all right.

well, good evening, everyone. my name is emile doak. i'm the executive director of 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 scholarship up offering educational programs for students and young professionals and offering conferences and copia like tonight's event. this event is also sponsored by my organization, the american

conservative of the american conservative or tech for short, exists to advance a mainstream vision for conservatism. we pursue our mission primarily through our print magazine and online journalism, as well as select conferences and events like the one you're attending here tonight. we were founded in 2000 to over 20 years ago now to reignite conversation that we felt conservatives had neglected for far too long. our magazine was a rare voice against the iraq war. in the early days of that conflict and a commitment to a foreign policy of realism, restraint continues to animate our publication today, but our mission was broader than that. one issue we also wanted to return considerations of faith and family. those civilizational foundations, to the center of our political discourse. and we felt that they were all they were too often simply played paid lip service and then ignored when when policymaking. and perhaps most pertinent to tonight's discussion, we wanted to recalibrate the conversation around political economy on the political right. we wanted to advance the

interests of american workers against an increasingly globalized free trade regime that prioritized corporate profits over the concerns of real workers in the real economy. now, if you read tyranny, think, which i believe the washington post called anomalously sensible, which i guess is a compliment, but if you read it like the washington post did, you'll find many stories of these real workers attempting to navigate an order that is often stacked against them. and in many ways, the book echoes the disposition that has animated our magazines pages for 21 years now a healthy skepticism of bigness in all forms and a preference for main street over wall street. but we also welcome honest disagreement and debates about the best ways to advance those interests. so i hope we'll be able to get into some these discussions sparked by scrubs, provocative prescriptions and tyranny. think here tonight and we've got a great lineup of speakers for you to do just that. so before we start, i want to introduce tonight's tonight's

speakers before handing it over to the author of the book. that brings us here tonight. first sohrab ahmari, of course, the founder and editor of compact magazine. a contributing editor to our publication, the american conservative. and a contributing writer for 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, london, and as the op ed editor, the new york post. his book, which we're here to discuss, is, of course, tyranny inc how private power crushed american liberty and what to do about it. just out from penguin random house. if you haven't picked up a caveat, please do. next, marco rubio, of course, the senior u.s. senator from florida and the author most recently of of decadence how our spoiled elites blew america's inheritance of, liberty, security and prosperity, which was published earlier this year. matthew stoller is director of research at the american economic liberties project and author of the 100 year war between monopoly power and democracy. published by simon and schuster

in 2019, soler has served as a policy adviser to the senate budget committee and writes the big newsletter a monopoly as. speaker crowder is a labor unionist in baltimore, a contributor to compact magazine. and last but certainly not least is my colleague, the american conservative bradley devlin he is our staff reporter doing excellent work for us. if you've read bradlee's work, you may think that he's older than his. he's actually very young. so one of those gen zers who has no memories of that terrible day, 21 years ago, 22 years ago, just. and who can give us a perspective of conservatives who have come of age during the height of much of the private tyranny and scrubs book. so just a quick couple notes here on how tonight's event will proceed. so, sir, i will start us off in just a few minutes here with some opening remarks. drawing from his books, core arguments for about 10 to 15 minutes after that, we will remarks from senator rubio for another 10 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 can see, our schedule is very tightly packed. but if we do have time, we will take one or two questions from the audience at the very end. either way, though, we will close promptly at 7:45 p.m. so can move on to their own dinner plans. and i would note though, please do remain your seats after the panel to allow speakers to leave first. so with that please, join me in welcoming sohrab ahmari. my friends. thank you all. thank you all for being here. i should start by saying i'm grateful to the bynum community foundation and the american conservative for this gathering. gathering thanks especially to emil for his steadfast support for my work and thanks to to the panelists. not least, senator rubio, who has shown genuine and rare leadership in pushing his party, my party to rethink some of its political economic dogmas and

who's been kind enough to take to both to endorse this book and now to time out of a busy legislative schedule to appear at this event. so to begin, i'd like to pan out to a global picture. for years, 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 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.

