>> shop now or anytime on c-span shop.org. >> live sunday, december 3 on in-depth author and berkeley law professor john u joins tv to take calls about the us supreme court. push and trump administrations and more. the book includes crisis and command, the lender in chief, donald trump's fight for presidential power and the politically incorrect guide to the supremeourt. join with your phone calls and text. in depth with john you live sunday, deceer 3 at noon on book tv on c-span2.

>> good evening everyone. my name is emile, executive director of the american conservative pleased to welcome you in washington and watching us on c-span to our book launch event force sohrab amari's tyranny inc., how private power crushed american liberty and what to do about it. the gathering is organized by the bottom community foundation. it seeks to advance appreciation for roman law, greek philosophy and judeo-christian religion . it does this by promoting scholarship, offering educational programs for young professionals and offering conferences like tonight's event . this event is sponsored by my organization the american conservative .

it exists to advance a main street vision for conservatism. we pursue our mission throw our print magazine and online journalism as well as select events like the one you are attending tonight. we were founded in 2000 2/20 years ago to reignite conversations we felt conservatives had neglected. our magazine was a rare voice against the iraq war in athe early days and a commitment to a foreign policy of realism and restraint continues to animate our publication but our realism was greater than that one on issue . we returned to families as the center of our political discourse and felt they were paid let service and ignored when policymaking. most pertinent we wanted to recalibrate the conversation around political economy. we wanted to advance the

interests of american workers against a globalized free trade regimes that prioritize corporate profits in the concerns of realworkers . now if you've read tyranny incorporated which the washington post called anomalously sensible which i guess is a compliment but if you've read it like the washington post did you'll find many stories of these workers attempting to navigate an economic order and in many ways the book and does the disposition that animated our pages for 21 years. healthy skepticism of bigots in all forms and preference for main street over a wall street but we also welcome honest disagreement about the best ways to advance those interests so hopefully we will get to discuss some of

the sobhari's provocative statements. before we start i want to ouintroduce tonight speakers before handing you over to the author of the book . first sohrab amari is founder and editor of context magazine, contributing editor r to our publication and contributing writer for the new statesman. she spent nearly a decade as an editor and columnist at the wall street journal and as the op-ed editor of the post. his latest book is of f course tyranny inc., a private power crushedamerican liberty and what to do with it just out from penguin . next marco rubio is the senior us senator from florida and author most recently of decades of decadence, how our spoiled elites view american inheritance of liberty published earlier this year. matthew stoler is director of research at the american economic liberty project and author of the hundred year war between not see power and democracy published by simon

and schuster in 2019. he has served as advisor and write a newsletter on monopolies. ashley crowder is a contributor to compact magazine and last but not least is my colleague at the american conservative bradley levin , doing excellent work for us. you may think that he's older than his years but he's very young, one of those generation z with no memories of that terrible day 22 years ago just yesterday and who can give us a perspective of conservativeshave come of age during the height of the private tyranny . so just quit couple of notes on how tonight event will proceed, she will start us off in a few minutes with opening remarks drawing from core arguments for 10 to 15 minutes and after that we will hear from senator rubio and i will invite the full panel to join us for discussion.

our schedule is tightly packed but we will take one or two questions from the audience. either way we will close at 7:45 people can move to their dinner plans and please remain in your seats to allow the speakers to speak first. with that join me in welcoming sohrab amari. >> thank you all for being here. i should start by saying i am grateful to the american conservative for cosponsoring this gathering. thanks to emile's steadfast support for my work and thanks to the other panelists, not least senator

rubio who has shown leadership in pushing my party to reclaim its dogma. both to endorse this book and not to taketime out of a busy legislative schedule . so to begin, i'd like to pan out to a global picture. four 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 dozens of societies built on coercion gave way to one built on consent. more recently however, coercion had made a depressing come back with many regions back flooding into kleppe tock receipt, authoritarianism and ideological dictatorships . o to see the severity of freedoms global fund consider a single news story from china where the leading democratic horizons opened up by earlier market reforms s have been shuttered by the

chinese regime. within the spring of 2020 height of the pandemic when a meatpacker at a slaughterhouse had had enough . the state owned firms of subject workers to a digital pan opticon, tracking their moves, chinese bosses made no bones about this all presents surveillance . it stoked a culture of fear reminding workers the government is continuously monitoring them and their failure to meet quotas result in.pay. at the outset chinese authorities identified slaughterhouses as essential enterprises. management ordered employees to put in ever larger ships at a moment when covid was poorly understood. that cavalier attitude prompted john to act.

