Is Socialism Still a Dirty Word?
2021-05-11 · Guest: John Judis (Author of The Socialist Awakening) · 52:26
The Evolution of Modern American Socialism
Bob Zadek interviews author and self-described socialist John Judis about his book, The Socialist Awakening. They discuss the shifting definition of socialism in the 21st century, moving away from Soviet-style central planning toward a social-democratic model that emphasizes regulation, unions, and the mitigation of economic anxiety. The conversation explores the tensions between voluntary exchange in capitalism and the perceived necessity of government intervention in essential services like healthcare and utilities.
Topics: Socialism, Capitalism, Social Democracy, Income Inequality, Healthcare Policy, Regulatory Capture, Campaign Finance, Bernie Sanders, Public Interest, The Socialist Awakening
Speakers:
- Bob Zadek: Host
- John Judis: Author of The Socialist Awakening
Introduction and the Evolution of Socialism [00:17]
Bob Zadek: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to The Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show in all of radio, and we are determined to remain that way. Thank you so much for listening this Sunday morning. We are, this morning and always, the show of ideas, never once the show of attitude.
This morning’s topic is very much in the news every single day, and today’s guest is one of my more prescient guest authors. He predicted it in magnificent timing of his book, The Socialist Awakening, which was written and published—well, written for sure, but published right before the 2020 election results. And the question is: how did John know?
This morning’s guest is John Judis. John is an—I dare say—avowed socialist and has been for most of his life, maybe adult life. He is a prolific author. He has just written, as I say, The Socialist Awakening, where he helps us understand all there is to understand about socialism as the term is used today—not as it was used several hundred years ago, but as it is used yesterday morning and tomorrow morning.
So John, socialism, which is a political and economic philosophy that you subscribe to, has very much in common with libertarianism. That is, the title, the name, the label says nothing, and if anything, it causes many people to take a step back. And you and I will help the audience understand what is really meant by the term socialism as it’s used today. John, welcome to the show this morning and thank you for writing that important book, The Socialist Awakening. So John, good morning.
John Judis: Good morning to you.
Bob Zadek: Now John, socialism has a bad label, a bad rap in most of society, or much of society, although it is experiencing an awakening. So when you use the term in your book, socialism, you use it to say a lot, and there’s a lot about the word that other people assume you mean, but they are wrong. So give us the elevator view of socialism as you use it in your book.
John Judis: Fine. Thanks for having me. I have to say, yes, I was a socialist from the ’60s, from Berkeley SDS, and I even was an editor of a publication called Socialist Revolution, a journal put out in San Francisco in the early ’70s. But I was at that time what I’d describe as an orthodox Marxist socialist. I believed that workers should own and control the means of production, there should be no capitalist class, markets should disappear, central planning—so I was really orthodox. I mean, it was sort of our vision was sort of the Soviet Union plus democracy. If you could have central planning and democracy, that would be socialism.
I became disabused of those views during the ’70s. I mean, I just couldn’t figure out what it would mean in America for us to have socialism. And you know, of course, when Ronald Reagan came in, the conservatives, the vision became even more distant. And then when the Soviet Union itself collapsed, that was the end. And I spent years where I think if you’d asked me my views, I would say I was much closer to a kind of—if you know the guy Herbert Croly, progressive. He was the founder of The New Republic, for which I worked for 20 years.
But I began to rethink socialism in the 1990s, and this was mainly on a theoretical basis. I was influenced by a historian named Marty Sklar, and it turned out that a lot of other people who had been socialists during the ’60s and ’70s went through the same process. And the idea that we had, the basic idea, was that socialism wasn’t a stage of history that would come after capitalism and that could only be brought about through a revolution, violent or peaceful, but it was something that was developing within capitalism in the same way that capitalism itself developed within feudalism. And you saw different aspects of it in public ownership, let’s say, of energy, transportation, healthcare, you know, in the New Deal itself.
