it. the first begets the second and justice sometimes requires state action. something even laissez faire types admit. so labor markets promoting countervailing power require requires government backing to offset the asymmetry that is otherwise created by employees going up against a few employers. otherwise, most rationally choose to put up with a bully boss or to suffer precarious

hours and low wages. or rather, take the risks associated with action. this was the logic behind the 1935 labor relations national labor relations act, which sought to encourage unionization and collective bargaining, and the 1938 fair labor standards act, which created federal minimum wage and overtime protections. the result? union membership peaked in 1945 at 33%, up from 2.7% at the turn of the 20th century and remained high throughout the 1950s and sixties. under pre-new deal conditions, the asset class went to survive or pitched battles against bosses that sometimes threatened social stability. post new deal. they could channel their demands through recognize unions and mass political parties. in a way, this model made explicit what ordinary people already knew that economic involves coercion. but it also gave them a measure of power to negotiate coercion to which they had long been

subjected. restoring political exchange capitalism. then, for most requires boosting union density. the share of the labor force belonging to labor organizations. today, that figure has sunk to percent in the private economy following a long decline that began, as you know, in the 1970s. now, apologists for the current state of affairs claim that this is because unions have their luster among their employees, among employees, or because automation and globalization shifted manufacturing out of the united states. yet organized labor is supposedly lousy. reputation is belied by recent polling showing that unions are more popular now than they have been in half century. indeed, the desire to be represented has steadily increased among nonunion workers since the 1970s, with mit study finding that nearly half of the nonunion labor force in 2017 would vote to join a union if if given the choice, meaning that roughly 58 million americans are

currently underrepresented. but what about the robots and china explanation? that too is overstated. as labor economist lawrence michel and his coauthors note in a 2020 study, many factoring union coverage, the share of workers who are either union members or otherwise covered by a collective bargaining. fell by 74% from 1977 to 2019. in nonunion non-manufacturing coverage fell by a comparable 60% over the same period. you can perhaps explain the manufacture sharing drop by pointing to robots and china, but you'd struggle to explain the comparable drop in non-manufacturing sectors. statistical analysis by michel, moreover, shows that overall union coverage only marginally changes. if we transpose today's the industrial price conditions to 1979 economy. or put another way. saving manufacturing wouldn't have necessarily saved the union. so if an american workers want

to unionize and the of manufacturing isn't the mean obstacle, then what accounts for labors doldrums? the answer is the same sort of private coercion that characterizes characterizes other dimensions of our economy. all made possible by political choices. and if they're made by possible political choices, then they can be reversed. in the nearly 90 years since the passage of the wagner act, lawmakers and often gop gop dominated labor boards have effectively nullified large chunks of the original law from creating a free speech right for employers to campaign against. yes, as if the two sides enjoy symmetrical power in the workplace to begin with. to effectively abolishing card check. to barring union representatives and even themselves from speaking in captive audience hearings designed to terrify big business and its political and media allies undermined the purpose of the wagner act. encourage union organizing and collective bargaining. despite these obstacles, a

ferment of union action is sweeping the labor market. starbucks baristas, delta flight attendants, kellogg's and john deere factory hands. railroad hands. dockworkers. screenwriters and many other groups have to unionize or to win better contracts under existing collective bargaining agreements. in april, 22, two years after christian smalls termination, a majority of workers at jfk voted to voted to have his independent amazon labor union represent them in collective bargaining. america finally isn't china. our political tradition cherishes human dignity and popular counter pressure against. elite, elite power. while the united states has always been a market society, the country has also given rise to many honorable traditions that have sought to bring the market system humane, democratic control from the jacksonian to progressive to populists, from teddy roosevelt to franklin roosevelt and to nixon and and

sorry to nixon and eisenhower. these traditions played decisive role in forging the first version of political exchange capitalism in the previous century, and once more, it's up to american workers, to our leaders, into a new consensus on their vigilance. our vigilance depend the broadly shared prosperity and checks against private tyranny without which there can be no land of the free. thank very much. and i'm delighted now to welcome senator rubio. [applause] >> i thank you. i apologize. i was distracted. i'll tell you what i was doing. i was text screaming at myself

for getting a parking kid at school at gainesville, florida. vacation watching at the university of florida. anyway, thank you for the first of all, thanks for writing this and for the work you've done in the steel. maybe i'll just come from my perspective becausetu really thk you touch on something. i was actually on a video conference today with some state legislators from georgia and asked about tech companies and what the federal government could do and how it could do this. it struck me and i said to them what i sit with the people and here's the example. there's one and he think this is truera in all of the country. there's generally one power company to matter where you live. its utility and there are allowedd to operate and basicaly a monopoly space, they are guaranteed a profit but the prophet are limited in the get in for the way it works you go to this public service commission say this amateur cost to generate power,le this is how much we are to charge people in order to make my statutorily protected profit. but the control of much money you make but they are monopoly. so imagine the electric company decides one day i'm not going to

