YouSaid · the spoken record

Bhaskar Sunkara

lines on the record: 237
first: 2022-12-22
most recent: 2022-12-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Okay, well, I can't give you good analogy for any of those, but it's like a raw prospect. Like, you know, someone who shows glimmers of hope. So they were drafted really high and then they bounced from team to team. And you're like, I'm clinging on to my AOC stock. But I think that she needs to be self-critical enough and her team needs to be self-critical enough to know that the goal is not merely to be a national cultural figure and win a re-election in your deep blue district. The goal has to be to become truly a national political figure, which will require changes.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think she's been ineffective, quite frankly, in the last year making that transition. Whereas I think other politicians who are not so far left, who don't identify socialists, well, let's say at John Fetterman has managed to become more effective. And I don't think it's a question of character or whatever else. And I like AOC, so I don't want to put it so harshly. But I think a lot of it has to do with her being a Congress person in a deep blue district and Fetterman being running for statewide office in a quote-unquote purple state. But at her best, at her best, she does it. But it's like glimmers. It's kind of like, I don't know, what sport are you biggest fan of? I'll give you a sports analogy.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On her from the right, and also this media tension and this notoriety, she hasn't really modulated or adjusted her audience, her rhetoric into how do you win over someone who Really hates a lot of your ideas, but might actually believe in some of your policies.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, instead of just a plain spoken burning, like, yeah, discrimination is wrong. If you ask me about a cultural issue, I'll come down on the same side as AOC, I'm sure, nine plus tens out of 10. But I'll try to root it into just basic, like, yeah, treat people with respect, you know, and they'll treat you with respect, and that's a way we should govern our civic sphere, you know, and we don't need to talk about intersectionality to, I think, get that. So there's that rhetoric. But she's not just a regular congressperson in a deep blue district, she's also a national and international cultural and political figure. So she's now a spokesperson because of largely a media event of her surprising upset election and her being young and being really connected to this post-Bernie moment. And I think amid these constant one attacks,”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She's still developing as a politician. It's very difficult when you're in a deep blue district and when you don't often have to worry about re-election or talk to or modulate your rhetoric to win over swing voters in your district, but then you're immediately a national and cultural figure. So AOC basically goes from her views, which are compelling in my mind a lot of her programmatic views are compelling, wins her district, then has her own rhetoric, which to me compared to Bernie owes itself more to the academic left in the way that a lot of the left has learned to talk. I don't mean academic in sense that she's like a Marxist or whatever else, but academic in the way that she may be Using at times like confusing language to convey basic points when she gets into the language of intersectionality and whatever else.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She does self identify as a democratic socialist. Think she was a very inspiring figure for a lot of people. She was kind of out of this Bernie wave of the first set of Bernie candidates in 2018 that identified with him instead of the Democratic Party establishment. I think that.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bernie would say some things about the world that objectively to a lot of people seemed correct, or at least pretty close to correct. And a journalist would just look at him like he was from outer space. To some extent, this also happens to people on the right. People on the right often say things that I find repulsive or just wrong, but there's parts of the media that would describe their certain views as illegitimate or outside the boundaries of acceptable conversation. I think there should be a few things outside the boundary of acceptable conversation, hate speech and so on. But there's this attempt to say their views are illegitimate and therefore anyone who votes for them for any reason is illegitimate too. And that's one reason why I think it feels a lot of resentment and will ultimately end up feeling”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think a lot of these people are friends, even if they don't know each other, they're friends because they went the same schools, they know the same people, they have the same broad just ideology and worldview. So they had a sense of what the Democratic Party should be and who it should be running and who was going to win. And also what was serious and unserious.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, not in the way of deliberate or direct vote working, but. They put their thumb in the scale for sure. I mean, it's not even conspiracy theory. There's all this stuff in the debates about Clinton's people being fed questions and whatever else and just the tone of the media. The media was extremely dismissive and hostile to him. I love that Bernie still does the Fox News town hall because they're just him speaking to the people and he's not afraid of going on any sort of outlet and making his case. But I think a lot of the liberal media in particular always had it out for Bernie Sanders.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think he's a practical thinker. And also, yeah, he is running, even if he should be afraid of it too, because he is a, you know, he is a major politician running for president. I think what people want is they want the left wing of the possible, or at least the segment of the party that was voting for him, the Democratic Party that was voting for him. They wanted something that was a step or two removed from what they had now and was visionary, but not so far removed that it seemed like a scary leap. And I think we lost a chance in 2016 to like someone that I think would have beaten Trump or the very least would have been close.