Transcription
We have to continue to elect more socialists, and we have to ensure that we are unapologetic about our socialism, which is to say, steal the stuff you want to control from the people who built it.
Hey there, friends, fans, and foes of Dad Saves America. John Pola here, and I thought I would take this Friday to talk about, well, about New York City, my former home, and the rise of socialism in the Big Apple.
I was just in New York City because I was pitching a show to, uh, a network, and, um, of course, I love the town. I had to spend some time going to my favorite pizzeria, Joe's Pizza, down on Carmine Street, which is just this small walk-in place. Four bucks, super great, super thin crust. Love it. And while I'm there, I'm reminded of the wave that's crashing on the shores of Manhattan, namely Mr. Mom Donnie. Of course, this is the New York Post, so they're going to be critical, but I wanted to take time to dive into Mr. Donnie and really take him seriously because I think it's a serious deal what happens in New York City.
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Cortez, and I am here, loud and proud, to rank Zoran Mdani number one for mayor of New York City.
>> AOC has been a political phenomenon, uh, but was limited to a very particular borough and a very particular congressional district of cooks. It's a much different thing to have the entirety of New York City go all-in on this type of politics. So, what is this guy who is a self-proclaimed, as Rob Henderson, uh, noted, nepo baby, who, uh, has basically come out of the upper crust of our elite, the top 1%, went to a, uh, well, went to private schools that were more expensive than my four years at Penn State? What is he offering? How is he appealing to enough New Yorkers that it looks like he is going to become the mayor? Well, he, I want to break down this ad that sort of lays it all out and dive a little deeper.
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>> Good evening. Mayor Eric Adams has been indicted by a federal grand jury.
>> Every politician says New York is the >> greatest city on the globe.
>> But what good is that if no one can afford to live here?
>> It's a fair question. Having spent the first almost 13 years of my adult life in New York City, it is a punishing place to live. Punishingly expensive, and it has been, uh, for a very long time.
>> City Hall is engulfed in corruption.
>> Unscientific.
>> The cost of living is the real crisis. New Yorkers are being crushed by rent and child care. The slowest buses in the nation are robbing us of our time and our sanity. Working people are being pushed out of the city they built. A mayor could change this, and that's why I'm running.
>> It's not clear that a mayor can change this. New York City is enormous. It is over 8 million people when it's in full operation mode, a lot of which are coming in from out of town to work in the city and then leave. In fact, that's one of the things about New York City and cities like it is it is a kind of two-tiered society, and that you do have the people that can make enough money to live in the city, in which case it's, it's great. Or the people who operate the city and keep it running and can't possibly afford to live anywhere near it, which is why New York City has for a long time had the longest commutes in the country. When I spent most of my time commuting in from New Jersey, I had about 4 hours of daily commuting into New York City every day. It is a major reason why I live here in Austin, Texas.
>> I'll make buses fast and free.
>> So I can just get where I'm going.
>> I don't know how you're going to make them fast with the traffic, but okay. I'll make child care available to all New Yorkers at no cost.
>> I want to raise my kid in New York.
>> Well, if the child care is free, then do you want to raise your kid, or do you want someone free that's not you to raise your kid? I'd be an unfair jab, but let's keep going.
>> And I'll freeze the rent for every single rent-stabilized tenant.
>> These Eric Adams rent hikes are killing us. I didn't know that Eric Adams was the largest landlord in New York City and was hiking rent on people. But political rhetoric doesn't need to be tethered to reality.
>> Life in this city doesn't need to be this hard. But politicians like Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo want it to be this way. They care about their donors. They care about themselves. They don't care about you, the working class who keep this city running. This campaign is for every New Yorker who believes in the dignity of their neighbors. And the government's job is to actually make our lives better.
>> Number one is the government's job to make our lives better. I, I think that that's such a broad term that we certainly don't want our government to make our lives worse. And, uh, and that's what you get into when you start to dig below the surface of these issues. But let's take each of these one by one because he is being very specific, and that is, I think, one of the reasons why he has resonated with enough people to, uh, clinch the nomination.
So, first up, there's a political problem that is giving rise to people like Mum Daddy. And that is that the center-left is rotten. In the center-left, if you could call it that, are Eric Adams, who is frankly the least worst of these candidates, and then Andrew Cuomo, who was the, the horrible governor of New York during COVID, who was ordering sick and infected COVID patients to go back into nursing homes, basically executing the exact reverse of what was supposed to be going on, and what was going on in sane countries, really, the only sane country, Sweden, which was protect the elderly from the virus and let everybody else go about living their lives because it's an airborne coronavirus. So you got Andrew Cuomo, corrupt, murderous groper, and Eric Adams, slightly less corrupt but still ultimately problematic mayor. And into that breach, that center that cannot hold, comes Mr. Mandani, radical socialist, but pitching himself with that Cheshire cat smile and claiming he can solve everything by giving us all the things we want for free.
