How Socialism Works

In America it's virtually a dirty word, but after being dragged through the mud for a century, socialism is still a part of the U.S.'s national character. Learn about this foil and complement to capitalism and why it might not be so bad.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to you stuff you should know from house Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Josh Clark, and there's Charles W Chuck Bryant and hold
your pause. Jerry Roland socialist and me socialist. It's so funny,

(00:25):
it's it's a dirty word. Yeah, people love Colin politicians
socialist these days they're just a socialist. Yeah. It's weird that,
you know the fact that that is a dirty words
because we stand in a moment in history where it's
been drugging through the mud for a hundred years. But
the tenets of it, the basis of it is the same.

(00:47):
It's virtually unchanged, and it's still it's kind of sensible
in some ways. Well, I mean I looked at there's
been various we're going to talk about these, but various
experiments socialist experiments throughout the years, and some work pretty
well for a little while. But it kind of dawned
on me at one point. You can't account for laziness. Yeah,
that's a huge that's when it all comes crumbling down.

(01:10):
Everyone had that same work ethic, it could thrive, but
as soon as that one dude, it's like, I don't
feel like working. Yeah, and I'm a sucker because if
I do, because I get the same junk that you do,
then it's just that's the beginning of the end. If
everybody had the work ethic of the people depicted in
w p A murals and post offices, we'll be fine,

(01:33):
which do look uncannily similar to Soviet era depictions of
workers too. Yeah, you know, because they're related. So we're
talking socialism today, which is a huge, enormous, sweeping topic. Um.
But we're gonna try to explain it and as best
the terms as we possibly can. Um. And it's really

(01:56):
tough to talk about socialism without talking about capital as
them too, because they're antithetical pretty much. But they're both
based on the same idea that from your economy springs
forth everything else. Like Karl Marx, Joseph Engels, the guys

(02:17):
who got together and wrote the Communist Manifesto. Um, they
basically said, it's the economy stupid. Yeah, what was that from?
That's James Carville? Was that Carville? I thought there was
some No, I was thinking of something else you're thinking
of I'm with stupid or no, I know what you're
thinking of. Lose weight, now ask me how what I

(02:40):
can do this all day? Where's the beef? What else? Uh?
Can't they get any other ad? Ever? I don't want
to grow up. No, there was one stupid that was
oil or gas commercial. It's the economy, bunch old gouts
sitting on the porch. Oh yeah, it sounds like a
fracking com. But I don't think they're saying like it's

(03:02):
the economy stupid. They're they're saying, just sit there and
shut up stupid. Probably that's that's more the kid. Let's
just go back to James Cargle. So he said it's
the economy stupid. It was one of the three main
talking points for Clinton campaign. So Carl Marks didn't say that.
But the idea was that you have this economy, and

(03:23):
depending on what you do with it, you can either
have a uh completely literally utopian society where everyone's equal,
nobody wants, everyone's taken care of, and there is no
class stratification. Or you can go the opposite way and
let this economy run on its own devices and step

(03:45):
out of the way, and what you have is capitalism.
And the marks an angle's opinion that was basically the
most inherently evil thing a state or government institution could do.
Is it just let an accou onomy run rampant, right,
because you have something called classes, you have stratification, you

(04:07):
have um wealth gap. Yeah, and basically the exploitation of
the very people who are producing the the goods in
a society, the workers. Yeah, the workers, uh, stay poor
and the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. And
like you said, it was based on this word utopia. Um.
A British writer named Thomas Moore in fifteen coined that term.

(04:28):
He wrote a book called Utopia about a fictional island
in the Atlantic Ocean. And Um, there was no private property,
there were no locks on the doors houses. You rotated
houses every ten years. So even if your free house
you thought your neighbors was better, ten years, you're gonna
get in that same house. Don't worry about it. I
just hope your neighbor doesn't trasted. In the meantime, exactly,

(04:51):
they had all were the same clothes. There were no
fancy clothes, six hour work days, free healthcare, state endorsed euthanasia,
which in fifteen fifteen was pretty radical. Yeah, there's a
lot of killing. Back then, divorce was okay. So this
was his version of utopia. And uh, one thing we'll
talk about is utopian socialism. That that word utopian was

(05:12):
tagged to it later on as like a majority of
kind of like there is no utopia, you naive nini. Yeah,
so your your socialism, your utopian socialism is not possible.
I see, you know, very clever. Sure, it's funny what
people can do with words to just completely tarnish the
concept because he can't account for laziness. So you've got

(05:34):
Thomas Moore writing in fifteen and he coins the term
utopia and it's not in and of itself socialism, but
it has a lot of the hallmarks of socialism, right,
Like there's no it's a classless society. Yeah, and um,
it's a it's a society that's operated and owned by
the people, very people who are producing goods. Yeah. And