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the US really didn't have that. The furthest left you could go was like Chris Hayes and MSNBC or whatever. I'm very glad that there's a socialist poll. And I think we have Bernie to thank for it to the extent that a lot of self-described socialists don't think Bernie is a real socialist. It's in part because he stays grounded in people's day-to-day lives and struggles. I don't think he thinks often the way that I do and other people more disconnected or step or move from day-to-day politics. Think about the future contours of a social society and so on. But I think he's morally committed to an egalitarian different sort of future.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then he decided to do politics, do electoral politics, and he failed for a long time. He did third-party politics. He kept losing races. Eventually he became by savvy and luck and things he learned, the mayor of Burlington, Vermont. And he just kept with the same message. And my book, I talk about, I quote, I think a Bernie speech from the 1970s, one of his early campaigns, and I compared it to a Bernie speech during his 2016 campaign. It was virtually identical. Millionaires would swapped with millionaires and billionaires. Speaking of billionaires, which is beautiful. I think there's something great to what he offered American politics. And also all around the world, there's a socialist poll in politics, whether you agree with it or not, and all these countries in Europe and any rich country, Japan and so on.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then obviously he had all his ideas, and he was also a product of the left, and that he went to Vermont. He kind of did the back to the land thing. He was basically not quite a hippie and affect, but he was out there trying to farm or whatever and, you know, cold as hell, northern Vermont.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But, you know He was politicized through the Young People Socialist League, which was an old offshoot of the Norm Thomas Socialist Party of America. So very old school socialist tradition. Then he was engaged in labor struggles in the 60s. He was engaged in the civil rights movement. So he came from this old left generation that I think just had a more plain spoken, more rooted way of understanding change in socialism. It wasn't, in my mind, polluted by academia and by some of the turn towards issues of culture and excessive focus on representation or whatever else. It was really rooted in something. Economic in a way”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because socialism, in my mind, should not be a complicated thing. Now, when we get to more abstract discussions about what a future system would look like, when we get to the policy trade-offs today, I think we need to put on a different hat. We should embrace all sorts of nuance and contradiction and complication. When it comes to the core, moral and ethical appeal, I think Bernie grasped that and how to communicate it. Now Bernie Sanders was politicized a very long time ago. I actually once told him I've only met him a few times, but one time I joked that in his book, he mentioned that one politicizing moment in his life was when the Brooklyn Dodgers left town and he was devastated because he was a Dodgers fan from Brooklyn. And I said, this is like 2020 campaign. This may be 2019. I said, Bernie, you're running for president. You did not need to keep reminding people.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love Bernie most of all, I like his clarity. He's by far the best communicator we have on the left. He speaks with a moral force. He's relatable. And he has taken a lot of socialist rhetoric from academia and brought it down to its core in a way that's comprehensible for ordinary people and speaks to their daily lives. So when Bernie does a speech, people can finish his lines because they know what he's going to say. They know what points he's going to hit.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“During the 2016 campaign, even though disproportionately his supporters were like young women in their 20s. But whatever. I think I ride for Bernie. There's worse things in the world being called a bro. So it's fine.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm fine with calling myself a Bernie Proud because it was made up by liberal journalists to smear Bernie and his supporters. Oh, that's hilarious.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And power. It's not normally the rhetoric that I use because I pose and I use more traditional socialist rhetoric and terms. But I think it gets to something real. So often with these sorts of shorthands we use in politics, they're imperfect, but they speak to a real thing.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But he got that through his merit and he's been rewarded in a party's getting rewarded because he's created vast amounts of wealth beyond what he's getting. This is just his share. It's in a salary cap league whenever he's doing an endorsement. Obviously that company is thinking that he's worth more than what they're paying him for that endorsement and so on. And to the extent with Elon Musk, people see innovation and they see someone who will put himself out there with sometimes crazy ideas because he's trying to think about the future and trying to just push things forward instead of just sitting on whatever money he has now and just investing it, earning 6% return for the rest of his life. I think that that's a positive thing. But I think it doesn't get to the broader policy question. When people invoke billionaires, they're invoking the specter of inequality.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you know, I would agree with that. LeBron James, if he's not already in his lifetime, will be a billionaire. And he got his money largely through just being a credible athlete, excelling in his field more than anyone saturated.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That, hey, this person has too much power and too much wealth and has too much ability to dictate things about the lives of others, I think is just simply a fact. And I think it's true in the cases of people who are good people and have risen to this position and it's true in the cases of people who are maybe not so good people and who have risen to these positions.