But before I dive into what his program is, I have to just say who his supporters are. Really something else. It, this is, uh, from an article in The Free Press. Um, this is it. This is the entitled managerial semi-elite that really constitutes the center of Mandani and people like him's political base. They are the over or mal-educated, um, paper pushers of our society. They're the kids that went to schools like Columbia, got degrees in horseshit, came out and got middle management jobs, can't afford a decent apartment, and are now angry about it at dinner parties on the rooftop of the Soho House. That is the center. That is the median voter for Mr. Mom Donnie. And, uh, and it says a lot about them. I think it says a lot about me that this picture makes me so angry. But let's dive in. What is he talking about?
Well, first up, free transportation.
>> I'll make buses fast and free.
>> So I can just get where I'm going.
>> I'll make buses fast and free.
Now, he's got an example, and it's from a video that really says a lot.
>> Take it in. The true icon of New York, Staten Island.
>> Get that? Take it in. Not the Statue of Liberty, because liberty is about the furthest thing from this guy's ideology. That's not the thing to take in.
>> Take it in. The true icon of New York, the Staten Island Ferry.
>> The Staten Island Ferry. Staten Island, by the way, will not be voting for this guy. It went way for Trump. But let's keep going.
>> Staten Island Ferry is a beacon on the waters of New York City. And the best part, it's free. Since 1997, the ferry's been free. And New Yorkers have come to know it as a dependable means of transit. And it's the best way to see the Statue of Liberty. So when people say buses can never be free, don't ask them to take a hike. Ask them to take the ferry. Let's get some more free transit.
>> Okay, for starters, nothing's free, dude. It's not free. It costs money to operate. It costs money to maintain. It costs money to build. It is just being paid for by someone other than the users. This is the first sort of socialist linguistic trick that gets used all the time. It's not free. New York City has incredibly high taxes. It has taxes specifically on city dwellers. There is a city income tax. In fact, one of the reasons to move to New Jersey as someone working in Manhattan, um, or, God forbid, if you're working in Queens or Brooklyn and living in Jersey, that's hell on earth as a life. But if you're doing that, you move to Jersey so you can escape the New York City taxes, so you're paying for it.
Number two, what happens when you give things away for free? Well, as it turns out, when you give things away for free, like buses, people that don't need to pay use it more. And what has been found over and over again in cities that have attempted to give away public transit entirely for free is it gets immediately swamped by vagrants and homeless people and, and jerks and jerks who aren't trying to get to work. They're just looking for a place to hang out. That's one of the fundamental problems going on here. When you don't ask anything of people in exchange for using a service, the people that really need it end up waiting in line behind free riders. Literally free riders. People that don't need to pay and are perfectly happy to abuse the resource. This is called the commons problem. The tragedy of the commons. And this is a recurring theme throughout not just him, but everyone like him that advocates for making everything free. Free means you get to wait in line.
And here's the other piece of the puzzle here is that New York is interesting because it is a place that actually uses our public transit. The agency that runs New York's transit spends billions of dollars and is routinely in the red and on the verge of crisis all the time. When you are giving stuff away below its actual cost, when you are subsidizing it with funds from people who don't use it, namely taxpayers, you create these incentives for stuff to be run poorly.
Let's keep moving because in a lot of ways, transit is not the biggest deal or the biggest pillar of his platform or the biggest concern for most New Yorkers and most Americans because I think New York is an acute version of problems we have across the country. It's a canary in the coal mine, if you will. So the next piece of the puzzle in the Mandani platform is driving down the cost of food. And, um, and this too is a significant problem. But here's what he wants to do.
>> Grocery prices are out of control. The cost of eggs and milk has skyrocketed. Some stores are even using dynamic pricing, jacking up the cost over the course of a day depending on what they can get away with. It doesn't need to be this way. I'm Zan Mandani, and as mayor, I will create a network of city-owned grocery stores. It's like a public option for produce. We will redirect city funds from corporate supermarkets to city-owned grocery stores whose mission is lower prices, not price gouging. These stores will operate without a profit motive or having to pay property taxes or rent and will pass on those savings to you.