monday in april he led all walk out of his colleagues. their demand was reasonable. they called for the complex to be closed and were stringently sanitized. john was terminated that day. framing the walkout as a violation of covid rules the firm's counsel denounced his actions as unacceptable and arguably illegal in internal memos. voicing dissent at a state owned firm in the people's republic is never easy but must now be framed as a sanitary threat. china continues to silence dissident workers and to resist efforts to organize them . actually i lied. none of these things took place in the middle kingdom. i borrowed the language of my news story verbatim from reporting about events that transpired here in the united

states. it isn't a government owned chinese slaughterhouse that used a digital pan opticon, and it wasn't a chinese slaughterhouse that terminated a worker for leading a walkout at the height of the pandemic over its employer's careless attitude. that would be the us condo on red amazon founded by jeff pazo's . the real john ming is named christian small. on a warehouse facility on staten island. at the height of the pandemic he became alarmed as his colleagues became sick. human resources dismissed his concerns telling another worker to keep her illness on thedownload according to the new york times.

then he led his walkout, the act for which amazon fired him . an amazon employer described small as not smart or articulate according to internal memos obtained by life magazine. vice news, i apologize. this from the company that would elbow its way to the forefront of corporate america's black livesactivism in the wake of george floyd's murder . since then smalls fought to organize the 6000 workers despite ferocious antiunion activity typical of the firm including prounion pamphlets and surveilling where workers congregating on the sidewalk according to the times . we are used to thinking of coercion as something that happens over there like tyrannical systems who lack checks and balances 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 driven graphic terms focused

cinstead on who is meeting the coercion we reach a unsettling new understanding. coercion is all too common in supposedly non-coercive societies like ours provided we pay attention to the responsibility of private tyranny. our reigning economic ideology tells us in the private sector no one can force us to do anything. competition ensures we are free to find a better deal elsewhere . the laissez-faire theorist hailed more competition as the only method by which our activities can be adjusted without coercive authority. most milton friedman insisted the central feature of market society is that it prevents one person from interfering with another in respect of the host of its activities . but this is utopian thinking

in some ways as idealistic and dangerous and other modern utopias that came to legitimate real-world oppression in the previous century. market utopianism has yielded a society shot through with private coercion. coercion we can't accept at the ballot box or at the court system by other democratic means precisely because it islabeled private . take the fact that a third of the 25 million americans employed in food service receive less than a weeks notice in their upcoming schedules according to university of california sociologist daniel snyder . justin time scheduling tended to shift the downsides associated with period's of low demand. in addition to wage charity because you can never be sure if you have enough wages workers treated this way reports sleeping poorly and

suffering mentally as a result and their children are more likely to show signs of anxiety if acted out to behave in school and it doesn't take a rocket scientist connect to connect the dots to predictable thoughts of their parents inability to spend regular time with them. then there are today's lopsided agreements. these days when you sign on the dotted line for a new job you agreed to a near-total surveillance of your digital life including confiscation of your personal devices, use of software to monitor your communications and even recording of your voice for commercial licensing is no longer about using your picture in a company brochure or consider commercial arbitration, the process originally intended to resolve disputes to equal bargaining power. thanks to supreme court conservatives practically rewriting the 25 arbitration act they share of nonunion

firms subjecting their workers to mandatory arbitration has exploded to 54 percent as of 2017 from two percent in 1992 according to legal scholars catherine stone and alexander colton. the employee when wind rates is 21 percent which is 59 percent as often as the federal courts and 38 percent as often in state courts. corporations enjoy what scholars call repeat player advantage. the more awesome a firm appears the last likely its employers are to prevail. arbitration frequently bars employers from joining forces to vindicate rights they would enjoy under statutory law, even when going in alone would be unjust not to mention irrational.