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Course, capitalists provide employment, take entrepreneurial risks, come up with new ideas sometimes themselves, sometimes directly manage work and whatever else. But they exert so much power over the lives of not just their workers with society as a whole, taking away some of their wealth and power is a way to just empower others. And again, these things have policy trade-offs. If you just snap your fingers and say Eli Musk, you're now all your wealth is gone. You're now on food stamps or whatever else in that kind of arbitrary way, you'd be a total, totally disincentivized people from trusting the rules of the game as they've been set up in a capitalist society. And I think that would have negative consequences for workers.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's perfectly justified in that it's a populist shorthand, right? So obviously, when I talk about inequality, I often talk about power dynamics between workers and bosses and so on. Billionaire is just the 99 1% version of it. It's just a popular shorthand to just explain the fact that there's a lot of people who have accumulated obscen Wealth. These people aren't, in my mind, parasites in the kind of very, very old school socialist rhetoric.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Does nothing, right? At that point, I think a lot of ordinary rich people might prefer the government to come in to tax them and to try to spur investment in certain productive sectors. So it really just depends. But I honestly believe that most people don't necessarily want to be rich for the sake of being rich. They want to be successful. And there's many different dynamics to that and accolades and social respect is an important one of them. It's also why people who just become filthy, rich often, the first thing they do is start up philanthropic trusts and try to give away their money because they want the social respect and accolades and whatever else. They don't want just their money.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think realistically that's not a disincentive for most people. First of all, we already have progressive taxation system. The government does take a bunch of the money away and people are still striving to become rich. A lot of what people want when they dream of success is they want accolades, they want respect, and of course they want some more wealth to consume luxury goods with or whatever else. But at a certain point, it becomes better for the state to tax and either redistribute directly or through social programs or redirect that money through tax credits and other ways to shape investment towards productive investment. We don't want a society in which a bunch of rich people fly around in helicopters going from club to club while the productive economy kind of”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why we'd have to take the investment function away from capitalism. There has to be, if you're going to make it so hard for them that they can't invest or they can't employ labor the way they're employing now, you have to create another mechanism for supply to be created. And that's why that's a transition point.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In theory, yes, of course. One would be if you tax the rich so much, they change their consumption patterns, and that has negative impacts on the economy as a whole. You would have to kind of really model it out, but there would be a certain point in which the consumption changes might have net detrimental effects. I think that's more unlikely. And the more likely the scenario is you tax corporations and other wealthy people in society to the point that they have potentially less money for productive investment because you're in a capital society, so you're relying on capitalists to invest. So you kind of don't want to be in the worst of both worlds where you've gone too far for capitalism, but not far enough for socialism. And my vision, of course, of socialism, that's one reason.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there are going to be certain trade offs. It's not a magical thing where you could just have everything without trade-offs.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In our welfare states because we're already spending so much on Social Security and all these other entitlements are the same people also for one closing borders so immigrants can't come in to help build the economy and to fill gaps in the economy and also who aren't for things that'll make it easier to have kids you know I'm 33 years old I have a lot of friends who have been putting off having kids until they save up X amount of dollars even though they have someone they could you know raise children with because they can't afford the cost of childcare they can't they can't you know their job probably won't give them more than four or six weeks of family leave or whatever else like this is not the case in other other countries so I think there's all sorts of benefits from having a bigger welfare state but yes there are”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For a society in which one, the public sphere is drunk like crazy because you're not going to go wander out for an evening stroll in a park if you live in a dangerous area or whatever else. The rot goes very deep in a welfare state is one way to live in a better society for everyone. There's been plenty of studies. There's one book called The Spirit Level on Inequality that was quite popular that just notes that inequality is really terrible for the psyches of the rich too, not just for the poor. So I think spending some more money living in a more just society is doable. There's different ways to address certain costs spirals. One reason why our welfare states are getting more and more expensive is in part just because our population is aging. But many of the same people who say we can't afford”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one reason, for example, that we have so much crime and violence in the US, there's lots of cultural and other causes with our level of gun ownership, American history and so on. But one really important factor is just the level of poverty and inequality in the U.S. compared to other countries that combined with guns and other factors means we live in more violent unequal societies. would be shocked by the fact that in even some of our nicest areas and cities and elsewhere, there's a lot of real violence too, it's just normal to have gun violence. It's normal to have drug-related violence. We have, what, like four or five hundred people some years in like Baltimore, a city of under a million getting killed. These are all recipes.