So my own theoretical views began to change. But you know, if you’d asked me still, I’d say, “Yeah, I’m a socialist, but you know, it doesn’t matter.” Then comes Bernie Sanders, who—we’re the same age, and he went from New York and Chicago to Vermont; I went from the East Coast to Berkeley in the same period, late ’60s. And I think went through a very similar kind of evolution that I did politically. He gains this incredible popularity, especially among the young, in the 2015-16 period, that Democratic primary. He wins more votes than Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton combined among young voters, the 18 to 29-year-old group.
And the thing is, his view of socialism was not the orthodox Marxist Soviet Union traditional view of socialism. It was again something very close to what was evolving in the ’90s and crossing our minds after the fall of the Soviet Union. Something very close to what you’d call in Europe a kind of advanced social democracy, where workers do have more say, strong unions, workers on the boards of corporations, industries that don’t act in the national interest strongly regulated and if necessary nationalized. But you know, markets as a very important part of the way that any economy has to work. So a very different kind of, and you would say softer kind of, democratic socialism.
And he gains this incredible popularity. And you look at these polls, and again among the young—and this is the generation that didn’t grow up during the Cold War as I did—and you know, what, 50% say they prefer socialism to capitalism. Now, you know, the polls are kind of fishy and it depends on how the questions are asked, but I tried to break it down. And among Democrats, maybe it’s about 15 to 20% would prefer that label to progressive, liberal, moderate, or anything else. So it’s a significant group, but it’s set off again from people who are over 45 years old, say, who primarily still see socialism as the Soviet Union or Cuba or Venezuela. And you know, you saw that in the election and what happened to Biden in Southern Florida, identification of Democrats with supporting socialism in Venezuela.
So it’s not, again, what when I say that I’m a socialist, what the book is about is not so much my politics, but what’s been arising among young people in the United States and Europe, and this kind of new view of socialism that’s more acceptable is coming into view. So that’s a long answer to your question, but it’s not like I’m presenting my definition of the word and saying the way political scientists do and say this is the real definition of socialism. What I’m talking about is the way it has evolved historically in our country and in Great Britain, on the continent, in a different way from the old Marxist or Soviet Union style of socialism.
Comparing Capitalism and Modern Socialism [04:01]
Bob Zadek: Now, select if you will, what is the primary fault line, if there is one, or what is wrong with capitalism? And I’ll define my term as I ask you to define yours, so you can focus on my defined term and help us understand what is the—if there is such a thing—primary difference between socialism and capitalism. And that’s a broad question and it’s unfair, so let me be more specific. What is the problem with capitalism?
Now, I’ll define capitalism so you can focus on my definition when you answer. In a capitalist or, if you will, free-market economic organization, people and institutions are free to enter into voluntary exchanges for their mutual benefit. The investors own capital; they have money which they have presumably lawfully acquired—we can discuss that—and they use that money to make more money, and in doing so, they have to buy goods and services, and the services they have to buy are the services of workers to whom they pay. Workers are not compelled to work for an employer; employers are not compelled to hire a worker. It’s all voluntary, gauzy-eyed, free-market exchanges. Now, that seems to be the natural order of human existence. So take your—help us by making the most direct comparison you can make between that environment and the environment you see as part of the awakening.
John Judis: Okay, well, let me first go back to the point I made: that the idea of socialism as something developing within capitalism and something that’s not necessarily contrary to markets, to private property. So let’s start there. So it’s not—I’m not going to say my definition is different from your definition. We’re talking about, again, two systems that can coexist with each other.
And what could happen historically—I mean, I’ll get around to your question more directly—is that the socialist aspects of an economy and a society could begin to predominate over the capitalist. But what we have now is coexistence. The economy in the United States, the role of government looks a lot different now than it did, let’s say, before 1932, or than it did in the 1890s or 1820s. A lot more government intervention, a lot more regulation. Unions you have now, which you had in a very primitive form in the Jacksonian period.
So we have developments that, if you take capitalism in its very pure ideal form, which you described, where individuals are treated the same way as commodities and they have to buy and sell labor on a market, and where there aren’t things like unions, and where there aren’t regulations, then we’ve moved a long way from that. And to the extent we have, we’ve got elements of the social, of socialism, within capitalism.
