March 19th Town Hall with Michael Moore, Elizabeth Warren and others

from the standpoint of a structuralist.

Structuralism simply means you're accounting for larger order contexts

when addressing a given situation.

The point being that much of what was discussed

in the context of root causes and solutions was rather disappointing to me

as the true origins of the problem of socioeconomic inequality

and loss of democracy was not really addressed at all.

Naturally if you do not understand the root problem

you cannot create viable solutions to problems or symptoms.

And it's frustrating to see how this representative group of influencers

still don't seem to have the awareness or perhaps the courage

to go after the market economy and its incentive psychology

and procedural dynamics.

When I say incentive psychology I'm referring to the individualistic,

effectively antisocial incentives generated through competition,

seeking short-term profits

generally at the expense of long-term sustainability

not to mention humane ethics.

An obvious example is that when a person works to invent something,

they do it first and foremost to sell, to make money.

The incentive is to make money, not advance society.

While some argue this relationship - this proxy relationship -

has been fruitful, which of course it has on one level,

it has also simultaneously been unnecessarily destructive,

especially when other economic alternatives that remove this proxy incentive system

could be applied to human society.

Also, things do not get done in our society because

they have no profit possibility,

which is extremely depressing and one of the main core reasons

so many problems go unresolved today,

from the resolution of ecological decline

to the prevalence of poverty and homelessness.

Similarly, when I say procedural dynamics

I'm referring to the game of market trade and how it orients human rationality.

In the same way a person plays a sport,

orienting behavior around the structure of the game itself,

there's a near automatic pattern of response

happening throughout human society

working to game itself in effect

for each individual or group's advantage.

For example, a universal constraint inherent to this market game

is the need for cost efficiency.

Cost efficiency simply means people are trying to save money on input

while maximizing gain upon the final sale of course.

And what has this led to? Well, slavery for one.

Whether abject slavery,

or the millions of slaves that exist in the world today

getting paid virtually no money or so little that it doesn't even matter,

in various degrees of coercion

driven by poverty and vulnerability.

And keep in mind - and I think it's an important distinction -

that what we call capitalism or a capitalist society,

isn't really capitalist by any absolute definition

because there's no such thing as a purely capitalist society nor could there ever be

in terms of the free-market foundation.

It's more accurate to say that it is capitalistic:

a qualitative property.

And this capitalistic tendency

was birthed by the Neolithic Revolution 12,000 years ago

molding and evolving society and culture ever since.

It's a specific structural framework that we've been inside of.

And if you're not familiar with that I can point you to my book

'The New Human Rights Movement' which details it

along with other issues related to socioeconomic inequality.

But suffice it to say, it's very important to understand that there's a

long term geographical determinism that has set

the characteristics of our society in motion.

That said, and put another way,

countless people are pulling levers on a giant machine,

engaging the market economy's gaming

through cost efficiency and so on,

not realizing that the long term result

includes human exploitation and abuse

along with a loss of earthly sustainability.

It's built into the collectively-operating mechanism.

without the need for individual malicious intent

on the part of any single individual.

Cost efficiency is often confused with the idea

of technical or natural efficiency and design.

The truth is cost efficiency is deeply destructive

because it doesn't actually employ any kind of true science.

Systems science would define true efficiency

in the design and production of a given good.

True efficiency is about doing things correctly from a scientific perspective in other words,

and cost efficiency is simply about doing things in order to maximize income

and reduce loss in the process of production and sale.

This again leads to enormous earthly waste and perpetual human abuse

as empirical and formal evidence shows.

And when you put these two things together -

incentive psychology and procedural dynamics of capitalism -

you begin to understand why any attempt to push back against the outcomes,

the inevitabilities of this system that we see consistently,

will either be short-lived or they will fail.

It will also happen, again regardless of the moral aptitude of the society,

because this isn't some trivial matter in decision-making.

This is about survival:

individual self-interest coupled with familial or group self-interest,

coupled with an expansive materialist culture now derived from our need to

keep consuming and having growth and GDP and creating jobs and so on,

will forever condemn any hope of improvement

in the context of socioeconomic inequality or class war

without large-scale structural economic change,

which effectively voids what we consider to be

the purest form that we've ever known of market economics.

In other words if you want to change the behavior of people and how we relate to each other

you have to change the framework they are operating in.

That said, let's begin with the basic opening by Sanders stating their cause.

[B. Sanders] But tonight's discussion is not just an analysis of our problems.

We're going to talk about solutions,

about where we go from here,

and how we create an economic and political system

which represents the needs of all Americans

and not just a handful of wealthy campaign contributors.