provide electricity for people who l believe this, or people in this line of work or people or in this line of business. while it would be pretty dramatic if they were able to do that and maybe, maybe i shouldn't speak to this in the public square because maybe torso and we'll get some bright idea about what electric companies and utilities should be doing to people. we are really not that far off in many spaces. strikes me, tomorrow there's going to be this artificial intelligence meeting in the senate where many apparently many of these prominent, mark zuckerberg a supposedd be there, so his elon musk i think we may have a fight as well as part of this thing. you know the whole thing they're supposed t to fight whatever. and it struck me if you think about it and this is nothing personal against them per se but i would argue in a room with maybe up to 100 transcended his cup the two most powerful people in the room will not be members elected by the public, but two heads of important companies one in particular will with meta.

it's not because of wealth. it's because they control what is in essence beautifully in the 21stst century. matter ultra, ws it called an x they all get together. but let's say the first four, maybe the first five get together and decide, you know what we're going to do, we're going to destroy so-and-so business are individual. could they not really do that? could they not deny just about anybody a space in the public square, destroy your business that they refuse to provide you? services would be very. this is an extraordinary amount of power in the hands of the private sector. and it can be used for what people presume to be noble reasons and so forth. but it can also be used under tremendous public pressure to target political opponents, to target those who follow it, align the target who they may not agree with. that isn't many, and it can be used to threaten you. it can be how many people there today are not afraid to openly

and express their views on a topic or take a public position on either side of a debate. although it seems to be disproportionately on one side of most debates because they are afraid of the impact that could have on them, not just reputationally in many ways economically. and i think that's what you sort of touch upon. we have we are not built to think of the public, of the private square, of private companies as holding that amount of power over individuals. but that's how consolidated that those industries have become. and where that sort of leads is an area that i spent most of my time, not so much. i mean, obviously, i've touched on some of the things that you've written about and talked about here today, but primarily, really, is this a product of and it really kind of almost tracks pretty with my adult life. i graduated high school and i say graduated as a term of art from high school. in 1980, i was not a good student. in fact, i did not become a good student till i started paying for it. or shall i say borrowing for it. and then i started caring a lot more about school and things of that nature. but i graduated high school in

89. i'm a you know, graduate from the university of florida in 93. so just the world changed between 89 and 93. it changed quite dramatically. i grew up in an era i vividly recall, you know, growing up were like, remember the movie the day after where the world was supposed to end and this nuclear time, remember war games where matthew broderick into the pentagon and started a war game that almost ended the world. so i grew up in that world, right? it was the united states versus the union. good versus evil. reagan versus these devils and that and that. and then it all just sort of fell apart, literally like the berlin collapses. and i remember even though i was in college and i will admit it was not like the predominant thing on my mind at that time. i was aware of it and i knew it was a pretty big deal. and i and i thought about that. but the rest of the world did too. and we emerged from that with things. first of all, a real level of hubris of of a feeling that we won we free enterprise democracy had won, and communism and marxism had been defeated.

and so naturally the war was this cold war. and now everyone was to become a free enterprise economy and everyone was going to become a and you may say to yourself, well, you know, that was a noble endeavor. and that was certainly something that we should have aspired to. there's nothing but we made decisions on a presumption that was flawed. a couple of presumptions. the first is that now somehow a economy and, global economic commerce would replace the nation state. there was a saying, i don't know who to attribute it to, but but i know it was out there because i heard it at the time and many years later, never have two countries with mcdonald's ever gone to war with each other. well, that's obviously sounds silly, but it was widely. am i right that i don't care? what does it matter anymore? these fact checkers. but i'm sure it was really said because i've heard it. and if it. there you go. exactly. i don't know who to attribute it to. so and i imagine people take credit for it. i guess the point being is that this idea that somehow inner commerce now between nation states or between people would now replace nation states that

no longer it matter, national interests are no longer really as relevant because we really couldn't fight with each other and it all be worked out that way. the second assumption that was made is that that the world was sort of at utopia that we had reached not only with the global commerce replace nation state and the national interest as a result, but in fact that we were really nothing more at this point, not citizens of a country or members of a community or what we were now all either investors and or consumers in global marketplace. the third assumption that was made is as a result of all this, the natural order of things should be that the market outcome would always deliver the most efficient, which is 100% true. if the market is allowed to work, it will deliver the most efficient outcome, and that would drive investment. and so who cares if the factory in your town or the employer that had been the anchor of a community for 30 years closed down because it was now cheaper to do what you used to do somewhere else, not just because of automation by the way, but