So what happens now? Why does the issue arise in certain respects? I mean, you can think again of the healthcare industry. Left to itself, and left to the distribution of income and wealth in the society, healthcare just wouldn’t be available to a lot of people. So you get government intervening in that market: Medicare, now we have the Affordable Care Act—you know, again, very flawed, but it’s a function of the fact that Americans decided that the healthcare industry just left to itself was not going to act in the national interest.
And you know, we had that with the public utilities in the 1920s, the same kind of issue. And the very idea of a public utility is one that invites some kind of regulation by the government and in some cases public ownership. So those are the kind of cases. I mean, you can again think about the environment, the Environmental Protection Agency. Why does that exist? Because again, if decisions are simply left to the market in those cases, there’ll be what economists call externalities, which is, you know, the pollution from coal in West Virginia blows up to Vermont and New Hampshire and Maine and people start getting asthma and things like that. So in 1971, you get the Environmental Protection Agency. Those are the elements of socialism that become introduced within capitalism. But at the same time, you know, you still have private insurance, you still have private energy companies. So the two coexist. But if you had, let’s say, the society could decide that the health insurance companies were just—we’re paying too much overhead as a country for competing these companies to compete for profits for their stockholders, so it would be better to have something like what Bernie Sanders called Medicare for All, where it becomes just a government-run insurance company. But you know, that’s not what we have. So we have something in between.
The “National Interest” and Essential Industries [06:35]
Bob Zadek: John, if I may, you mentioned in passing in your last answer that healthcare wasn’t really operating, and the phrase I made a note of is “in the national interest.” And that got my attention, and I’ll raise my question this way: Does the food industry in America operate in the national interest? And the reason I’m asking is food, like healthcare, is essential for life. We have no “food for all” plan. We simply have food. It’s healthy, inexpensive, available to everybody. If people don’t have enough money for food, we seem to have government programs that provide the money. But why do you think—why is healthcare privately operated not in the public interest, but food is, whatever the public interest may mean?
John Judis: Listen, I didn’t say it was—I mean, look, both industries, healthcare and agriculture, are heavily governmentally regulated. In the 1920s and the late 1930s, there was this enormous scandal because people were starving and food was just going to waste because they didn’t have the money to buy it and the farmers believed they weren’t going to make any profit from selling it. So at that point, you get Roosevelt’s Department of Agriculture intervene, and the kind of intervention that starts then has continued to this day, you know, again with things like subsidies for farmers so they can have decent prices for what they produce, and you have food stamps so people who don’t have the income can buy food. So there’s no difference in that case between the food industry and the healthcare industry. I’m making the same point about both.
You know, let’s say the toy industry. Well, again, even there you have safety regulations because it turned out, you know, that companies were selling things to kids that would blow up in their face and, you know, blind them or what have you. So in the ’60s, you get something there. But again, it’s much less so in an industry like that or clothing than it is in what you rightly describe as essential industries like healthcare, food, energy.
Income Inequality and Fairness [09:41]
Bob Zadek: Now, in your book and in your other writings as well, in your public speaking, you often—very often—the word equality, as in income inequality, pops up. It is, as I understand it, quite an important concept in distinguishing between socialism, which seeks to level it—not so that it’s identical among all people, but it looks at income inequality as an important failure of the free market that a socialist system, the “social” in socialism, seeks to remedy. Now, my first question is: what’s wrong with income inequality per se? After all, people are born with different attributes. It is unfair that some people are born healthier than others, taller, more handsome, thinner, etc. Inequality is a fact of human existence. So what’s the big deal—and I’m not trying to be a wise guy, but I’m inviting you to focus on this very important fault line between us—what’s the big deal about income inequality per se, as compared with health inequality, appearance inequality, accident of birth inequality? So speak to the evils, as you see it, of income inequality, because so much of socialism seeks to fix that perceived evil.
John Judis: Okay, so you know, again, I don’t identify equality with complete leveling. You know, sometimes they now use this word equity instead of equality. Let’s just talk about equality. The first thing is a question of fairness, whether it’s fair, for instance, for somebody who inherits millions and millions of dollars, doesn’t have to work for it on the one hand, and another person who’s born to very, very modest and humble circumstances and doesn’t really have the opportunity to make enough money even to support decently a family. So I mean, you know, those are again extremes, but those are the kind of extremes that call up the idea of justice, and the society should do something.
