If Capitalism Creates Winners, Why Are So Many Opting Out

WEBVTT
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Americans don't want capitalism anymore.
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So there's a lot of things that are going well right now.
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We're in the eye of a hurricane before the midterm.
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These very charismatic socialists like Mandarin, Al-Said, AOC.
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The problem is capitalism is an unequal monster of injustice.
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The American empire is not in decline at all.
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You said you were an educated man.
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You weren't, you didn't say you were on customer.
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I didn't, I didn't.
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You made that up too.
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What is the point?
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Well, if you wouldn't interrupt you, you're illegal about the.
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If you were to say something, I wouldn't bother interrupting you.
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Whether the DNC leadership likes it or not, and most indications are that they don't, the Democratic Socialists of America are having a moment.
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Insurgent socialists have won many primaries against centrist opponents in this key election year, often defying big spending campaigns designed to keep them out.
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The leading lights include New York City Mayor Zaran Mondani and the popular congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who may yet run for president.
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Republicans like Senator Tate Cruz and the president say their progress is chilling and that all Americans should fear what they call a burgeoning communist-Islamist alliance.
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Campaign rhetoric aside, it's fair to say that most conservatives think their economic ideas are insane, but that doesn't mean they're not popular.
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And in a world of billionaires is bogey men, stagnant wages, and soaring inflation, voters may well be buying what they're sharing.
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My next two guests have very different views about where this is all going.
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Richard Wolfe is a popular Marxist economist, often cited by the DSA, and Victor Davis Hansen is a leading history and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and also of the counter-revolution, the fall and rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement.
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Well, welcome to both of you.
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Victor, welcome back to Uncensored.
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I want to read you a clip from Donald Trump in 2024.
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He said, We are a nation in decline, a failing nation.
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We are a nation that has the highest inflation in 50 years, where banks are collapsing.
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A pretty apocalyptic view of the United States.
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Was he right?
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Well, in the Biden four years, the aggregate inflation had gone almost 21%, and it averaged 5.1% every year.
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But if you were to look at Staples, vehicles, fuel, insurance, housing, healthcare had gone almost 30%.
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So he was right about that.
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His first year he had about 2.6%, so he have he halved the annual rate of inflation.
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We'll see about this year.
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About decline, uh, I don't think that I think what he was suggesting is that we were an exceptional, pre-eminent country, and that that was a reaction to prior presidents that said that we were not especially any more exceptional than, say, the United Kingdom or Greece.
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But if you look at right now very quickly, most of the prognosis 15 years ago about the United States proved wrong.
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They said China was going to eclipse our economy.
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They have four times the population, yet they have$10 trillion less GDP.
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I can remember in 2006 we were told the EU was a new socialist paradigm.
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They have 450 million people, 100 million more people than we do, and they have a$10 trillion smaller uh GDP still.
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And you look at, say, eight or nine rubrics, uh, space launches, satellites, bioengineering, digital media, software, AI, and you look at companies in the world that are measured either by market capitalization or usage downloads, and out of those top ten, almost in every category, nine are American.
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Once in a while, there's a Chinese or a European country.
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So you can use a lot of barometers, but the United States, I think we're in the eye of a hurricane before the midterm.
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But if you look at recent um developments, we have the highest um per family income, that was 2025 in history.
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We have the lowest crime rate in 70 years.
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We have um the lowest poverty rate uh at about 10.2% of the population.
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We created 140,000 new jobs last year.
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There is worry because of the war about inflation and the price of oil, but we've increased oil production by about a million barrels, and we're the largest producer of natural gas in history and exporter of it, and the largest producer currently of oil.
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So there's a lot of things that are going well right now, but we're in a political campaign and the war has clouded a lot of that uh news, I think.
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Richard Wolf, welcome to a sense of.
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I think you broadly agree the American Empire is not what it was.
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I think you differ about why this is.
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You see that there's been a kind of inevitable death rattle of global capitalism.
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Explain why you feel that.
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Well, I take a historical view and I don't cherry-pick my statistics in the manner of Mr.
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Hansen, which is a remarkable exercise.
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But he has a problem, which is as you opened the program, socialism is on the rise here in the United States, uh, faster and more broadly based than anyone, including Mr.
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Hansen, had foreseen or expected.
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And there's good reason for that, unless you want to dismiss all of the people that are finding socialism attractive as being cloudy or uninformed and things like that.
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Here's the story about uh the the empire, and and I'm glad you brought it up.
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Empires were created starting about four centuries ago in your country, Pierce.
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England is where this began, because capitalism replaced feudalism.
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And when capitalism replaces feudalism, there's an internal urge to expand.