because of cheaper labor. who cares? it's going to go over there. that means lower prices, right? you go to the store, you'll pay a lot less for whatever it is they made there, even though it's made halfway around the world and they have to ship it back to you. but here's the great news. a better job is coming. it will replace the job that was wiped out. it will actually pay you more. you'll be happier. and that was another assumption that was made in this laboratory. but we all know that's not how it worked out and what we've learned. and i say all this to you guys, by the way, is someone basically and, you know, grew up in the ranks, the free enterprise orthodoxy of the republican party and of the center right. and one of the reasons why is because the people on the other side of this debate were either socialists or communists or a combination thereof. and i felt like those people are wrong, they're crazy. these things are really bad for the world. and so i'm the opposite of whatever that is. and that was the only opposite that was offered. and so these assumptions sort of guided public policy and in some ways built a consensus. so that's why you get to 2001 is

like, sure, let's trying to join the trade organization, let them in because don't worry, yeah, they're going to cheat. yes, they're going to steal jobs from us, but they're going get rich. and when they get rich, they'll become just like us and they'll stop cheating and other pretty stupid gamble. but that was the notion why were these things wrong? the assumptions were wrong for a couple of reasons. the first is nation state will always matter because the most essential to human nature will never change. 5500 years of recorded history teaches that, and that's why history repeats itself. now we change the way we live. we change the we dress, we change the way we speak. we change all kinds of things. but human nature will never change. and one of the core elements of human nature is this desire to belong. and that's why anywhere in the world that you put people together to ten people, they immediately want to join something and band together to do something. it's just a natural. and one of those things in the modern era and i mean the modern era in the last three or 400 years is the rise of nation states and belonging matter. so that's the first reason why it was wrong. now, the idea that we had that that would no longer matter.

we would all now be citizens of a global economy, citizens of the world. we would you we wouldn't matter anymore. you know, that was a that people adopted that who could to adopt who had passports and could travel all over the world and went to all these forums. but for most people in america, that was never true. but it was especially not true for the leaders of china and russia and other countries who said no we're going to stay with nation state interests. thank you very. we're going to still continue to focus on the nation state. but the other area that was made was about the jobs and the mistake that was made there was the belief that jobs were simply like the place that provides you a paycheck and jobs are a lot more than about a paycheck. first, a paycheck really matters, but a job is not a job, just a job. there are jobs and then there are stable jobs. there are jobs and then there are reliable jobs. there are jobs and there are jobs that you can actually a family on. and our economic numbers don't mention that it almost i always sort of like think to myself every time i hear the monthly report, 100,000 new jobs created

what they don't tell is, well, what kind of jobs are these jobs are going to be around in six months. do these jobs pay enough? they pay at least 40 or $50,000. at a minimum. you could afford to i don't know, you know, raise a family be a member of a community. well, can you rely on that job existing three or four years from now so you can actually a member of a community. so that's the first thing. they don't tell you. the second thing i'll tell you is about underemployment. what about i don't know what the percentage is up to now, 30, 35% of people that have these degrees and can't find a job. and the degree got and they borrowed money for that degree. but they can't find a job. are these are the kinds of jobs. and the other point is so you when you yank jobs away from people, you don't just rob them of their dignity and their purpose. you actually has a corrosive effect on family formation and on community because if you think about a community, the anchor of a community is those stable reliable jobs. because unless you have stable, reliable jobs, you don't have coaches for the little, you don't have presidents for the pta, you don't have the civic organizations that actually hold the country together. one of the notions that was lost

in this era was that america is not an economy. america is not a government. america is a nation. and the glue, the fiber of a nation, not the government. the government is what, you know, creates laws and sort of us and does all sorts of things, but but it's not the country and it's not an economy. we have an economy. we need an economy. but our our country, the fiber and the basic elements of a country, our families and community, the two most important institutions in any and i don't care how wealthy you are, how much your gdp influentl your government may be if you have family and community and they are not strong, country will not be strong. it will be weak and it will be divided. and those are the economic implications that that had. and so the struggle now for people and sort of a realization that i as i said, look, i don't think there's anything wrong with learning and then adapting what learn to what's before you. and beginning in about 2014. 2015 certainly by 2016.

