New Ideas in Politics: the Silence is Deafening.

you guys know I come out of a formal
political science background what you may not know is that I have nothing but contempt for this entire generation of people who are in formal political science and you hear them on the news sometimes sometimes I just heard a podcast interviewing a guy who published a book and he's one of these formal political scientists who now works in a think tank in Washington DC where he advocates for a brighter future for America for political reform and like you think you think that will be interesting to me right Wow we're forming the political institutions to have a better more democratic future in America and you know why it's not interesting because there are no new ideas like the paucity the lack of new ideas in politics during my lifetime and I would say especially in the last 20 years I can say the silence is deafening so cut Melissa on the phone here and the really the one thing I wanted to say and we'll see if Melissa has anything to say back and you know what again when you're talking about a lack of ideas maybe Melissa is not gonna have a lot to say maybe you in the audience in our can have a lot to say we'll just sit here in silence for 30 seconds with an end of video I don't mind like you can talk about ideas talking about a lack of ideas harder to do I understand my fundamental observation or problem is this the distinction between left and right has become a referendum on the generosity of the state on how generous government should be with really no meaningful discussion even about what to do with that money with that generosity with those programs so you guys have already heard me say this Bernie Sanders looks at the prison system and just says we should have the same system but be more generous and the Conservatives I mean I'm gonna stereotype here because we're not talking about any one conservative leader they look at the prison system and they want to stay the same but they want to save money they want to spend less money maybe privatize more maybe you have more free market mechanism they want to save taxpayers money but on both sides there were no new ideas and there really isn't even like an empty space for questioning wait maybe we should have a fundamentally new approach to prisons and you've heard me say this about universities Bernie Sanders looks at the university system and says we'll keep it the way it is but we'll be more generous and this is I see this is fundamentally conservative it's conservative but generous and meanwhile the actual conservatives are the right-wingers they look at the same system and again there's there were no new ideas maybe they want to keep it exactly the same just traditionalism or they want to save money one of the other but there there are no new ideas again when I go across the board through every sector of life through every area of government policy you could even include something like religion and this you know what is the role of religion in our society I think that this kind of budgetary approach to what government is where the difference between left and right just becomes a referendum on generosity it's it's not it's not merely a lack of new ideas but a lack of even pausing to question wait what if what if what we do in the future with our universities what if what we do in the future with our prisons is fundamentally different from what we've done in the past what if it's fundamentally different we do now what if the solution isn't something we already all know and understand what if it isn't as simple as imitating what England or Denmark or Japan or or doing what if we actually have to think of something new or try something new that seems to have have dropped out of the kind of procedure of thinking about politics and I can say honestly you know in my lifetime I'm now I'm now 41 years old okay Melissa again look I'm sorry if you got nothing to say fine if you got everything to say fine if you want to disagree with me by all means go ahead but that's something that's kind of been weighing me down the last the last few weeks and months especially the difference between the left and right basically is the difference of how generous the government is the other week I listen to the State of the Union address from Donald Trump and all the Republicans and you know in the audience applauded and you know cheered when he said that ten million people have been taken off of food stamps so not because they're rich they've been taken up in food stamps and not because they're so wealthy they don't eat didn't say that it's a pretty good representation of how the Republicans generally seem to view helping the poor helping the poor is to get them jobs to get them employed so yeah you have a bread Bernie Sanders book but I didn't actually read his book I probably agree with you that it seems that Bernie Sanders idea is to just become more generous and to you know direct more money towards all these programs I mean that of course gets people asking you know where is the money gonna come from and of course most of the time it's Oh take ticket from the wealthy take it from Wall Street and you know it really does hit wealthy against the poor right right and so and so also does aoc Alexandra Ocasio Carter's i just mentioned cuz bernie sanders is a very old man alexandria is young but it actually is the same problem like i don't think her policies are any different for bernie sanders in this respect yeah all right so someone being wealthy doesn't by default make them evil okay so I'm gonna jump in I'm gonna take advantage of this momentary silence in your in your thoughts look I'm gonna give two examples that are totally profoundly different but totally profoundly prove the same point okay racism no two examples I had - all right so we'll talk about racism for just a moment or the other one would come to me uh the United States of America and I don't I don't really even mean this in a provocative way it was built for a kind of openly racist purpose and that the first and most profound form of racism wasn't even slavery but it was genocide it was the enslavement and extinction of the native peoples and taken away so there was an openly racist purpose that the United States of America existed for wait I remember the second one who they're totally different okay why would the future of the United States of America and its form of government its system of democracy or any element why would any of our institutions in the future preserve the traditions of the past just in this one respect if you just think of the the challenge