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The successful company is the one that makes a profit.
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The more successful company is the one that turns the profit back into the business to grow it.
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Because with competition, growth is a condition of survival.
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So capitalism grows.
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If it starts in London, pretty soon it runs out of the workers and the raw materials and the food needed in that area, and it expands.
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The history of the last four centuries is masses of rural agrarian people being drawn as in a magnet into the urban industrial.
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And the capitalism created these new countries, uh, Western Europe to begin with, expanding to North America and Japan, and they genuinely built a world economy.
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Marx was one of the early thinkers to point that out.
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They are generating a world economy.
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The problem is that the economy capitalism generated is an unequal monster of injustice in which Asia, Africa, Latin America, and much else are used to funnel wealth.
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You know, Belgium is a small country in Northwest Europe, but if you give it the Congo, it becomes wealthy.
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But that's because it takes the wealth of the Congo and moves it to Brussels.
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So it looks pretty, as Brussels indeed does.
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And that is now the revolt of the Third World, the global south, whatever you want it.
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The other feature which goes most to your question is that the culmination of European-led colonialism were the two worst world wars in human history.
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When they ran out of the globe to take for each other, they began to intrude on each other.
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The British on the French, the French on the German, the Russians on the Japanese, you know the story.
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And World Wars I and II are the culmination.
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What people don't understand is that when the colony, the colonializing countries destroyed one another in World Wars I and II, they had an exception.
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Because air power and air technology weren't developed yet, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans protected the United States so that it was the country having joined the colonizers that inherited the colonial system from all the others.
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The second half of the 20th century is the century of the wealth of America because it became the uni empire, the collection of all the others.
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As the British lost India, the United States went in.
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As the French lost their colonies, U.S.
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corporations, U.S.
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government, U.S.
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military went in.
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We enjoy being the one big empire.
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But given that the world was building up to an anti-imperial, anti-colonial era, which we're living through, it is now the time for the United States, the inheritor of all those empires, to suffer the result they all did, which is, as every empire in human history, it was born, it evolved, and then it passed away, and we are now passing away.
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And nothing illustrates it better than this kind of war with Iran, where one of the empire's corners turns out to be able to fight back.
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Victor, um you know, it's interesting because I'm sure there are lots of that you may have agreed with, a lot of it you don't agree with.
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What is inarguable right now is this very palpable rise of the democratic socialists.
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And these very charismatic socialists like Mamdani, Al-Said, AOC, and others, all different, slightly different forms of socialism, but socialists at their heart, really.
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Um, there is clearly a movement going on.
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What do you put that down to?
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I mean, if you think that what they're espousing is disastrous, why are so many young people in particular gravitating to these younger, dynamic socialists in the way they are?
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Well, uh, before I answer that, I'll just say that if you take uh worldwide socialism and empires and American decline, if you look at when if you look at the Western hemisphere five years, six years ago, the left had used the word pink type, that they felt that Brazil was a model, Venezuela was a model, Colombia was a model.
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So if those 32 nations that consist of South, Central, and the Caribbean, there's only five now that are socialist: Brazil, Nicaragua, probably Mexico, and uh Paraguay just flipped.
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All of the rest are either capitalist or consensual governments, and most of them are pro-American.
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And if you look at where the China is right now, which is I don't know what we would call it, it's quasi-capitalist, quasi-socialist, surely totalitarian.
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It is an internal turmoil.
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It's just fired all of its general staff, it's got a 1.0 fertility rate.
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Its GDP has not uh increased, as everybody told said, it would.
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In some ways, you could look at it as one American produces 40%, 30% more GDP goods and services than his four Chinese counterparts.
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So the American empire, if that's the term, and we were not a colonial empire, uh, is not in decline, it's in ascendance relative to the EU, relative to our neighbors to the north, Canada, relative to Russia, relative to that's just I didn't cherry pick those statistics, that's just a fact.
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Yes, Mr.
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Wistig.
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No, if you want to say that the GDP figures are wrong, you tell me.
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But as for here, uh let me tell you, you may use.
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I didn't interrupt you, please.
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No, no, you uh look, no, I let you go, I let you say three or four talks that were reasonable.
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You talked a lot.
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I had a lot of ones beginning.
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That's another cherry pick, you know.
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It's not the length, it's really the substance that matters.
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Maybe if you were if you were a little bit more educated, you'd learn it.
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I'm a professor of economics.
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I study economic history.
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One of the things we study is economic development.
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There is no country on earth in the history of our race that has developed its economy faster, further, than the People's Republic of China.
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Whatever you want to play games, that is the reality.
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For the last 40 years, the average growth of GDP in China has been quite sense.
