I am more left wing than Bernie Sanders: his reforms are really shallow.

I begin this video with an
acknowledgement that in the year 2020 the concept of political science seems like a joke right my major and university was political science what is political science what would it even mean to think scientifically about politics or to have expertise in the science of politics it seems like a bad joke but there's a meaningful challenge for us to set aside the baggage of the particular culture we were born into to set aside the assumptions built into the particular language we grew up speaking and to examine politics scientifically most of you watching this video will assume that Bernie Sanders is left-wing that all of his policies are left-wing domestic foreign policy economic social you'll assume they're all left-wing just because Bernie Sanders says that he wants to help the poor do you think definitionally do you think by definition conservatives don't want to help the poor or do you think that's just a cultural assumption that's common in the United States of America right now in the year 2020 do you think in Italy there are no conservatives who go out and help the poor hands on conservative Christian Italians whose whole lives have to do with charity work helping the homeless helping drug addicts helping orphans no I used to live in Cambodia there were conservative Christians in Cambodia who were really helping the poor hands on they were doing that sheriff he worked there too I don't like those people all right there are conservatives who are devoted to helping the poor there are conservatives who help the poor in charity work there are conservatives who are committed to social and political policies that help the poor and there will be in future in Italy in Cambodia in the United States America there will be conservative Christians who build their whole political program on helping the poor because there is nothing ineluctable there's nothing definitional about the connection between conservatism and shall we say contempt for the poor or a difference for the port that's just the cultural context in United States of America right now in the year 2020 how about Bernie Sanders in his policy on Detroit and if you don't know what I mean you didn't read the book you did not read Bernie Sanders book which mentions Detroit again and again and again Detroit is the locus classic us for the economic vision of Bernie Sanders Bernie Sanders is deeply committed to reviving automotive manufacturing in Detroit heavy industry in Detroit you know what I say Bernie Sanders wants to revive automotive manufacturing trade if he wants the economy of Detroit to go back to being the way it was in 1965 he doesn't need to be elected president United States he needs to invent the time machine all right it's completely ridiculous but tell me something can't you even imagine if you just use your measurement a little bit can't you imagine a conservative political leader singing exactly the same things that Bernie Sanders says about the economy of Detroit can't you imagine a conservative or even someone right-wing saying that the problem is losing all of our jobs to China and Japan Bernie Sanders says that read his book the problem is American jobs going away to China Japan in Mexico the problem is that you need a government focused on reviving the car industry heavy industry and manufacturing in Detroit right if you just go through economically what is problem this is like the slogan make America great again this is a fundamentally conservative backward-looking view of the economy and what he promises on this basis is more more good-paying jobs more high-paying jobs and he thinks he's going to do that too heavy industry mass manufacturing and unions Union going back to the way things were at night in the 1960s and you had you know many many thousands of people all working in the same factory on the same schedule on the same shift and they could organize into a union and bargain for higher wages you need a time machine this is not the reality of the economy in 22 and looking ahead to 2030 and 2040 this is less and less the economic reality of life Amara but Bernie Sanders is fundamentally a conservative political thinker he is looking back he's looking back to the past or the way things were in the United States Berg he wants to go back there okay and he looks to what are simply conservative examples of Western European states and what they've accomplished and he conservatively wants America to go back to that standard also but look I sympathize Bernie Sanders goes to Denmark and he goes to Scotland and he looks at the social programs those countries have and he says America can do this too there's nothing radical about that Bernie Sanders himself says it he says he's not a radical it's actually a very conservative very backward looking way of thinking what is Bernie Sanders policy on education he wants to keep the university system in the United States America the same way it is now he puts the same broken bad system he just wants to lower the price of entry he just wants to remove the cost of tuition what does Bernie Sanders want to do with medical care he wants the same system the way it is now he's just gonna expand the government payment program he's gonna make it free or he's gonna make it incredibly cheap for people to get medical with the same system right this is not even reform this is a conservative position on these policy instead instead of doing what the left-wing definitionally does instead of doing what the left