>> Solution, once again, government-run thing. Couple problems with this. The grocery business is the lowest profit margin business, maybe in the world. Grocery stores barely survive. The average grocery profit margin across this country is between 1 and 2 and a half to 3%. That's the profit. So let's imagine somehow that he can erase the profit. Okay, you've reduced the cost by 1 to 2%. But let's just listen carefully to the pieces of the puzzle here he's adding in because it also points to the ratchet effect that people like Mom Donnie like and want and exploit to continually put more and more government in the system. Keep in mind, by the way, in each of these pillars, there is already massive government spending, massive government services, and massive government regulation of every single element of what he's complaining about.
>> Jacking up the cost over the course of a day depending on what they can get away with. It doesn't need to be this way. I'm Zan Madani, and as mayor, I will create a network of city-owned grocery stores. It's like a public option.
>> It's like a public option. So, if you remember the Affordable Care Act days, and if you're old enough to remember, maybe you do, but most of you probably don't. There was a debate about whether or not the Affordable Care Act should have a public option, a government entity competing with the private market. And the claim, which was correct, was that that's just a way to crowd everybody else out by making a government-run service cheaper through rigging the system so that it is cheaper by default because no one else could compete at the same level playing field. And that's what's happening. And listen to what he's saying will make it cheaper, 'cause the profit's only 1%.
>> For produce, we will redirect city funds from corporate supermarkets to city-owned grocery stores.
>> I'm not sure what that means. I'm not sure what all this, uh, city funds going into corporate grocery stores means. Is it mean that there's, you know, city support for people that are poor, like giving them the equivalent of food stamps? I, I'm not really sure, but that's not as important as what comes next.
>> Whose mission is lower prices, not price gouging. These stores will operate without a profit motive or having to pay property taxes or rent.
>> The stores will not have to pay property taxes or rent. Well, that's interesting because number one, property taxes in New York City are monstrous. They are way more than the 1 to 2% of the profit margin that a store like Christis, which I used to go to all the time, has to pay. So, why can they do that? Well, because of the government. So, what he's saying is we, the city, will tax all the other grocery stores and then compete with them and, of course, not tax ourselves because we're the government. So that he's, he's playing tricks with with the public. He's creating this sort of playing both sides of the negotiating table here. How won't they pay rent? Well, because the city will simply own the stores. So, that's just state ownership of the means of production. But, of course, none of this makes any sense because most of the cost of food has nothing to do with the retail aspect of selling you the food. Again, these are just retailers. The food comes in on a truck, they put it on a shelf, it starts going bad, especially if it's produce, and they try to sell it as fast as they can and very quickly discount it before it goes bad, as well as face enormous competition from all the other stores around, which is why the profit margins are only 1 to 2%.
Now, if you are a state or city-run grocery store that doesn't need to compete because you take your revenue and some of your costs are covered by people who don't shop there, namely all taxpayers, the incentive to be efficient, the incentive to not let food go to waste, goes down. The incentive to make sure you're doing the best for your customers goes down. And this is why these efforts, which have been tried in many other places, fail.
>> It's clear this Sunfresh at 31st and Prospect is struggling. This is the first section people see when they come in. There's barely any produce. A lot of the coolers and shelves around the store look the same way, empty. So shoppers have been asking us, if the store isn't closing, then where is all the food? A rotten smell comes through the door, and anywhere you turn, you'll see products that need to be restocked. No hot food or deli.
>> I watch people walk in and walk out.
>> The grocery store has received financial assistance from the city but has been unable to keep those shelves stocked.
>> Incentives matter. Something that Mr. Mom Donnie both understands, 'cause he wants things to be cheaper, and doesn't understand at all, 'cause he wants all of the incentives to be stripped out of the society. The extreme version of this, which is the easy place to go, of course, is the Soviet Union, which had breadlines and mass starvation and killed tens of millions of people by starving them to death, often intentionally in the case of the Ukrainians, um, but also accidentally, because communism doesn't work. Such that when Boris Yeltsin came to the United States, the thing he was most shocked by was our grocery stores. He comes in and sees the enormous amount of variety very affordably and says, "This is incredible. Look at him. Look at him." He's like, "I can't even believe what I'm seeing." This is the thing that Mom Donnie doesn't understand. The way you get to cheaper stuff is having the incentives to make and produce more and then compete to keep the price down. He doesn't believe in any of that.
But where this comes into play most dramatically is housing. I have a lot of experience with this, specifically in New York City, because when I first moved to New York City, coming out of Penn State, I was commuting in from the outer boroughs. I was what we used to call a bridge and tunnel guy. And, and so I know firsthand how grindingly difficult, how utterly suffocating it is to live in New York City. Rent, it's too damn high.