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I mean, let's go.
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Come on.
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Either you say it and you talk about it.
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Or you interrupt the correction.
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Those are the two options.
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The other option I'm talking about today.
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I'm talking about today.
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It's Dallas.
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Today in the year 2026, using the numbers of the IMF, the economic growth of the GDP of the United States is anticipated to be 2.1 to 2.2%.
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The same number for China is 5%.
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Now, even you can understand who's doing better.
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1.4 billion people produce about 30 to 40 percent GDP as Americans do, given its population.
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And you were talking about American decline.
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I just quoted all of the statistics of major companies in the world that are dominating the new technology.
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I'm not trying to interrupt you, but you let me answer his question, if you please.
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I didn't I first of all, I didn't engage in ad hominem, and I didn't interrupt you when you were giving your oration.
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I'm just telling you that the socialist program in America is there's two catalysts.
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Number one, the DSA's membership has been about 75 to 85 percent white, and it's mostly confined the the nucleus into urban areas in blue or purple states.
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And when you look at the profile of education, they not only most of them have VAs, but most of them have advanced degrees.
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So you're talking about a very affluent group of white, largely white people, who feel that their educational uh certification, the letters after their name, have brought have not brought them the level of affluence that they feel that they enjoy, and which they is in stark um contrast to the people they associate with in New York, in Denver, LA, in San Francisco, in Boston.
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And they cannot afford, I mean, they don't have the money of doctors and other professionals, and the money and the prices in those cities for housing, cost of living, food, are beyond their reach.
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And that has made that elite group of people organize and they vent their frustrations and they are spreading that message.
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There is a second group.
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We have about 53 million people who were not born in the United States, about 17 percent.
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That's a record in percentage and actual numbers.
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A small minority of that group come as first or second generation from largely the Middle East.
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And I'm talking about people like Rashida Talib, Ilian Omar, Zoran Mandami, Hassan Piker, Abdual Said.
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I'm just taking it.
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Are you really no no no?
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Are you really going to try once again to pin socialists are dangerous immigrants?
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Are you going?
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I'm not.
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I'm not.
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I didn't see the Trump SRN that you repeat that.
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Wow.
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You can't do better than that.
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My goodness.
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You know why 75% of the people in the DSM.
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I think you should let it vink to finish his point.
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I don't think you heard him make his point.
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Let him think to finish the point of the body.
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You said you were an educated man.
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You weren't, you didn't say you were.
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No, I I didn't.
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I didn't.
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You made that up.
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Let me finish.
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Let me finish.
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And so I wasn't talking about their immigrant status per se.
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I was saying that we have an elite, elite group of people.
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This is the second component.
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This is the second component of what makes up the socialist leadership.
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And what do they have in what do they have in common?
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They're very, very wealthy people.
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Wealthy other socialists.
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Yes, let me finish.
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I just said that there was an elite in the cities that are highly educated, they come from upper middle class, they're largely white, and they're dissatisfied that their credentials did not result in the type of life they deserved.
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They think they deserve.
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As far as the immigrants, I'm saying that there is a pattern here.
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Zoran Mandami, you could argue, is a came, he's a dual citizen of Uganda.
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He came from what you would call a settler colonial 1% of India that owns 60% of the GDP of Uganda.
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He's very wealthy.
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His parents, one's a PhD, one's a filmmaker.
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Hassan Piker's Turkish family are multi-millionaires.
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He drives a$200,000 Porsche.
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He bought a$3 million.
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Are you kidding?
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Are we having an analysis of socialism on the personal property of two people?
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No, I'm not finished.
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I'm not finished.
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I said Ilian Omar.
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What is the point?
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Well, if you wouldn't interrupt, you would learn.
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Ilian Omar has a thing, I wouldn't bother interrupting you.
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Ilian Omar just filed a$30 million, I don't think it's accurate, net worth statement as required by federal disclosures.
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Abdul El-Say filed a tax return of$600,000.
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So what I'm getting at is when you these two groups of people are the driving force in this socialist movement.
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And we don't know yet the degree.
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You just made that out.
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You just made that driving force of anything.
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Yeah, yeah, they're in the news.
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Who chose in American politics?
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One of the reasons we have socialism is that American politics is a game for rich people 99% of the time.
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That's what we're doing.
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If you look at the Senate and you look at the House, you'll see that the number of millionaires is overwhelming.
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What do you mean?
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They're greater than the Democratic part, they're greater on the left than they are the top.
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That's true.
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That's a salute nonsense.
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Listen, we have a country dominated right now by billionaires.
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The people sitting on the platform behind Mr.
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Trump when he was inaugurated in January of last year are the billionaires of this country.