I mean, the inheritance tax, which Andrew Carnegie, you know, a noted capitalist from the late 19th, early 20th century, championed, is a good idea in my view. And that’s an attempt to create equality, so equality by birth, so that you don’t have a situation that you have with, let’s say, basketball, where some people are just born taller. This is a case where somebody simply inherits a lot of money and can just clip coupons for the rest of their life versus somebody in much more modest circumstances. And that’s again why you have college scholarships, all those kind of things. So that’s one issue.
Second issue is the issue of stability. And this is again essential to the understanding of the economy that arose in the 1930s through John Maynard Keynes and has made some of a comeback in the 21st century, which is again the idea if you have inequality of income that’s radical, the way we had in the 1920s and the way we began to have in this country, you know, particularly in the 1980s, 1990s and after that, you have too much saving. You have people who are getting income and spending it, but then you have disproportionately too many people who are getting income that’s simply saved and not invested. So you don’t get enough consumption of the products that are produced, you get instability, you get recessions and things like that. So that’s again a question of the business cycle and the damage that a kind of radical inequality could do.
The third thing I’ll mention is that we have this kind of weird situation in the United States that we haven’t figured out how to deal with yet, where we really have an economy that’s spilling out these billionaires, these people, you know, with 400—I mean, who make more money in a minute than I’m going to make in my, you know, in a week or a year of my life. And where you have the salaries of CEOs going from, let’s say, I think it was like 16 times the average worker 50 years ago to now 160 times. I, you know, again, I’m not going to tell you those numbers are exact, but it’s something like that. It’s some huge disparity. So again, that fosters both instability economically, one, and it’s unfair. So those are, you know, I think those are the two big beefs. So what you want is some way of making things more equal. Not equal, you know, with an equality sign, but more equal, fairer.
Voluntary vs. Compulsory Redistribution [15:43]
Bob Zadek: I’ll try to respond a bit. You referred interestingly enough to Andrew Carnegie. And let me address Andrew Carnegie. Of course, he was one of those early capitalists who accumulated buckets of money and started with nothing but accumulated lots of money. And he gave lots of money away: the Carnegie libraries, the endowments, the universities, as did Rockefeller. Now, this is not—I’m not going to be saying that in praise of any individual; I’m speaking about the system. So there was an adjustment of income inequality by those who were fortunate enough, for whatever reason, to accumulate much more money than others, to give lots of it away. Warren Buffett famously and Bill Gates famously have given away buckets of their money.
So the difference between that view of Andrew Carnegie, because you selected him, and yours is there—under a capitalist system, there is an adjustment of income inequality. The difference is under socialism, it’s compulsory, and under capitalism, it’s voluntary. Same result—now maybe not to the penny, of course not, and maybe socialists would prefer more self-imposed adjustment—but that’s a question of one person’s opinion of how another should spend their money. So is it only a question of capitalism does self-adjust, both in terms of people having some freedom of movement between classes—that still exists, not as much as in the past, but still exists—but it’s self-correcting income inequality versus imposition by government, which means with the threat of jail if you don’t comply? So is it a question of voluntary versus force or something deeper?
John Judis: No, it has nothing to—I mean, in terms of a purely voluntary system where we rely on the charity of a few billionaires or whatever, that hasn’t existed since maybe the late 19th century. And Andrew Carnegie again was a proponent of the inheritance tax. During the—what, the income tax was an amendment in what, 1913? Yes, 1913. So we’ve had an income tax, and the income tax has always been progressive. So we’ve always intervened. And you know, according to you, we didn’t have socialism in 1913, but we did have a government that collected taxes, and if you didn’t pay your taxes, you know, you could go to jail. So yeah, there was force involved.