>> It is a very expensive place. I was making $500 bucks a week to start. That is like $26,000 a year trying to get by in New York City and not getting by. And then as it progressed, as my career progressed, you're constantly moving, trying to get a tiny bit more space. And this is a picture from my first apartment in Hoboken, New Jersey, which at the time, in 2004, was over $400,000. So, so I was making at that time something like $120,000 a year. I was now a producer. This was several years, five years into my career. And I, I was barely getting by. I was basically living paycheck to paycheck. I know exactly what these young yuppie professionals, um, who unfortunately have never gotten a good econ or history class in their entire adult lives. I know where they're coming from on a daily basis. I know what it's like to feel like you're making a lot of money and living paycheck to paycheck and barely scraping by and basically having to pick up side work just to not go further and further into debt. It is indeed suffocating.
So what's going on here? Well, one thing is true, and that is that the cost of housing in this country relative to wages, and again, both of these things are medians, which means you're taking this wide variety of different locations and different costs and different careers and averaging it all together. We're finding the middle point. That ratio has pushed, is now pushing 6x where it used to be going back several decades closer to 3 to 4. That is the centerpiece of pain in this country. I think the staggering explosion in the relative cost of housing, and of course, you need housing to live. It is essential, and it's been smashed. Why has it been smashed? Well, before we get to why, let's hear what Mr. Mandani's solution is, because he thinks he's got the answer to this crisis.
>> In this country, housing is treated as a commodity, not a right. It's a consumer product, just like clothes or cars, that private businesses can sell on the market to make a profit. And if someone isn't able to pay, either because their landlord raised their rent or because they can't work for one reason or another, they're not able to stay in their homes. It might be profitable for landlords and developers, but it's not efficient or beneficial for the rest of society. In fact, housing doesn't have to be seen as a market at all.
>> Get that? Housing doesn't need to be seen as a market at all. We're getting to the core of this guy's philosophy here. Housing, property, doesn't need to be a market.
>> In other countries, housing is considered a fundamental right, like education or healthcare.
>> Fundamental right, like these, these other services that other people provide you. These are lovely words. Talk of rights. Um, but when you're talking about the right of a service provided by other people, you are saying you have a right to other people doing things for you. Just for a little moment here. This idea that there is a fundamental right to other people's services is the ideology of slavery. That's what this is. I have a right for you to take care of me. I have a right for you as a doctor to take care of me. I have a right for you as a teacher to take care of me. I have a right. Now, when there aren't enough doctors, there aren't enough houses, there aren't enough teachers for me to get it, what happens to my right? Well, is it still a right? This is a deeply philosophical question, but the language of rights is really just a way to say you deserve this, and it doesn't really matter how we get it to you so long as you get it.
>> If we want to end the housing crisis, the solution has to be moving toward the full decommodification of housing.
>> What exactly does he mean? It's easy to be like, "Oh, well, commodity is kind of bad, right? It's bad to be commoditized. That means it's devalued or something. There's something negative about it being a commodity." Um, well, to decommodify it, what does that look like?
>> In other words, moving away from the status quo in which most people access housing by purchasing it on the market.
>> Private property. So, we should move away from private property where people own things, where they engage in contracts with other individuals, and now it's mine. It was yours, and you sold it to me for a price we agreed to, and now it's mine. None of that anymore. We're going to do something else. What are we going to do?
>> And toward a future where we guarantee high-quality housing to all.
>> Yes. Jump to the conclusion.
>> So, how can we do it? We'll have to go beyond the market. We can establish community land trusts to gradually buy up housing on the private market and convert it to community ownership.
>> Community ownership. What does that mean? That means the government owns it. Let's be clear. Community is a word for the government.
>> We can give tenants a right of first refusal to buy out their landlords when buildings go up for sale. We can give tenants the right of first refusal to buy the apartment when it goes up for sale. So, if I am thinking about getting into the rental business, I would be then required to sell it to my tenants before I sell it to anybody else. Am I going to do that? Am I going to build a new rental property if I'm going to be required to sell it to the people that, um, I rent it to? I, I, maybe I'm not going to do that. But I'm getting ahead of myself. And we can fully commit to a new era of social housing. Ending subsidies for luxury housing development and using our wealth to build beautiful, high-quality social housing projects that offer good homes and strong communities to everyone.
>> What's going on in New York in particular? And, and, and, and why is this a problem? And why is this skipping over why New York is so expensive? Well, let's recount. He wants to freeze rents so that people that own a property and rent it to others are not allowed to increase the cost, and, and ultimately control all of the housing by having the city buy it all and own it and call it community ownership, but it's the government. The government is an entity managed by individuals that would own and manage it. So, it's not you or we, it's the government. And, and then somehow that will all magically eliminate all scarcity and make sure everybody has housing. Uh, keep in mind the government's heavily involved, especially at the city level. The city is the good place to talk about this because cities tend to be the unit of governance that has the biggest impact on housing costs.