presented by racism and the tradition the transition to a society that is in if not post racist at least it doesn't actively believe in and pursue this kind of genocide and enslavement right I mean you know the point is yeah things are not perfect now but I heard a great anecdote the other day about one of the more sanguine leaders in the u.s. civil war and he so he was a military commander in the American Civil War and he literally published his own magazine that was called the white man and in this magazine he actively promoted the idea that what America was all about and what it needed to prioritize was murdering the native people and enslaving the blacks and you know there was a civil war he got to prove that he he didn't just believe these things on paper okay so look yeah when you ask like when I ask a simple question with like what is a university and what is the function and shape these things in society I am NOT pandering to a woke left-wing audience when I say this why would these two of the future resemble the traditions of the past and the second example sorry I didn't say this up front is just technology right and there's a sense in which we want to pretend technology is shallow like Instagram isn't that different from a camera and it is you know okay but given just these two factors totally transformative power of technology totally transformative change in attitudes towards ethnicity and slavery and religion and and the rights of the individual and so on okay so why does a university look the way it does anymore why is a university built around a cathedral and a statue of a white man on a horse who was himself a slave owner and participated in that genocide and the whole function of the university and wasting tens of thousands of dollars and you know a football stadium and so on and so forth there's there's this obvious sense in which the university could resemble Instagram obviously they get a bit far the university could resemble YouTube and I'm not someone who's saying we need to demolish all the classrooms I'm not I've made my thoughts and it's clear but even if you're just raising it in this broadest sense okay well technology has transformative powers and you know the the abandonment of the old racist raison d'être for the nation-state as a whole as this sort of transformation shouldn't we be asking fundamentally new questions about politics and coming up with and at least trying new ideas for for institutions should you know innovation is completely alien to both the concept of generosity and the concept of saving taxpayers dollars like the left-wing approach which is the left-wing approach presumes we already know the solution we already know the answers we had Bernie Sanders today saying he's just gonna dump more money on Howard University and the historically black colleges what a joke his vision of the future of education is to preserve racial segregation this echo this leftover aspect of the history of racial segregation those colleges were created because black people were not two white colleges and when they were let in they were treated really badly so you you just want to dump more money on what everyone actually admits if you read about is a really poorly functioning and really bad value for money for these students it's a ripoff the historically black colleges by the way there's another interesting story look that's so both are conservative what should one side wants to just preserve tradition with more money and one wants to preserve the tradition at a lower cost and they're both wrong because they both exclude innovation thanks babe go if you pledge some that Bernie Sanders part of his Medicare for all plan is to lower the wages for nurses and doctors he doesn't admit that so I've raised that that issue provocatively but yes go on yeah I think part of restructuring the education system is admitting that we're going to have to pay professors less money yes and if you look at the university that I went to University of Michigan you can see the wages of all the professors it's publicly available and it is rather impressive how much the professors are that isn't taking into account the people who are adjunct professors of course yes you know earning full-time wages a lot of people are part-time in in education system now in the university education system so yeah I was just kind of thinking you know the different universities that you've been to universities around the world you've been to universities I think in Cambodia and you know you've been to the universities in England even you have experienced this in China you will remember most of the university professors also owned restaurants or other small businesses because they you know for for you the wages that you were earning were actually like maybe 1000 equai more yes other professors who is right there for years I was one of the most highly paid professors but if not it's not the most hourly paid that university I was one of them yeah right but that was I mean there were manufacturers for us leaving China but that was when one of them but for you it wasn't enough to justify the costs of you know traveling internationally to see your daughter twice a year like it it just wasn't enough it compared to like Western Standard of money you know it's a good standard of living in China you know what you're earning was was good but many of the professor's had sidekicks the professor the boss that I had was a professor at the University of she would also had an English school that she did outside so yeah I just say I mean like part of maybe you know restructuring education is realizing that well even though you paid tens of thousands of dollars to get your PhD you weren't gonna be earning that much money and also the president's at the universities yes it's insane yeah university presidents earning yeah insane and Sam was right okay okay yeah the heads of the university were earning so much money and like so much was being devoted to football and you know you've you've mentioned this recently in other videos so so yes I think fundamentally I agree with you that you know there needs to be restructuring there needs to be reimagine a ssin of what university is okay so completely completely agree with you but I think it's really good you raise this because it's a segue to the other issue ahead on my mind is when I was walking home before I turn on the camera here and that is that I don't think anyone on the left or the right is actually interested in reducing inequality alright now again what about innovation what about new ideas in today's dollars I had someone