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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Today we are re-airing the national call-in special that I co-hosted with Maria Hinojosa on Thursday night as part of our national series, America, Are We Ready? specifically this time, America, Are We Ready to Save the Middle Class? This hour, in an era when young Americans aren't expected to do as well financially as their parents did, as we've been hearing in the first hour, the presidential campaign suggests the fundamental question, how much capitalism and how much socialism would be the best for America today? We have a guest who's more American capitalist, one more European social democrat. I think you'll really find it interesting. It's coming up after the latest news.

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Brian Lehrer: From WNYC in New York, it's America, Are We Ready? This hour, America, Are We Ready to Save the Middle Class? It's a national call-in special on what parts of capitalism and what parts of socialism are right for America today. I'm Brian Lehrer from WNYC.

Maria Hinojosa: I'm Maria Hinojosa, host of Latino USA and author of a new book. It's called "Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America" The American middle class has been shrinking for decades. Today's young adults are as a whole not expected to do better than their parents. Inequality by income has been rising. Income inequality by race has been persistent.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Americans are angry and Americans are divided. Some voted for Donald Trump in 2016 because they believed the business and political elites had left them behind, that American capitalism had left them behind, and ironically, to some of those voters, Trump as a wealthy businessman, seem to get that. At the same time, many other Americans form the movement that gave Bernie Sanders so much support after decades of his democratic socialism being seen as fringe.

Maria Hinojosa: Here we are, in 2020. Trump is running on statements like this, which is from a campaign event in Florida that he had this week. This was intended to build support by honoring veterans of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961.

Donald Trump: The courageous veterans here today bear witness to how socialism, radical mobs, and violent communists ruin a nation. Now the Democratic Party is unleashing socialism right within our own beautiful country.

Maria Hinojosa: We have Joe Biden responding saying things like this about the Biden-Sanders primary season.

Joe Biden: I beat the socialists, that's how I got elected. That's how I got the nomination. Do I look like a socialist? Look at my career, my whole career. I am not a socialist.

Brian Lehrer: But Biden is running with Sanders's support, and many Americans want something new, not the free market global capitalism that got us into this mess, and not Fidel Castro or the Soviet-style communism that collapsed 30 years ago. We're going to try something this hour on America, Are We Ready To Save The Middle Class? We're going to ask, ideology aside, how much of each can really contribute to saving the middle class from extinction and reverse income inequality? Can we take some things that are the best of capitalism and take some other things that are the best of socialism? Are we ready to save the middle class with a mix?

Maria Hinojosa: What do you think about these heady questions that actually impact our lives? Listeners, this is a national call-in show, not Twitter. This is calling in, so we're inviting you to pick up the phone and call-in and tell us where are you on this scale of capitalist to socialist? What mix of the two do you think is best for the United States of America in the 21st-century world? Where do you think Trump and Biden fall on this spectrum? You're invited to call 844-745-TALK. It's 844-745-8255.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Can you name a way that the US should be more socialist in your opinion or the other way around? Where are you on the scale of capitalists to socialist? Can you identify something good about each that if that's going to be part of the debate that people are having, we can look for the sweet spot? What mix of the two do you think is best for America in the 21st-century world, and where do you think Trump and Biden fall on that spectrum, as Maria asked? You're invited to call at 844-745-TALK, 844-745-8255, 844-745-TALK.

Maria Hinojosa: We have two guests with us for this hour. We have one who's maybe a little bit more capitalist and maybe another one who's a little bit more socialist, let's say. Oren Cass is executive director of a think tank called American Compass. He was a domestic policy advisor for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign in 2012. He's the author of the 2018 book, The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America. Pavlina Tcherneva. Got that right. Tcherneva, is a Bard University economics professor, a research scholar at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard. She's the author of a book that came out this year called The Case for a Job Guarantee. Welcome, both of you, to America, Are We Ready?

I guess, just to set the stage because I actually visited Cuba. I actually was in Nicaragua. I've been to these places. Let's talk with some basic definitions. What is capitalism? What is socialism in the context of the United States? Because it really doesn't feel like what I remember Castro versus Ayn Rand, right? Pavlina you're already laughing, so start us off here.