Let me give you a personal example. My best friend, when we were moving down here to Austin, had an apartment that he owned. I'm gonna say he owned because it was actually a co-op, which is a useful model here. Most of the apartments in the New York City area are co-ops, which means you don't really own your apartment. That would be like a condo. A co-op is you and everyone else that has bought into the building own shares in the building, and then you basically your unit is like a, is like the shares you own, but you don't really own your, your unit. You own shares in the overall thing. So it's like mini socialism in a certain sense. It is community ownership of the building. Okay. He wanted to put up a wall to turn his one-bedroom that had this sort of hallway, they called it a junior four, into a two-bedroom. Now, technically, this would be increasing the housing in a sense. It would make the unit capable of more comfortably housing more people. This process of building a non-load-bearing wall in an apartment building that apparently my buddy felt he owned, 'cause he did pay for it and had a mortgage, took over six months. It involved getting approval by the co-op board, which was slow and included old cat ladies that are grumpy and have nothing better to do than to scrutinize what all their neighbors do. This is socialism is the ideology that every busybody in your neighborhood should have a say in how you live your life. That's what socialism really is at every scale. People think, "Oh, I can have local socialism." No, it sucks at every scale. But, uh, so that was number one. Then it took multiple layers of city approvals to build a non-load-bearing wall. This is two days of work. It took six months. That is at the heart of the housing problem in New York City, or it's one of the things. It is hyper, hyper regulated. Building in New York City is very, very, very, very difficult. And if you look at alternatives like Houston, Texas, which has very little regulation relatively, or Tokyo, which has relatively laxer building regulations, the, the cost per unit and the growth in housing costs look nothing like New York City or the national average. Government is the core of the problem here.
But it's not the only problem. The other problem is rent control. Cities that have rent control, which say there is a max, that there are apartment units that have a fixed price, have higher rents overall than cities that don't. Why? Why would that be? That doesn't make any sense. The government's saying make it cheaper somehow just by decree. The reason is nobody wants to build a property that, or improve a property that they can't get a return on investment on. And you wouldn't want your government to do that either, because they're taking your tax dollars, and then how are they going to recoup the money? They can't. So what ends up happening with rent control is large sections of the housing supply get locked away. A, they are taken off the market, driving down the supply of housing and driving up the price. This is a major driver of housing costs in cities like New York. Rent control is part of the fundamental problem. And what happens instead is it doesn't eliminate scarcity. It doesn't make everything free. It shifts rationing, and it moves the rationing to a system of politics and patronage. I know this firsthand because I briefly lived in a rent-controlled apartment, which I only was able to get into because I knew a guy. I had a buddy that was actually subletting from another guy that had this rent-control deal. So he sublet from him, and then I sublet from him, and then some cat lady on the floor ratted us out, and I had to move back to New Rochelle. So, I know this firsthand. You get into these apartments through your connections, not your ability to pay. There is nothing moral about political connections versus ability to pay. That is not a more moral system of rationing. And the other thing that happens is the politically connected get all the great deals. So in New York City, there is an egregious example of this, which is Congressman Charlie Rangel, sort of longtime Democrat of New York, had four rent-controlled apartments under his command. This was a relatively wealthy, powerful guy who managed to keep his housing costs well below what the rest of us working schlubs were paying because of rent control. Because he was politically connected. Rent control creates a black market in which you just have to know a guy or pass this down to your kids in order to get a deal. That will just explode if Mom Donnie were to win, which he probably will, and actually get to implement his ideas. You will have less housing, higher costs, except for Mom Donnie's cronies.
The other piece of the puzzle, of course, is nobody will want to invest in the city, so you will have fewer people building. Right now, we have a New York City, and a lot of cities in the country have, have housing shortages. So, how do you solve a housing shortage? Is by creating more housing. You're not going to create more housing by making it so unappealing to developers to build housing. And that's what's exactly what's happened in New York. We, I have three projects in New York. We have one in Hudson Square, uh, which is kind of just between Tribeca and West Village. We, we have a waiting list there. Every time we get a notice for someone to move out, there's another tenant paying higher rent lined up for that apartment. What, what is that saying to me? It's saying there's a huge housing shortage in New York City. This is really important. Prices are mostly not set by the seller. They're set by the buyers. This is a fact that is fundamentally misunderstood by these socialist types. But I've been there. You're trying to get a house. You're trying to get an apartment in New York City. It's really, really hard. The second they come on the market, they fly off. So, how does the price go up? Well, people bid it up. That's what happens. It's not even that the landlord sets the price crazy high. The price gets driven up by the fact that there's competition for a scarce resource. That's what happens. That's how prices change. That's why competition is so important. 'Cause in a freer market, it'd be easy to come in and compete. Oh man, look at these landlords. They're making a killing. I should build a rental property and undercut them. That's what happens in cities like Houston, where building is easy. But in New York, it's just a bunch of crooks.