And there’s always been force involved in capitalism. I mean, the police and the National Guard were sent after strikers in the 1890s. And you could still, if you fool around a little too much, you’ll end up with an injunction in court for strikes. That happens all the time if you have secondary boycotts. So capitalism has always involved a degree of force. But you know, I guess what I’m saying is that sometimes that force has been used in a benign way in order to create greater equality of opportunity, not necessarily equality of income, but at least equality of opportunity. And again, opportunity to have decent healthcare, opportunity to live in cities where you don’t cough all the time from bad air. So again, I think that that’s the kind of equality that I’m talking about. And you know, don’t equate that with something like China or Russia where, in effect, the society is ruled in a very authoritarian way. This kind of force has been a natural part of capitalism almost from the beginning, and from the beginning. And you know, you can read that—one of the good things to read about that is Karl Polanyi’s book, The Great Transformation, where he talks about the evolution of capitalism precisely in the poor laws in England. So I recommend that after you buy my books, you know, look at that book.
The Power of Big Tech and Political Influence [18:02]
Bob Zadek: You had mentioned in drawing a distinction, you distinguished—sorry to use the same word twice—you distinguished somebody born into a wealthy family as being unfair because that person from birth never has to worry. And by the way, I am troubled by inheritance. I haven’t figured it out yet as you have, but I worry about that a bit. But that’s an aside. So one individual is born into great wealth, and therefore that’s kind of unfair; that individual did nothing other than be born. That same individual, having been born from parents who have the right genes, so that person is born smarter and stronger and healthier, etc. To me, in both instances, you made a distinction as if they’re different. They’re the same. And you don’t seem to care that much about the unfairness of somebody who is lucky enough to have been conceived by people with good genes versus conceived by people with great wealth. Isn’t it the same unfairness, or is neither unfair?
John Judis: Well, you know, I don’t know if you’re going to get to debating too much because obviously if you’re born with blue eyes rather than brown eyes, or if you end up six feet rather than five foot seven as I do, it’s ineradicable. You can’t have a government program—though God knows in like 50 years we might be changing heights, you know, the way we’re doing various changes now. So that’s a lot different. But a government, you know, an economic system can intervene and not to eliminate inheritance again, but to put a tax on it. So to that degree making the situation fairer. There is no government program that could, you know, make me a center on the Los Angeles Lakers. It just would not—it can’t happen. Or to make me smarter than I am. Well, maybe, you know, I mean, but again, that’s a—then you start talking about Head Start and government programs and helping kids. But again, physical characteristics and brainpower and stuff like that, a lot of that is inherited, but it’s—you know, you can’t do anything about it. You live with it. And to the extent that society rewards certain things and not others, you know, I don’t think you can do much about that either. But you can do something about the transmission of great wealth.
Bob Zadek: So it is the transmission—is being born into wealth—that is just assumed to be unfair and that society has to correct it so that the individual born into great wealth has less of an advantage. They’ll still have a substantial advantage, but just less of it, simply on the principle of fairness. You know, you probably remember this from the ’90s, this guy Frank Luntz, a Republican consultant, developed this idea—he called inheritance tax “death taxes,” and that people were being taxed for dying. And so he got a lot of people on board with this idea that there shouldn’t be inheritance taxes, and the taxes really, which again were very modest—I mean, you had to inherit like $4 million or something in order to be taxed on it. Now it’s much more money before you get taxed. But I think that kind of tax again is fair and it’s something that government should do. Not confiscatory, again, that’s something different. Because if you make a lot of money, you want your children to have a degree of comfort, you want them to be able—I mean, it’s one of the advantages that you get from making money, not just being able to buy a Mac Pro, but also to leave something to your kids. That’s fine. But leaving enough so that they don’t have to ever work compared to somebody else, that makes me more leery, and that’s a point at which equality becomes a moral issue.
Bob Zadek: Here is the core question that I’ve been just patiently waiting to be able to ask you so I really can learn from your answer. Let’s take, not at random, Jeff Bezos. Now, Jeff Bezos started with not much more than anybody else; his bio and his early life are pretty ordinary. And he found a way to give you and I and the rest of the planet cheap stuff almost instantaneously. Amazing. He has improved the lives of gazillion people, including his own workers who voluntarily work for him. Now, what is inherently unfair? Where does the system fail us that Bezos became the second or third or fourth wealthiest person simply by figuring out a way to satisfy the needs of the planet? What’s inherently unfair about that? What went wrong in your view that allowed Bezos under those circumstances to become fabulously wealthy?