(05:55):
we should have set up front there are dozens of
types of socialism. So this this could be like a
wealth part series and it will be. And this is
my god, now, well no, this this one. I was thinking,
this fits into what's become our socioeconomic suite. You know,
we have a death suite. We've done so much economic
stuff and socio economic stuff that I feel like we've

(06:16):
got a suite coming up that I'm gonna put together. Yeah.
So Thomas Moore comes up with utopia, but he's not
the first person to ever write about the concepts the
basic foundation or principles of um socialism. That award goes
to Plato, who described a place in his republic Um

(06:38):
that basically had two classes, the governed and those who governed,
and the government were completely subservient to those who governed,
but those who governed were just basically inherently perfect in
every way, shape or form. And aside from that there
the there, it was classless, right, everybody else was very

(06:59):
much equal in the over and where this hierarchy of
a blunted pyramid um, but they decided who was going
to make what and in what amounts. So you have
this hallmark, this other hallmark of socialism, which is complete
and utter government control of an economy, which constitutes a

(07:20):
planned economy. Yeah, and uh things, Uh, we're talking about
utopian works. Between seventeen hundred and eighteen fifty, these were
very popular because these themes were because there was a
lot of oppression going on in that hundred and fifty
years still is around the world, of course, but it
became a popular theme in books and novels to write

(07:43):
about these utopian societies like, man, it could be so
much better. No oppression of slavery, everyone is all boats
are rising. Um. And then a French revolutionary named Francois
Noel Babouf is considered the first socialist because he is
the first one who um said, you know what, no

(08:03):
more private property. We should all be equal, and I'm
the first socialist. Yeah. He the reason he was no
and he had his head cut off by the French
Revolution at age thirty seven for his views where technically, um,
today he's referred to as a revolutionary communist. Yeah, UM

(08:25):
should go ahead and cover that. Yeah, because socialism was
the word was around when he was around, so he
was called a socialist, but his views were so militant,
um that he's now considered a revolutionary communist and that
that sort of communism is basically like socialism with guns. Yeah,
if you're a communist, socialism is a UM. It's a

(08:48):
transitional state between a capitalist society and a communist society.
So it's a temporary point in the glorious transition from
capitalism to communism because communists know from experience now that
you can't just go from capitalism to communism overnight. You're
going to completely cripple your economy. People are going to

(09:10):
starve to death. You just have huge problems, so you
have to go to socialism. So the difference between socialism
and communism is that in a socialist country, everybody's producing
for the general good, but what you receive is based
on your merit, whereas with communism, everyone's producing for the
general good and what you receive is based on your need. Yeah,

(09:35):
and communism is is a militant takeover and utopian socialism.
The main difference there is the idea is that everyone
is on board and just gives this stuff up. There's
no overthrow of the upper class because the upper class
is like, no, I'm on board, right, that's an utopian socialism.
But with communism, though, I think it's kind of gotten

(09:56):
the I I think in practice it's been uh at
the at the barrel of a gun. Basically, like mouse said,
power springs from the barrel of a gun. So the
idea that communism and militancy are associated has you know,
become kind of a thing. But I think theoretically they're

(10:18):
not necessarily related, right you know. Uh, And then a
few others. You have, um, market socialism, which Yugoslavia and
Hungary had a version of in the sixties and seventies,
and that is most people see that as as sort
of the bridge between socialism and capitalism, where the government
does own the resources, a lot of them at least,

(10:38):
but market forces determined production and demand, so there is
incentive and true socialism, there's no incentive to work harder. See,
I don't know that that's necessarily true. I think it's
communism and socialism you're still allowed to give incentive for
harder work. Well, which kind of socialism though? Um remember

(10:59):
our blimp episode. Remember the helium supply that the US
government controls. That's an example of market socialism. Yeah, that's
a good point. I think we're demonstrating just how hard
it is to define it because there are so many times.
Yeah we can you can talk about it in pure terms,
which we let's let's do that. And then I think

(11:20):
if you understand, you know, just the pure definition of socialism,
you can start to understand you can recognize it in
the real world. Right, So with socialism you have um,
no no classes. Everybody is told what to do, to
what to make, where to go to work, and the

(11:42):
production output is determined by a central planning committee in
most cases the government, and then that same committee takes
all these this production and distributes it according to who
needs what, and the economy is completely controlled and playing
end and uh, this plan is put into effect by

(12:03):
the workers and everybody's equal. And there's no private property.
And that's a tricky one too, because if you went
to Soviet Russia in the sixties, you go into somebody's
house and they had a TV set and that was
that family's TV set. So the distinction that I came
across for private property is there's in socialism people can

(12:28):
own TVs, but nobody owns the factory that makes the TVs.
So by the government controlling the factor that makes TVs,
theoretically you can make even more TVs and more people
can enjoy the fruits of the TV factories production. Does
that make sense? Okay? I think if you want to