in one case alone level employee of accounting giant ro burns and young would have had to shell out $200,000 figure not disputed by ernst and young and expenses to recover roughly thousand dollars from wage underpayment under the fair labor standards act . the justice writing for a narrow high court majority upheld that outcome on the ground the employee and contracted to arbitrate his disputes . in fact ernst and young presented arbitration in an email long after its employee had been hired to enhance consent of the condition of an continued employment, in other words if you show up to work 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 discordant with real life at that point stephen morris had the ability to renegotiate his agreement or press for better terms in reality what he had to do was only show up to work the next day because he

had to pay for mortgage and child care and elder care so things don'thave to to be this way . a better model would admit coercion is inevitable in all human affairs. it recognizes unchecked coercion makes a mockery of our democratic ideals and it would insist such coercion be ameliorated by a more robust political is and take to asset rich fuel and asset less many. cathis is a promise of what i call political exchange capitalism. it was the philosophy that underpinned the new deal, generating the mass disparity defined three decades after world war ii and crucially it formed a bipartisan consensus winning a legions of progressives and an earlier generation of conservatives from eisenhower to next and . these men weren't starry

eyed socialists but hard-nosed realists who experience had alerted to the dangers of unchecked market power. political exchange capitalism describes the world as it is. not the preindustrial arcadia of independent artisans, the premise of much market utopian ideology but a machine driven idea dominating most industries. its chief aspects are 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 15th century and has hardened since. big tech rules would bring embarrassment to the monocle eyes of gilded age tycoons. it follows privately

exercised economic power is less the exception than the rule. instead of waiving competition as a talisman against coercion political capitalism chains the hands of those subjugated by private power. thus the new dealers resolved to make it easier to mount countervailing power after decades in government had hindered them from doing so sometimes through violence. countervailing power is similar to competition but exerted not on the same side of a given market webut on the other side of a market, not with competitors but with suppliers. in this way private economic power is held in pocheck by those who are subjugated to it, the first day gets the second and as competition

requires action , something even less to admit so in labor markets promoting countervailing power requires government backing to offset the asymmetry created by employees going up againstfew employers . otherwise most choose to suffer precarious hours of low wages rather than take the risk associated with collective action. this was the logic behind a national labour relations act which sought to encourage collective bargaining and in 1938 fair labor's act which encouraged overtime protection. union membership peaked in 1935 up from 2.7 percent at the turn of the 20th century and remains thigh through the 1960s. under pre-new deal conditions the assets went along to

survive or pitched intense battles against bosses that threatened social stability. they could channel their demands to recognize unions and mass political parties. in a way this model make explicit what ordinary people knew, that economic lives involve coercion that gave them a measure of power to which they had long been subjected. restoring political exchange capitalism before most requires boosting union density, i share of the labor force belonging to labor organizations and today that figure sunk to six percent following along the line that t began in the 1970s. apologists loor the current state of affairs claim this is because unions have lost their luster among employees or because our nations globalization shifted manufacturing out of the united states. if organized labor lousy

reputation is the lie showing that unions are more popular now than they have been in a half century the need to desire to be represented as increased among nonunion workers since the 1970s with one mit study finding half of the nonunion labor force in wo2017 would to join a union if given the choice meaning 58 million americans are currentlyunderrepresented . but what about the robots of china explanation. that too is overstated and e labor economists lauren michelle and his co-authors note manufacturing union coverage to share the workers who are either union members or otherwise by collective bargaining agreement fell by 74 percent from 1975 july 2, 2019 and non- any factoring coverage fell by a comfortable 60 percent over the same period. we you can explain the manufacturing drop by pointing to china but you struggle to explain the

comparable drop in non-you manufacturing sector. statistical analysis shows overall union coverage marginally changes if you transpose today's industrialized conditions to 1979 economy . savingmanufacturing wouldn't have saved the union . as american workers want to unionize and the loss of manufacturing isn't the main obstacle what accounts for labors doldrums? 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're made by political choices and they can be reversed. in 90 years since the passage of the wagner act lawmakers and gop dominated labor boards have nullified large chunks of the law. from creating a priest free speech right to campaign and

enjoy symmetrical power to effectively abolishing card checks to barring union representatives and workers speaking in captive audience hearings. big business and political and media analysts undermine the purpose of the wagner act to encourage union organizing and collective bargaining .pi despite these obstacles a moment of union action is ar sweeping the labor market. priestess and factory hands, railroad hands, dockworkers, actors and many other groups have organized to win better contracts under existing collective bargaining agreements. in april 2 years after christian smalls termination a majority of workers voted to have his independence amazon labor union represented in collective bargaining. america finally is in china. our political tradition