has meant since the French Revolution when it was defined all right in your culture today in the United States of America you assume that anyone supporting limited government small government efficient government is conservative and right-wing whereas anyone promoting the expansion of governor anyone who says government should become larger who take on more responsibilities more spending that those people are left me neither one of these things is definitionally left or right okay historically the people who were advocating for small government were the original liberals the original philosophic radicals the original utilitarians also people who said no they don't want government bureaucracy expanding to control everything they don't want totalitarian government they want a sphere for personal liberty which meant in practice in large part so-called free enterprise that was a left-wing position okay and it could be again and whether or not it is now in your culture in your language right but definitionally what happened with the French Revolution was you had a movement that said hey we can sweep aside the accumulated assumptions of centuries we can get rid of tradition we can start with a blank chalkboard and we can figure out how to solve this problem this problem that problem we can say look the fact that a thousand years ago people started using a measurement called the foot that was allegedly the size of the Kings foot it doesn't matter what we need right now is a set of scientists to sit down with a blank chalkboard and design how we should measure things weights distance time we need a whole new system starting from a blank sheet of paper and you know what French Revolution ended in disaster the French Revolution ended in failure but it was during the French Revolution it was the political discourse within the French Revolution that define for us the meaning of the term left and left-wing in contrast to what right that we still have today and what America really means is not the conservatism of Bernie Sanders what America needs is someone who can look at the university system and say this is broken and bad and wrong and the way to fix it is not just keeping everything the same but lowering the price of admission someone who can look at the hospital system and say this is broken and bad and wrong and the way to fix it is not just lowering the price of treatment lowering the price of admission to the hospital however you want to put it let me ask you something as a thought experiment real quickly here have you ever seen someone wearing a t-shirt that says the name of the driving school where they learned to drive a car have you ever seen someone with a baseball cap or other branded merchandise the school where you learned to drive a car if you learned to drive the school where you learned to have a car did it have a football team did you guys get together and cheer for a multi-million dollar football team did you have a swimming pool did it have huge palatial gardens why is there such a stark difference between the very efficient very cheap world of people preparing to learn how to drive a car preparing for a government exam that proves either you can or cannot drive a car sale if that gives you the credential says yes you've learned how to drift why is there such a tremendous gap between that form of Education and the multi-billion dollar super corrupt industry of university education a university education system that never was designed by anyone for any reason we're at best we can go back about 200 years and say this was a system of education for the edification of a tiny number of aristocratic men that yes man there was only one gender men whose lives would be defined on the one hand by agriculture as land owning aristocrats on the other hand by military service and they needed a place to go and study Latin and Greek and ethics you should take a look at what ethics meant about 150 years ago in academia get this get this education so they could be refined gentlemen and that's how we got this idea that everything no matter what the subjects should take for years how long does it take to become a Bachelor of English let's be clear unlike your driving test that there is no standard for what it means to be a bad the government just never bothered to find that they defined very precisely what a what defines who's a good driver and who's a bad driver who's safe to drive a car doesn't government to find that right there are a lot of other technical areas of expertise where the government has a definition whether or not it's safe for you to own a gun whether or not it's safe for you to operate a crane you okay there are things where there's a government created examine what what does it mean to be a bachelor I think why does it take four years why can't you have some kind of competitive lean efficient business that sells you in education and English literature the same way there are small companies that will sell you a education how to drive a car why is that why does it have to take four years why do I have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to support a sports team and a swimming pool and palatial gardens and this whole permanent vacation lifestyle for thousands of students living on a campus just to become a Bachelor of English and why does it take four years to become a Bachelor of English while at the same time it supposedly takes me only four years to learn Chinese there is absolutely no way you could learn the Chinese language in four years I'm in a position to speak on that there is