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that one for ordinary people, most of them, the trade-off of even hypothetically if taxes on lower middle class and working class people in certain cases go up. The trade off would still be in their benefit because they're the ones who currently would be consuming more of those goods and also our tax system and whatnot is progressive so the rich will pay more. The majority will consume more of them. Also, I think a lot of these programs are the bedrock of a healthy society.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of bureaucracy in billing right now in our healthcare sector, for example, that would be eliminated. There's a lot of costs that are spiraling upward of provider costs from both doctors, hospitals, but also pharmaceuticals to drug costs that insurance companies shoulder because their market share is too fragmented to really negotiate hard. Medicare can sometimes negotiate better rates, but Medicare for all would negotiate even better rates. So I think there's a cost spiral that we can adjust with more government involvement. And there's a reason why we spend a bigger share of our GDP on healthcare than other places. But let me just accept the broad premise that social programs cost money.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I will not argue with you on the numbers because you just random numbers. I do think universal healthcare, if done right, can be basically cost neutral. I think it's an exception because we spend a tremendous amount of money on healthcare, a huge percentage of our GDP. So I think it could be done in a way that's close to cost neutral.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Having the collective power to represent representatives that will build a broader safety net is in their interest. For upper middle class people, for others, they could afford to pay for their own provisioning either directly or through like Obamacare-like schemes where you just get a subsidy and you pay the rest yourself and whatever. This is for really the bottom 40% plus of the population. They really don't have any options. So they prioritize other things. And they end up with some sort of injury or health problem or whatever else. And it's bad for everyone in society, but it's especially bad for the people at the bottom of the labor market.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whatever you call it early. Yeah, a lot of it starts with so New York City at least we do have Universal Pre-K. So from age three onward, you have the option for that. I mean, it's important for kids' socialization. Their parents are now able to know that they could go to work or do something else and have their kids taken care of. There's a lot of measures like that that we could do to equalize things. And again, Libertarians in the audience, if some of this stuff is scary because it's obviously more state involved, state involved in pre-K, state is already very involved in K through 12, more investment into state institutions like our state universities and college. But for me, it's not a question of state versus non-state. It's a question of good outcomes for people. And it just happens to be that for working class people.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In general, when it comes to the public sector or any sphere that you're investing in, obviously, it's not just as simple as throwing money at a problem. I do think we have a lot of schools that are underfunded. But we have other schools that are adequately funded, but the conditions in which those schools are, like the neighborhoods they're in and what's going on in society, the problems are so deep that it's impossible for just education to solve everything. And I think especially a lot of liberals think that education should be the panacea. Invest in education, you'll help people. If kids are living in poverty, if they go into school hungry or whatever else, like education is not going to give them Everything they need to succeed. So sometimes we think put too much weight on education.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just, if you're going to make something like that free, you just have to make sure that you're doing it in egalitarian way. And that one, the options, the routes to college are more equal. So, you know, there's more investment in K-12 education so that more kids in rough neighborhoods have the chance to go to college. And for those that choose the trade route from any part of the country, that they're given the skills and resources for vocational trainings. And those are also free. And it just feels like in terms of order of operation, I would just start with K through 12 education, improving it, and whatever else, then college after. But I'm not opposed to it.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, universal healthcare is probably far higher on my priorities than free college. I think right now the way our system is built. Someone goes to college, they're given credentials, they're given decree they carry with them for the rest of their life, it gives them a chance to join kind of a privileged part of the labor market, right? It's not a zero-sum game. I don't want college-educated people to think that non-college educated people are their enemies and vice versa, because a lot of them are just ordinary working class people trying to survive and they're in different areas or in different sectors, some of them are in nursing sectors where they need a college degree and so on. But if you just make college tuition free, but you don't also make trade skills and other things free for someone to learn how to become an electrician or a plumber or whatever else, then to some degree you're privileging one sector of the labor market over another. So I would advocate”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I would say free college is not at the top of my list of priorities, but it definitely should be free in my vision of a just society.