cherishes human dignity and popular counter pressure against elite power. while the united states has always been a market society the country has given rise to many honorable traditions that have sought to bring the system under humanitarian control from progressive farmers to populists, from teddy roosevelt to franklin roosevelt to nixon and eisenhower , these traditions played a decisive role in forging the first version of political exchange capitalism and once more, it's up to american workers to drag our leaders into a new consensus on their vigilance, our th vigilance depends on a broadly shared prosperity and checks of against private tyranny. thank you very much and i am delighted to welcomesenator rubio . [applause]

>> i apologize. i'll tell you what i was doing. i was text screeningat my son for getting a parking ticket . in case you're watching atthe university of florida . anyway. thank you first of all for writing this and for the work you've done in this field. i think you touch on this but i was on a video conference with state legislators from georgia and they asked about tech companies and what the federal government could do and i said amthere's one and this is true in all countries, there's one power company no matter where you go. they are allowed to operate in basically amonopoly space , guaranteed a thprofit but

their profits are limited and when they get to florida the way it goes is go to the public service commission you say this is how much i have to charge people to make my statutorily protected profit but they are a monopoly. 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. that would be pretty dramatic. and maybe i shouldn't speak this in the public square because tomorrow someone will get a bright idea about what utilities should be doing that we are not that far off in many spaces. it strikes me tomorrow will be this artificial intelligence meeting in the senate where many apparently of these prominent people like mark zuckerberg is supposed to be there and also

elon musk and it struck me if a you think about it but i would argue in a room with maybe up to 100 united states senators, it will not be members elected by parliament but to heads of important companies, one in particular with meta-. not because of wealth, it's because they control in essence what is a utility. if today ifamazon google apple , i'll throw, what is it called. they all get together but w let's say the first five get together and decide we're d- going to destroy so and so. business or individual but they could not deny about anybody space in the public square, destroy a business or

refuse to provide you the service it would be difficult. this is an extraordinary amount of power in the private sector and it can be used for noble reasons but also the under tremendous public pressure to target political opponents and target those who they may not agree with. it can be used to threaten. how many people are not afraid to openly express their views on a topic or take a public position on deeither side of the debate although it seems to be proportionally one side. they are afraid because of the impact it could have on them economically and that's what you touch upon. we are not built to think of the private square, private companies as holding that amount of power but that is how consolidated those industries have become and what that leaves is an area, obviously i have touched on uc some of the things you've

written about but what isthis a product of ? it tracks pretty well with my adult life . i graduated high school in 1999, not because i am a good student and then i started carrying a lot more about school but i graduated in high school in 1989, from the university of florida in 1993 but the world changed between 89 and 93. i vividly recall growing up, day after the world was supposed to and in this nuclear attack, remember matthew broderick, i grew up in that world, good versus evil, reagan versus the devils and it all fell apart like the berlin wall collapsed.

it was not the predominant thing on my mind at that time, i was aware of it and i knew it was a big deal and i thought about that but the rest of the world did to and we emerged with two things . first of all a real love of hubris. the fact that we, free enterprise democracy have one andcommunism, marxism is defeated . not everyone was going to become a free enterprise economy and everyone was going to become a democracy and you may say that was a noble endeavor and something we should aspire to but we made pdecisions on a couple presumptions. the first is that now a global economy would replace the nation. i don't know who to attribute it to but i heard it at the time, never have two countries with a mcdonald's ever gone to war with each other.

am i right, i don't care. i'm sure it was really said because i've heard it. there you go. i don't know who to attribute it to. point being is this idea that commerce between nation states would replace nationstates and no longer would it matter, no longer work natural national interests matter. second assumption is now that this utopia, not only would global commerce replace nationstates but in fact that we were nothing more, not citizens of a country or members of our community, we ra were now either investors or consumers in a global marketplace.he the third assumption is that

as a result the national order should be the market outcomes would deliver 100 percent, if the market delivers themost efficient outcome and that would drive investment .who cares if the factory has been in the community closed down because itdoesn't do what you used to do somewhere else . it's going to go over there, that means lower prices and you will pay less for whatever it is they make their but here's the great news. a better job is comingthat would replace the job that was wiped out . that was another assumption made. but that's not how it worked out. i say all this as someone basically raised and grew up

