Billionaire Leon Cooperman was on the verge of tears while speaking about his concern about “the lefties” and their progressive outlook on capitalism.
“I’ve lived the American dream. I’m trying to convince people like [Senators] Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and AOC (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez)—don’t move away from capitalism. Capitalism is the best system,” Cooperman said on CNBC’s Squawk Box on Friday while holding back tears. “I get choked up when I talk about it because basically, my father came to America at the age of 12 as a plumber’s apprentice. No education.”
“I went to public school in the Bronx, high school in the Bronx, college in the Bronx. I started my career in Wall Street the day after I got my MBA from Columbia. I had no money. I couldn’t afford a vacation. I made a lot of money. I’m giving it all back,” Cooperman said before co-anchor Rebecca Quick stepped in as he choked up.
“Giving it all back?” Give me a fucking break, asshole.
There are two groups of people:
Those that think there are two groups of people, and those that don’t.
The premise that socialism is better relies on the government not becoming corrupt. When it fails, it’s really bad.
Capitalism also functions great when the government isn’t corrupt … it gives consumers choice and fails much more softly.
If you look at examples of cooperatives, socialist utopia projects, etc… they break down much for the same reason capitalism has broken down for the majority of people in the US… The largest party is the party that doesn’t vote, and of those that vote half of them don’t know what they’re voting for, and of those that know what they’re voting for half of them are basing their votes on misinformation.
Managing society takes work from everybody in society. There’s no easy button that keeps the train on the tracks.
To be fair, you did qualify “as it exists today” and that makes a difference. However, the point is it’s not capitalism that failed us, in many ways it’s ourselves, our parents, and/or our grandparents not paying attention and elected the right people. Similarly those same people buy the cheapest thing in Walmart and don’t stop to ask themselves why it’s so cheap.
Union busting, the manufacturing exodus, etc, it all could’ve been stopped if people had just paid more attention. You’ll never get me to trust that by moving to socialism as an economic model people are suddenly going to pay more attention and not fuck it up.
I don’t think the US needs to go full socialist (mostly because I think it’s impossible and as you said, still corruptible), but we need to lean more towards socialism to start clawing our way back to having a middle class. If we could get affordable universal healthcare and affordable colleges, I would be beyond thrilled. Even though these are things that many, many other countries have had for a long time.
I think a universal basic income would also make a ton of sense, as we potentially enter the era of AI taking over a lot of our jobs. At some point, hopefully we become so efficient at “work” that we can use UBI to help people survive who want to do something outside the usual 9-5 (or who have been automated out of their job).
If we could get affordable universal healthcare and affordable colleges, I would be beyond thrilled.
I agree.
I think a universal basic income would also make a ton of sense, as we potentially enter the era of AI taking over a lot of our jobs.
I don’t really believe AI is going to come for that many jobs … at least not in its current generation/family. It’s more of a story teller than a serious threat (it’s like a robot that builds caricatures of products that occasionally are correctly assembled).
That said, I’m not entirely opposed to a universal basic income or a universal supplementary income (a point my father made is that rather than trying to raise the minimum wage, why not progressively subsidize people below a certain threshold).
Personally, I’d prefer to see the efficiency gains result in a 3 or 4 day work week for most people. Lots of people would decline without anything to do and society in general could miss out on some great minds that instead of creating simply consumed.
Yes, I think we should already be at a 4 day work week for many jobs. If you look at productivity and efficiency growth since the 40 hour work week was invented, it’s off the charts.
However, that’s one of the problems with unbridled capitalism. The market demands constant growth, which is hard to sustain and doesn’t reward easing up on employees.
I don’t feel like debunking this crap, but you’re wrong and placing the blame on individuals.
This is why every country with a better lifestyle than the US is not a fully communist one, but a capitalist one with some key socialist programs like universal healthcare, free college education, generous paid maternal leave, standard 5 weeks of holiday for all workers, etc. These should be considered basic necessities in any relatively wealthy country.
I think a universal basic income would also make a ton of sense, as we potentially enter the era of AI taking over a lot of our jobs. At some point, hopefully we become so efficient at “work” that we can use UBI to help people survive who want to do something outside the usual 9-5 (or who have been automated out of their job).
Unfortunately I live in a country where “social wages” and an actual wage freeze were later used to suppress labour actions, and then retracted anyway. There’s a homeless crisis and mental illness suicide pandemic now. Oh yeah and Canada is euthanising “lost cause” disabled people, and Sweden let COVID cull off some of the elderly population…
Social safety nets can always be retracted. Social liberalism has run its course as a viable strategy, much like vanguardism (which is what people mean when they think of “communism”). We need perdurable systems, and as far as I’m concerned, confederalist systems are the only empirically successful systems, although even then it’s hit or miss; see the collapse of syndicalism in Catalunya due to socialist infighting.
Anyway I’m a Bookchinite and currently making peace with the idea I may not live to see 2024, so that’s my context.
Say what you will, but the countries with a good balance of socialist and capitalist policies are still on the top of every list, from happiness to life expectancy, to income equality to health to education, etc.
You can say what you want about Canada and Sweden, but when compared to the US’ far more “anarchist” approach, both have far longer life spans and higher rates of health than the US does.
As you use very ambiguous terms like Bookchinite, and confederalist which are open to massive amounts of interpretation, it’s not really clear what you are proposing (government is a form of confederation, after all). But I suppose you are hinting at being a Libertarian Socialist. It’s a view which I am very sympathetic to, but one in which the upheaval needed to implement would end us up back at some form of fascism, similar to the previous attempts at communism. I would love to see such a system someday, but I think the only way it could ever come about is by starting from social democracy and gradually working towards it. It could likely take centuries.
Social democracy is the best system we have managed to date by just about any yardstick we have for measurement. That’s not to say it’s perfect, I can imagine many types of organizational systems which could be considered far superior should we actually be able to implement them correctly, but unfortunatley human nature is a massive blocking point to so many things, and the tendency is always towards some form of fascism if things become unstable. So IMO, we have to first get as much of the world onto the “Scandanavian model” of stable social democracy with good rule of law, and then work from that point of stability to something even better (I’m a fan of UBI personally as it’s far easier to implement than any sort of system which gets rid of property rights and achieves much the same thing when widely implemented).