asked me about this recently you know partly because of the specter of both Donald Trump and Bloomberg Mike Bloomberg these are people with billions of dollars in Bloomberg's case really try to look at a quantitative estimate of how much money got it's it's unbelievable and you know people have sometimes asked me do I think billionaires should exist okay well I'm more radical and more extreme than anyone on the left if you ask me what I think all right I don't think anyone should earn more than $200,000 a year all right and Wow the other caught the other context this came up in you guys may not remember I had a kind of frenemy here on YouTube I used to do videos with called Maude vegan and she was one of these people like Andrew yang Andrew yang see that's funny I'm recording this now in 2020 everyone knows who Andrew yang is do you think anyone will remember the name Andrew yang at the year 2025 I don't know but Maude vegan like Andrew yang she scare mongering about robots a little bit and I've always said this I remember saying this to my own mother recently know the fundamental engine of social inequality is the apartment building or is the condominium tower and that's why Donald Trump's that's what Donald Trump never ran out of money even though we kept going bankrupt because his father owns apartment buildings there is no way you have a point there is no way a robot assembly line competes with the unbelievable financial impact of having society divided into two classes of men there are those who pay rent and there are those who get rich collecting the rent and it doesn't matter the people who pay rent even if they are wealthy even if they're comfortable if you have an apartment building and every single resident is a dentist earning a good living still the landlord collecting the rent is becoming fantastically wealthy and soon enough he has enough money to buy another apartment building and another and another okay this one factor alone which by the way is recognized in Aristotle and not by Karl Marx Karl Marx it's amazing when stupid guy in a lot of obvious ways but you know this was not dealt with by Marx but it was dealt with by Aristotle already okay this leads to a fundamental problem that is more than one possible solution and you know what if you have a maximum way which yes I agree with you I think it should be ruthlessly enforced on medical doctors ruthlessly enforced on university professors and university presidents okay when you have a maximum income a maximum wage it changes human behavior many ways if you're a professor and you can't earn more than a hundred thousand dollars or two hundred thousand is gonna be you were gonna direct your time and energy into things other than money you know into things other than milking the system for as much as I can because that's all you can milk so maybe that's gonna go into caring about your students more writing books more or maybe you're gonna run a vegan restaurant in your spare time I don't know you're gonna find other things to put your passions into when you have a maximum if you're gonna take up painting or spend more time with your children you're gonna do something else if you as a landlord have a maximum income and a maximum value of the land you can own and so on if you can only own one apartment building let's just say that's the limit you are going to put more care and energy into doing the best you can with that one apartment building as opposed to building a huge Empire of apartment buildings all right so without going into more examples my point is that having a maximum wage having maximum limits on land ownership property ownership this isn't just good for the poor and I don't even believe in it being good for the abstract concept of equality it's actually good for the rich themselves it's actually good for the millionaires it's good for the billionaires not to exist and I think it actually is so much more meaningful life again sorry just to fill it in with a surgeon as opposed to a surgeon trying to earn as much money as possible let's say doing plastic surgery it's like okay we'll look this is the maximum amount you can earn so now you can re-evaluate your priorities but maybe each year once you get that once you hit that maximum doing a certain number of nose jobs and boob jobs maybe now maybe now you start to care for the poor maybe now say okay I'm going to go on vacation to Ethiopia and maybe do some medical practice in Ethiopia because I've already done my boob jobs with ear you know for real we're tired that's we're talking about the rich more meaningful lives were not just talking about helping the poor you want yes look I'm like you so it's hard for me to disagree it might be more interesting for you and I but she's never talked to me about this poor it's we it's interesting we agree but I say this stuff she could describe we haven't done we have a lot in common but go on I'm not motivated by money but I I recognize that a huge percent of the population is motivated by earning money and you know somebody on the right might think if you cap the wage potential at $200,000 that would descent off' eyes people from from really you know going hard and trying to earn a million dollars from and you know people might say that that's not good that people don't have these empires or you know like like the example that you used a landlord who only is able to own one apartment building it's going to put a lot of effort into that ring as opposed to like you know buying other properties so that they can make more rents you know make more money off of people paying rent you know that this this just this it incentivizes growth this leads to less growth which of course is you know what what the right tends to think of as you know improved economy is if if more more buildings are being built but but but of course that that's your correct some people would make that argument but it's a false argument because the reality is you would have the same number of apartment buildings but with a larger number of landlords they would be owned by more people so like each building would have one owner and with a very large building it might be divided where there are two different owners one for the apartments on the east side and one for departments the west side because the apartment buildings too big or something but no you would just have more landlords responsible and each each landlord would be responsible for a small enough amount of land that he or she could really take care of it as opposed to being an absentee landlord going in right it would have to be a you know for the amount