part of that happens to be on the presidential trail. i'm on there's a certain count in. number one is if americans doing so well, why is everybody so -- at each other and at the world in general? there's a lot of that. and it was shocking to me, because i'm a product of the american dream. my mom was a stock clerk at, kmart, the last jobs she had. my dad was, a banquet bartender, and they owned a home and they retired with dignity and they left all for their kids better off. i'm in the u.s. senate running for president like this is a great country. why isn't everybody happy about it? and you encounter people say, well, you know, because i worked in this place for 30 years and my dad before me and one day they got first they cut my pay and then they just got up and left. and now what i do now i can't find a job that replaces that one. and they tell me, why don't you learn how to code and move to san francisco? and this was back in 16 when people still lived in san francisco. and and they said and said, i'm not you know, it doesn't work for me. it completely disconnects them. and and so it disconnects them from community and family from all the things that make life

worth living and the implication that that had. so we lost that perspective. and the challenge then became, i despise, i think, socialism is a failure everywhere it's been tried. if you look at the southern border, the united states, a substantial percentage of the people there come from socialist countries called venezuela, nicaragua and cuba, it's failed everywhere. communism, it's failed. marxism has failed everywhere. so i believe in the you know, i believe in the market. i believe in market and capitalism because it is the one economic model capable of creating not just prosperity, but widespread prosperity that allows you to build society anchored in family and in community. we're not everyone's going to be a billionaire or even a millionaire, but you're going to produce the largest of good paying jobs for as many people as possible, but only if you make that a priority. only if that becomes part of the equation. john, when you make public policy decisions. and so when you make public policy under the assumption that, well, this policy generate 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. you need that. but 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 as many people as possible. americans, in our case, and that's the perspective that was lost. it didn't matter where the wealth was being created, it didn't matter where the wealth was being concentrated. it didn't matter if the wealth was the product of jobs created somewhere else. what mattered was whether some company with an address in the united states, although american and no other way in terms of they viewed themselves did well when the bell rang at the end of the day and the stock market and that was the perspective we lost and here's the other quandary that you reach the and i believe in the market but the market it's a tool it exists to serve the national interest, not the 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 it most certainly does. the market says is more efficient to buy 88% of the active ingredient in our pharmaceuticals in china because they subsidize it, because they still come because of lower level whatever it may be. is it international interested this on a foreign competitor/adversary for 80% of the active ingredients in our pharmaceutical or to quite a few% of the rare earth in them or minerals on earth? or any of the other industrial capabilities? what about during covid were you couldn't make mask them could make this and now may we did need that many masks i suppose but maybe at the time at thal these panic those going on about, for the first time we come face-to-face with the industrialization and the national interest composed of it. it's easy to talk about it simply from would be greking abk to the '50s. what i'm saying is that lack of

industry capacity has a national security component to it, a national economic security, but also has a job component. i published a report the week ago talked about the standing of men inla the workplace, and in particular what i would focus on her men without college degrees. why are men with a college degree struggling in the 21st it century to find jobs? the large district jobs are largely sportive orchestral type jobs and they vanish as well. we can go on and on but the point is we come to point with this realization is before us and the two choices are not the market is always right do whatever cup which of the market whatever ultimately just that's the right one, or let the government take over the means of production and poor bunch of government money into every endeavor that has an american flag sticker on the door. those are two false choices. but we have to return to an era in which we understand the proper role of the market and it is is to serve the nation and that requires a strong re-embraced the concept of national interests at every level. that does not make you a nationalist is a word thrown

around these days as it is out of cuba what's happening in the rest of the world or what public about america. i don't only care about america but to do care about america before anything else, , not because i'm inhumane but because of an american elected official does that put the american national interest as the first topic of thought you in any decision, well who is? the bolivian senate? the senate of, you know, i don't know, lithuania? was supposed but the american national interest first? you want to think about the corporate setting where the always argue our job is to protect our shareholders, my job is to protect my shareholders which happens to be the minute women of the kind of american families of this country.e' so i don't think there's anything t wrong in saying numbr one we need to make national interest the number one objective, the number one archery we apply to any public policy decision at the federal level. number two, that it is in the national interest to have an economy that empowers workers to

have dignified and stable work so they can build families and committees. number three, that should extend to our engagements around the world. there are things, terrible things that happen in the world and if we can help, and we should, but number one before we decide how we get involved and how much we get involved, what is the core national interest of the united states? that's more true today than ever. we are no longer the world sole superpower. we're no longer a europol world we have the luxury of playing every conflict or in everything that's going on around the world. we can care about all of them, we can try to help where we can but by and large we do have do not pick our fights more than ever because there's a great and as powerful ass his country is t doesit not have unlimited power. it does not have unlimited reach and it does not have unlimited resources and has to prioritize them in individual political era. i'll close with one last observation.th i've talked about the ai thing and interesting because i'm a firm believer you b basically cannot hold back technological events, no matter how h hard you try. technological advances are going