Pavlina Tcherneva: Thank you. Thank you, for having me. I am chuckling because I am a immigrant. I am now American citizen, but I was born in a communist country, Bulgaria. When I hear these conversations, I always chuckle because there's nothing that I hear that has anything to do with the Soviet-style socialism, or communism that we had seen during the Cold War era. I think the right way to approach this is that it is a spectrum. There is no such thing as pure capitalism.

I think what we're looking at, is trying to understand the role of government and the extent of that role because even when you think of a free-market economy, we have a lot of socialized-- Think of veteran benefits, veteran health insurance. Trump speaking at a veteran event and talking against socialism, when we actually have socialized veteran healthcare. The police force is socialized security, public education is socialized education.

I feel like these red herrings and these very tense divisions have not been able to advance the conversation. The way I see it is that if we want to have an economy that is a little more stable, and that's a market economy, we need to be able to provide some basic provisions to deal with economic security. When we talk about the Biden platform and the Sanders platform, I think the question here is, are these going to be adequate protections for the vagaries of capitalism, if you will?

Brian Lehrer: Oren, you write that the conservative blueprint envisions a flourishing society built upon a foundation of strong families and communities, buttressed by a free market. Where do you as somebody who comes out of conservatism and the Republican Party, Mitt Romney policy advisor, where do you think American capitalism actually is right now compared to that ideal that you established?

Oren Cass: I think we maybe don't have that much disagreement on the basic socialism versus capitalism discussion here. Words have meanings, and it's important to be clear that socialism versus capitalism is a question of who owns what in society. The idea of socialism is that literally the means of production, the companies, and the equipment are owned by the people collectively or the government. The idea of capitalism is that those things should be owned by private actors and businesses and individuals.

All of those questions have been, for instance, how do we pay for the police? It's not socialist to raise taxes and use that money to pay for the police. It's not even socialist to raise taxes and use some of that for redistribution. Those are all mechanisms within a capitalist market economy for trying to both address things that markets just don't do. Just about any free-market economist would tell you, the market is not going to provide police protection effectively, and then also to address some of the things that a market might do, but in ways that we don't like. Maybe we want to see a different distribution of incomes than what the market is delivering. I think that's exactly where we have to have this discussion, assuming we don't actually have anyone here who thinks we should nationalize the economy. Which is where's the market economy producing outcomes we're not happy with and where do we think public policy could play a role, either in correcting those outcomes or my preference either in creating rules in institutions that are going to guide the markets toward better outcomes.

I think there's certainly a tremendous amount of work to be done but that the way to approach it, typically, is to recognize that markets with the support of the right institutions, and with the right rules, can produce very good outcomes. We want to figure out how to make that happen.

Brian Lehrer: Before we go to calls, Pavlina, why don't you put the premise behind your book title, The Case for a Job Guarantee, on the table? I know Oren is going to disagree with that. What is the case for a job guarantee and how does it fit in with what you said before, which is that you're not interested in destroying capitalism, you're interested in optimizing?

Pavlina Tcherneva: The premise is that in a market-based economy, we always have unemployment, it's guaranteed. Whether you have a bigger role of government or a smaller role of government, unemployment seems to be perennial. Government is still responsible for all the social costs, and all the real devastation that unemployment causes. The question is, can we do things better? The job guarantee is just a public option for jobs. It's not much different from other public options that we have.

If I give you, for example, the public option for retirement security, we call that Social Security. When a person doesn't have private retirement, they are guaranteed public Social Security. Public education, again, that's a public option. If you're not able to afford private school, you're guaranteed to see it in a public education. The job guarantee is that idea that, yes, the private sector creates the vast majority of jobs, but it's also not in the business of hiring every single person. There are lots of other reasons why the labor market has not worked for a great many people for a long time. We need to have some structural policy that puts a minimum floor, provide a basic job for anyone, that will not be at poverty, it will be above poverty, a living job. [unintelligible 00:12:23].

Maria Hinojosa: I'm trying to understand Oren and Pavlina, do you agree that there is a certain level of-- It's not exactly socialism, but government support for these massive programs that do help to a certain degree. Oren would you agree with that, you just wouldn't want to call it socialized anything, but that they exist, the programs exist?