Elizabeth, what's going on in America?

[E. Warren] Okay.

So I want to start this where

we're picking up where Bernie left off and that is

look at all the data right now about inequality in America,

inequality in wealth, inequality in income.

But I want to reframe this a little bit.

I see this as inequality in opportunity

and that that is one of the most corrosive parts

about what's happening and what's gone wrong over a generation.

[PJ] The synergy of influences that limit human potential,

individual by individual, is vast

and the idea of equality and opportunity

or equal access to potentials of society

become increasingly dubious, tenuous and confused

when the entire society is actually premised

in something that moves against any type of balance or equality.

In other words, the foundation of the society we have today

is premised in scarcity, competition,

and the game of seeking income to support future interests

and hence greed and so on.

You can't have equal opportunity in a society

that for example makes money out of debt,

selling that money like any other good.

You can't have equal opportunity

when there is an actual boom and bust cycle that periodically

wipes out the lower- and middle-class potentials.

And the list goes on, and it's a little bit disappointing

and even though I agree with Warren's gesture,

that no one brings up the other forces that limit human potential and public health.

And I think the general gravitation of the Democratic socialists and others of this mindset

is also that you can kind of regulate it in hard rigid laws

that will preserve some degree of equal access,

even though the entire society is premised on unequal access

as a driver of industry and innovation, by the way.

And once someone does even attempt to create such legislation like FDR did decades ago,

you'll notice that the general pressure

is always to dismantle such programs in the name of free markets

and the problem here effectively is consistency.

You cannot have contradictory social patterns and expect both of them to preserve themselves.

And while we do see, as I'll talk about moreso later in the video,

differences between the United States and say the Scandinavian countries

and other social democracies, in terms of how they "collar" capitalism,

the United States itself exists in a completely different level of the sickness.

That even if you regulate in free education, free health care,

free medical leave, free extended vacations, all these other things common of

the pop culture socialism as we know it today,

it would just be a matter of time before a new constituency

would come in and remove those safety nets

in favor of larger order capitalist rationalization.

So I hope all of that makes sense because equal opportunity,

to define that and make it real and make it applicable,

requires far more than what these folks are proposing.

- So for me, what this generational shift is about

is a shift in this fundamental question about who this government works for

and who it creates opportunities for.

[PJ] You can't pose the question of who the government works for

without understanding what gives birth to the structure of government to begin with.

Governments are fundamentally premised economically.

That may seem odd since we're led to believe

government is the starting point of our society in action.

But if you examine the nature of governments since the Neolithic Revolution

you will see that they are first and foremost concerned with economic behavior.

Feudalism, mercantilism, capitalism

and even socialism and communism as they have existed,

have had institutions of governance that organize around those economic foundations

explaining their differences.

This only makes sense since the economy is what produces survival.

And as a related aside,

I'd like to point out that this understanding that economics

is the root of survival has led to some deeply superficial perspectives

that further misunderstand the nature of government,

such as with modern Libertarians.

They see a false duality between markets and government

and as the argument goes, government is a problem

as it restricts the so-called free market

and hence if we reduce government power or regulation,

as was notably done by the Thatcher and Reagan administrations,

you will open up markets and wealth will spread, more people will be supportive and so on.

Obviously it didn't work out that way nor would it ever work out that way.

And my point here is to not debate the libertarian perspective directly

but to show the pervasiveness of this false duality,

or confusion which is even present in the Sanders panel.

The truth is government and business are inseparable

because you have to have regulation

of the individualistic and self-interest-driven anarchy

that defines market behavior.

The invisible hand may exist to some degree

but that degree is so limited,

far too limited to be universally workable.

Markets simply are not a viable system when it comes to accounting

for human sustainability or social stabilization.

It's old and out-of-date.

If government did magically vanish,

the negative externalities produced by market behavior

would pretty much destroy the planet overnight, gesturaly speaking.

So regulation becomes critical to collaring this primitive economic model

that simply can't take into account what is required.

That stated, overall government has two roles:

the democratic or regulatory rule,

where the general population sees problems and tries

to vote in regulations to solve those problems,

while the other role is to facilitate business

and work to preserve national business in a competitive global context

along with encouraging and assisting the expression

of the most successful in business.

Now this second rule explains why there is a natural gravitation in America

for high-level corporate power to create legislation

and in effect control government.

More succinctly government is a regulator on one side

and government is a tool for groupistic business power

and economic advantage on the other.

Even more, since market economics guarantees inequality and class hierarchy

due to its very structure,