I know where you're going to go next. We don't need that. The city can just build all the housing. That's it. We can have it be like the public option, or like public education, which is also a terrible example, especially in New York City. What happens when the city does that? Well, in San Francisco, here's just one example, but it is representative. It costs $750,000 per unit to build affordable housing for the homeless. So, when you don't face competition and you're spending other people's money, you build $750,000 apartment units for homeless drug addicts. That's, that's reality. This is not a theory. This is the practice. This is the deep blue hunger games economics that Mr. Mom Donnie and his kindred spirits want to do.
And all of this leads us fundamentally to the underlying ideology. My platform is that every single person should have housing. If there was any system that could guarantee each person housing, whether you call it the abolition of private property or you call it, you know, just a statewide housing guarantee, it is preferable to what is going on right now.
>> And I think that people try and play like gotcha games about these kinds of things and it's like, look, I care more about whether somebody has a home.
>> Yeah. Care. I care. I care is really easy to say. I care when you're spending other people's money, but that little sneaked in. Yeah, you know, if we want to abolish private property, that, that might work. Um, that's really what's going on. And he says as much.
Socialism. Terrifying word.
>> A lot of people are afraid of the word socialist, and a lot of people have misconceptions about what it means. I'm a democratic socialist, and what socialism means to me is a commitment to dignity.
>> Okay.
>> All right.
>> A state that provides whatever is necessary for its people to live a dignified life. So the typical big three that we talk about are housing, healthcare, education. But frankly, if you look around in the moment of this pandemic, we see how many more things are necessary to live with a dignified life. We need our internet because we have all of our kids staying at home doing remote learning. And if you don't have internet, you can't be taught, you can't learn. Whether it's child care, whether it's public transportation, whether it's our utilities, whether it's our housing, whether it's our healthcare, these are not things that should be up for debate.
So, just to be clear, here are the things that should not be produced privately and by people, individuals who can make deals with each other, have contracts, invest, and then build capacity to sell things to other people voluntarily. That's all that capitalism is. It's just people doing deals with each other voluntarily. Can't use that system for the important things like healthcare, food, housing, education, transportation, child care. That's kind of all of life. That's kind of the whole enchilada. We can let Apple make us iPhones. Okay. We can let people like his famous mother make movies because, of course, that's going to be a totally free market with very little regulation, and, you know, it's, you're free to make billions of dollars if you, if you can pull it off. You can do that. You can be a movie maker, and that can be private. But for everything else, we should have state ownership of the means of production.
>> Because we see what happens when we let the market be the sole determinant of the distribution of dignity.
>> Okay. When the market is the sole distributor of dignity. I'm not even sure what he means by dignity because it sounds like what he means by dignity is a modern 21st-century comfortable life. I have a very different notion of dignity, which is fundamental human respect, that I have sovereignty over myself and my body, and you can't just take stuff from me or do things to me because it violates my dignity, my sovereignty as a person. He's, that's not his definition of dignity because right below the surface of his all his free stuff is taking it from other people and then forcing people to do the work, which is why we end up with goologs everywhere because if you can't make a living being a doctor, not a lot of people go into medicine, and if you keep doing that long enough, you end up needing to conscript people into medicine.
The other piece of the puzzle here, I want to just replay this 'cause it's really important. These are not things that should be up for debate because we see what happens when we let the market be the sole determinant of the distribution of dignity. We see what happens when we let the market be the sole distributor of dignity. What are you talking about? We don't live in an anarchist society. Every element of what he's talking about has government involved quite substantially. And the areas where government is involved the most is the areas that are the most broken and the most expensive and have grown the most as a share of income, namely healthcare, education. Those are the two places where government has near total monopolies, and they have outpaced inflation for decades. Housing is next in line, and the financing of housing has been entirely controlled by government regulations and large government entities like Fannie and Freddie, which is an entire other video I can get into. But a lot of what's going on when it comes to housing and housing costs that isn't at the city level, like telling you how many outlets you need to put in and having six months to build an unload-bearing wall. The other piece of the puzzle with housing is that the finance of it is a giant inflationary Fannie and Freddie Federal Reserve scam. So all of that is not the, the free market being the sole distributor of dignity, whatever. Again, and, and this, the next piece of the puzzle here I just think is important to, to think about when you hear this rhetoric is this idea of distribution. It smuggles in the Marxist zero-sum model of the world. See, our buddy Karl Marx, which is all this really is, it's all just Marx. It assumes there pre-exists some pool of wealth, and it's in something like a giant warehouse. And the question is, how will it be distributed? Will it be distributed fairly or unfairly, equally or unequally? There's no notion of how things get created, of building new things. It's just about distribution. This is essentially a misuse of a term that comes out of statistics. When we talk about the distribution of wealth, the technical meaning is just looking at the way the numbers plot along a graph. But that's not how we as people, not economists and statisticians, hear it. We hear it and think of distribution center, a person or entity making decisions for who gets what.