Oren Cass: Oh, I agree that there's a critical need for all sorts of programs that are provided by the government in a well-functioning market economy. I don't think it's actually a question of dispute whether or not that socialism, the programs provided by the government, raised through taxes are perfectly compatible with and in fact necessary to a market economy. I'm not familiar with a single free market economist who would disagree with that.

Maria Hinojosa: Pavlina, are you good with that because you're saying the police are a form of socialized security?

Pavlina Tcherneva: Let me just make two points. The first one is if people mean by unfettered capitalism, a minimal amount of government or the government shouldn't interfere, we are living it now, the longest period of inaction in the middle of a major crisis since the Great Depression. It's during the Great Depression that we realized actually we need government, we got to reinvent it, we got to rethink it. Let's make sure that we have a more stable system going forward and we--

Brian Lehrer: I have to jump in because we're coming to a break. There are areas of disagreement more than what meets the ear so far. We're going to hear Oren on The Green New Deal, as America, Are We Ready, continues.

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Brian Lehrer: It's America, Are We Ready to Save the Middle Class, a national call-in special. I'm Brian Lehrer from WNYC with Maria Hijonosa, host of Latino USA and author of the new book, Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America. Our guests, Oren Cass, executive director of the think tank American Compass. He was a domestic policy advisor for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign in 2012. He is author of The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America, and Pavlina Tcherneva, Bard University economics professor, a research scholar at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard and author of The case for a job guarantee.

Again, we're inviting your calls on the question, what are the best parts of capitalism and the best parts of socialism that you would like to see incorporated more into the American economy as we go forward in a tough time for so many workers and when socialism is being bandied around a lot as a word in the presidential campaign? Let's go to the first caller. We're going to go to Dave in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Dave, you're on America, Are We Ready. Hi there.

Dave: How are you doing? Actually, I'm enjoying the program. For me, being that I've been on both ends of the spectrum. I've been a small business owner so I've enjoyed the fruits of capitalism but also I have student debt, I have health care premiums that are high. I see it being as, the best parts of both systems are the ability to own and run a business in a free market economy but also have that safety net there where, whatever I earn isn't going back to my education, my health care. Those programs, if we take the Scandinavian model, eliminates that from the paycheck. What you're taking home basically is paying for your living expenses, and you actually have a much happier quality of life because you're not worried about your student loan payments, you're not worried about your health care premiums.

Oren Cass: When you talk about this, do you do say, "Look, I'm okay with a little socialism here in Bucks County."? Do you say that and what's the response to people who I assume are voters in Pennsylvania?

Dave: Oh, I am a social democrat. I actually ran as a social democrat in a municipal election, and I won. My ideas are not that far out there. When you explain to people that things like GPS was born out of a socialized program. Our road systems are socialized, our police departments, our fire departments, and telecommunications. All these things came from taxpayer money, which eventually ended up out in the world, even things like the internet that started with the DARPA, which is taxpayer-funded. How much do we rely on the internet? That all started because of socialized programs.

Brian Lehrer: A government research program known as DARPA, back then. Dave, thank you very much. Oren Cass, you right, that progressives might seem the natural ones to align with workers interests, but the reforms the labor market needs, and you acknowledged that the market does need reform, but you say the reforms that the market needs will entail real trade-offs with other priorities that progressives currently see as more important. What's that tension that you have in mind?

Oren Cass: I think a lot of the question that we have to answer is within this market framework? How important is it to us that people are able to earn their own livings and be productive contributors and support themselves and their families versus to what extent do we think we'd actually be comfortable with just redistributing other people's resources to them to make sure they have the things they need? When we start talking about things like the cost of college, the cost of health care, one solution would be to say, "Let's just have the government pay for all those things." The other approach would be to say, "Actually, wouldn't it be nice if jobs paid enough to pay for those things?"

It seems to me that that should certainly be our first goal is that we have a labor market in an economy where wages are rising, and people are able to provide for themselves and their families. If we want to do that, then we have to not just ask, "What new government programs can we create to give things to people?" But rather, "What rules and institutions do we need for the market that are actually going to help people to do things for themselves?" That's a different agenda.

Brian Lehrer: Are you referring to a living wage law that's higher than what we generally consider the minimum wage or something else?