(12:51):
explain something, do it, and by explaining it in terms
of TV and TVs. Jerry just she went to Cuba
this year, remember, and had an experience with the communism.
That was really interesting. We should do a podcast on
Cuba as a whole and have Jerry sit in and
not speak. You just write things down and we can
relay the message. And like I said, to understand socialism,

(13:14):
it's you have to also understand capitalism. And capitalism is
basically like the the supply and demand runs everything, and
the if somebody needs something, they're willing to pay a
higher price for it, which means the sector over here
will start to ramp up because they want to make

(13:34):
more money. There's no planned economy. It just changes based
on the needs of the individual. Yeah, and there's uh,
there's competition. It's encouraged in capitalism, not so much in socialism,
not at all in socialism, because competition is one of
the great evils of capitalism. And that it's right if

(13:56):
you make a bunch of money and we're in the
same industry. I'm not making a bunch of money and
I can go bankrupt and my family could starve, But
you're really rich. I like that. Yeah, imaging imagine if
the shoe on the other foot. I want us to
all be rich. What's that called socialism? Okay, alright, So

(14:19):
I was talking about Francois Babouf and uh. He was
credited with being one of the first socialists, but the idea,
the concept wasn't really popularized on a broad scale until
the seventeen hundreds thanks to something called the Industrial Revolution,
which is when as everyone knows, uh, Robert Baron's kind
of started opening factories and controlling the wealth and putting

(14:42):
people out of work or making people work for or
offering people work I should say, uh, for very little money.
And there was a big wealth gap. That was the
first big wealth gap. Um. The rich got richer in
that case, and the poor got poor and people got um.
There's a lot of unrest because of the slave labor,

(15:04):
and the idea of socialism kind of became more popular
all of a sudden, right. It seems like any time
that um, business and industry has overstepped its exploitation of
the working class, socialism has kind of been there to
step up as a solution to that, and people have
been more prone to adopt it. Yeah, and and tough

(15:25):
times obviously, because that's one of the byproducts of socialism
of a group of the government controlling industry. That means
that the government also protects the workers from being screwed
over by industry because you're working for the government and
the government is not seeking to screw you over. Does
that make sense? Yeah, I feel like I'm not explaining

(15:45):
this correctly and striving me a little bonkers. Frankly, No,
you're doing great because of this. Um the Industrial Revolution, though,
there were these communes that started to pop up and
all over the place that, uh, we're people. They were
kind of socialist experiments. One was called Brook Farm in
the eighteen forties just outside of Boston and West Roxbury,

(16:08):
and it was founded by a Uterian Unitarian minister and
his wife, George and Sophia Ripley, and they said, you
know what, you can choose your job, you can do
whatever you want to do. Um, everyone's gonna get equal pay.
We're gonna base our little society on a guy named
a Frenchman named Charles Furrier who just died a few
years ago. But he was super smart, we think, and

(16:30):
uh he actually coined the term feminism. So ladies are
going to be equal a huge thing. Because this was
the eight forties, that was way ahead of its time.
And uh, they had visions to build this big structure
called a Fallon story, and that was their undoing. It
seems like there's always this one thing that ruins these experiments,
and that was their's fire destroyed it and basically bankrupted

(16:53):
them by eighty seven. So that was the end of
brook Farm. And that's just one example, yeah, one of many, because,
like you said, there are a lot of communes that
sprung up within larger capitalist systems, but that practiced their
own brand of socialism. There were Christian socialist communes, like
the Shakers were socialist community. Yeah. I was wondering about

(17:17):
the Amish, and I looked up like our Amish socialists,
and I think they have a hierarchy. Yeah, and they weren't.
I don't think they're thought of as true socialists, but
they have a lot of the same values. I think,
like we all worked together, we all work hard for
the good of all of us, and values are what
drove um all of these socialist experiments, including the Christian

(17:39):
socialist experiments, because basically they were saying, hey, you know what,
we don't think capitalism really jibes with Christian teachings. We
think socialism does a little more. So we're gonna go
off and try this and don't even try to persecute
us because religious freedom. Religious freedom. Yeah, you've seen the
bumper stickers. Jesus was a socialist. I haven't they're out there.

(18:00):
Last one I saw said easy does it? So check
your like you were saying, like this is brook Farm
wasn't didn't exist in a vacuum. There were a lot
of these socialist experiments going on everybody. There seemed to
be two types. There was one that just wanted to
just get away from the world. Just leave us alone.
We're doing our own thing. If you want to come

(18:21):
join us, awesome, but we're not trying to change the world.
We're just trying to change the world, our world. There
were other ones that sought to like basically perform this
experiment that demonstrated that this that socialism worked and in
the hopes that it would spread out to the rest
of the country or the rest of the continent or whatever.
And one of them was in Scotland, formed by a

(18:44):
guy named um Robert Owen who was a wealthy, wealthy,
wealthy capitalist who decided that capitalism was evil and then
he was going to use his wealth to try socialist experiments.
And the first one was in Scotland, in um New Lanark. Yeah,
in seventeen eighty six. Um. He he basically moved out there.