Guest of the show and former Democratic socialist-friendly mayor of New York, Bill De Blasio, who I personally like, but who was a really poor mayor. I'm sorry, Bill, but you, you weren't good. He had this saying, "We have plenty of money. It's just in the wrong hands." Again, the assumption being there's these resources out there, and we just, we just need to decide that other people get it than who has it right now. This is the philosophy of theft. It is the philosophy of communism. And that's what we've got going on here. Now, today's communists look a little different than they used to. So, they used to be guys like this, guys with scary mustaches, with constructivist fonts, strong men. Now they look a little more like this.
>> If we want to defeat capitalism, we are going to need a party that will organize working people to fight for the demands that we want and to win socialism. Thank you so much.
>> Great.
>> Uh, quick point of privilege. Quick point of personal privilege. Um, guys, I, first of all, James Jackson, Sacramento, he/him. I just want to say, can we please keep the chatter to a minimum? I'm one of the people who's very, very prone to sensory overload. There's a lot of whispering and chatter going on. It's making it very difficult for me to focus. Please, can we just, I know it's, we're all fresh and ready to go, but can we please just keep the chatter to a minimum? It's affecting my ability to focus. Thank you.
>> Thank you, comrade. Okay.
>> Thank you, comrade, for your hypersensitivity about your auditory processing problems, but we'll storm the gates soon enough. Oh, just you wait. It gets so much better. Is there a speaker against name chapter?
>> Pronoun privilege point of personal privilege?
>> Yes.
>> Please do not use gendered language to, to address everyone. This is what we're dealing with. This is the new. This is the Democratic Socialists of America convention. It's from a few years ago, but it's all the same stuff. It's woke all the way down. Below the surface, though, it's pretty brutal.
>> What the purpose is about this entire project. It's not simply to raise class consciousness, but to win socialism. And obviously raising class consciousness is a critical part of that, but making sure that we have candidates that both understand that and are willing to put that forward at every which moment that they have, at every which opportunity that they are given. We have to continue to elect more socialists. And we have to ensure that we are unapologetic about our socialism. There are also other issues that we firmly believe in. Whether it's BDS, right, or whether it's the, the end goal of, of seizing the means of production.
>> So, you know, this is the useful idiots situation that Lenin talked about where you can't really let the masses know too much about your real end goal. You got to keep them kind of in the dark with flowery language about free stuff while you plot to seize the means of production, which is to say, steal the stuff you want to control from the people who built it, and, and the grandmas who put their retirement funds into investing in it. That's what we're talking about. That's what this guy and his ilk are about. This is a movement going on in the Democratic Party in its centers of intellectual gravity. He is not alone.
>> The Minneapolis DFL has endorsed State Senator Omar Fate to be the next mayor.
>> I'm running for mayor.
>> State Senator Omar Fate, a Democratic socialist, has won the DFL endorsement, gaining at least 60% of the vote Saturday night.
>> State Senator Omar Fate has represented the South Minneapolis area where George Floyd was killed since 2021. He is a Democratic socialist who championed the cause of Uber drivers. He backs an additional tax for affordable housing. He supports rent stabilization and a $20 minimum wage. And in 2022, he supported a losing charter amendment that critics say would have defunded the police. By the way, and plenty of people have covered this, and there's lots of data out there. Nobody that lives in an unsafe community wants to defund the police and never has. This has been, as Rob Henderson calls it, a luxury belief from day one. This is a laundry list of sort of blob woke communist sort of omni-issue omni-movement stuff that's, you know, tack on a little Gaza, little, uh, you know, "from the river to the sea," which in this community goes over real big, and, uh, and you've got, you've got the total picture here.