Oren Cass: No, I don't think just passing a law saying, we want you to pay this much money, is actually a solution for the labor market. I do think a better system of organized labor could go a long way. In a lot of countries, wages by industry are set through negotiations between unions and representatives of industry. That means actually getting rid of a lot of what big labor is in this country today, where we fight factory by factory for whether or not we're going to have a union. You say you don't have to do that. Strangely enough, Europe is right to work because they've said, "We're not going to have those fights in every workplace. We're going to have negotiations between employers and representative workers that that set standards for a whole industry." [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Right to work meaning if somebody strikes, somebody else can go and work in that.

Oren Cass: No, sorry, just to clarify, right to work is the question of whether you have to be a member of a union if your workplace is unionized. In much of America, you don't assume you need to be a member of a union, but you do have to pay the dues. Whereas in Europe, being a part of a union or paying dues to a union is entirely voluntary, but it is still a group of unions and employer representatives that set a lot of these wages and standards and I would much rather see that than see just a regulation from Washington, try to figure things out for everybody.

Maria Hinojosa: Pavlina, I'm a survivor of COVID, so I take this a little bit personally because when I was sick, in the very beginning when New York was the center of the epidemic, I was just saying, "Look, why doesn't the government--" This is a little bit illusionary, but why doesn't the government just pay everybody across the country, send them checks, and tell them to stay home? If we all do that for the next three to four months we'll probably be able to take this. Was that wildly unrealistic of me to want to desire and also your thoughts on what Oren is saying?

Pavlina Tcherneva: No, not a role wildly unrealistic. In fact, it was entirely feasible. When you think back to March, we passed an enormous budget, $2.2 trillion. That was huge by all historical standards outside of World War II and that was enough to pay everybody's wage for three months. We could have sent everybody home and we could have had money left over to pay for health care and for mobilization, et cetera.

I think that what's a little bit missing maybe in this conversation is that there is something called the public money. There is something called public financial institutions, treasury, federal reserve, that they are charged with financing expenditures for the government, which may become extraordinarily large in crisis and that's why we designed them. We designed them so that the government's checks don't bounce and the government doesn't depend on taxpayer money when it needs to pay the bills for such uninsurable events.

We don't know when the next pandemic is going to come, what kind of climate disaster is going to come and we will have to pay, we will have to fund essential programs for the common good. I think this has to be introduced in the conversation that we actually have, again, socialized finance if you will, that is there to precisely protect from such extraordinary events. We need to be able to employ those policies more effectively.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take another call, Jonathan in Dallas. You're on America, Are We Ready to Save the Middle Class? Hi, Jonathan.

Jonathan: Hi, it is an honor to be here. Thank you so much for taking my call. I would just like to point out that we need to figure out exactly what system we are living in right now today. A lot of people would think that we are in a capitalist society, but really it's a crony capitalist society where the people at the top, like the federal reserve, have manipulated interest rates where we no longer truly can understand the true value of borrowing money.

What this does to the markets is it takes true price discovery from the markets, and it becomes a situation where it's really not true capitalism. I believe that capitalism, it is driven by profits because that is the best way that you increase productivity, but at the same time, capitalism should be hand in hand with generosity. As soon as you take generosity away from that, then you have a system that turns into what we have right now, where you privatized profits, but then the losses become public in the form of taxpayers having to pay for all that.

Brian Lehrer: Is that generosity in the form of people's tax dollars or in the form of people's private behavior, for you?

Jonathan: I 100% believe that yes, for me, it is in the form of private behavior where if you look at churches or nonprofit organizations, they are the first people to mobilize whenever there's crisis. There's this notion that the federal government becomes extremely-- it's not a well-oiled machine.

Brian Lehrer: What do you say to those who reply that there's just never going to be enough private charity to go around.

Jonathan: Those who believe that there will never be enough private charity, I believe that we have all been given gifts and talents and we are given time and energy. That is our true wealth. Each one of us has this, and we're going to be held accountable by the way that we utilize, spend, or invest these very important assets that are given to us when we are born.

Brain Lehrer: Jonathan, thank you very much. Maria, I think to that model, the question of race, probably, has to come in, and who has wealth and who people with wealth see as worthy.

Maria Hinojosa: How did you know that that's what I was thinking?