(19:07):
He bought um, like you said, he had a lot
of money. He's a big philanthropists, and he bought a
mill and said, you know what, this cotton mill. I'm
gonna base this cooperative society around this mill, and it's
gonna be our foundation. That's how we're gonna make our money.
And we're gonna divide up property among everyone, and everyone's
gonna work the same and get paid the same. And um,

(19:29):
it didn't work out, of course, but he was huge
in the early um progression of childcare basically, Yeah, he
was really big on protecting children. He raised minimum the
minimum age to ten. Yeah, the working age to ten
and uh not minimum age, like you have to have

(19:50):
a childless ten years old. If you're born under the
age of ten, you go to jail. But um, he
instituted infant childcare for the first time in Great Britain.
He h preschool, Yeah, first preschool, first public library. Uh,
first public school too, I think like free public school.
So he led a lot of reform but it didn't
work out in England, so he said I'm sorry Scotland.

(20:13):
I know, I think new Landark it's self worked out,
but it didn't catch on. And so he said, nuts
to you guys. I'm going over to America where they're
way more open minded. That's right. So he went over
and Um, there was some land in Indiana in a
place called Harmony. Uh it was actually that was already

(20:33):
a commune of sorts there. Um that lasted eleven years,
from eighteen fourteen to eighteen Yeah, but they were a
non socialist religious commune right now, they were totally socialists.
They were they were separatists from the German Lutheran Church
and they formed their own little socialist society there in
Harmony and succeeded for eleven years thanks to their German

(20:56):
work ethic. And then they decided they wanted to go
back to Pennsylvania. Yeah, they just left. And then um
Owens comes in says, hey, this land, I'd like to
buy it from me. I'll name it New Harmony and
I'll start my little experiment over here in the United
States and see how it works, and basically did the
same thing. Yeah, they said, thanks chump, but that lasted
just two years. Um. Yeah, this was not Owen's fault here. Well,

(21:19):
I mean from what I gathered that the main reason
that it didn't work out is that people liked it
so much. It was a bit chaotic, though, and they
started splintering off, forming their own communes, and all these
other communes started popping up, and it just couldn't survive anymore. Okay. Well, also,
his business partner for the commune took all the money

(21:42):
and left. Yeah. I didn't see that that was the
main reason, though. I think they were dead in the
water by that point. That might have been the nail
in the coffin, right, So you pulled the Mr Burns,
Yeah exactly. So, um there there, that's three there's that's
just three communities. Community he went back to and he
was like, all right, yeah, I guess I'm out of here,

(22:02):
and he started but he um he really, I guess
got a lot of press and raised awareness for the
concept of labor reform and really helped set the stage
for the labor struggles that would take place in Europe
and the United States throughout the nineteenth century. And again,
this is the result of a couple of things, but
mostly the Industrial Revolution, because in the Industrial Revolution, business

(22:27):
owners were the income inequality gap was growing by leaps
and bounds because business owners could buy a machine that
could do the work of ten people for a tenth
of the price. And so as a result of this
you have experiments and socialism. You also have another thing
grow up called um. Blood eye is UM. You know

(22:47):
the Ladites, they're supposedly afraid of technology. That's that's really
a misinterpretation. UM. The Loodites like to smash technology that
took their jobs. They weren't afraid of the few future
or anything like that. They just wanted to keep their jobs.
So Leoodite sprang up at about the same time too,
so you have Loodite socialism. And in eighteen forty eight

(23:10):
there is what's called a revolutionary waves similar to the
Arab spring of what two thou twelve, two dozen thirteen,
where almost all of the monarchies in Europe faced challenges
from socialist revolutions, and most of the revolutions were crushed,
but some of them had lasting effects. Like you know
how Sweden is considered a UM partially socialist state. UM.

(23:33):
Same with Denmark and all these other countries, France, all
of them had to do with these the socialist uprising
in eighteen forty eight. They made an imprint and impact,
and when the when the revolutions themselves were crushed, they
started to move over here in the US, and that's
when you saw a lot of these socialist experiments pop up. Yeah,
and every country still has a lot of socialist programs,

(23:56):
um that you could label a socialists for sure. So
we'll talk more about social salism in the United States
right after this, so choke, we're talking about socialism in
the US, which people are like, what are you talking
about the US as a capitalist society. Well, there's actually
been a lot of socialism throughout the history of the US.