John Judis: You know, we’ve never had, even during the so-called Robber Baron era of the late 19th century with the Rockefellers and Carnegies, the kind of disparity between great wealth and the average person that we have now. And some of it’s the kind of winner-take-all character of high tech, which seems to be built into it. I mean, it’s a kind of effect: if you have a billion people who subscribe to Facebook, that gives you an advantage over anybody else. I mean, there’s a business term for it. And so these people make incredible amounts of money. And at the same time, who am I to deny that Facebook or Google or Apple or Amazon aren’t really useful innovations? So I was taking the easiest road to talk with you about equality by talking about what’s going to happen to Bezos’s money when he dies and inherits. And there are lots of people who are not—who are very, very rich and don’t necessarily use their money for good purposes. You can look at the history of what the Trump Foundation or some of his buddies at Mar-a-Lago and what they do with their money, and you know, I think you’d find a much different kind of story from Bezos or Warren Buffett. So I’m not in the business of criticizing him. And I don’t know quite what we are going to do about those particular industries because it’s not just a matter of how much money somebody like that makes, but it’s the enormous power they wield over our lives. So again, I think we’re at a point where there are critics on both the left and the right, and I’m not sure myself what the answer is to the Facebook, Google, Amazon conundrum. But there is a problem there.
Bob Zadek: Is the power political power, economic power, or both?
John Judis: Yes, absolutely. That’s part of it. Part of it is political power.
Bob Zadek: If it is political power, isn’t the fault the behavior of the political system who responds to money and perhaps makes—uses their political power for selfish reasons because they’re rewarded economically? Is the problem the provider of the funds or the acceptor of the funds? Because if there was no one to accept the funds and provide political favors, there would be no political power from the money.
John Judis: Look, let’s talk again about political power and what great wealth can confer. You know, the libertarians talk about this regulatory capture. You’ve heard this phrase, right? Where the industries themselves are so powerful that they capture the regulatory agencies, and the agencies instead of protecting the public end up protecting the industry. So again, what to do about that and how to again what we’re going to do about these incredibly powerful and wealthy industries. Okay, so that’s one element of politics, that’s influence over government. The other is campaign finance. And I’m not a believer in Buckley v. Valeo, the 1976 thing. I think that we should have a system that’s closer to that of the Europeans, where there’s limits on how much candidates can spend as well as limits on how much individuals can contribute so that again the wealthy and the powerful don’t have inordinate influence over the kind of choices that people make in campaigns. And I know that there are a lot of instances where money doesn’t matter as much, where Hillary Clinton had a lot more money than Donald Trump but it didn’t help her in 2016. But again, you know, particularly in local and state races, there’s this kind of invisible effect where money matters a lot and you have a kind of accumulation of power. The Koch brothers network has been very important in influencing state and local elections. So I would like to see some equalizing there so everyone—so we get towards a situation where it is really one person, one vote in America, and where people’s money doesn’t give them the equivalent of billions of votes.
Democracy and Majority Rule [24:38]
Bob Zadek: Now, in one of the major fault lines or differences between a capitalist system and a more socialist or socialist system is socialism has great faith in majority rule, democracy. Workers having, if not control, then at least a more meaningful say in the operation of the factories and the companies for which they work. Putting more voting power and faith in majorities. Is that a fair distinction? Is one of your criticisms of the existing system is that the majority gets stepped upon by a minority and majority rule would just be more clearly more fair than the system we have now? Is democracy, majority rule, an important distinction?
