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 us up here on stage. the audience will. bear with us just for a second. we're going to get miked up here and then go straight into our panel.

all right. we are all good to go. i want to start our mikes around. all right. well, i want to start our panel discussion. they're here tonight. really? where senator rubio left us off, which is a question of where this book fits on political spectrum. so, rob, you are, of course, a man of the right. you write for us of the american conservative, have been long time commentator in the conservative. the book has gotten a lot of criticism the right. so i just want to start on that note. so if there's a point in your book where you kind of retell that narrative that you had mentioned in your remarks about of the political economic

history of this country, especially in the post depression area. and there is one, though, that stuck to me where you said that part of what drove the prosperity that we saw in the middle of the past century was a commitment to limits. and that's something that that's been a theme of. a lot of things that i've written about from a conservative. so i just want to give you this opportunity. answer your critics. how are you not a full socialist quite yet. great question. so the smartest reviews of this book have come from marxists. and they've they've argued that this book is a fund. what it puts forward a fundamentally conservative project, whereas often when i'm dealing with center right or center left podcasters or reviewers say, well, it seems like your brain is a right wing brain when it comes to abortion. but it's a you know, you have more of a left wing mentality when it comes to economy. and how do you reconcile those two? whereas, in fact, for me, a commitment to a market that

exists within the limits of the common arises from the same place it's informed by my catholic faith and catholic social, which is as early as the century. the popes recognized that, you know, unhindered markets were creating vast disparities in power and wealth and that the way to combat that is one of the ways, of course, is by allowing workers to encouraging them to to to to bargain collectively and in other places for the state, intervene in markets to ensure that you wouldn't have catastrophic situations of market failure. so it's it's not as if i shut down my conservative brain when i become, you know, a writer on political economy and then turn it back on when i turn to let's say, cultural issues, it all kind of comes from the comes from the same place. it's very important to note that, you know, the new deal project, the new deal and what preceded it, you know, herbert

hoover laid down of the frameworks that then were subsequently formalized or given much greater scale by fdr. this idea of class compromise was seen as the conservative thing to do in the face of market disruptions and then in the face of social unrest that was coming about because workers didn't earn enough to afford the goods that they were producing and that was leading to social instability. and so this model of you might call class compromise is not class antagonism, right? it recognizes that class antagonism is real, but it seeks to reconcile classes rather than take the class antagonism all the way into the sort. of abolition of one class by the other. and so, yeah, i mean, there's nothing contradictory about being conservative and supporting a kind of a socially managed capitalist vision. so one quick follow up for senator rubio on this before we bring in the rest of the panel. you touched on this at the end of your remarks that you were

perhaps more optimistic than others about remaking the as a working class party. i'm wondering first, if you can just expand on that a little bit. that optimism and to what do you think are some the main barriers to achieving that sort of political realignment? well, first of all, i think that's where the party writ large is in terms of its voters. it's one of the things that really starkly apparent to me when i ran for president is how different the people like i go campaign somewhere and i hear, you know, naphtha sox, you know, the the the economy you know these people are sending our jobs overseas all these time. and then you go somewhere with donors who look very different lives in a very different experiences and you realize there was already a massive disconnect in the party between its donor base and, its voter base. and i think as much as anything else, you know, the trump campaign sort of exposed that because he challenged all sorts of conservative orthodoxy in his campaign and sort of revealed, hey, we're what the donors tell you is really a good idea and not every donor. and i think that's unfair. but generally speaking, we're the tradition of the party and

then we're the voters where we're dramatically different. so the demand is there someone is going to be the voice of that group. and one of the things that challenges at least from my perspective, is that traditional political spectrum, as we've identified it for 25 or 30 years. and we think that somehow, like if you were here 150 years ago, the center, the right, the left, the political parties looked like they did now they look very different. there was an era in this country where there were very conservative democrats and there were quite liberal republicans. so we've had multiple realignments and reinventions of how the parties align and so forth. i think polarization has sort of just driven people into two camps these days. so where is the home of the american that says, look, i don't want socialism, i don't want the government controlling the means of production. i don't want to be a government employee. and i certainly don't want the government telling me what to do with every aspect of my life. but i do want public policy officials that, number one, care about creating an economy that not just people can get rich, but also people can find good, stable paying jobs. there's a market for that. there are people that are like, look, i feel terrible for what's