in the ranks of the free enterprise orthodoxy of the republican party and center-right and it's because the people on the other side were either socialists or communist and a combination of the above. i am the opposite of whatever that is. so these assumptions guided public policy and in some ways build a consensus so that's why you get to 2001 and sure, let's join though world h,trade organization because yes, they're going to cheat when they get they will become just like us. it is a stupid gamble but that was the notion. these assumptions were wrong for a couple reasons. nation states will always matter because human nature will never change. that's why history repeats itself. we change the way we speak,

but human nature will never change and one of the core elements is this desire to belong and that's why people want to join something and band together and one of those things in the modern era is a nationstate. and the longing matters so that's the first thing. the idea that would know longer matter, that was a fantasy that people could afford to adopt who had passports and could travel all over the world but for most of america it was especially not truefor the leaders of china and russia and other countries who said we are going to stay with nation state interests .but the other era was, the mistake that was made was the belief that jobs were the place that provides you a paycheck and jobs are a lot more than about a paycheck

but a job is not just a job. there are jobs and then there are stable jobs. jobs that you can raise a family on. our economic numbers don't mention that.ys i always sort of thinking to myself every time i hear the to report 100,000 new jobs, what they tell you is what kind of jobs? do these jobs pay 40 or $50,000 so you can afford to raise a afamily or can you rely on that job existing three or four years from now? that's the first thing that i'll tell you and the second is i don't know what percentage is out there, people that have these degrees can't find a job and they borrowed money but now they can't find a job. the other point is when you yank jobs away you yank

dignity and it has a corrosive effect because if you think about a community they anchor is those stable reliable jobs because unless you have stable reliable jobs you don't have coaches for er the little league , you don't have a civil league that holds a country together . america is not an economy. america is not a government. america is a nation and the fiber is what creates laws and protects us but it's not the country . it's not an economy. we need an economy but the fiber and basic elements are family andcommunity . i don't care how much your gdp grows, how influential your covenant may be if you don't have family and community your country will

be divided and those are the economic implications. the struggle and realize asian that i said adapting to what's before youand beginning 2014, certainly by 2016 part of that happens to be on the presidential trail . if america is doing so well why is everybody so mad at each other? it was shocking because i am a product of the american dream. my dad was a banker and they owned a home and retired with dignity and left all four of their kids better off and i am running for senator, why isn't anybody as happy ? they said i worked in this place and one day first they cut my pay and got up and left and now i can't find a job that replaces that one

and they say why don't you code and learn how to move to san francisco. i lived in san francisco and they said it doesn't work for me. and so it disconnects them from community and family and all the things that made life worth living so we lost that perspective . i think socialism is a failure everywhere it's been tried. a substantial amount of the people, from venezuela, nicaragua, it's failed there. so i believe in the market. bei believe in capitalism because it is the one economic model capable of creating not just prosperity but widespread prosperity to 'build societies and families and communities.

you're going to produce the largest number of good paying g jobs for as many people as possible but only if you make that a priority if that becomes part of the equation so when you make public policy under the assumption this policy generates economic growth and wealth and that's important. you can't have jobs without wealth creation, you need that but you can't have that alone. it has to be the growth that creates prosperity but also good paying jobs for as many people as possible and that's perspective of the left. it doesn't matter whether wealth is being created. it didn't matter whether wealth was the product ofjobs created somewhere else .>> .. 88% of the active ingredients

in the pharmaceuticals in china and to subsidize it whatever it may be is it in our national interest to depend on a foreign competitor for 88% of the active ingredients or to corner 80% or any of these other industrial capabilities what aboutt during covid where we were freaking out because we couldn't make masks and maybe wewe didn't need that

many but all this time the panic so for the first time we came face-to-face with the deindustrialization and data component. i'm not talking about going back to the 50s. i amam saying that lack of industrialat capacity as a nationalic security component, economic security but also a job component. i published a report a week ago that talked about the standing of men in the workplace and in particular men without college degrees because the jobs that supported the moreia industrial type. we can go on and on but we've come to the point where this realization is before endd of te two choices are not the market is right or should the government toun take over the means of production and pour a