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If they were Russian, we'd call them oligarchs, but we don't.
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We leave that for them.
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We have billionaires.
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Let me ask Picture a question.
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Isn't the big problem for Trump?
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As you've got this rise, populist rise of the Democratic Socialists, you've also got the whole fallout from the Iran War, and in particular, the impact it's had on cost of living, and in particular, say on gas prices.
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So data released by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, uh, gasoline was$3.08 a gallon in January 2025.
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It's now$4.48.
00:23:37.409 --> 00:23:42.609
Diesel was at$3.63 per gallon in January 2025.
00:23:42.769 --> 00:23:44.289
Now$6.53.
00:23:44.609 --> 00:23:54.209
You know, Trump's day of reckoning for the Iran war may well be through the prism of gas prices come the ballot box in the midterms.
00:23:54.529 --> 00:23:58.849
I mean, isn't that isn't that a cold hard reality of why you're seeing it?
00:23:59.729 --> 00:24:00.929
Well, hang on Victor first.
00:24:03.569 --> 00:24:04.449
I will come to you, Richard.
00:24:05.249 --> 00:24:06.369
Why do you why do you do that?
00:24:06.449 --> 00:24:07.569
Why do you interrupt all the time?
00:24:07.969 --> 00:24:09.009
But just on that point, Victor.
00:24:11.249 --> 00:24:11.889
Let me ask Victor.
00:24:12.609 --> 00:24:13.809
I'll come to you, Richard, in a minute.
00:24:14.049 --> 00:24:31.489
But is this not going to be one of the major determining factors that Trump, far from reducing the cost of living as he campaigned on, and far from not going and attacking Middle Eastern countries, which he campaigned on, has done the complete reverse, and people may vote with the reality in their lives?
00:24:31.889 --> 00:24:32.689
We'll see it.
00:24:32.929 --> 00:24:39.089
It could be in 1992, gas prices out of the first Gulf War, uh, I would argue.
00:24:39.969 --> 00:24:40.369
George O.
00:24:40.849 --> 00:24:42.129
He was not re-elected.
00:24:42.609 --> 00:24:43.729
He was not in a recession.
00:24:43.809 --> 00:24:52.049
It was under 20 months earlier with people who felt the price of gas was high and they believed that we felt for the Democratic message.
00:24:52.209 --> 00:24:59.249
It was very well articulated by Bill Clinton that we were in the worst, I'm quoting literally, the worst recession since the Great Depression.
00:25:00.209 --> 00:25:05.009
That 9091 recession had been over for 20 months when he said that.
00:25:05.329 --> 00:25:11.569
But the price of gasoline had soared when the oil fields of Kuwait, as you remember, were torched.
00:25:11.809 --> 00:25:20.689
So, yes, the price of gasoline uh is the most uh uh is the most uh evident uh increase.
00:25:20.929 --> 00:25:23.489
Will the inflation rate get to three percent?
00:25:23.649 --> 00:25:28.769
It probably will, but it won't get to five percent, which was the average of the Biden administration.
00:25:28.849 --> 00:25:31.809
But that's not going to matter because it's the perception.
00:25:32.209 --> 00:25:38.929
And as far as the Iran war is unpopular, but it's a very different war.
00:25:39.089 --> 00:25:42.289
I mean, Iran is a a country of 93 million people.
00:25:42.369 --> 00:25:46.849
It was considered the strongest country in the Middle East.
00:25:47.089 --> 00:25:48.769
We haven't had a ground war.
00:25:49.009 --> 00:26:02.289
We have only had about 38 days of kinetic activity, and then we've had negotiations, a brief interlude, a back and forth, missile fire, negotiations and negotiations over these seven months.
00:26:02.449 --> 00:26:03.809
So it's a very strange peak.
00:26:04.049 --> 00:26:06.129
We've tragically lost 19 people.
00:26:06.449 --> 00:26:13.409
But if you look at the entire seven-month war, the accident rate every day in the US military is one fatality.
00:26:13.569 --> 00:26:17.569
We have got 11 times more fatality during the war than we've lost in our.
00:26:18.129 --> 00:26:20.849
But the problem, I think the problem, and I'll bring Richard back in here.
00:26:21.169 --> 00:26:30.369
The problem with the Iran war is the asymmetric war that the Iranians have been waging by controlling the Strait of Formoose, which has 20% of the world's energy flow through it.
00:26:30.689 --> 00:26:45.489
I interviewed the Prime Minister of Qatar uh at the weekend in London, and the economic damage to Qatar alone from the uh liquid nitrogen uh go uh liquid natural gas that goes through the strait has been rendered almost to nothing, right, for seven months.