(24:18):
There's been, um, the Socialist Party. Milwaukee has had some
socialist mayors. Uh. If you live in Vermont, one of
your senators as a socialist, Bernie Sanders. And there's this
kind of long storied history springing out of workers rights movements,
labor movements in the United States that were supported by
socialists and actually gave rise to UM, the Socialist Party

(24:41):
here in the US. Yeah. In eighteen seventy six, the
Workingmen's Party was formed and then a year later changed
their name to the Socialist Labor Party and uh, of
which Jack London writer was an early member. Uh. They
were called the Works, and they had someone on the
presidential ticket re election from seven nineteen seventy six, and

(25:04):
had a little know that. Oh yeah, they had a
newspaper called The People that was finally folded in two
thousand eight, and they even had an office in two
thousand eight, although as of two thousand and seven they
only had seventy seven members, and apparently the the official
meetings in San Francisco we're only attended by three to

(25:26):
six people. That is, that's a far cry from the
peak when Eugene Debs, who was the socialist candidate for
the fifth time I think, when he was in jail
and still managed to get a million votes in the
general election for president as a socialist. Not bad. And

(25:46):
then they're down at three to six members in San Francisco. Well,
that was in two thousand seven and eight. Maybe they've
they're booming again, who knows. But part of it is
because the term socialism, since socialism is basically in a
lot ways antithetical to capitalism, has been, like I said,
dragged through the mud over the centuries. And it was
about this time, actually it was in nineteen seventeen that

(26:08):
it really started in earnest. Yeah, the government here in
the US and acted the Espionage Act and kind of
tied everything tonton, not everything that socialism, at least to communism,
and um made a lot of things illegal to like
and publicly endorsed things like communism or socialism and criticized

(26:29):
the involvement in World War One. Yeah, and so, which
is why Eugene Debs was in jail. By the time
nineteen fifties rolled around, through McCarthyism, which we have a
great episode of McCarthyism, the Socialist Labor Party was waning
because you did not want to be tabbed a communist. No,
unless you were a communist. I mean, you could basically
like lose your career by being blacklisted by the McCarthy trials.

(26:54):
And that's in the US. Elsewhere in the world. Um,
long before the nineteen fifties, it was a dictator in
the Soviet and named v I. Lenin you might have
heard of, and he was the first world leader to
really implement socialism on a big, broad government scale. Yeah,
up to that point, it was all theoretical except for

(27:14):
little experiments or a little communes. Lenin was the one
who said, let's see if this can work. Yeah, And
he was a communist, but um, he implemented socialist initiatives
after taking over the nineteen seventeen nationalized industry, UH to
a large degree in agriculture. Um, but things were not profitable.
So he kind of had to backtrack a little bit

(27:36):
to a mixed economy a little bit. And one of
the reasons why things weren't profitable, Chuck, was what you
were talking about was account for the lazy Yeah, incentive.
People didn't have incentive, and Lenin didn't. He hadn't figured
out that to truly incentivize people in the absence of money,
you needed violence. And so Stalin came in and recognized

(27:58):
the is you won't die pretty much. And tens and
tens of millions of people died under Stalin's rule as
he basically forced communism to work by stripping people of
any kind of private ownership of land or farms or
anything like that. Institute and collectivism and really taking communism

(28:20):
in this communist experiment and making it function by forcing
the gears together. And a lot of blood came out
of that interaction, but it worked for a little while.
Like in the sixties, the Soviet economy was growing at
a rate of about twice that of the United States
per year. And this is all considering that the government

(28:42):
is deciding exactly how the economy is going to go.
And then post World War One, there was a lot
of activity in Europe uh socialist parties springing up in Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Belgium,
Great Britain, Africa, Latin America, Asia, people were dabbling in it. Basically,
governments were dabbling in it. There's a wave of it
in Africa in the seventies too, um And in part

(29:05):
that was because while there's proxy roars being fought between
the United States and the uss are UM. But also
it's because the uss are appeared successful. And can we
talk about the U S. S R for a second
and how it worked. So basically, every year the Government
Planning Committee created the gosp Plan, which is like this,

(29:27):
the plan for the Soviet economy. They would say, okay,
so we need this, this, this, and this and this
million different things and each of these million different things
cost this government sets the price right right, So they
would say, how can we make this happen? And they

(29:47):
would send it down the chain and everybody would take
a look at it and figure out their plan. Like
this main plan would be split into thousands of tiny
subplans and components, and the people who are actually carrying
out the war would look at it and say, Okay,
we can do this and this and this, and I
can get you this many tons of cotton, and we
can do this many tons of potatoes, and this is

(30:08):
how we're gonna do it, and they would send it
back up the chain, and for the year the economy
would be planned. And it actually did work for a
little while. But the problem is it's like you say,
you can't account for laziness, and there was a you
can also not account for an action. There was a
huge criticism of this um plan by capitalist economists who

(30:30):
were saying, this can never work. And the reason it
can't work is because in a capitalist society you rely
on the markets for information. You guys don't have a market.
You have government control the markets, so there's no real
information being gleaned, so you can't possibly know who needs
what where. And this very famous communist economists came back with,