bit. of those are two full choices but we have to return to the era that we understand the proper role of the market and that requires us to reimburse the concept of the national interest of every level. i don't only care about america. i care about america more than anything else because in an american elected official doesn't put the interest at the first topic of thought behind any decision or who is supposed to put the american nationalst interest first. my job is to protect my shareholders which happend to be

so i don't think there'sr anything wrong in saying we need to make the national interest the number one objective and criteria to any public policy decision but the federal level. number two that it does in the national interest to have an economy that empowers workers to buhave dignified and stable work to build families and communities and that should extend to our engagements around thea world. what is it the interest in the united states we are no longer the world's power this is no longer the luxury of playing every conflict with everything going on around the world. giving it we f have to pick our flights more than ever because it is great and powerful the country is it doesn't have unlimited powert or breach or

resources and it has to prioritize the geopolitical era. i am a firm believer that you basically cannot no matter how hard you try, technological advancements are going to happen. the technology that makes humans do what humans do better faster more accurately or a technology that replaces. is it going to be automation that allows one worker to do the work of five or something that actually takes the human element out completely. there is a lot more freaking ongoing on in the level that it

could be more than about automation. don't worry about automation, that's going to be good. we are all going to make a lot of 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 with the people making a lot of money and suddenly realizing they may not need me anymore. one of the cornerstones of the hollywood strike screenwriters don't want toe be replaced by machines and a fake avatar whatever it is that's going to replace them so you think about it and now a disruption that impactsr white color, higher educatedar or standard of living workers and all of a sudden they are freaked outre about some revolutionary change going on but that interest didn't existan when it came to the american worker and whether it was out of malice and greed and stupidity when we decided we were no

longer a country that needed to make things that create jobs we do more damage to the national country and the reasonn i know this is true because it isn't just happening to us. virtually every industrialized country in the world particularly in the west is going through similar domestic upheavals whether it's the state of their economies, climate and the like because they are all feeling the exact same thing. these decisions and assumptions that have led to the world into the country for 30 years were a mistake t and now we have to confront it and it's my personal hope although i think you are more pessimistic than i am that it will be the home of the movement but it won't be easy because there are a lot of groups, deep roots that go into everything from the intellectual worldd too much of the traditional center-right institutions but there's change

we've made a lot of progress and i think you for the invitation to talk about it because i think what you've discussed is a byproduct of a economic decisios that actually empowered the vertical integration of certain industries that have power at the time when we felt as long as it's a private sector don't worry about it because there will be a competitor that regulate how they behave. there is no competitor for amazon or google, there really isn't. and so now we reap what we sow. thank you for the chance to talk about all of this. i look forward to your questions. [applause] >> thank you, senator rubio. bear with us for a second we are going to get miked up and then

go into the panelists discussion.

we are all good to go. i want to start our panel discussion here tonight where senator rubio left off which is the question of where this book fits on the political spectrum. you write for the american conservative, longtime commentator in the conservative space. the book has gotten a lot of criticism from the writer so i want to start on that note. there is a point in the book you read tell that narrative about the sort of political economic history of the country especially in the post-depression era and you said part of what drove the prosperity that we saw in the past century was the commitment toth limits and that's something 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 the critics.

>> great question. the smartest reviews in the book have come from marxists and they've argued what it was poor forin the fundamental conservate project whereas often when i'm dealing with center-right or centerleft broadcasters or viewers they say it seems like your brain is a right brain when it comes to abortion but you have more of a left-wing totality when it comes to economy and how do you reconcile the two. the commitment to the market with a limit to the common good arises from the same place. as early as the 19th century they recognize unhindered markets were creating disparities in power and wealth and that the way to combat that is one of the ways of course is

by allowing workers to encourage them to organize and bargain collectively in other places for the state to intervene in markets to ensure you wouldn't have catastrophic situations. on cultural issues let's say it comes from the same place and it's important to know the new deal project and order and what preceded herbert hoover lead down the framework and the idea of class compromise was seen as a conservative thing to do in the face of market disruption because workers didn't earn enough to afford the goods they

were producing in the stability. so this model of class compromise is not a class antagonism. it recognizes that's real but it seeks to recognize rather than take the class antagonism all the way to this with the evolution of one byy the other. there's nothing contradictory about being conservative and socially managed. >> one quick follow-up before we bring up the rest of the panel and you touched on this in your remarks that you were perhaps more optimistic about remaking the gop as a working class party. i wonder if you can expand on that and what do you think are some of the barriers to achieving sort of political realignment. >> that is where the party is and that was apparent for me.