i thank you. i apologize. i was distracted. i'll tell you, i was doing. i was tech screaming at my son for getting a parking ticket at school and in gainesville, florida. in case you're watching the university of florida. anyway, thank you for. thanks. first of all, thanks for writing this. and for the work you've done in this field. maybe i'll just come from my perspective because i really think touched on something. i was actually on a video conference today with some state legislators from from georgia, and they asked about tech companies and what the federal government could do and how it could this. and it struck me and i said to them what i had to other people and sort of here's the example. i have. there's one and i think this is true in all the country. there's generally one power company, no matter where you live, it's a utility and they are allowed to operate. and basically a monopoly space.

they are guaranteed a profit. but their profits limited and they get to so in florida the way it works is you go to this public service commission and you say this is how much it costs to generate power this is how much you have to charge people in order to make my statutorily protected profit. but they control how much money you make, but they are a monopoly. so imagine the electric company decides one day i am not going to provide electricity for who believe this or. people who are in this line of work or people who in this line of business while it'd be pretty dramatic if they were able to do that and maybe, maybe i shouldn't speak this into the public square because maybe someone will get some bright idea about what electric companies and utilities should be doing to people. we're really not that far off in many spaces. it strikes me tomorrow there's going to be this artificial intelligence meeting in the senate where many, apparently many of these prominent mark zuckerberg is supposed to be there. so is elon musk. so i think we may have a fight as well coordinated as part of

this thing. you know the whole thing, they're supposed to fight the supposed to have or whatever. and it struck me if you think about it and this is nothing personal against them per se, but i would argue that in room with maybe up to 100 united states senator, the two most powerful people in that room will not be members elected by the public, but two heads of important companies one in particular will matter. and, you know, and it's not because of wealth. it's because they control what is, in essence, a utility in the 21st century. if today, four or five companies, if amazon, google, you know, matter ultra, what is 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 grows, how geopolitically influential 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 buy 88% of the active ingredients in our pharmaceuticals in china because they subsidize it, because they steal, because they have lower labor, whatever it may be. is it in our national interest to depend on a foreign competitor adversary for 88% of the active ingredients in our pharmaceutical, or to corner 80% of the rare earth minerals on earth or any of these other industrial capable cities? what about during covid? i was freaking out because we couldn't make masks and we couldn't make this. and now, you know, maybe we didn't need that many masks, i

suppose. but maybe you know, at the time and all these panic that was going on about the way we react for the first time, we came face to face with the industrial ization and the national interest component of it. and it's easy to talk about deindustrialization simply from wouldn't it be great if we had more factories? the feels like the good old days. i'm not talking about going back to the fifties. what i'm saying to you is that that lack of industrial capacity has a national security component to it, a national economic security, but it also has a job component. i published a report a week ago talked about the the standing of men in the workplace and in particular, what i would focus on are men without college degrees. why are men without college degrees struggling the 21st century to find jobs? because the jobs that largely supported them were industrial type jobs and they have vanished as well. and we can go on and on. but the point that we've come to a point where this realization is before us and the two choices are not a the market's always right. do what? worship the market, whatever outcome it reaches, that's the right. or b, let the government take over the means of production and

pour a bunch of government into every endeavor that has an american flag sticker on the door. those two false choices. but we have to return to an era in which we understand the proper role of the market and it exists to serve the nation. and that requires us to remember the concept of the national interests at every level. and we should not be. that does not you a you know, nationalist is a word this term thrown around these days as if to say i don't care about what's happening in the rest of the world or all i only care about america don't only care about america, but i do care about america before anything else. not because i'm inhumane, but because of an american elected official does not put the american national as the first topic of thought behind any decision. well, who is the bolivian senate? the senate of, you know, i don't know, lithuania who is supposed to put the american national interest first. if you to think about the corporate setting, where they always argue our job is to protect our shareholders, my is to protect my shareholders,

which happens to be the men and women of the united states of america and the families of this country. and so i don't think there's anything wrong in saying, number one, we need to make the national interest, the number one objective, the number criteria 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 communities. and number three, that should extend to our engagements around the world. there are things there are, a lot of terrible things that happen in the world. and if we can help, we 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's sole superpower, where this is no longer a unipolar world. we have the luxury of playing in 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 to now pick our fights more than ever, because there's greatness powerful as this country is, it

