When reality catches up to the illusion

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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**Karoline Leavitt** (0:27)
Wayfair, every style, every home today on the show.

**David Pakman** (0:31)
I will explain why I am not a socialist, why I'm not a communist. We will also look at Fox News's own polling, delivering just brutal news for Republicans. And it's also getting a lot harder to pretend voters are buying what Trump is selling. We're going to look at some disturbing new questions about the Pentagon's handling of Iran war death numbers. And we'll also have an honest conversation, always honest, about what to do with people who voted for Donald Trump three times and are now admitting they were wrong. Also, Donald Trump accidentally makes the most anti-capitalist argument maybe of his political career while calling everybody else communists. And then Karoline Leavitt is pressed on some uncomfortable questions as Republicans are turning on JD Vance before Trump's presidency is even over.
And we will wrap up with why America's growing public health problems have a lot more to do with politics than a lot of people realize. All of that today.
If I have anything to say about it.
Well, I'm getting a ton of comments lately, questions saying, David, why aren't you a socialist? Why aren't you a communist? You often mention it. But what about explaining the why? And I've even gotten some suggestions that because I'm not a socialist or a communist, I must be some kind of right winger. I must have had some political 180 where now I am on the political right. But the question is, why do I not subscribe to those ideologies? I think that's a legitimate question that I want to explore. Now the real reason that I don't support those systems is very simple. I don't believe either system is the best way to maximize human well-being and to organize society. And as such, they are not systems that I can support. And I believe this looking at empirical historical data and in applying a socioeconomic analysis to these theories. I am a social Democrat. As a reminder, social Democrat and Democratic socialist are two completely different things. Democratic socialists are socialists, whereas social Democrats are not. As a social Democrat, I support getting everybody health care, strong unions and supportive labor, affordable education that is of high quality, progressive taxation, where the wealthiest are taxed the most, serious corporate regulation and a very strong social safety net. I support those things. I also support markets, private businesses, private ownership of property and the ability to make profit in private industry. For a lot of goods and services, there is no good reason to eliminate markets. We don't need government planners deciding, for example, which restaurants should open, which laptops should be manufactured, what kind of furniture should be manufactured and sold. It's completely fine to let companies compete there. Let people start businesses and own them. Let people test ideas succeed and fail within the context of a market. I do believe that markets encourage innovation, but not because of the reason right wingers say they do. Right wingers love to say, if you don't have markets, nobody will ever work hard if they don't have the possibility of becoming a millionaire or a billionaire. I don't buy that stuff from the right. People are also motivated by a lot of other things. Curiosity and purpose, recognition, solving problems. And we see publicly funded research produce extraordinary breakthroughs. But it is also true. And we should recognize that competition and financial rewards are also real motivators. And if you remove them across the entire economy, you reduce experimentation, you reduce innovation and also, I would argue, efficiency. And so what social democracy recognizes social democracy being a form of regulated capitalism, social democracy recognizes markets are really useful tools, but markets are not the moral authorities that the right wing believes them to be. I do also believe that some things should be removed from the profit motive because market failure would cause completely unacceptable harm that wealthy countries have no reason to accept. If you don't like the available TVs, you can wait to buy one. If you don't like the prices, you can wait for a sale or not buy one at all and hope that the market adjusts. That's TVs. If you need insulin, you can't wait for the market to become more compassionate or adjust so that you can afford your insulin. And so in the areas of health care, education, infrastructure, law enforcement, military and other essential services, we can't treat them like sneakers. We can't treat them like video games. Their purpose must be universal access, not let's extract the maximum possible profit from people who end up with nowhere else to go. That's the basic social democratic approach. You use markets where they improve people's lives and you you use public provision where markets predictably fail. So then why am I not a socialist or a communist? Why won't I go further? Let's deal with each of them sort of one by one. Now I don't want to make this a definitional game where people it's sort of like when you criticize Jordan Peterson and the Peterson people go, you're not criticizing exactly what he meant. Even if we have to have some kind of working definitions for socialism and communism, socialism and communism in turn usually want to replace private ownership of major industries with worker public or state ownership, depending on whether we're talking about a socialist or a communist model.