(30:51):
actually that's not true. All we have to do is
look at stocks. If we have a lot of surplus
of something, then we know that we need to lower prices.
If they're a scarcity of something, that we need to
raise prices. Hence, communism works, and for a little while
it looked like it worked until the whole thing broke down.
And the whole thing broke down was because you have

(31:12):
people whose job it is to set prices who were
scared to death of screwing up, so they would just
remain inactive, and ultimately, by the time they did respond
to something, it was too late and people would starve
or the whole system would be totally thrown off. Because
if you have a planned, managed economy, you if one

(31:32):
little bit is thrown off, the whole thing can break down.
So that ultimately is why the Soviet experiment failed. It
was just too tightly controlled. That's a good one, all right.
Back to the United States, despite McCarthy ism and the
threats of the McCarthy era, there were some prominent socialists
in the US and there still are. Actually. Albert Einstein

(31:54):
was famous for a paper called hy Socialism in where
he a plan to and it was all education based,
which is good, but um he advocated for playing economies
and wanted every citizen to to be had their livelihood insured. UM.
Some other notable American socialist uh ed Asner and Saul Bellow,

(32:19):
Patch Adams, famous clown doctor, UH, comedian Lewis Black, singer
Harry Belafonte all identify as socialist to this day. UH.
And I guess we can't talk about um socialism without
talking about Britain post World War two. Uh. There was
the winds of change were brewing because Winston Churchill was

(32:42):
defeated in his re election bid by Clement Atlee, who
was the head of the Labor Party. And that's what
the you because it's England and uh, it was a
democratic socialist party and established a nineteen hundred and Churchill
was the head of the Tory Party, the Conservatives, and
UH they were after World War two. They were the
citizens were fed up. They said, our healthcare stinks, there's

(33:05):
labor problems all over the place. And I don't think
Churchill's got the goods to uh to right the ship.
So we're gonna elect this at Lee fella. And he
had some pretty lasting changes he. Um. There were a
lot of improvements under some of the nationalization policies under Athlee,

(33:26):
like coal miners were given paid vacations, they were taken
care of safety wise, they were given sick leave. Um.
But of course when you nationalize industry like that, it
became unprofitable because you can't account for laziness and there
was no competition and workers weren't motivated. But his big
legacy was the NHS, the National Health Service, which was

(33:49):
established in nine UH, which provided free medical care and
it is still in use today because it was super popular,
even though uh financially it didn't work out for quite
a while. Scotland is talking about going independent right now.
There's a referendum coming up, and one of the main

(34:09):
talking points is if Scotland can go independent, that the
Scottish NHS can stay socialist rather than you know, get
sold off the private industry, right um, like they think
it's going on in England. Oh, is that what's going
on right now? That's what That's what the pro Scottish
independence people are accusing the English of I did not

(34:31):
know that. Interesting. Well, they love their free healthcare, um,
but a lot of it. UH. In the seventies, that
was incredible inflation going on over there. Percent in nineteen
seventy five and the winter of discontent. UM of nine.
Nineteen seventy nine was a dark time over there because

(34:52):
there were a lot of major labor strikes going on
and the country was headed in the wrong direction. Um
until Margaret Thatcher came along. And despite what you think
about her, she did right the ship economically in a
lot of ways. Uh. One thing she did was she
reduced spending UM and education and healthcare. Uh. Inflation went down.

(35:16):
Unemployment rose still though, and she started to denationalize a
lot of the major industries, like the telecom industry and
selling it off to the private sector, and things started
making a profit again, which was seen as a big victory. Yeah,
so that's really um, that's a great Britain is a
good example of the response people being people being screwed over. Yeah,

(35:41):
socialism steck being in, Socialism getting out of control and
then capitalism coming in. I think capitalism runs rampant, people
start to get screwed over again, socialism starts to step in.
There seems to be like an ebb and flow between
those two and mostly just those two, especially if you
consider communism socialism, and it's strange, is there like a

(36:05):
third one out there that we're missing? There's really just
capitalism and socialism. I don't know. We'll talk more about
socialism as it stands today in just a second. Let's
just take this message break first, Chuck. If there's anything
the web has done, it's democratize humanity. Yeah. And one

(36:26):
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It's also very intuitive doing this. You don't have to
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can just drag and drop to create a really great

(36:47):
looking website. And if you find yourself in any trouble,
squarespace has world class customer service. Yeah. It's super intuitive.
You're not gonna learn how to code or anything like that,
but what you will get is a beautiful, clean design. Uh.
Your content is going to be the focus. You're gonna
be creating your logo. You're gonna be able to sell stuff.
You're gonna be able to show off your art or

(37:08):
your films or your music. It's really all there for
the grabbing Yep, like you said, all plans have commerce options,
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(37:31):
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use our offer code stuff s t u f F
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gonna get that ten percent off your first purchase and
you're gonna be glad you did it. Okay, So, Chuck,