does not have unlimited power. it does not have unlimited reach, and it does not have a resources. and it has to prioritize them in a new geopolitical era. i'll close with one last observation. i've talked about the a.i. thing, and it's interesting because i am a firm believer that you basically cannot hold back technological events no matter how hard you try. technological advances are going happen, and every freaking out about artificial intelligence, there are a couple of points that i have about the primarily like this intelligence going to become something that and there's a lot nobody knows the answer to this okay but is it going to be a technology that makes humans do what humans do better, faster, more accurately? or is it going to be a technology that replaces humans? i mean, completely is it going to be automation that actually allowed one worker to do the work of five? or is it going to be something that actually takes the human element out completely? we don't know the answer to that. but what strikes 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 there was about automation. some of the same people said, don't worry about automation. that's going to be good because yellow be less workers, but the workers will make more money or don't worry about deindustrialization because we're all going to be software engineers and we're all going to make a lot of money. don't worry about that. but now those same people are freaking out. you know why? 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. it threatens the people that are making a lot of money and suddenly realizing they may not need me anymore. i mean, one of the cornerstones of the hollywood is screenwriters don't to be replaced by machine and actors that don't want to be replaced by a fake avatar or whatever is is going to replace them. so you think about it now we are seeing a disruption that impacts white collar higher educated or higher standard of living workers. and all of a sudden now they are freaked out about some revolutionary going on in society. but that interest did not exist when it came to american worker and whether was out of malice, out of greed or out of stupidity

when we decided that we were longer a country that needed to make things and create jobs that can employ as many americans as possible in a stable way. we did real damage to the country and the national and and the reason why i know this is true is because it's not just happening to us. virtually every industrialized country in the world, particularly in the west, is going through similar domestic upheavals, whether it's immigration or the state of their economy or government policies on, climate and the like, because all feeling the exact same thing. these decisions and assumptions that have led this world and our country for 30 years or a mistake and now we have to confront that mistake and hopefully reverse it. and it's my personal hope, although i think you're a little bit more pessimistic than i am, that the republican party will be the home of that movement, but it won't be easy because there are a lot of roots deep roots that go into everything from, you know, intellectual world that lead public policy to much of the traditional center

right institutions. there's change we've made a lot of progress. and four or five years, we have a lot more, more work to do. and i thank you for the invitation to talk about it because i do think what you discuss about tyranny is, a byproduct of economic decisions that actually empower the centralized and vertical integration certain industries that have extraordinary power at a time when we all felt as long as it's a private sector, don't worry about it, because there'll be a competitor out there that will regulate how they behave. there is no competitor for amazon. there is no competitor for google. there really isn't. and and so now we we reap what we saw. so anyway, thank you for the chance to talk to you about this. i look forward to your questions. i will. thank. senator rubio, i want to invite our panelists now to join [applause] >> thank you, senator rubio. i want to thank our panelists for joining us on stage.

we are going to get mike up here and go straight to our panel discussion.

>> i want to start, the mics are on. all right. 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. a man of the right rights for the american conservative, long-term conservative, the book has a lot of criticism from the right. i want to start on that note. there's a point where you retell the narrative you mentioned in your remarks about the political economic history of this country especially in the post-depression period and you said part of what drove the prosperity in the past century was limits, something that's been a theme of a lot of things i've written about from a

conservative perspective. i want to give you the opportunity to answer your critics, you're not a full socialist quite yet. >> great question. the smartest reviews of this book have come from marxists and they have argued that this book is, what it puts forward is a fundamentally conservative project where as often when i'm dealing with center-right or centerleft reviewer's they will say it seems like your brain is a right wing brain when it comes to abortion but more of a left-wing mentality when it comes to economy and how do you reconcile those two where for me a commitment to a market that exists within the limits of the common good arises from the same place, informed by my catholic faith and catholic teachings which is as early as the 19 century, unhindered markets were creating vast

disparities in power and wealth and the way to combat that, one of the ways is allowing workers, encouraging them to organize, to bargain collectively and in other places for the state to intervene in markets to ensure that we don't have catastrophic situations of market failure. it is not as if i shut down my conservative brain when i become a writer on the political economy and turn it back on with cultural issues. it comes from the same place and it's important to note the new deal projects, the new deal order and what preceded it, herbert hoover lay down many of the frameworks that were formalized and given greater scale by fdr. the idea of class compromise, what is seen as the conservative thing to do in the face of market disruption and in the face of social unrest