>> To make an affordable Minneapolis that works for everyone. We need a mayor that works as hard as you do. I'm ready to work hard to one, build a Minneapolis that working people can afford to call home. Two, protect our city from a hostile White House. And three, diversify our city's public safety response by increasing the minimum wage to $20 by 2028 and passing rent stabilization to stop price gouging and incentivizing new construction. We can protect workers. Protecting all of our communities from Donald Trump means not letting MPD interact with ICE, whether it's for an immigration raid or not. Our residents deserve a mayor that will stand up to Donald Trump and say no, not in our community.
>> I have a theory, and my theory goes something like this. This guy and Mom Donnie are a SCOTUS plant. They are people designed to turn reasonable, normal Americans, including diverse Americans, let's say non-white Americans, against immigration. Because you watch this, if you're reasonable, and you think we can't have these people in our country, rent-free, free buses, universal childcare.
[Music]
I'm dead. I like immigrants. He's going to screw most of the immigrants in New York City because, because you know the industries that immigrants get into, especially in places like New York City, they get into running bodegas and grocery stores. They become landlords. This is an immigrant screw job. One of the reasons why a majority of Mexican and Latino men in this country voted for Donald Trump in 2024, and especially here in Texas, is because hardworking immigrants that come here and look at that Statue of Liberty and say, "I want to be free to pursue my dreams and build a life for myself," look at people like this and say, like, these are the crazy demagogic scumbags I have fled from to come to this country. And now we face an interesting choice. We
As middle to upper middle class Gen Xers who've put our kids into these ridiculous woke Madrasa schools and not taught them the value of a dollar or put them in work early enough, have raised a generation that want to social signal with their vote and usher in an era of Hunger Games economics in our big cities.
And there's a part of me that says, "Go at it, New York. Have a blast. We need bad examples. Trash the city. Let's see how far you can push it. Let's let democracy do what HL Mein said and give the people what they want good and hard."
But there's another part of me, the humane part, the part of me that loved my time in New York City, even though it was grindingly difficult, that can't help but think about how many victims are going to be brutalized if this guy and people like him get into power and actually succeed in putting these ideas into action.
We have seen what happens in this country and especially in others, places like Argentina. Argentina used to be one of the wealthiest countries per capita on this planet. Argentina at the start of the last century was on track to potentially beat the United States on a per capita basis. And in came the Peronists, the socialistic ideologues pitching free stuff and in the cases of uh Hollywood depictions through song like with Madonna, "Don't Cry for Me Argentina." And they wrecked the place and they said, "We're going to provide it all for free, but since we can't tax enough of the money to make it happen and we're horribly inefficient and we're a giant monopoly and we're filled with cronies and monopolist scumbags, we'll just run the printing press to make it free and therefore steal your money out of your back pocket instead of your front." Um, you end up in a hyperinflationary hell hole with a 40 to 50% poverty rate.
I don't think we're going to head all the way there, but we will if we elect people like this. And uh and I think our job in the public domain and as parents is to teach our kids these lessons so they don't just repeat the lessons of history over and over again like useful idiots. We've been here before. Not a single thing you've heard is new.
And I want to end with this, my good old buddy Carl Marx. So in the Communist Manifesto all this stuff was there. Okay, ready.
Number one in the agenda: abolition of property and land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
Number two: heavy progressive and graduated income tax.
Number three: abolition of all rights of inheritance.
Number four: confiscation of the property of all immigrants and rebels, which might be a little time-specific, but even so.
Number five: centralization of credit in the hands of the state. Sound like the Federal Reserve? Cuz it is by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
Number six: centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.
Number seven: extension of the factories and instruments of production owned by the state and bringing into cultivation of wastelands, etc. So again, some of this is particular to Germany at the time.
Number eight: equal liability of all to labor, establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
Number nine: a combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries. Gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country by a more equitable distribution of population over the country. We will own everything. We will own the land. By "we," we mean the government, the state. We will tell you where to live, where to work, what you can do.
But number 10 is my favorite: Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form, combination of education with industrial production, etc. We have most of that stuff and we're we're enjoying the fruits of it. And I think, you know, the idea that if something isn't working, you should keep doing more of it until it works is the definition of craziness.
And I hope we can wake up and I hope we can find different ways to help other citizens understand that all of this has already been tried and there is a lot of change that we can do because we need lots of change that doesn't just involve handing the people that gave the problems to us more power and control. That's all I'm I'm not saying everything's great. Everything's not great. But having the arsonists put out the fire is a bad idea. And I don't think we should let our kids push us into that or each other.
But let me know what you think. I will definitely be doing plenty more videos about the ideas that underpin socialism and communism. If you want to see more, head over to dadsavesamea.com. And don't forget to like and subscribe. We've got lots of other content about this and many other things. And of course, have a great weekend.