to happen and every one is freaking out about her first artificial intelligence. a couple points about the primary like this artificial intelligence is going to become something that and there's a lot of he knows the answer to, okay, but is b a going to be technoloy that makes humans do what you meant to do better, faster, more actually? oryza going toi be technology that replaces humans? i mean completely.g as a going to be automation that a loved one worker to do the work of five? oryza going to be something that takes the human element out completely? we don't know the answer to that but what strikes me about it is there's a lot more freaking out going on about ai right now which is not yet really on top of us, in the levels that it could be much more than it was about automation. some of the same people got the win but automation that'sau goig to be good because there will be less workers but the workers will make more money, or to worry about the industrialization because were allma be software engineers and will all make a lot of money. but now the same people are freaking out. you know why? for the first time with a massive disruptive technological

advance that threatens not the blue-collar worker, not the $40,000 a dollars a year worker, it threatens the people that are making a lot of money and suddenly realizing they may not need me anymore. one of the cornerstones of the hollywood strike is screenwriters don'tma want to be replaced by a machine and actors that don't want to be replaced by a fake avatar aware of his that's going to replace them. so you think about it. now we're seeing a disruption that impacts white-collar highek educated or higher standard of living workers and all of a sudden now they are freaked out about some revolutionary change going on in society. but that interested not exist when it came to the american worker, and whether it was out of malice, out of or and stupidity when we decided we were no longer a country that need to make things and create jobs that can voice many americans as possible in a state what, we did real damage to the country and the national fiber. the reason why i know this is true because it's i not just happening to us. virtually every internationalize country in the world, particularly in the west, is

going through going to similar domestic upheavals where there's immigration or the state of the economy or government policies on climate and the like, because they are all feeling the exact same thing. these decisions and assumption that it led this world and our country for 30 years were a mistake, and now we have to confront that mistake and hopefully reverse it. it's my personal although i think you're little more pessimistic than i am that the republican party will be the home of that movement but it won't be easy because the are lot of roots deep roots that go into everything from intellectual world that lead public policy too muchf of the traditional center-right institutions. but there'se change. we've made a lot of progress in four or five years. we've a lot more work to do and i thanknk you for the invitation to talk about because i do think what you discuss about tyranny is a byproduct of economic decisions that actually empowered the centralization and vertical integration of certain industries that have extraordinary power at a time

when we all felt as long as its private sector, don't worry about it because it would be a competitive after that will regulate how they behave, there is no competitive for amazon. there is no competitor for google. there really isn't. and so now we reap what we sow. salima, thank you for the chance to talk you about all this. i look forward to your questions. [applause] >> thank you, senator rubio. i want to invite our panelists now to join us up here on stage. the audience will bear with us just for a second. we will get mics appeared then go straight into our panel discussion. [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> all right. we are all good to go. i want to start -- all right. i want to start a panel discussion here tonight really where senator rubio left us off, which is a question of where this book fits on the political spectrum. so rob, you write for the

american conservative, have been a longtime commentator in the conserves space. the book is j that a lot of criticism from the right. i want to start on that note. if there'sok a point in your bok where you kind of retail that narrative that you mention in your remarks about sort of the political economic history of this country, , especially in te post-depression area. there's one that stuck to me where you saidov part of what drove the prosperity that we saw in the middle of the past century with a commitment to limits, and the something that's been a theme of a lot of things that i've written about from a conservative perspective. i want to give you this opportunity to answer your critics, , however you're not a full socialist quite yet? >> great question. so the smartest reviews of this book have come from marxists, and they argued that this book -- what it puts forward is a a fundamentally conservative project, whereas often when i

get it withnt center-right centerleft broadcasters or reviewers they will say well, it seems like to bring its a right wing brain when it comes to abortion that you have more of a left wing mentality when it comes to economy and how do you reconcile those two? whereas in fact, for me a commitment to a market that exist within the limits of the common good arises from the same place. it's informed by my catholic faith and catholic social teaching which is as early as the 19 century the popes recognize that unhindered markets were creating vast disparities of power and wealth, and that the way to combat that is one of the ways of course by allowing workers to encouraging them to organize, to bargain collectively, and at otherer places for the state to intervene in markets to ensure that we 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 then turned back on when they turn to let say cultural issues. it all kind that comes from the same place. it's very important to know that the new deal project, the new deal order and what preceded it, herbert hoover laid down many of the frameworks that were subsequently formalized or given muchmu greater scale by fdr, the idea of class compromise was seen asiv the conservative thing to do in the face of market disruption and then in the face of social unrest that was coming about because workers didn't earn enough to afford to go to the field producing. that was leading social instability. so this model of what you might call class compromise is not class antagonism. it recognizes class antagonism is real but it seeks to reconcile the classes rather than take the class antagonism although it into the abolition of one class by other.