(37:58):
you mentioned the NHS. It's still around today. It's an
example of a socialist government system. Canada has something similar. Um.
It's often very criticized as being very expensive, very inefficient,
very slow, but there's a lot of people who get
health care that otherwise wouldn't. Yeah, I think about of
every dollar in Canada goes to the health care systems,

(38:22):
are right, That's that's a lot. That's a lot, and
every Canadian I know says still better than what you
guys got. I mean, it's definitely cheaper than what the
Americans spent on healthcare for sure. Yeah, like we went
and we may have to wait for our m r I,
but at least we're not going broke because we get sick.
But that's a that's a good example of socialism versus capitalism.

(38:43):
If you go to Canada, if you're a Canadian and
you go to the hospital, I should say, Um, your
m RI is going to cost the same no matter
what hospital you go to, which I guess is zero dollars.
But that but if there, if there is a charge
of the government, it's going to be the same price,
right roughly the same price. If you go to the
United States, you can go to two different medical clinics

(39:04):
in the same town and you could have a discrepancy
of maybe ten thousand dollars for a single MRI I procedure. Um.
And that's because in Canada, the government controls the cost
of healthcare. It says this is how much an m
r I cost. In the United States, there's a free
market for people who have MRI s that they wanted

(39:25):
contract out to use and they can charge whatever they want,
so there's a big discrepancy. Yeah, and uh, they give
one example in this article in Canada of a woman
um who had identical quadruplets that they could not be
delivered in Canada because they didn't have the resources, so
she had to go to Montana to have her baby

(39:45):
is born. So that's just one example of maybe some
of the downfalls of socialized medicine. Yeah. So here in
the United States, like you said, socialism gets tossed about
is a um. It's a sugatory term and a little
willy nilly if you ask me it is. It's also
very glib, especially if you're saying socialism doesn't work or

(40:09):
socialism is exists in an evil direction, because what you're
talking about then is pure socialism and pure socialist theory.
Depending on how you look at it, Yes, maybe it
does strike you as evil, especially if you think of
communism as being militant. The thing is, you can make
the same arguments about pure capitalism, where it's just a

(40:30):
completely unfettered free market with no regulation whatsoever. The income
and equality tends to develop and progress and people tend
to get trampled. So the idea of saying, like a
politician and socialist or something like that. Um, if they're
a United States politician, yeah, they probably do have some

(40:52):
sort of socialist tendencies in that they are they're voting
to continue funding Medicare or medicaid, social security, welfare of
any kind, any kind of government regulation in the United States.
The very fact that there is a rule for a
particular industry that says, no, you can't, um, dump toxic

(41:15):
chemicals into a river. Sorry, that's socialism. That's government control
over an industry. In part. It's not nationalization, which is
a hallmark of socialism where the government says, hey, your
board of directors has gone and these government employees now
run this company. Um, but it's still the same. It's
still a version of socialism. So well, you have today

(41:38):
in most western developed nations is what's called the third way,
which is a mixed economy where you have a free
market and supply and demand uh runs that market, but
you still have government protections. You probably have welfare programs,
and that is public libraries. Yeah, that is rather than

(41:59):
this have been tied in spasms between socialism and capitalism.
This this pendulum swinging back and forth. It feels like
the two are starting to or have merged together, into
a hybrid that could conceivably smooth out over time. Conceivably
smooth out over time. Yeah, yeah, it would be great.

(42:21):
It's possible. That's what we're seeing right now. So in
the future, all economies will be mixed economies. That's my
prediction all over the world. Yeah. Yeah, Do you got
anything else? I got nothing else? Well? Cool. I did
read one article that I thought was interesting about the
United States military being the ultimate socialist experiment. Oh yeah,

(42:42):
tell well it was just I think it had a
lot of holes in it, but just the idea that
the military like you dress alike, you all live, you know,
you have different ranks of course, but you're essentially equal,
all working together for the greater good. Um. It was
an interesting perspective. But like I said, I had as
it's like Swiss cheese. Yeah, it's a It's a good

(43:03):
idea though, right, It was interesting. So, um, what that
sounds like it's talking about is is what people I
think are ultimately saying when they're saying like communist, capitalist
pig that kind of thing, and they're throwing like slander
back and forth from either way, what you're really saying
is collectivist or individualist. If you take the economy part

(43:24):
away from it, what you're saying is, are you the
kind of person who subscribes to everyone working together for
the greater good? Or are you the kind of person
who subscribes to the idea of individual liberty where people
should be allowed to express themselves and move freely and
and not be fettered by any kind of constraints. That's
what it all boils down to. That's a bumper sticker.