happening the world. but at the end of the day, we always have to do what's in america's national first and foremost and, how we react around the world and even here domestically, there's a market for that. that market is going to be met by some political movement. it won't be easy because, as i said, there's a tremendous amount of infrastructure. over 25 or 30 years that's been built on this traditional paradigm. but but but i think it's an inevitable evolution. and i think the republican party is right now the only place that can be the home of it, because the social radicalized portion of the democratic party makes it impossible for it to be. it's just a hostile environment to the working class voter who's sort of looking for a sense and balance in politics reflect not just their economic needs but their general preferences for themselves, families and the future of country. so i think i think anything is going to be easy, but i certainly think that that's where it winds up. so i want to bring in matt

stoller on that because i think that's probably fair to say that you're your man of the left. you are wing perspective on this panel. and as you know, as sure our audience knows sort of as recently a new magazine, a compact magazine under these sort of hypothesis that there are enough voices, disparate voices on left and right, that we need to to highlight emphasize in this new journal. so i'm curious first, your response to senator rubio's optimism on a gop working class party and to where you think maybe some of the limits to that that left, right cooperation might lie? yeah. so i look at it. so i am a democrat and a progressive democrat, and i kind of look at the problem as sort of like parties are kind of in a race. right. who's going to find the voice that speaks to that angry or the angry, frustrated person out

there who just sees how disconnected the political elites really are? and just to give a quick example, where both parties could do it today is the first day of the google and trial, which has been which was brought by trump in 2020 and has been continue by biden and either party could. and there are states involved and either party could win and become the dominant governing party. what i think is happening and what book is really about is a specific language of moral reform that you're rejecting, which is the language of efficiency, because the language of efficiency, the language of economics, modern economics is a language of moral reform that it has taken over both parties. the corporate world thinktank, world policy making world. and it traps us into not seeing power. both different parties, different philosophies of how to be once you are removed from that sort of world where there

is no power, a utopian world which is a trap, all of a sudden the possibility of building a society opens up. and i think, you know what? you see what i what? i've seen this happen to me and i think it happened. it it happens to everyone who is sort of one day doesn't see power in the next day does it's like there are many ways to craft a society. we just have to choose to do it. and i think the party that decides do that first is the party that is going to be sort of dominant over a generation. that makes sense. bradley are young conservative on the panel. it struck me that perhaps some of the most the most praise for sarah's book and sort of the project on the right at least has come from younger conservatives. you know, there are a lot of the the sort of older generation who have panned this. but if you're looking for praise from the right, it's going to be the younger generation. i just wonder if can speak to that why that is especially based on your experience as a young conservative? yeah, it has been from younger conservatives, not the old guard

types that are continually turning out white papers on why we need another corporate tax cut and why, which is another four years of republican administration pursuing that. some statistics that sohrab has in his book that most everyone in audience probably knows, right? wages stagnant since 1973. the productivity of a going up 75% since that same year. and yet it's their real wages. wages have only gone up 9%. and then if you look at a little deeper into that data, you see that wages are stagnant, but the gains that have been made are concentrated amongst those wage earners, above the 75th percentile. right. oh, how do you get their education? education has increased. 200% over that same time period. a lot of necessary goods that we consider necessary for family

formation, health care, college homes. right. we've seen the rapid increase in those types of prices. and time and time again, when young people are talk to you about this, they say, yes, my student debt did factor into me delaying getting married, delaying, buying a home, delaying having children. and so there's there's at the same time, this argument the old guard mates. well, you know if you're educated can actually get into those rungs of wage labor that are seeing those gains. well, since 2000, the average salary slash wage for college graduates been pretty volatile and is currently on a downswing. there's a slight progression there. so what actually pulls people out this and young people haven't gotten a good answer from two political parties that are on appeasing corporate power and setting up or continuing

that neoliberal structure that. saurabh so eloquently lies lines out in the book and young conservative isvs i think are seeing this fallacy in their own lives in their in their you know, republican politicians not senator rubio will go on the stump and talk about wallets, wallets, wallets, paychecks, paychecks, paychecks you know, will everyone thinks are okay until it hits their wallets. well, young people are seeing those in the costs of of all of these goods that we need to start families. and so that they're young conservatives are realizing that there's, i think, an incorrect that undergirds a lot of this that pushes family to the side pushes nations to the side and focuses more on this consent choose at will contracting and you know they might not articulate it in a direct way, but they that that kind of

arrangement that so much of the you we can call it the unit party consensus rests on is false. and so pursuing other forms of conservatism that hearkens back to the time before the goldwater in 1964. i mean, look at the history of the republican party for the longest time, i think since really the republican party was founded until the roosevelt taft split like number one issue for republicans was the tariff, the general tariff. we must have the general tariff. general tariff. there's if you go down to the one of the smithsonian's down, you'll see in an exhibit a brochure from republicans that say, you know, free trade leads to poverty and despair. republican protectionism leads to prosperity. and goodwill to all men or something like. you're right. and that's the tradition that more young conservatives rediscovering and trying to navigate out of these problems, that this neo liberal consensus