so yeah, there's nothing contradictory about being conservative and supporting ava kind of a socially managed capitalist vision. >> so one quick follow-up for senator rubio on this before you bring in the rest of the panel. you touched on this at the end of your remarks that you are perhaps more optimistic than others about remaking the gop as a working-class party. i'm wondering, first come if you can spend on that little bit that optimism and what you think are some of the main barriers to achieving that sort of political realignment?er >> first of all i think that's what the party writ large is in terms of its voters. one of the things really starkly paired to be when i ran for president is out different people like i go camping somewhere ina the here the economy, these people are sending jobs overseas all these things and then you go somewhere where donors who live different lives and live different expenses and youwe realize thers a massive disconnect in the party between its donor base and

its voter base. as much as it else the trump campaign sort exposed that because he challenged all sorts of conservative orthodoxy in his campaign and sort of revealed hey, what the donors. this was a good idea, not every donor, i think that's unfair but generally speaking, or the tradition of the party and whether voters were recognize a difference. the demand is there. someone is going to be the voice of that group. one of the things that challenge is at least from my perspective is that traditional political spectrum as we've identified it for 25 orin 30 years. we think some alike if you if you hear 150 years ago the sender, the right, left, the political parties, they look very different. there was an era where there were conservative democrats are quite liberal republicans sweep of multiple realignments and reinventions of how the parties aligned and so forth. i think polarization as driven sapeople into two camps he stay. where some of the americas is look at what i'm socialism, i do want government controlled means

of production. i do want a government telling you what to do with every aspect of my life. but i do a public policy officials that number one about creating an economy that not just people can get rich but also people can find good stable paint jobs. there's a market for that. there are people like look i feel terrible for what's happening in the world but at the end of the day we all set to do what's in america's national interest. first and foremost. and how we react around the world and even here domestically. there's aet market for that. that market is going to be met by some political movement. it won't be easy because as i i said their sentiments amount of infrastructure over 25 or 30 years that's been built on this traditional paradigm. ibu think it's an inevitable heevolution and i think the republican party is right now the only place that can be the home of it because the social radicalized portion of the democratic party makes it impossible for it to be, it's just a hostile environment to the working-class voter who was sort of looking for common sense

and balance in politics that reflect that just the economic needs but the general general preferences for themselves, their families and the future of thenk country. i don't think it's really easy but i certainly think that's what it winds up. >> i want too bring in math on that because it's probably fair to say you are a man of the left. you are a left-wing perspective on this panel. as you know, i'm sure our audience knows, recently launched a new magazine compact magazine under the sort of hypothesis that there are enough voices, disparate voices on the left and right that we need to highlight and emphasized in this new journal. i'm curious, first response to senator rubio is optimism on a gop working-class party and where you think maybe some of the limitsit to that left-right cooperation might lie? >> yet. so i look at it, so i'm a

democrat and a progressive democrat, and i look at the problem as sort of like both parties i kind of in a race, right? who's going to find the voice that speaks to the angry or the angry, frustrated person out there who just sees how disconnected the political elites really are? and just to give a quick example, where both parties could do it, today is the first day of the google antitrust trial. which is been in which was brought by trumpian 2020 and has been continued by biden, and either party could, and our states involved, and either party could win and become the dominant governingng party. what i think is happening and what your book is really about is a specific language of moral reform that you are rejecting, which is a language of efficiency. because the language ofec efficiency, the linkage of

economics, modern economics is a language of moral reform that has taken over both parties, the corporate world, thinking world, policymaking world, and it traps as they did not seem power. different parties with different philosophies about to be. once you arere removed from that sort of world weather is no power, a utopian world, which is a trap, all of the sudden the possibility of building a society opens up. what you see, what's happened to me and i think it happens, it happens anyone who is sort of wendy doesn't seep out, the next he does, it's like there are many ways to craft a a societ. we just have to choose to do it, editing the party that decides to do that first is a party that is going to be sort of dominant over a generation. >> that makes sense. bradley, you are the young conservative on the panel. it struck me that perhaps some of the most, the most praise

from the right at least has come from younger conservatives. there are lot of the sort of older generation who have penned this but if you're looking for praise and write its and began a generation. i'm what you can speak to that why did a special based on your expect as a young conservative? >> yeah, it has been from jack or conservatives, not old guard types that are continually turning out white papers on why we need another corporate tax cut and wife we should have another four years of republican organization pursuing that. some statistics that sohrab has in his book that most about any audience probably knows, right, wages stagnant since 1973, their productivity of a laborer going up 7% since% since that same year and yet their real wages have only gone up 9%. and then if you look at a little deeper into that data you see that wages are stagnant at the gains that have been made are concentrated amongst those wage

earners above the 75th percentile, right? how do you get there? education. education has increased 200% over that same timeframe. a lot of necessary goods, goods that we considered necessary for family formation, healthcare, college, homes, right? we've seen the rapid increase in those types of prices. in time and time again when young people are talked to about this, they said yes, my student loan debt did factor into me elaine getting married, delaying buying a home, delaying having children. and so there's at the same thing as argument the old guard made, if you're educated you can actually get into those runs of wage labor that are seeing those gains. well, since 2000, the average salary at/wage for college graduates has p been pretty volatile and is currently on a downswing.

