The comedian responded to a listener who wrote in after hearing him defend
socialism, or say favorable things about socialism during his podcast.
And his response to the angry listener was pretty fantastic, now before we
get to his response, here's what the listener wrote in about last week.
>> Last week you mentioned, you don't know why people demonize socialism.
I was really taken aback at that statement, Jesus Christ,
every country that has tried socialism has failed, and
it's responsible for tens of millions of deaths.
All right, so would you say capitalism is working?
>> [LAUGH].
>> So that very last part, would you say capitalism is working?
Is part of his response to the person who wrote in,
and I'm gonna venture to say that the individual who wrote in,
hasn't spent too much time thinking about this, because he's regurgitating the same
talking points that we hear from conservatives.
The fearmongering about Venezuela,
the talking point about how socialism hasn't worked in any country, but
these debates about, is, is socialism or capitalism good.
It's kind of frustrating because fact of the matter is,
there are portions of the economy that should be that should be
de-commodified certain things that should not have a profit motive behind them.
We're going into a deeper conversation about that in just a moment, but
I want to go to the first part of first response to this listener, let's watch.
>> When like, what is it like, 99% of the wealth is in like 2% of the people's
hands, all of these tent cities, you're telling me this is working?
You don't think capitalism is responsible for tens of millions of deaths?
You're really sort of looking the other way with what capitalism has done to other
countries.
All the sweatshop labor, all the wars we've fought in
over in a quote freedom where most of it is about, natural resources.
All of these countries where we've gone in and,
stuck in heads of the government that are gonna do what we want to do so
we can take advantage of them.
>> Yeah, I mean, he makes some pretty important points there, and
it's undeniable that the United States has engaged in coups, and
various countries in order to overthrow democratically elected leftist leaders.
Who want to nationalize portions of their economy, and they've done it on
behalf of US based business interests and multinational corporations,
like that is why we engage in the kinds of wars that we engage in.
And so I love that he brought that stuff up, but if you think he's done,
you'd be mistaken, He makes some other really, really great points.
Before we get to that though, Ben, I want to get your thoughts.
>> Yeah, I love that birds saying this, I'm a little bit surprised, but I do love
it because it's enough of people on the right trying to oversimplify everything.
Just because they're intellectually lazy and do not want to have a nuanced
understanding of things that just are nuanced.
You can't simplify things down to black and white when they are not bad,
they act as though, we're pure capitalism and socialism is wrong.
It's just problems abound with statements like that, firstly,
it's not socialism that's to blame for the deaths in these other countries.
It's these murderous dictators, these horrible leaders that came to power and
decided under the guise of that system,
they would have done that if they were leading a capitalist country as well.
And the fact that here in America, we are a blend.
We are capitalist with lots of socialist flavor in there.
And that is the country that you love so much.
And I guarantee you it's the same people that say,
keep government out of my medicare.
So that's some socialism for you as well.
So these people just need to nuance up their arguments.
>> Right, and I love engaging with conservatives on this kind of debate
because, they'll say socialism hasn't worked anywhere.
And then you'll give examples of Scandinavian countries that have
decommodified sectors of their economy because again,
when it comes to things like healthcare, when it comes to things like prisons.
You don't want to have a profit motive, because when there's a profit motive,
the idea is to put profits over human lives, maximize profits at all costs.
You have a fiduciary responsibility to return interest on your shareholders
investment, that doesn't work, okay?
The free market idea doesn't work in certain areas of society, and
we've seen how it's played out, whether it has to do with fire departments.
If we have privatized fire departments, how do you think that would play out?
There's a reason why we don't have private companies putting out fires,
because if you don't have the money to pay whatever private company you need to
put out the fire, you're screwed, right?
So you point to the Scandinavian countries and, and yes,
they have mixed economies as well.
And I think they're mixed economies do way better than how our mixed economy is
working at the moment.
And the first thing conservatives will say is,
there's private businesses, there's private businesses in places like Denmark.
Did you know?
Yeah, I do know that.
So why don't we, do a little bit of Denmark here in the United States?
No we can't do that socialism.
Okay.
>> And it's as though it's as though private prisons
are flourishing here in America.
There's no issues whatsoever with that, with just inhumane conditions and
overcrowding and
people being in imprisoned, simply for the profit motive, having their lives ruined.