i go campaign and here these people were sending our jobs overseas and then you go somewhere where they have the different lives andli experiencs and you realize there was a massive disconnect between the donor base and i think as much as anything else, the trump campaign sort of exposed that and challenges all sorts of orthodoxy in the campaign and revealed where the tradition was and so the demand is there someone is going to be the voice of the group and one of the things that challenges from my perspective is that traditional political spectrum as we've identified and wee think if you were here 150 years ago the centers of the left and right political party, there was an

era in the country where there were conservativera democrats ad quite liberal republicans, so we've had multiple realignments and how the parties aligned and so forth. has driven people into camps these days so where is the home of the american that says i don't want socialism or controlling the means of production were to be a government employee telling me what towi do with every aspect f my life but i do want public policy officials that number one care about creating an economy wherels not just people get rich but also find a good paying jobs. there's a market for that. i feel terrible for what is happening in the world but at the end of the day we have to do what is in america's interest. that market is going to be met. it won't be easy because there is a tremendous amount of infrastructure but i think it's

an inevitable solution and right now the only place that can be the home of it because the social radicalization makes it impossible it's just a hostile environment to the working class voter looking for the politics that reflect not just the economic needs but the preferences for themselves, their family and the future of the country. i certainly think that's where it winds up. >> it's fair to say no the left-wing perspective. they launched a new magazine under the sort of hypothesis that there's enough voices we need to highlight and emphasize

so i'm curious your responses to the optimism on the working class party and where you think some ofit the limits to that cooperation might apply. >> i am a progressive democrat and i kind of look at the problem as sort of both parties who's goingic to find the voice that speaks to that angry frustrated person who sees how disconnected and to give an example of both parties today is the first day of the google antitrust trial which was brought by trump in 2020 and has been continued.

either party, and there are states involved either party could win to become the dominant governing party. what i think is happening and your book is about a specific language of moral reform which is the language of efficiency because the language of efficiency and economics has taken over both parties, the corporate world. both philosophies of how to be once you are removed where there is a utopian world that is a trap all a of a sudden the possibility of building a society and one day doesn't a se power and the next day does. at the party that decides to do

that first is going to be sort of dominant over a generation. >> you are the young conservative on the panel. it struck me some of the most praise on the project has come from younger conservatives. the older generation that spoke on this but from the right it's going to be the younger generation. based on your experience as a youngse conservative. >> lot the old guard types some statistics that most everyone in the audience probably knows the wages 1973 the productivity of

the labor going up 75% since the same year and yet the real wages have only gone up 9%. if you look deeper you see the wages are stagnant and concentrated amongst those wage earners above the 75th5t percentile. how do you get there? education. education has increased 200% over the same time period. a lot of necessary. we've seen the rapid increase time and time again they say my student loan debt did factor into me delaying getting married, delaying buying. a home and having children so there's

at the same time this argument. since 2000, the average salary and wage has been pretty volatile and is currently only downswing a slight downward so what pulls out of this and people haven't gotten an answer from the political parties that are focused on appeasing corporate power and setting up or continuing the neoliberal structure and young conservatives i think are seeing this in their own. not senator rubiole talking abot wallets, wallets, paychecks,

everyone thinks it's okay until it hits their wallets. young people are seeing those in the cost of all of these goods they need to start families and so young conservatives are realizing that there's an incorrect anthropology that pushes family to the side and nations to the slide and focuses more on this consent to choose and well contracting. they might not articulate it in a direct way, but they see that kind of arrangement in the consensus is false and so they are pursuing other forms of conservatism that harken back to the time before the goldwater years in 1964 granted the history of the republican party. the longest time i think since

the republican party was founded. if you go down to one of the smithsonian's down there you will see in the exhibit a brochure from republicans that say democrat free-trade leadspao poverty, despair, republican protectionism, prosperity and goodwill to all men or something like that and that's the rvtradition that more young conservatives are rediscovering to navigate outt of these problems. the chief remedy in the book. so there are many statistics that show a lot of workers do

want to join unions but another set of statistics that's helpful to put thiswa into light was a survey done by american compass that asks why the union members wouldn't want to be part of the union and the top sort of reasons why were political involvement, number two, member dues, corruption and then way down the list was the fear of retaliation so i'm curious to get your thoughts on why potential union members want to join in this very antidote how we can get over that and encourage them more. >> the way someone becomes a unionou member it's not like becoming a member of the nra were the democratic socialists in america.