(43:44):
That's a long bumper sticker. Just truncate. It's got nothing else.
So if you want to learn more about socialism, you
should type that word into the search bart how stuff
works dot com. And uh, since I said search bar,
it's time for listener man. Yeah. Hey, before I read this,
I want to say thanks to our friends Josh and

(44:06):
Joel Over at pod on pod Yeah. They're a podcast
review podcast and they gave us. We didn't know they
were doing this, We just saw it and they they
gave us like the best review. It was really really nice. Yeah,
they gave us like a very well thought out review.
Wasn't just you know, like we love these guys. It's
a great podcast. They explained what they liked about it,

(44:26):
and well that's what they do on their show. I
listen to some other ones and they really if you're
looking to get into other podcasts, I would start with
pod on pod and listen to some of their reviews
because the review like the sound quality and the production exactly.
That's what I mean, just professionalism and um well thought out. Yeah,
it's very well thought out and they did a great job.
So um thanks to Yeah, go check out pot on pod.
They gave Jerry like huge glowing review. I think they

(44:49):
called us the new standard and sound quality. That's awesome.
You know how about that over Mark Marine when they
said just gave me tingle. All right, I'm gonna call
this email. UM, be careful, becks. Um. She was listening
to our Elevator podcast and I've mentioned something about hearing

(45:10):
that you're less likely to get injured in an accident
if you're drunk, and she said she related her story
because it happened to her. She was at a house
party across the road from a friend of hers made
the mistake of drinking beer than wine, so she was
really really drunk. She and her friend decided to go
into town, got to the main street and bumped into
two guys who said, hey, come over and uh, come
have a drink with us at this pub. Um. It

(45:34):
was in West London, and she says, now when she
thinks back at thirty five, how a stupid she was
to just like attempt across the street and join these
two random strangers while she was drunk, She is, she's
very um wary of that now, but she says she
went across. I looked first left, which was my biggest

(45:56):
mistake here in London, because we drive on the left,
so you should always look right. Uh, and you've ever
been over there, They say that on the street for
us dumb Americans like at the airport and say look
right on the sidewalk. Um, she says, she only looked
left and decided to take her for my drunken brain
that she would just step out into the street. I

(46:17):
remember my friends screaming becks. No, she got hit by
a car on her right. She landed on the bonnet
and the driver hit his brakes and I hit the tarmac.
That's the street. Oh my god. He was going forty
miles and he was only about three feet away when
I stepped out, had no chance of stopping. He got

(46:37):
out of the car, got a pen and paper and
wrote my name on it, and then wrote I accept
full responsibility for this accident, and made me sign it
as I lay there on the pavement, and then he
drove off. Um the guys that offered us to come
over and join them for a drink carried me across
the road and into the pub and called an ambulance.
They stayed with me until it arrived. Matros all right,

(46:59):
I'm very great, all of them. Still, my injuries were
this one grays little finger. That is it. No hen injury,
no broken bones, no nothing. And I attributed it to
two things. One I didn't see it coming, so I
wasn't tensed up into I was properly drunk, so I
didn't tense up. I did end up in the hospital
later that night when I when the shock set in
and I got a headache, and my family was worried

(47:21):
that I was concussed, which I was not. Um as
an aside, I did not escape the incident mentally unscathed.
I suffered a period of real sadness and remorse for
weeks afterward, because I felt guilty that I had come
out of it unharmed. When so many little kids get
hit by cars through no fault of their own and die,
survivor guilt? Is that what that is? That's what Jeff

(47:41):
Bridges called it. When what was that called survivor? No
big Lebowski something less? Uh? I think it was called
survivor He survives a plane wrecking like learns to Live now. Yeah,
but it wasn't called Survivors. Remember he was a good movie.
Are you sure it wasn't called survewever? Yeah, it was
called Uh, I Can't Die or something like that. You're

(48:06):
thinking of Unbreakable, that's Bruce Willis Now. I watched that
the other night again, though, good movie. It holds up,
Huh it does. That's funny because that was the one
that was the toughest to watch the first time. I mean,
aside from signs and all that clapchat, but I mean,
like the sixth sense goes down easy. Sure, Unbreakable it
takes a It's it doesn't go down quite as easy.

(48:27):
But I would suspect that means that it still resonates
more later. Yeah. He uh, fearless, fearless, I knew, what's
something less? He um. I think the working title was
Survivor um. So that is from Beck's Bloomfield. And she
is a graphic designer at Little Red Robot Design, which
you can find a Little Red Robot dot ceo dot

(48:48):
m Z because she lives in New Zealand now and
she is the one who sent in a picture of
her awesome dog, Stanley with holding a sign in his
mouth saying I heart s Y s K, Emily and Becks.
But everyone's okay, maybe take that as a gift. Yeah,
it's a mulligan. She's over the guilt by now, I think. Okay. Well,

(49:10):
if you have an amazing story that you want to share,
we love hearing those. You can tweet it to us
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Works dot com and join us at at home on
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(49:35):
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