Because they sold a little bit of weed out of economic desperation and
myriad other reasons.
>> Exactly. >> None of these systems are perfect.
That's why you have to adjust and adapt and
have a nuanced blended approach in life.
That's what you needed in your personal life.
And that's what nations need as well, it's just obvious, and
these people that don't want to understand that can go on and
spot their talking points, but it's Bill Berg gets it.
>> He does, and he gets it way better than I would have expected.
And that's not to say like, I think Bill burr is uninformed, no.
It's just rare to hear from an older comedian who has a very
firm grasp of the downfalls of capitalism and you're about to hear.
>> And by the way, sorry, and who, from what I understand,
even though I know Bill, and he's a buddy and he's a very nice man,
I believe he voted for trump [LAUGH] and and still has these opinions.
So at least maybe this is somebody that has the ear of people on the right, and
maybe that can trickle into some of what they think,
because they think of him as one of their gods.
>> Yeah, it's a really good point.
So I think this next video is the best because everything that
right wingers are afraid of happening under a socialist system
turns out it's already happening under a capitalist system.
So let's watch.
>> Right. I took off my Birkenstocks,
I'm gonna read read the rest of this here.
Socialism all starts the same way, create a boogeyman,
like corporations, the rich or a race.
We've never done that in this country, we've never created a boogeyman.
[LAUGH].
There's never, I mean, Jesus Christ buddy, blame them for all your problems.
Yeah, we never did that.
The leaders didn't promise to fix all the problems.
Boy.
Slowly the government starts to control every aspect of your life.
Why does this sound so familiar?
Promise that every aren't they like recording all our phone conversations now,
and we're slowly on our way to getting microchipped promise that everybody
will have the same equity and outcome.
This creates mediocrity loss of the middle class,
where have I seen that before?
>> Oops, now, that was that was fantastic.
I'm very happy that he read that message and actually responded to it,
and there's really nothing else to add to it, it's just demonstrably true.
I mean, it's about it, think about our data being collected and
sold to third parties every single time we're on the internet.
Doesn't matter what site you're on, doesn't matter what you're up to.
Their scraping all that data and selling it off to data brokers.
It's all this information about us is readily available online,
including where we live with our phone numbers, it's terrifying, right?
And that's being done for profits, right?
So though that privacy that we care about so much gone.
The rents that we care about so much, they've been shipped away up for for
decades now.
>> True. And it's the exact sort of just insane
thinking, this conspiratorial thinking that always thinks the system that we
have is the one that is perfect when it's failing us.
It's the same people who are afraid of taking a vaccine, because they're
afraid that Bill Gates will be tracking them when they are not afraid of
the other old rich white billionaires, who are literally tracking them.
They don't mind if Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg are literally tracking them.
They don't care if they're using an app like Tiktok that is owned and
observed by china.
They don't care if they actually opt in all the time for
like funny apps, that are literally I can have a funny nose on my face,
accept all tracking dat no problem.
It's gonna chisel my jawline, track me, baby, take it away.
No issue with that.
But if somebody else that's not tracking you, somebody told you is gonna track you,
it's an issue.
It's the same mindset that leads to broken thinking, somebody complaining about
in a theoretical socialist system, there won't be a middle class in a country
that has an eroding and shrinking middle class for decades on decades.
And a tinier tinier portion of the money going to said middle class.
>> Our member Shade Dragon, and
you can become a member by clicking that join button.
If you're watching us on YouTube or
you go to tyt.com/join members do the show with us.
Shade Dragon says capitalism is working for about five people,
and, that's the point.
I mean that's the point about the middle class disappearing,
because there's redistribution of wealth in this country, it is happening.
It's just that the redistribution of wealth goes from the bottom to the top.
>> It's perfect Dana, we've got great platforms.
Now capitalism has created a public square that apparently with breaking
news is about to be completely ruined by Elon Musk changing his mind and
now buying it again because he has $44 billion dollars to spare.
And Trump's gonna be allowed back on and people that are fighting
disinformation will be squelched, so it's a perfect system.
>> If Burr is able to get through to some of these people because you're right,
that was the best point.
That he does appeal to conservatives that typically don't think about these things.
If he's able to break through even a little bit, that would be huge.
So we'll see how it plays out.
But again, his points were fantastic and just demonstrably true.