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Maria Hinojosa: Because that's a very nice statement, but that doesn't really take into account, yes historical wealth or the historical robbing of wealth. We have to understand the history of the United States. How was this country built? It was built on free Black labor, right? How was the West of the United States? It was built on immigrant labor, actually Asian, Chinese labor. How did the United States repay that? Sadly, by excluding Chinese workers? There's a lot to be said about what are born with and what we're able to do and I certainly think that it's a big part of the conversation and actually, Brian, something that right now is so fervent in the United States because of the Black Lives Matter movement and everybody just thinking about, "Wow, this didn't just happen now, this is a historical structural problem that we have yet to resolve."

Brian Lehrer: Let's go next to Kate in Burlington County, New Jersey. Kate, you're on America, Are We Ready? Hi.

Kate: Thank you. Hi. Almost everyone I know is hurting financially very badly and this is smart people who've worked hard all their lives and are still working hard and they just can't make it. Socialism is used by politicians as a scare word. The billionaire companies snd I think there are 440 of them in this country if I'm not mistaken, are hiding under the title of capitalism and the propaganda that we've built up around that word as though it's okay for them to pay no taxes.

A lot of them aren't paying any taxes at all, or a dollar or two, and the rest of them are paying way under what they did before Reagan changed the rules. This is where the money should come from. There's enough money in this country to do the infrastructure, to give everybody a decent education, to make homelessness a thing that we will never see again and that's where I think the money should come from. Get after the big companies and make them pay up.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. We're going to go right to another caller and that's going to be, Myles in Brooklyn. Myles, you're on America, Are We ready?

Myles: Hi, thank you for taking my call.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for making it.

Myles: Hello.

Brian Lehrer: Hi there. Is there a best part of socialism or capitalism that you want to see folded into the next generation of policy?

Myles: Yes, I was going to say in terms of socialism, we could probably benefit from a single-payer health care system and a universal basic income, and then from capitalism specifically, we already benefit from the drive and the motivation that capitalism instills in us to gain and make more money and drive the economy forward.

Brian Lehrer: Myles, thank you very much. Pavlina, your book which argues for a federally guaranteed job for anyone who needs one, is sometimes placed as an alternative to what Myles brought up, which is a universal basic income. We remember that there was one candidate, Andrew Yang, running on universal basic income. Give people $1,000 a month, that'll cushion them and they can then feel free to be entrepreneurial or creative or whatever they need to do and there'll be less poverty. You say, "No, not that. Don't give people money, guarantee them a job." What's the difference?

Pavlina Tcherneva: We are looking for economic security, so we got to do some form of both, income support and job support. If you provide people with income support, and we are doing it right now, we could do it a lot better because the unemployment insurance boost expired and people are really on the verge of losing their homes or not being able to pay their bills. We did provide major income assistance, which is important has to be renewed, but what are we looking at? We're staring at the largest jobless situation since The Great, Depression. We need to find a way to transition folks back into paid work.

I don't think that you can imagine a society where folks will be quite satisfied with the current scenario if they were only given $1,000 a month for the rest of the year. The jobs component is not just a way to transition people. Jobs are more than just income. It is really to help them build their livelihoods if you will, to provide some sort of certainty and security, but also think of this, job guarantee, the right to a job, was the first of what FDR called the Economic Bill of Rights.

When you look at 30 million unemployment insurers, 27 million without health care, one out of six adults with food insecurity, housing problems. I'm enumerating the basic conditions for a good life that were part of that package of the economic rights package. I think this is a good place to start if we're going to be talking about economic justice, social justice, and so forth.

Brian Lehrer: Oren, can you give us one minute before we go to our next break on something I know you've written about, which is a bipartisan Marco Rubio and Tammy Baldwin effort. Rubio, a Republican senator from Florida, Baldwin, a Democratic senator from Wisconsin, regarding how to see and respond to China. What's their fundamental bipartisan insight in the context of this conversation?

Oren Cass: One of the things that's gone very wrong in our economy in recent years is the way that we've approached globalization and trusting that it doesn't matter what gets made where, because the power of the free market will ensure something new and better will come along. That has proved to be not true. It's not something economic says would be true.

Recognizing that when we have an economic competitor like China out there that's trying to take leadership in strategic industries and that's causing us to lose a lot of good jobs in a lot of very important industries, it's important to respond to that and either try to persuade China to change its behavior, put up barriers between us and China, or take actions here. Don't copy China, but find ways to take actions here that's going to make this a more attractive place to make things.