that it would cost to buy these huge you know laws these huge apartment buildings you you would have to have many people if the if the limit is two hundred thousand dollars like you would need to have people like if there are no billionaires to invest in a big property like this you need more than more investors you might be able to get away with if you're if you're wrong but but babe again sorry so you know people who raise this objection it's always naive because billionaires don't gamble with their own money all they do is co-sign a bank loan so a billionaire so let's say I wanted to open a Starbucks it's a real example real quick if I were going to open a Starbucks which I'm completely qualified to do by the way I go to a friend of mine who's a billionaire and ask him to invest the money so I can open up let's let's say it's a unique coffee it's called a vegan bucks let's just take the other corporation out of it I want to open a coffee shop and I have a friend of civilian air he is all he is gonna do is go to the bank and sign a guarantee in theory he might put down ten thousand dollars or something to indicate his seriousness in backing me but most time and all that meat and then the bank provides me with the money and I pay the money to the bank so that that's really what goes on amazingly even with property investment even when it's buying a house or what have you the people who have billions of dollars they don't really dip into there they don't dip into their non liquid assets they just act as guarantor x' for banks and other sources investment and within our lifetimes the banks have been desperate for that type of investment to put into so in some other parallel universes some other period of history that might not be true but in this era of history no it's it's all really the money the money does basically flow from the banks yeah yeah right a couple different things I wanted to say just on the topic of you know landlords having this infinite source of income because of rent yes I actually just was thinking about it you know university is also play into the system because if there's housing you know like I lived in student housing my first year at University the amount that gets paid in for your housing is also you know kind of incredible kind of astronomical Maseca near I decided to live in an apartment because it cost less money to like share a two-bedroom apartment off-campus than to live on campus and Aaron's not like these places are real nice like I was kind of living in a crummy dorm room and yeah so I just say University is also or kind of part of that that they have this unlimited source of income every year because of the students that live on campus and they try to sell it as this experience like oh you get to live on campus you get to be you know close to the libraries close to your classes as it's kind of be asked to like there was um like um on-campus housing but it was like on a different unit you know you had to take a bus to get downtown to get to your classes everyday like the release campus there was a different campus that house you know thousands of students so yeah it's you know you sell it as this experience that you're getting the college experience you're living in a dorm yeah so well you know so look I don't want to get too much into the unique politics of eyes'll Mazar because the more unique they are the more they relevant they're in violence but melissa has heard me say this many times that one of the ways in which governments become corrupt is just the assumption that it's their job to boost up property values higher and higher and this includes having a university in the center of the city surrounded by glass towers if you want to provide education to people on a cost-effective basis Canada is full of ghost towns we had one while I was there it had just become a ghost town because like the only the only company had shut down the company was a tree tree planting it was a government-led reforest rican cern you know okay if you want to you can take the whole medical science department from University of Toronto and move it into this ghost town and everyone can live in a hut or everyone can own their own house at one percent of the price of living in downtown Toronto right absolutely you can reduce the cost of living and provide education lower price just by taking the universities you know department by department out of Paris out of Berlin out of Toronto out of you know New York City that the enormous cost this is without even getting socialist about so I just say if the government's agenda is actually to provide housing in a cost-effective way that is going to include forms of urban planning that are directly contrary to the impulse of trying to at all times elevate and escalate property values so that government can collect more taxes on those properties yeah yeah make a jab because like here's your mistake that you know you think it's about providing cheap housing or you think that it's really about education right you think that education university is really about education when it's not you know like it's it's about having this college experience where you know wait you see in those crappy Hollywood movies like you know it's your first first year away from your parents and you're gonna get drunk every weekend and get laid and you know it's that's what they're saying that's what they're selling the college experience so you're gonna go to football games every Saturday and be there for the team you know be in this cheering crowd well and let's listen the tragedy the case the case that you were just trying to improve medical education you know I get to see this on the campus in that you worked at in China that campus was not designed for it was a beautiful campus it was nice but it wasn't designed for sports teams it was it was designed for learning you know the the students were all like on this campus they lived on the campus and they walked to the classes came home and you know their dorms were right there right next to the closet yeah I mean it's efficient and it's a way for you to learn all you need is a chalkboard people I've I've worked as a teacher in places where there was no electricity I had a chalkboard and a candle I've done that yes so I'm just saying what you need is a chalkboard and shelter from the rain to provide education but look so baby I'll wrap up this video now but I mean let's just let's just know that you know prisons and universities have in common that they divide they define what people will do for the rest of their lives like I wish I could pretend that talked about