00:26:45.889 --> 00:26:48.849
But we're we're we're we're right in we're right in the middle of something.
00:26:49.009 --> 00:26:58.289
Yes, Trump should have said he should have explained exactly what he was doing on day one, and I think they were too optimistic based on the Maduro and the first time.
00:26:58.609 --> 00:26:59.969
I think they I think they I agree.
00:27:00.049 --> 00:27:02.689
I think they thought they could take the race leader, and it's not realistic.
00:27:03.329 --> 00:27:05.889
I've got a point, but we're just running we're running out of time.
00:27:05.969 --> 00:27:23.809
I want to leave Richard a chance just to have a final word just on this, because it seems to me that the rise of a democratic socialist, the rising gas prices, the rising cost of living, Trump's, you know, in a way, repudiation of his own campaigning with what he's done with Iran and the impact on the economy.
00:27:23.969 --> 00:27:26.609
That this could be a day of reckoning in the midterms.
00:27:26.929 --> 00:27:34.769
What does that mean for America post-midters should he lose both uh the House and the Senate, do you think?
00:27:35.409 --> 00:27:37.969
Well, you'd be right in saying position 50.
00:27:41.489 --> 00:27:42.049
He's in truth.
00:27:43.889 --> 00:27:47.409
And the Republican Party is in trouble no matter what happens.
00:27:47.569 --> 00:27:50.049
And that's because of larger social issues.
00:27:50.209 --> 00:27:54.929
The reason I gave the history was to give a sense of the larger process.
00:27:55.169 --> 00:28:01.809
The United States at the end of World War II was less unequal than the European countries.
00:28:01.969 --> 00:28:08.769
Now it has outpaced all the European countries to become the most unequal at all.
00:28:09.169 --> 00:28:18.529
You know, it it is an incredible study in capitalism's failure to generalize or to bring prosperity.
00:28:18.689 --> 00:28:25.089
Wherever capitalism settles, it creates such inequality that it eventually erupts.
00:28:25.489 --> 00:28:35.169
That's when the inequality is reduced until they can re-establish the capitalist system, which then resumes the rush to inequality.
00:28:35.329 --> 00:28:37.249
That's what fuels socialism.
00:28:37.569 --> 00:28:44.609
That's why the point of poverty rate is the lowest that socialism isn't there is doesn't work.
00:28:44.769 --> 00:28:47.809
It's like the old joke of uh Mark Twain.
00:28:47.969 --> 00:28:51.889
You know, the reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated.
00:28:52.129 --> 00:28:55.249
Socialism is the governing party in Spain.
00:28:55.569 --> 00:29:00.849
Socialism is about to become the mayor of Berlin, not just the mayor of New York.
00:29:01.009 --> 00:29:07.729
There are reasons for that that have to do with internal transformations in those societies.
00:29:08.209 --> 00:29:09.329
That's what's going on.
00:29:09.489 --> 00:29:09.649
Okay.
00:29:09.809 --> 00:29:14.609
The mass of Americans don't want capitalism anymore.
00:29:14.849 --> 00:29:18.209
That's the they don't know much about socialism.
00:29:18.449 --> 00:29:19.249
How could they?
00:29:19.409 --> 00:29:23.009
It's been banned since the Cold War began in 45.
00:29:23.169 --> 00:29:23.329
Okay.
00:29:23.649 --> 00:29:31.329
What you're seeing is the expression of anti-capitalism as the appreciation of socialism.
00:29:31.729 --> 00:29:36.529
That would get you to understand where the support for it is coming.
00:29:36.769 --> 00:29:37.009
Okay.
00:29:37.089 --> 00:29:38.849
I'm going to leave in that fascinating debate.
00:29:39.809 --> 00:29:41.249
I'll just I'll end with one statement.
00:29:41.329 --> 00:29:44.769
The poverty rate, as I speak, is the lowest that's ever been recorded.
00:29:44.849 --> 00:29:45.649
And that was a good thing.
00:29:45.809 --> 00:29:46.529
No, that's not true.
00:29:46.929 --> 00:29:47.889
Another one that is true.
00:29:48.129 --> 00:29:50.689
Magic, it is magic cherry pick statistics.
00:29:51.329 --> 00:29:54.449
That's what I do for the harm.
00:29:57.489 --> 00:29:58.929
Because you don't have an argument.
00:29:59.089 --> 00:30:05.889
When you don't have to do it, the beauty of this show is that people can now scurry to the internet, they can Google it and work out.
00:30:10.529 --> 00:30:11.489
Anyway, I'll leave it there.
00:30:11.729 --> 00:30:13.489
Gentlemen, thank you both very much.