.. haven't gotten a good answer from two political parties that are on appeasing corporate power and setting up or continuing that neoliberal structure that. saurabh so eloquently lies lines out in the book and young conservative isvs i think are seeing this fallacy in their own >> in their own lives and you know, republican politicians, not senator rubio going on the stump, wallets, wallets, wallets, paychecks, paychecks, paychecks. everyone thinks that taxes are okay until it hits their wallet. well, young people are seeing those in the costs of all of these goods and they need to start families. young conservatives are realizing that there's, i think, an incorrect

anthropology that undergirds this that pushes family to the side, pushes nations to the side and focuses more on this consent, choose, at-will contracting and they might not articulate it in a direct way, but they see that that kind of arrangement that so much of the-- we can call it the uni-party rests on, it's false. it harkens back to before the time in the goldwater years in 1964. you look at the history of the republican party. for the longest time, i think, since really the republican party was founded until the roosevelt task split, the number one issue for republicans was the tariff, must have a general tariff, if you go down to the-- one of the smithsonians down there you'll see in the exhibit a brochure from republicans that say, you know,

democrat-free trade leads to poverty and despair, republican protectionism leads to prosperity and goodwill to all men or something like that, right? that's the tradition that more young conservatives are recovering in trying to navigate out of these problems that this neo liberal consensus has left us with. >> so i want to turn to, perhaps the chief remedy in the book, which is union memberships, the need boost and support unions. i mentioned this, but there's a lot -- there are many statistics on that that show that, you know, a lot of workers do want to join unions, but i think another statistic that's kind of helpful to put this into light was a survey done by american compass which asked why potential union members would not want to be part of a union and the top sort of reasons why were, one,

unions, political involvement is toxic. two, member dues, three, corruption, and then way down the list at number nine was fear of retaliation from the company. so, ashby, i want to bring you in on this and because you've done work on the labor and labor movement. why potential won't join unions, and for our economy, how we can get over it. >> bear in mind becoming a union member, it's not like the n.r.a. or the democratic socialists of america or something like that. the main way that people are union members is incidental by becoming an employee of a shop that's organized. 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 really going to be built around the issues that actually matter to those employees who elect a union. so, i think these sort of abstract, or these surveys are a bit abstract. i think they're interesting and so far as that sort of point to kind of reputations that unions have, that are built up in certain ways. so over some of the-- what was the top reason you said? >> the reason to join the political involvement is toxic. >> oh, political involvement is toxic. so for the reasons i was talking about, you know, actual political orientation of, you know, members, a lot of union members are republicans already and so different unions are going to have different sort of make-ups and some are going to be more conservative than others. but 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 line and sort of very conservative and holding a sign at the exact level and exact same way. this is a labor demonstration in the same way that one that's much more sort of boys boisterous, and all kinds of people want to get together and have a say at work and have a contract with their co-workers and employer and having something that's very important that sohrab touches on in the book, that's what senator rubio was talking about, having stability in your job and being able to count on it, reliability and stability, you can't be dismissed for no reason or for no reason that's

not illegal. >> and one more thought on the question of unions being perceived not wrongly by many workers, but being politicized and specifically politicized on the side of the democratic party. our friend michael lind points out in his recent book, at one point he visited the page of the leader of the afl-cio and her pin tweet was something like, you know, well-- i'm slightly paraphrasing, but we stand for maximal reproductive freedoms and, you know, as michael says, lots of workers who are, you know, either are covered by the afl-cio or would want to be covered don't share those views. so, what's that's reflecting is the degree to which, you know, organized labor has become very much a part of the democratic party. but one thing-- one major reason for that is, you know, over the past two generations the labor movement

has often, more often than not gotten the back of the hand from the republican party so it's been forced to shift to the democrats, i think, by political necessity. and therefore, even those workers who are coming to the republican party as voters, they don't have an organized vote, voiced within the republican party in the same way that organized labor is an organized part of the democratic coalition. but if we had a republican party that was more friendly to 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. it's national labor relations boards will just be kind of made up of union busters and so on. so i want to turn it to the audience, one, maybe two questions. if you have a questions please raise your hand and we'll do whatever we can, yes, right over here.