prisons and universities was merely a convenient example but it's tragic I mean it's real sorry I mean you know Melissa if you even think about your own friends we're not gonna get into you know examples but you know people most people there there's one chance to study and you know maybe they end up in debt for the rest of the lives no they have this one chance you know to you know to become something to become someone that's what we say this in English right you become a job you know when I was a child I think now this is illegal schoolteachers you still used to say to children what do you want to be a garbage man like it you know if kids weren't studying do you do you want to be a girl because that's who you are right if that's the job you have if that's the level of education you have you are or a garbage man you know today we'd say sanitation worker but you know this this sense of identity and purpose and place there really is a profound economic function there's a profound function in terms of preparing you to actually participate in democracy there's a profound political function if there's a sense in which I would say both high schools and universities and yes also prisons have this awesome significance in shaping what people do at least for the next ten years after they they finished school if not for the whole rest of their lives so that's something the political establishment the political elite and the whole Democratic you know infrastructure of society ought to be obsessed over we ought to care passionately about it and we ought to be innovating you know we can't just look back at what Cambridge University used to be centuries ago we can't look back at what Harvard was you know a hundred years ago on a really deep level that makes no sense it's an incoherent answer or it's an answer to the wrong question for what the future of these institutions will be with the future in our society or debar soup and look sorry it's the only other big issue we talked about here I feel the same way about inequality if we're talking about rich and poor and property ownership and paying rent there's a there's a fundamental question here that Aristotle already asked more than two thousand years ago and that we've been refusing to ask I think in in the last 50 years any final thoughts been excuse me yeah you know I was I'm sorry if I ranted too much about University no look the one thing that I wanted to talk about was just the role that getting rich has in America you know I'm not I don't think that it is just unique to America but in America I just noticed as I was watching the Super Bowl there was this quite touching commercial where someone who was a pro football player was in the commercial and he was riding past the old field that he used to play on when he was a kid and he said like you know I wish I could talk to that kid now and tell him that you know one day you're gonna make it one day you're gonna you know basically be famous and earn a lot of money just for throwing around a ball I mean I'm sorry to simplify I know a lot goes into it a lot of training a lot of like you know thousands of hours of practice but that is the way to get rich that is the way to get notoriety in America and to me that's really sad and yeah I mean it does typically like it does for me fundamentally get down to the meaning of life like what is you know what are you gonna do with your time on this earth with this limited time that you have here I don't think that the answer is to just get rich and yeah yeah I mean I I that's why I mean that's why I like I like Bernie Sanders campaign you know it's for the he's really for the working-class you you like to think that like you know he's working for you but and I think he's probably doing what he can I mean this is what he's been saying the last 30 years like he's really been about this you know helping the middle class just by pouring money into these different ideas if it's Medicare for all free education and cancel student that you know all these things that are just you know let's put money on the problem and it'll fix it but ya know I agree with you I think you know it we need some fundamental reimagine ation reimagining the situation and how to how to solve that yeah you know I just say I think that classism you know some meaning here really the hatred for the poor contempt for the poor it's comforting to people in the same way that racism used to be like still today I mean if you can if you actually really think that people from other cultures and other races don't have intellectual potential then you don't agonize about you don't regret the fact that perhaps poverty war or even something as simple as an earthquake is preventing them from leading meaningful lives and I think it's very very hard for people if they've grown up racist to really recognize and face up to the fact like no people who are born black or born Arab they really do have as much intellectual potential as white people and then it really is a tragedy when for example on the island of Haiti that was poor to begin with an earthquake makes life you know really impossible for everyone for decades thereafter you know Haiti Haiti was really wiped out by a very very bad earthquake and again they were poor to begin with so you know but no but these people they really do have the same intellectual potential if only they could go to a university and also have you know protection from mosquitos and you know decent decent places to look that's so as you say it's a it's a deeper tragedy you know the one sense in which I'm a little bit bizarre is I have I have almost a reverse classism because I've got to tell you I think poor people have more intellectual potential than the rich you know yeah I think there's a real problem that people like Kim Kardashian grow up stupid because they're rich I think there's a deadening of the instincts and a deadening of curiosity and there's a great loss of intellectual potential because of what growing up wealthy means today and now that that probably wasn't true when Aristotle lived just because rich people they probably still had very hard lives they were still fundamentally working on a farmer and serving in the army but to me the Kim Kardashian factor is real and it runs deep and that that makes this tragedy this this question of providing the poor with with you know the means to lead a meaningful life and develop to develop themselves intellectually and to participate in democracy in a meaningful way that that makes it you know all the more important okay babe work we passed our 30 minutes so I'm gonna stop there okay