has left us with. so i want to turn to perhaps the chief remedy that sarah puts forward in the book, which union membership the need to support and boost unions. sarah mentioned this, but there is, you know, a lot of there are many statistics on this that show that, you know, a lot of workers do want to join unions, but i think another statistic that's helpful to kind of to put this into a light was a survey done by american compass which asked why potential union members would not want to be part a union. and the top of reasons why were one union political involvement is toxic to member dues. three corruption and then way down the list at number nine was fear of retaliation from from the company. so ashley i want to bring you in on this because i know you've done a of work in labor in the labor movement. i'm just curious to get your thoughts on sort of why

potentially union members won't join unions. and if so, rob is right that this is a great antidote to a lot of the issues that we're seeing in our political economy, how we can get over that and encourage more. sure. so it bears keeping mind that the way somebody becomes union member, it's not like, you know, becoming a member of the nra or, you know, the democratic socialists of america or something like that. the main way that people become union members is actually of incidental. it's by becoming an employee in a shop that's already organized for those. or the second largest way is actually by people who are the first to form a union and elect a labor organization at their workplace. and so for for those cases, i think successful campaigns are really going to be around the issues that actually matter to those employees who who elect a union. so i think these sort of you know, abstract or these surveys are a bit abstract, but i think they're interesting insofar as

they sort of point to kind of reputations that unions have are built up in certain ways. so what what were some of the what was the top reason that you said? yes, how a reason not to join the union. the union's political involvement is toxic. oh, political involvement is toxic. yeah. so, you know, for the reasons i talking about, i mean, actual, you know, political orientations of union members are, you know a lot of union members are republicans already. so know different unions are going to have different sort of, you know, makeups. some are going to be more conservative than others. but if you look at the diversity that exists in the labor movement now, i mean, if you if you see the. demonstrations of some pilots now, they sort of all get together and stand in a line. and it's sort of very conservative and they're all holding sign at the same level in the exact same way. you know, this is a labor demonstrator in the same way that one, that's much more sort of boisterous.

so you know, i think, you know, even though the labor movement is small, i want it to get a lot bigger. it's quite diverse and there's room in it for all kinds of people who want to join together, have a say at work and negotiating a contract with. their coworkers, their employer and and having something that's very important, that sort of touches on in the book. and that is not being an employee. and this sits what senator rubio was talking about of having stability in, your job and being able to count on it, reliable stability that you can't be dismissed for no reason or for any reason. that's not illegal. yeah please, just one more thought on the question of unions being perceived not by many workers as being politicized, and specifically on the side of the democratic party. our friend michael lind points out in his most recent book that at one point, you know, he just

visited the page of the leader of the afl-cio and her pin tweet was something like, you know, well, for the like i'm slightly paraphrasing, but like we stand for, you know, maximal reproductive freedom. and, you know, as michael says, like lots of workers who are, you know, either are covered by the afl-cio or would want to be covered don't share those views. so what that reflecting is the degree to which you know, organized labor has become very much part of the democratic party. but one thing one major reason for that, you know, over the past two generations, the labor movement has often more often than not gotten the back of the hand from the republican party. and so it's been forced to shift, too, to the democrats, i think, by political necessity. and therefore, even those workers are coming to the republican party as voters. they don't have an organized

vote voice the republican party in the same way that organized labor is in an organized part of the democratic coalition. but if we had a republican party that was friendly to labor organizations, then you could i think you would see labor becoming more independent. it's not so dependent on one party knowing that the other one will be, you know, hostile at every stage. it's national labor relations boards will just be kind of made up of union busters and. well, i want to turn it to the audience. we have time for one, maybe two questions. so if you have a question, please, your hands and we will do what we can. yes, right over here. yes. so first, mr. morrison saying in your remarks were very interesting you mentioned your faith very briefly in your remarks. i was just curious to what degree faith informs this. what is the vision for? sure. yeah. i mean, you know, when i when i when i became a catholic, i was, you know, working for a

publication that, you know, pushes the kind of neo liberal dogma. right. tax free trade over everything else. and but it seemed to me the more i read the pope's teachings on on and social issues on moderate social, catholic, social teaching. the less the attempt to synthesize catholicism and paul ryan ism tenable and so you know in mehlman's garden limits the centrality of limits in and the classical and christian tradition. you know you i think there's a liberating aspect being kind of having a catholic view on things because because you look at a market and you you neither fetishize the market nor you completely turn away from you say, well, it's a, it's a tool, it's a human institution. but it's subject to the imperatives of the good. and therefore, there are things