that's coming about because workers didn't turn enough to afford the goods they were producing leading to social instability so this model of class compromise is not antagonism. it recognizes class antagonism is real but seeks to reconcile the classes rather than take it all the way to abolition of one class by the other. there's nothing contradictory about being conservative and supporting a kind of socially managed capitalist decision. >> one follow-up for senator rubio, you touched on this at the end of your remarks that you are perhaps more optimistic than everyone else about remaking the gop is a working class party. i wonder if you could expand on that optimism and what do you think are some of the main barriers to achieving that?

>> i think that is where the party writ large is, one of the things apparent to me when i ran for president, how different people. i go campaign somewhere and here the economy sending our jobs overseas and go somewhere with donors who have different experiences and realize there was a disconnect between the donor base of the voters. the trump campaign exposed that, challenging all sorts of conservative orthodoxy and revealed what the donors tell you is a good idea, not every donor, that's unfair but generally speaking, the tradition of the party and where the voters were were dramatically different so the demand is there, some what is going to be the voice of that group and one of the things that challenges in my perspective is the traditional political spectrum as we identified it for 25 or 30

years. if you are here one hundred 50 years ago, the center, the right, the left looked very different. there was an era where there were very conservative democrats and quite liberal republicans. we had multiple realignments in how the party is aligned and so forth. polarization has driven people, where's the home of the american that says i don't want the government controlling the means of production don't want to be a government employee. i do want public policy, not just where people get rich but get jobs, there's a market for that. there are people who feel terrible for what is happening in the world but we have to do what is in america's national interests first and foremost and how we react around the world, there's a market for that. the market will be met by some political movement, it won't be easy, there's a tremendous amount of infrastructure, 25 or

30 years of the traditional paradigm. it is an inevitable evolution and the only place that can be home of it is the republican party because the social station of the democratic party makes it impossible for it to be, just a hostile environment to the working class voter who is looking for common sense balanced party, not just their economic needs but general preferences about the future of the country. it is not going to be easy but that is where it winds up. >> i want to bring in matt fuller on that. fair to say you are a man of the left, left-wing perspective on this panel, as you know and our audience knows, there's a new magazine under the hypothesis that there are

enough disparate voices on the right and left that we need to highlight and emphasize so your response to senator rubio's optimism on a gop working-class party and where you think the limits to the left/right cooperation might lie. >> yeah, so i look at it like so i am a democrat, progressive democrat and i kind of look at the problem as sort of both parties are in a race, who is going to find the voice to speak to that angry frustrated person out there who just sees how disconnected the political -- both parties can do it, today is the first day of the google antitrust trial which was brought by trump in 2020 and has been continued by

biden, either party could, there are states involved, either party could win and become the dominant governing party. what i think is happening and what your book is about is the specific language of moral reform which is the language of efficiency. the language of efficiency, the linkage of economics is a language of moral reform taken up over both parties, the corporate world, policymaking world and traps us into not seeing power. those different parties with different philosophies of how to be, once you are removed from that sort of world where there is no power, a utopia which is a trap, all of a sudden the possibility of building a society opens up. what you see happens to everyone who doesn't see power in the next day does.

there are many ways to craft a society, we just have to choose to do it and the party that decides to do that first is the party that will be dominant over a generation. >> you are the youngest conservative on the panel. it struck me that perhaps some of the most praise for the book on the right has come from younger conservatives, there's the older generation, looking for praise from the right, it's going to be the younger generation, speak to why that is especially based on your experience as a young conservative. >> it has been from younger conservatives, not the old guard types continually turning out papers on why we need another corporate tax cut, another four years of a republican administration pursuing that. some statistics server rob has in his book that most everyone

in the audience probably knows, wage is stagnant, productivity of a laborer going up 75% and real wages going up 9%. and if you look deeper into that data, wages are stagnant, concentrated among those wage earners up 76%. how do you get there? education. education has increased 200% over that same time period. a lot of necessary goods, goods we consider necessary for healthcare, college, homes, we've seen the rapid increase in those types of prices. time and time again when younger people i talked to about this they say my student loan debt did factor into me