the main way people become union members is kind of incidental by becoming an employee and people that are the firstst to form an organization at their workplace, so for those cases i think successful campaigns are going to be built around the issues that actually matter to those employees who elect the union so they are abstract and interesting so far as they point to the kind of reputations that are built up ince certain ways. what was the top reason? for the reasons i was talking about, the political orientation of union members are a lot of

union members are republicans already so different unions are goingre to have different makeus and be conservative. the demonstrations of pilots now they all to get together and stand in line at the same level in the same way. even though the labor union is small and we want it to get a lot bigger it's quite diverse and there's room for all kinds of people who want to join together and have a say at work negotiating the contract with coworkers and their employer and having something important that

isis not being an at will emploe and that's what senator rubio was talking about is having stability i in your job and beig able to count on it and that you can't be dismissed for no reason or for' any reason. unions being perceived not wrongly but being politicized on the side of the democratic party our friend points out in the most recent book that at one point we just visited the page of the afl-cio and slightly paraphrasing but we stand for the maximal reproductive

freedom. over the past two generations the labor o union has often gotn the back of the hand from the republican party so it's been forced to shift. they don't have an organized voice vote in the same way that organized labor is a part of the coalition but if we had a republican party 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 ats every stage.

we have time for one or maybe two questions. please raise your hand and we will do what we can. right over here. i'm curious what degree [inaudible]] >> when i became a catholic i was working for a publication that pushes the kind of neoliberal dogma free-trade over everything else but it seemed the more i read the post teachings on the social issues, the less the attempt.

he mentioned the classical and tradition. i think there's a liberating aspect because you look at thema market and satisfies the market or turn away from it and say it's a tool and human institution imperative for thehe common good and therefore there are things that must limit it and that attitude and respect for limits i think is at the heart a of the political economc thinking. >> one of the things i found interesting about the reviewsbof the book that were critical

catholic social teaching and somest of these are getting at somewhatat different things and that's the fallacy that i eluded to all the way back to liberalism that at will contracted onset that is completely foreign to the entire western 15th, 16th century and for me that is my sense of equality and freedom and human dignity. those are the types we are talking about when we are motivating these questions.

we might hear from conservatives [inaudible] >> i've spoken onfo this before the social doctrine is incredibly fascinating because it's also deep-rooted and some base principle that the individual and what do you derive that from because you are made in the imagehe of the crear butrt also what you have the opportunity to do. how many things in the material possession and it's from it argues that man was made to work and it argues human beings have an obligation to work but then it goes on to say in the functioning economy people have an obligation to work but the economy you have public policy makers to create and foster an economy that creates that work that's two sides of the same coin so you also have to have an

economy that produces the work. it can't just be the human dignity and the other is it has a very simple definition fore e role that is to promote the common good a speech i gave about common good capitalism and it was the argument that capitalism is a tool that we use to achieve the common good and the definition is what the politics is about. i think there's some fundamental principles. the kind of work that allows you to do the things that make life worth living and that's what we don't have an answer for. if you get a degree that it takes seven read years make the money back it's a great investment. what's the formula today outside of a handful of jobs if you figured out how to invent this

page on the internet where people can connect withou each other but other than that sort of thing what is the guarantee that you will find that you will find a job that pays you enough iin used to say we are on the verge of becoming the first that lead the generation. i can tell you from personal experience members and my family are at least ten years behind where i would have economically and socially. i was ten years away from where they are today and that's a

dramaticic impact on the country moving forward. it's important to realize that neoliberalism is religious zealotry. senator holly introduced a bill which gets introduced periodically. there was a metaphysical rage when you propose new ideas that's important it works in both ways. i mentioned at the outset.

if you haven't gone and bought it please do it's an important book but secondly you can keep up with everything on magazine as well as his column at the americaner conservative. last housekeeping note as i mentioned please do stay in your seats until the speakers have had a chance to leave the room.