John Judis: Boy, we’re going to really get in the weeds here. I’m all for democracy and I think that that is an essential element of—should be an essential element of socialism. And you know, again, when the kids or Bernie Sanders talks about socialism, they always say democratic socialism. Democracy in America—you know, the irony of our system is that it’s always, in my opinion, depended for its reforms on a kind of enlightened and disinterested—not uninterested, but disinterested—elites. And a lot of the reforms in the 20th century, including the New Deal and the Progressive Era, were championed by the Warren Buffetts of the world. So we’ve always had this kind of peculiar situation. And one of the problems we have now is that there really is a violent clash within the elites themselves, and you can see that within the present Trump era and what’s going on now, let’s see, even down to the Liz Cheney controversy. So democracy is complicated in that way. We have a constitutional democracy. I think that’s important, though again it can be abused. But the Bill of Rights is incredibly important, and though it gets modified, misinterpreted, uninterpreted, whatever you want to say, I think it’s still been a kind of check that’s provided us with a degree of self-rule that other countries haven’t enjoyed. So again, yes, I’m all for democracy. And you know, capitalism has been consistent with democracy. There’s obviously problems there in terms of what we talked about, but America was both a capitalist and a democratic system. Its problem initially was that it also had another system in the South called slavery that was, as it turned out, inconsistent with wage labor capitalism. Sorry to give you such a long answer, I hope I’m not—
Eliminating Economic Anxiety [28:18]
Bob Zadek: No, it’s no problem. I enjoy them. When you calculate the redistribution of wealth, obviously you had said at the outset that no, of course we don’t want everybody to earn exactly the same amount. It was obvious and you just stated the obvious, and of course I understand that. Is there a limit in the view of a thoughtful socialist? How do you measure how much income inequality, how much taking from those with more to give to those with less? How do you determine—what’s the objective data that will tell you that’s enough? When will you have achieved, or what will be the measure of the perfect balance of taking from those with more to give to those with less? Because it seems to be a ratchet. No matter how much in our current economic system is transferred, the trend has been one way; the trend has been more and more transfers as time goes on, not less and less. When will even the socialist say that’s enough?
John Judis: I’m more focused not on how wealthy people are, but on the lives that people who are not wealthy live. And how they can be changed. And I think that that should be the way in which we understand problems with equality. What I’d like to see in America is something that you see in a few European countries, which is that the people here who are citizens are free from the kind of anxiety about healthcare, housing, having enough to eat—the very basic kind of anxieties that we feel that, believe it or not, other people in other countries don’t feel the same way.
I had a friend, a Dane, who was a journalist who lost his job when he was about 60 years old. He had three daughters, maybe he was 55, and his wife had a good job at a defense contractor; she was a military expert. And they had a nice house in the suburbs. And she got terminal cancer. She ended up dying; it took several years. He was unemployed, and he was unemployed partly because he got involved in this libel suit where somebody libeled him and he eventually won. It was the kind of situation that in the United States could absolutely wreck people; they would lose their house, etc., etc. Unemployment for years in Denmark—you know, 90% of your wages. Healthcare free, again based on large taxes. The kids all went to college free, room and board, and they’re all happy and they have jobs now. It just wouldn’t happen that way in the United States. And they all also are perfectly responsible citizens; they all work full-time. My retired friend is still working odd jobs and things like that. But I would like to see the elimination of those kind of anxieties that Americans feel and sometimes aren’t even aware of, and aware that there’s another way of having it. And that’s a kind of equality that I’d like to see in the society because again, people who are really wealthy don’t have to have those kind of fears about their lives.
Bob Zadek: So it seems like we have a ways to go. So if you are correct about the awakening, I better start spending my money now before we achieve that balance. So I’m exhausted at the thought of working towards that goal, but at least you have identified a goal theoretically. Someday you may even say, John, we’ve gotten there, that’s enough, and that’s a relief to me.
This is Bob Zadek. I want to thank John Judis for joining us for this hour. John has written The Socialist Awakening. He predicted, if you will, not expressly, the awakening. There is the book; he’s held it up for us. He has, if you will, predicted the Biden administration. How prescient of you, John. And we will see if we all become awake as a result. So John, thank you very much for helping us understand, demystify, and maybe remove some of the fear, perhaps, or perhaps instill more of the fear. I leave that to the listeners. You have explained it very, very well. We understand a lot more than we did before. So John, thank you so much. John on Twitter is @JohnBJudis (J-U-D-I-S). He welcomes your thankful tweets to John. So thank you so much, John, for joining us, and thank you for my friends out there for spending an hour with us this morning. John, I’m no longer afraid. So thank you so much.
John Judis: Sure, it was fun.