delaying getting married, delaying buying a home, delaying getting get children. at the same time the argument the old guard makes, educated, you can get into those wrongs of wage labor that are seeing those but since 2,000, the average salary wage for college graduates has been pretty volatile and on a downswing. slight downward regression so what pools people out of this and young people haven't gotten a good answer from two political parties that are focused on appeasing corporate power, setting up or continuing that neoliberal structure lined up in the book, young conservatives are seeing this fallacy in their own lives, and republican politicians, not

senator rubio talking about wallace wallace wallace, paycheck to paycheck paycheck, everyone thinks taxes are okay until it hits their wallet. young people are seeing the costs of all these goods to start family so young conservatives are realizing that there's an incorrect anthropology that undergirds a lot of this that pushes family to the side, pushes nations to the side and focuses more on this consent to choose at will contracting, they might not articulate it in a direct way but they see that that kind of arrangement that so much of the party consensus rests on is false so they are pursuing other forms of conservatism that harkens back to the time

before the goldwater years in 1964, look at the history of the republican party, the longest time since the republican party was founded, until the roosevelt taft split, the number one issue for republicans was the tariff, we must have a general tariff. if you go to the smithsonian down there, you will see in the exhibitor brochure from republican saying democrat free-trade leads to poverty and despair, republican protectionism leads to prosperity and goodwill to all men or something like that and that is the tradition more young conservatives are rediscovering and trying to navigate out of the problems this neoliberalism left us with. >> i want to turn to perhaps the chief remedy in the book which is union membership, the need to support unions. there is, many statistics on

this that show that a lot of workers want to join unions but another statistic that is helpful to put this into light was survey done by american compass which asked why union members would not want to be part of a union and the top reasons why were, one, unions political involvement is toxic, member dues, corruption and way down the list at number 9 was fear of retaliation from the company. i know you've done a lot of work in the labor movement. i'm curious to get your thoughts on why potential union members won't join unions and this is a great antidote to the issues on the political economy, how we can get over that and encourage someone. >> it bears keeping in mind the way someone becomes a union

member is not like becoming a member of the nra or the democratic socialists of america or something like that. the way people become union members is incidental. it's by becoming an employee in a shop that is already organized. the second largest way is people who are the first to form a union and elect a labor organization at their workplace so for those cases i think successful campaigns are going to be built around the issues that actually matter to the employees who elect a union so the sort of abstract surveys are a bit abstract. i think they are interesting insofar as they point to reputations unions have that are built up in certain ways. what was the top reason you said? >> tot reason not to join, the union's political involvement is toxic. >> for the reasons i was

talking about, actual political orientation of union members, a lot of union members are republicans already. different unions will have different sort of makeups and some will be more conservative than others. look at the diversity that exists in the labor movement now. if you see the demonstrations of pilots now, they all get together and stand in a line, very conservative and holding a sign at the same level in the same way. this is a labor demonstration in the same way that one that is much more boisterous so i think even though the labor movement is small and i want it to get a lot bigger, it is quite diverse and there is room in it for all kinds of people who want to join together and have a say at work and negotiate a contract with their

coworkers, their employer, and having something that's very important is not being an employee. it sits on what senator rubio was talking about, having stability in your job and being able to count on it, reliability, stability that you can't be dismissed for no reason or any reason that's not illegal. >> one more thought on the question of unions being perceived, not wrongly by many workers as being politicized on the side of the democratic party. our friend michael lind points out in his most recent book at one point he just visited the page of the leader of the afl-cio, something like slightly paraphrasing, maximum reproductive freedom and as michael said, lots of workers

covered by the afl-cio would want to be covered don't share those views so what that is reflecting is the degree to which organized labor has become part of the democratic party. one major reason is over the past two generations the labor movement has more often than not gotten the back of the hand from the republican party and so has been forced to shift to the democrats by political necessity. even those workers who are coming to the republican party as voters don't have an organized vote in the same way organized labor is an organized part of the democratic coalition. if we had a republican party that's more friendly that's more friendly to labor organizations you could see labor becoming more independent