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Socialist need to be really connected to the day-to-day struggles of people to just improve their lives. So if you're feeling like you're paying $400, $500 on the Obamacare market for health insurance, and that's hampering your ability to do what you want to do in your life, then maybe you would support a candidate who's for universal healthcare. If you feel like you're struggling to find work that you could afford to pay your rent with or whatever else, maybe you'll support a candidate committed to all sorts of mechanisms to reduce housing prices or increase your power as a tenant and whatever else. So I think it's like these day-to-day concerns need to be connected to the more abstract and lofty vision of change. Otherwise, our politics just becomes like this fantasy world thing that's nice ideas to think about.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You, by default, can just opt into a public plan. And let's say hypothetically, you don't even have to pay for it, then it's just a backdoor to universal healthcare really quickly. Because I think the vast majority of people who aren't currently covered, and also a lot of employers, to be honest, would probably drop their private coverage if they knew their employees can just get a public option and maybe would only provide supplemental insurance or whatever else. Think the broad overarching point of all these demands is to say that.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't support a public option in part because I think if we allow politicians to just say, hey, I support a public option, it just kind of a way to signal your support for universal healthcare would give us nothing. And I think that's what we saw under with Biden and a lot of other politicians that have supported public option. I think in practice, if a public option is defined in such a way that it just means”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Democracy is a great thing. Political democracy is wonderful. It came from the struggles of ordinary people to expand suffrage and so on. But the economic sphere entrenched power in the economic sphere bleeds into our political democracy. So I think there's a lot of people with a vested interest in not having universal health care. There's a large industries with a vested interest in not having universal healthcare. They pay for ads, pay lobbyists, they influence government, and they have made it very difficult. So you can't get universal health care done without the bill, even if you pass something, you're trying to make a change. Like Obamacare was supposed to have a public option. Everybody's been running on a public option in the Democratic Party for 12, 13 years. Why don't we have a public option? People know that if people have the choice of bombing into government plan, they might just keep, that might be the slow road to really.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's kind of a ridiculous leap if you don't have the credibility as the group of people organizing for universal healthcare, organizing for a $15 bit of wage, enabling to get the goods. And also in practice, as we fight for these reforms, ordinary people will have a better sense, at least my hope is, of what it means to be involved with politics and what politics can do for their lives. It's positive because right now when we talk about politics, it often just seems that we're talking about like a very glib cultural conflict removed from the things that are important in our lives. Whereas in truth, I think politics can be a tool for us to make our lives better.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we have to start in the hare and now. And if you can't convince people that the state should play a bigger role in their health insurance, and you can convince Americans and a whole host of other sectors that they should be living in something closer to social democracy, how are you going to convince those people that there should be worker ownership of the means of production?”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This system. There's a lot of other people that are underinsured or worried about how to pay co pays or premiums involved. I think would be a net benefit for the vast majority of the U.S. population, even if it was offset a certain taxes, because we spend a lot of money out of pocket with health insurance. And it's a demand also that's widely popular. So for me, it's almost like if you're trying to build support for something like socialism, we were talking this lofty vision of socialism after capitalism or what worker ownership of the means of production would look like in practice and so on. And by the way, you're one of the few interviewers who ever asked me any of the details. So it's good that I had a, I've been thinking of a rough sketch in my head for the last 16 years that I've been a socialist.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But instead of having all these different insurance carriers, we're just going to have one national insurance carrier that we're all going to pay into. That national insurance carrier is going to negotiate the price of healthcare with doctors, the price of drugs with the pharmaceutical companies and so on to hopefully reduce prices and to implement a different little bit of planning into the system because if there's only one big national insurance company, that company has a lot of weight and power. But you could still visit your same doctor and there's still some, it's not as radical of a shift in that direction. And that's a dominant demand of Bernie Sanders and the left right now. There's 30 plus million people in the US and would be insured that currently aren't insured if we moved.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obviously, for cosmetic procedures, whatever, they have preferences. But for most routine things that people do in healthcare, they just need to see a doctor. You know, they need to get diagnosed. Some of these systems have had trouble with waitlists for specialists or whatever. That's more of like an allocation problem of if you want more specialists, you pay specialists more. This is problems that could be solved by through the mechanisms of planning and government-run healthcare. So that's kind of the most left-wing that you could get is the system in the United Kingdom. Beyond that, you have a system like Medicare for All where you say, all right, most of the doctors, besides for public hospitals that already exist, are going to be privately employed by hospitals. Hospitals are going to be private.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source