that must limited. and so that's that kind of attitude of respect for limits is i think at the heart of my political economic thinking. can i add one thing on to here? one of the things i found very interesting about the reviews of saab's book that were critical, they'd quote john locke and go, gotcha. the catholic teaching as a recent convert to catholicism self catholic social teaching and some of these liberal theorists often use similar language, but they're getting it somewhat different things and that's the interplay fallacy that i alluded to that runs not just through neo liberalism but all the way back to liberalism. and it's and it's that choice oriented, consent oriented at will contracting orient mindset that is is foreign to really the entire western canon pre you

know, 15th 16th century and that's kind of for me my my faith rediscovered that sense of when talk about equality and freedom and human dignity right those are those are the types of of freedom and dignity that we're talking about when we're motivating these questions like very a-type core policy proposals that you might hear from conservatives of this day and age can i have it please as i actually have spoken this before in the past, the catholic social doctrine is actually incredibly fascinating because it's also very intellectually deep, but it's rooted in some pretty basic principles. the first is the dignity of the person, that the individual dignity. where do you derive dignity from? from a faith perspective, because you're made in the image of the creator, but also from what you have opportunity to do, what it is that you fulfill from and it isn't from the acquisition of wealth or status or how many things material possession and it is from its fundamental core. it's argues that man was made to

work. and so what it argues is that human beings have an obligation work, but then it goes on to say so in a functioning economy, people an obligation to work. but the economy you have public policymakers have an obligation to create foster economy that creates that work. that's two sides of the same coin. so yeah, if i you you should be if you want to expect you're going to go out and work. you also have to have an economy that produces the work it can't just be produces work that fulfills the human dignity and the is that has a very simple definition for the role of civil officials and that is to promote the common good, which is a term of a speech i gave in 2019 about common good capitalism. and it largely was the argument that capitalism is a tool that we use, achieve the common good and has then the definite lesson of what is in the common good is what our politics about. but i think there are some fundamental that there will be broad agreement. and one of them is that we need to have economic policies that create work for those who we are expecting to work and, the kind of work that allows you to do the things that make life worth

living and allow for human flourishing like family formation. and that's what we have an answer for, for young americans. i mean, i know when i was my baby told me, you went to school, you get a degree, especially if you go to going to get a degree that takes seven or eight years, borrow some. it doesn't matter. you'll make it back. it's a great investment. what's that formula today outside of maybe a handful of jobs that, i can say if you figure out how to do this, like 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 is the guarantee that to americans? and i don't mean, guarantee you're going to be wealthy. the guarantee you will find if you're willing to do x, you will at least find a job that pays you enough so you don't have stay up at night worried that you're going to get laid off at any moment. you're going to lose everything you have. and then who's going to pay to raise these kids and why should i even get married and why should i even own a home? why should i even be involved in a community if i'm going to have to move into an every two and a half years to find another job that's comparable? we don't have an answer. and so used to say we are on the

verge of becoming the first americans that leave the next generation better off. i think we're actually living it because i can just tell you from personal experience anecdotal, nonetheless, perhaps the numbers it up members my family are at least ten years behind where i was economically and socially in terms of homeownership career achievement and the like at that when i was you know 30 i was ten years ahead of where they are today in their thirties. and i think that has a dramatic impact on the country moving forward that that i don't we are fully yet absorbed. just just briefly matt. yeah, yeah. i just want it's just important realize that neoliberalism is based on faith, like it's religious zealotry and it that's i saw like i'll just be real quick, senator hawley introduced a bill on user a usury cap which you know, gets introduced periodically and. the level of anger towards that was there was a metaphysical rage, like how you right and that's what find when you

propose new ideas or saying, hey, this stuff isn't working. they're like, how you and that's because it's a criticism of their religion, right? that that's, i think, important faith works in both ways. it sounds like when i increase the child tax credit how dare you right that needs to go to machines you monster. well, i meant i had mentioned at the outset that unfortunately we are on a really tight timeline. so we need to leave it there for today. just a few closing notes, though. first of all, if you have not already gone and bought tierney ink, please do it. is it really important and provocative book? secondly, can keep up with everything that zarrab is both on the pages of comeback magazine, as well as his weekly column at, the american conservatives. i go check us out as well. and just last housekeeping, as i mentioned at the outset, please do stay in your seats until the speakers have had a chance to leave the room. so thank you to all of our please join me in thinking our panelists.