Brian Lehrer: Which means the government is going to pick winners and losers in the economy?

Oren Cass: Not necessarily, the kinds of policies that would make it more attractive to make things here can in many cases be universal ones. Some of the things we've talked about here, like better funding for innovation, funding for education that focuses on the kinds of education that are actually useful in--

Brian Lehrer: This is America, Are We Ready to Save the Middle Class?

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Brian Lehrer: It's America, Are We Ready to Save the Middle Class? A national call-in special. I'm Brian Lehrer from WNYC with Maria Hinojosa, host of Latino USA and author of Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America. Our guests, Oren Cass, executive director of the think tank, American Compass. He was a domestic policy advisor for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign in 2012 and he is author of The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America. Pavlina Tcherneva, Bard university economics professor, research scholar at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard and author of The Case for a Job Guarantee.

Again, listeners, we're inviting your calls on the question, where are you on the scale of capitalist to socialist? Is there a best part of socialism and a best part of capitalism that should be incorporated, integrated together with each other into the next economy since socialism is such a hot button word in this presidential campaign? Callers and listeners, don't be insulted if we bump some of you, if we get too many calls from one part of the country. We're on all over the US and we don't have that many lines.

If by the luck of the draw, we get a lot of calls from one place or a few places, we're going to pass on some of you and open the lines for people from elsewhere. Don't take it personally. At 844-745-TALK, 844-745-8255, 844-745-TALK. Yes, socialism is a hot button word in this campaign. Here, for example, is former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, from The Republican Convention.

Nikki Haley: Their vision for America is socialism, and we know that socialism has failed everywhere.

Brian Lehrer: Joe Biden says, "I'm no socialist. Do I look like a socialist?" Bernie Sanders is supporting him and they work very hard on a joint platform.

Bernie Sanders: I was very delighted that the vice president agreed to work with our campaign in putting together six separate task forces dealing with the major issues of our country. I think we hammered out some agreements which will make in my, view Joe Biden, a very progressive president if he in fact implements what has been written.

Brian Lehrer: Pavlina, for you as the more socialist-leaning guest here, how do you see the Biden campaign on that scale?

Pavlina Tcherneva: They're trying to rethink the role of the public sector. I think that they have moved forward to propose for bolder programs that will attempt to revive the golden age of the American economy in the post-war era, big bold infrastructure investment, protections for families. I think they're moving in the right direction to swing the pendulum in the opposite direction from this idea, from the Reagan era that the public sector really doesn't have any role to play where here we are rethinking public policy. I would like to see firm commitments to certain guarantees such as health care, but the program is very comprehensive by past comparisons.

Brian Lehrer: Oren, any different view?

Oren Cass: I think that's a pretty accurate description of where the Biden campaign is. They've set up a lot of Bernie Sanders' task forces. I don't believe Biden has actually endorsed many of Sanders's more radical proposals. I think a lot of people are waiting to see what, if anything, Biden actually believes and what Biden administration would actually focus on.

Maria Hinojosa: Now, interestingly, in some of the reporting that I've done, I've actually heard Latino Republicans or Latino centrists who maybe didn't want to vote for Trump, but that they're hearing these things about how Biden is going to become a socialist overnight, that AOC is actually pulling him deeply to the left. I wonder what Peter in Philadelphia has to say about that. Hey, Peter, welcome to the show. Peter?

Brian Lehrer: Peter, are you there? Peter in Philly?

Maria Hinojosa: All right. That's not fair, it has happened to me before. [chuckles]

Brian Lehrer: That's right. I think this might be my fault. I think I might've been clicking on the wrong button, but let's see if Sam in Lincoln, Massachusetts is there. Hi, Sam.

Sam: I'm here. I just want to point out that capitalism is a system based on the idea that it's best to exploit the working class so a few people can make a profit. Socialism is based on the idea that an economy should be organized around what's best for all the people.

In the Scandinavian countries who take a socialist stance, they've got the highest standard of living. The last point I'd like to make is that capitalism is based on the idea of racism and that the whole capitalist system was based on the slave trade and the idea that the best way for a couple of people to make a lot of money is to enslave a whole race of people. That's what I wanted to say.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Pavlina, does that go too far for you?