(inaudible) just curious, what degree forms employee --. >> sure, when i became a catholic i was working for a publication that pushes the kind of neo liberal dogma, right, tax cuts, free trade over everything else. the more i read the pope's teachings on social issues on modern-- catholic social teaching, pt less the attempt to synthesize catholocism and paul ryan seemed tenable. neil mentioned limits, the centrality of limits and the classical and christian tradition. you know, i think there's a

liberating aspect in being kind of having a catholic view on things because you look at a market and you neither fetishize the market nor completely turn away from it. you say it's a tool, it's subject to the imperative of the common good and therefore, there are things that must limit it. and so that kind of attitude for respect for limits is, i think, at the heart of my political economic thinking. >> can i add one thing on here? one of the things i found very interesting about the reviews of the book that were critical. they quote john locke and go, a-ha, i gotcha. the catholic social teaching, catholic social teaching and theorists use social language and getting at somewhat different things and that's the and throw anthropological thing

i was alluding to, the at will contract mindset that's completely foreign to really the entire western canon pre-you know, 15th, 16th century and that's kind of, for me, my faith has rediscovered that sense of, when we talk about equality and freedom and human dignity. right? those are the type of freedom and dignity that we're talking about when we're motivating those questions. very atypical policy proposals you might hear from conservatives of this day and age. >> can i ask, i've spoken on this before in the past. the catholic social doctrine is fascinating and it's pretty deep, but rooted in basic principles, the individual has dignity. where do you derive dignity

from, from faith perspective because you're made in the image of the creator. and also what you have the opportunity to do, what you fulfill dignity from, it isn't wealth, status, or how many material possessions and it is from at its fundamental core, it's argued that man was made to work. and so, what it argues is that human beings have an obligation to work, but then goes on to say, so, yes, in a functioning economy, people have an obligation to work and public policy to foster an economy that creates that work. there are two sides of the same coin. so, yeah, if you should be-- if you expect to go out and work, you also have to have an economy that produces the work. it didn't just be produces the work and human dignity. there's a definition for the role of officials, that is to promote the common good. a speech i gave about common good capitalism and the argument that capitalism is the

tool that we use, the definition what is in the common good is what our politics are about. i think there are fundamental principles that we brought agreement on and one is that we need to have economic policies that create work for those who-- we are expecting to work. and the kind of work that allows you to do the things that make life worth living and offer human flourishing and that's what we don't have an answer for, for young americans. and you went to school, you get a degree, that takes seven, eight years, borrow some money, it doesn't matter, you'll make it back, a great investment. and outside of a handful of jobs, figure out how to do this, if you figure out how to invent a page on the internet where people can connect with each other you can become a billionaire, other than that sort of thing, what is the guarantee that, to americans. i don't mean guarantee that you're going to be wealthy, you're willing to do x. you'll find a job at that pays you enough so you don't have to stay up at night worried that

you're going to get laid off every moment and lose everything you have and who is going to raise these kids and why should i get married if have a community and then have to move every two years. we're the first generation that leaves the next generation getter off, and i think we're living it. anecdo anecdotal, members of my family are at least 10 years behind where i was home ownership, achievement and the like. when i was 30 i was 10 years ahead of where they are in their 30's and i think that has a dramatic impact on the country moving forward that i don't think we have fully yet absorbed. >> just briefly. yeah, i just want-- it's important to realize that neo liberalism is based on faith. like its religious zealotry, and i saw like--

real quick, i saw senator hawley introduced a bill on usury cap which is introduced periodically and the level of anger towards that, there was a metaphysical rage. like how dare you. right? and that puts fine when you propose new ideas or saying, hey, this isn't working. they're like how dare you? because it's a criticism of their religion, right? that's, i think, important, faith works in both ways. >> that sounds like when i increased the child tax credit, how dare you. that needs to go to machine. >> you monster. >> i had mentioned at the outset unfortunately we're on a tight timeline, we need to leave it there for today. just a few closing notes. first of all, if you've not already gone and bought tyranny, inc., please do, an important and provocative book. and keep up with everything that sohrab is doing, the magazine as well as his weekly

column at the american conservative. check it out and housekeeping note as i machined-- as i mentioned at the out set please stay in your seats until the panelists have left the room. please join me in thanking our panelists. [applause] ♪♪ . >> if you're enjoying book tv sign up for our newsletter using the qr code on the screen. to receive the schedule of upcoming programs, author discussions, book festivals and more. book tv, every sunday on c-span2 or anytime online at book tv.org. television for serious readers. >> weekends on c-span2 are an intellectual feast. every saturday american history tv documents america's story, and on sundays, book tv brings youhe latest in nonfiction

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