because it is not so dependent on one party knowing that the other one will be hostile at every stage, the national labor relations board and so on. >> i want to turn to the audience. we have time for one or 2 questions. if you have a question please raise your hand and we will do what we can. >> you mentioned in your remarks i was curious to what degree the reform is in position are you? >> >> when i became a catholic, i was working for a publication that pushes the neoliberal dogma, free-trade over everything else but seemed the more i read the post's

teachings on social issues the last the attempt to synthesize catholicism and paul ryan seemed tenable and so you mentioned limits, the centrality of limits and the classical and christian tradition, there's a liberating aspect in having a catholic -- you look at a market and unite or fetishize the market, nor do you completely turn away from it. it is a tool, it's a human institution but is subject to the imperative of the common good and therefore things that are limited. that is the attitude of respect for limits is at the heart of my political economic thinking. >> that's one thing that i found very interesting about

the reviews that were critical, they quote john locke and go gotcha. the catholic social teaching is a recent -- catholic social teaching and some of these liberal theorists often use similar language but are getting at somewhat different things and that's the anthropological fallacy that i alluded to that runs not just her neoliberalism but all the way back to liberalism and the choice or consent oriented at will contracting oriented mindset that is completely foreign to the entire western canon pre-15th, 16th century. we rediscovered that sense of talking about freedom and human dignity. those are the types of freedom and dignity we are talking

about. very atypical policy proposals we might hear from conservatives this day and age. >> the catholic social doctrine is fascinating because it is also until actually deep because it is rooted in basic principles, the dignity of the person, the individual has dignity. where do you derive that dignity from from a faith perspective, also from what you have the opportunity to do, it's not from the acquisition of wealth, status, how many material possessions and it is from at its fundamental core it argues man was made to work. what it argues that human beings have an obligation to work but goes on to say yes, in a functioning economy people have an obligation to work but the economy, you have public policymakers have an obligation to foster an economy that creates that work, the two sides of the same coin.

you go out and work, you have to have an economy that produces the work, can't just be produces the work and the other, a simple definition for the role of civilization to promote the common good witches as speech i gave about common good capitalism and it largely was the argument that capitalism is a tool to achieve the common good and the definition of what is in the common good is what our politics is about and there are some fundamental principles we have broad agreement on and one of them is that we need to have economic policies that create work for those we are expecting to work and the kind of work that allows you to do the things that allow for human flourishing like family formation and that's what we don't have an answer to for young americans. i know if you went to school, get a degree the take 7 or 8 years, you will make back the money, it's a great investment. what's the formula today, outside of a handful of jobs,

figure out how to do this, if you figure out how to invent this page on the internet where people can connect with each other you can become a billionaire but other than that sort of thing, what's the guarantee to americans, don't mean guarantee that you will be wealthy but that you find if you're willing to do x you will at least find a job that pays you and of that you don't have to stay up at night where you will get laid off at any moment, lose everything you have and who will pay to raise these kids and why should i get married and own a home, why should i be involved in a community if i will have to move into a half years to find another job it's comfortable. we don't have an answer so i used to say we are on the verge of becoming the first americans that leave the next americans better off, i can say from personal experience, members of my family are at least 10 years behind where i was economically and socially in terms of

homeownership, and the like. i was 30, i was 10 years ahead of where they are today and that has a dramatic impact on the country moving forward that i don't think we fully yet absorbed. >> important to realize neoliberalism is based on faith. it is religious zealotry. i saw senator holly introduce a bill that gets introduced periodically, the level of anger towards that, there was a metaphysical rage. that is what you find when you propose new ideas or say this stuff isn't working, how dare you. because it is a criticism of their religion. that is important. faith works both ways. >> how dare you.

that needs to go to machine. >> you monster. i mentioned at the outset we are in a tight timeline so we need to leave it there for today. a few closing notes. if you've not bought "tyranny, inc." it is important and provocative book. you can keep everything in the pages of compact magazine and his weekly column of the american conservative, checked us out as well and a housekeeping note, please stay in your seats until speakers have a chance to leave the room. please join me in thanking our panelists. [applause] >> if you are enjoying booktv sign up for the newsletter using the qr code on screen to receive the schedule of upcoming programs, author discussions, book festivals and more.

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