Pavlina Tcherneva: Not at all. I think it is spot on. I think you don't even have to-- Intuitively, even if you're a firm owner, you know that labor is a cost. Firms try to minimize their cost. Capitalism that is driven by production for profit. For capitalism, labor is a cost. We shouldn't be surprised that the tendency will be to reduce wages, remove basic benefits. It's just part of the logic, which is the reason why we need to have some sort of public support to ensure that there is a minimum floor.

I want to say also one other thing, let's flip the conversation the other way, like let's say, a market economy that is presumably delivering all these benefits, how long should we wait for the market economy to deliver climate solutions? How long should we wait for the market economy to deliver housing solutions? Nobody can accuse America of being socialist in the post-war era. We have gone precisely the opposite way. That's the era that we've seen the highest inequality, the weakest labor market, and the worst climate crisis.

Maria Hinojosa: We have a call from the South, yes, Atlanta. That is where we find Graciela. What are your thoughts, Graciela?

Graciela: Hi. I just wanted to say that America was founded on the idea of capitalism, that if you work hard and you play by the rules that you can achieve anything but in reality, that was only slated for a few people, mostly from European countries that had a certain look, i.e. Anglo-Saxon or white. The reality is that America is afraid of the word socialism because they equate it with communism.

What I think of what socialism is, is to look after each other, and to look for the common good for everybody, but because we're so entrenched in our own beliefs and with this racist undertone, that only a few are able to prosper. They don't really want to look after each other or the whole well-being because Americans look at each other as different and tribal in a way.

Brian Lehrer: How far would you like to go down the socialist road?

Graciela: I had the privilege of actually visiting a couple of Scandinavian countries. The atmosphere, it's so much calmer, it's so much peaceful. You can tell that people are looking after each other. They don't have to worry about paying if you get sick, they don't have to worry about getting somewhere because the transportation system is so good. I just want Americans to be able to live up to that ideology of if you work hard and you play by the rules then everybody can benefit and everybody can contribute to the system. I don’t know if I’m explaining myself. [chuckles]

Maria Hinojosa: No. Thank you so much, Graciela. [Spanish language].

Brian Lehrer: Very clear.

Maria Hinojosa: Thank you so much. Brian, it is interesting that it is 2020 and we are on a national radio show, and we are talking about socialism in the United States. I do want to just take a moment to say, this was not a conversation that we were having in the year 2000, for example, like this. There is something about this. Oren, specifically, when people think about the left, when they think about socialism, they do think about unions. You write that basically, 1930s style labor unions have basically expired in your view, but that new forms of organizing labors should be in fact, you say, "A conservative priority." That's really interesting. What kind of new organizing do you imagine, and that you can see conservatives getting behind? Paint that picture for us.

Oren Cass: I should back up for a moment. It's important when we talk about, for instance, Scandinavian countries, that seemed to be very popular on this show, to emphasize that those are capitalist countries. They have generous welfare states. When we have callers calling in and saying that capitalism is based on slavery, or Pavlina, saying that labor is a cost, and it's inevitable in a capitalist system, that labor is going to be exploited and it's just going to be for the benefit of a few.

Scandinavia is a capitalist system. It's really, really important to have our terms straight, and to work with some accurate basic facts about things like what these systems are, what the tradeoffs are-

Brian Lehrer: Are those both capitalists and what you would call democratic socialist or social democracies?

Oren Cass: That's right. Scandinavia has a very generous welfare state. If we want to talk about the benefit of generous welfare state, that's a terrific conversation to have. The kinds of criticisms that get very casually flown thrown around and have now been endorsed during this hour by Pavlina, at least, the idea that capitalism is essentially inherently racist, or based on slavery or inherently exploitative, holding up the Scandinavian countries as an example, it is not proving those things about capitalism, it's proving exactly the opposite, which is that capitalism can function a lot of ways.

Among other things here in America, for all of the problems that we have as a nation, capitalism has among other things produced the highest standard of living for the middle class, was already a post-slavery society in the north at the time of the founding, has led to extraordinary gains in income across races and ethnic groups, across demographic groups nationwide.