no way you could learn Russian in four years and I've met and spoken to people who got a bachelor's degree in Russian I've met people got a bachelor's degree in Sanskrit but the system itself is like way beyond the concept of a man who who holds a hammer sees every problem as a nail the system is designed where they started with a format a completely irrational medieval format that's just an echo of a tradition from centuries ago having to do with aristocratic gentleman education there's no applicability in the real world today it wasn't even designed to prepare you to be a Bachelor of English let alone competent in Chinese let alone comp competent in mechanical engineering or any other service we started with a completely cultural traditional concept of what higher education was supposed to be built around Greek and Latin and ethics and then we just said okay we'll sell it to you in a whole bunch of flavors but whether you choose to study Chinese or you choose to study English literature it's gonna be four years it's gonna cost you the same amount of money it's gonna take the same amount of time and if you choose something that's easy to learn we're gonna load on a whole bunch of breadth requirements a whole bunch of our relevant courses that you have to take just to make it fill up four years and you know what if you choose something that's really challenging that's basically impossible to learn in four years then we're gonna load it up with breadth requirements and pretend that was never the point to begin with we're gonna pretend that we're really teaching you critical thinking so the fact that you spent fifty thousand dollars and lost four years of your life and you still can't speak Chinese or you still can't read a newspaper in Russian that doesn't really matter because you got critical thinking thanks for your fifty thousand dollars here's your worthless diploma Bernie Sanders wants to revive the economy in Detroit by traveling back to 1965 and that's exactly what he wants to do for universities also in 1965 university tuition was cheap a tiny percentage of the population got a university degree and the economic value of the university degree was much higher than it was today a BA a bachelor's degree in 1965 actually led to job opportunities today it leads to zero Bernie Sanders is not looking at the reality of coding camps of how people now get an education and training to be able to really do computer science let me tell you something coding camps if you want to learn how to program a computer there's no swimming pool there's no sports team okay there are no Gardens it's a lot more like going to drive in school and it's still expensive but what you're paying for all the money is going into giving you job training for the specific skill you need to learn you're not getting breadth requirements with English literature you're not getting a relevant teaching hey that could be a better way to organize adult education in Chinese in a baking reminder guys I went to college to learn how to bake bread did you learn a goddamn thing that's another I've been back in the form of human events Bernie Sanders is not looking around analytically and thing hmm what we have here is the accumulation of a set of irrational traditions since the dark ages and what we need to do is start thinking more like the left wing did in the French Revolution and wipe the board clean and start thinking rationally reasoning from first principles to conclusions how do we solve this problem how do we provide education to millions of people to everybody or the 90% of people not not take a system of education that was designed for a tiny minority of the population 150 years ago not take not try to go back to the system of education as it was in 1965 not try to just take a completely broken system that's bankrupting the nation and just lower the price to entry just socialize the cost of that education why can't we start from a blank chalkboard from a blank sheet of paper and think how can we provide education to the poor how can we provide education to everybody at a high level of quality that leads to a high level of employability at a low cost or an effective cost how are we gonna solve that problem if you started with a blank chalkboard nobody nobody would come to the conclusion that we should imitate what's happening right now at Oxford University England at Cambridge University England nobody would say well the first thing we got to do is build a cathedral nobody would say the first thing we got to do is build an enormous sports stadium and start spending millions of dollars on football we have the accretion of cultural assumptions the accretion of cultural expectations and those of us who are really willing to think pragmatically and nihilistic aliy in overturning those cultural assumptions those those are the people who are truly and profoundly left-wing what Bernie Sanders wants to do is truly and profoundly conservative he wants Detroit to go back to the way it was in 1965 he wants the university system to go back to the way it was in 1965 and he looks at the accomplishment of Western European countries whether it be Scotland or it be Denmark and he wants America to emulate what those conservative government institutions have already a rather than really thinking through what's optimal what's most effective not what are the greatest hits of the last 50 years of political and economic development but what could be the best solution these problems for the next 50 years that's what's really left wing that's what's really radical