Unfortunately, this is where some of these conversations go off the rails, we end up with these incredibly overbroad critiques that seemed to be something someone picked up in a university classroom or something that just do not withstand the very basic scrutiny of logic. We would make a lot more progress in talking about how to actually make our system work better for more people. If instead of throwing out the most inflammatory and outrageous statements we can think of, we start from some things that if we actually sat down and talked about most of us would agree, which is that we like the idea of a capitalist system.

We want to have a private sector and private businesses and private property and people to have an incentive to innovate and to build successful businesses and try to advance their own condition. Then we need to figure out a way to do that in a market economy that's going to encourage the right kinds of investment, that's going to encourage opportunity to be spread widely, then that also has government programs that do those things and help people who are left behind.

We can have terrific discussions about how to do all those things as well as possible, but saying that capitalism is built on slavery or inherently exploitative and on and on, you're shutting down those conversations and headed down a dead end. If Pavlina wants to actually endorse socialism and point us to a socialist country, not a capitalist country, that she thinks is more in line with what America should be trying to achieve, then I think that we could discuss that.

I don't think she'll do that, because when we actually focus on the issues, there isn't a whole lot of enthusiasm for abandoning the many things that are really quite good about the system we have.

Brian Lehrer: Pavlina, you've been name-checked so you got to reply.

Pavlina Tcherneva: Yes, there are many varieties of capitalism, but you really have to know a little bit about the history of capitalism to argue that this is this benevolent wonderful system that we should all be aspiring to. We know that it began with plundering of resources from peripheries, oppression of colonized people. You cannot overlook the history of slavery, and you got to reckon with the idea that we provided labor protections, but they didn't extend to migrant labor. All of these things throughout the historical evolution of this market economy will have to be recognized, and they need to be remedied. We are in a conversation-

Brian Lehrer: How should they be remedied, Pavlina?

Pavlina Tcherneva: We are in a conversation of the role of the public sector, the degree to which the public sector should provide protections. I have not proposed the ownership of the means of production by all, and some people could make that argument. You can't quite argue that I'm saying inherently this or inherently that. What I'm quite clearly suggesting is that the marketing system is an evolutionary system and the public sector plays an important role in how it's going to look. This is the conversation we're having right now. What should we expect of the public sector in the next transformation?

Brian Lehrer: Let's get one more caller in here before we run out of time. Marissa in Phoenix. Marissa, you're on America, Are We Ready? Hi, there, we've got about one minute for you.

Marissa: Hi, I just wanted to add something to the conversation. I'm really appreciative that you took my call. I just wanted to bring up the possible topic of, in addition to raising the minimum wage for people, maybe putting some legislature or something in place that could prevent the top earners of these large companies from making such a large difference in income from their lowest paid employee. I would just love to hear your thoughts on that.

Brian Lehrer: Oren, is that something that you would endorse? As we start to near the end of the program, you can also put on the table some of those new forms of organizing that we were trying to get at a minute ago and then we got off on some other things.

Oren Cass: Actually, those two points are related. There's obviously an imbalance in power, in any labor market between employers and workers. That's something that Adam Smith recognized and wrote about and ever since economists have focused on and looked for solutions to. One of the best solutions is some form of organization, giving workers representation.

The way that we want to approach that is not to say, individual companies, either you're a union company or a non-union company. Of course, if that's the situation, then non-union companies are going to fight hard to stay that way, and union companies in a lot of cases are going to struggle, but instead to say, workers, we're giving you representation and you will negotiate with employers for your whole industry. We're not going to have a different deal company by company, we're going to have a deal for the industry. If you do it that way, you get rid of a lot of the disadvantages of the system we have now and I think, opened up a lot of- [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Pavlina, take our last 20 seconds for anything you want to say.

Pavlina Tcherneva: I think that one way or another, we're going to end up with a different form of market economy. The question is, are we going to take an active role to rethink what that's going to look like or are we just going to let things devolve as they continue devolving? I think that in fact there are many more points of agreement that we need to move forward with productive ways. I think this is the conversation.

Brian Lehrer: That's a good way to end, Pavlina Tcherneva's book is The Case for a Job Guarantee, Oren Cass's book is The Once and Future worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America, Maria Hinojosa's book is Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America. I'm Brian Lehrer and I invite you to sign up for my podcast Brian Lehrer: A Daily Politics Podcasts, where we talk about stuff like this every day. Thank you all so much for listening to America, Are We Ready?

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