A (0:00)

Sam. Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives, our jobs, our incomes, our debts, those of our children and those that are coming down the road to confront us very, very soon, as they already do. The big election won't change that, and probably, if in my guess be right, may make them worse. Any case, let's get involved. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life and I currently teach at the New School University. For today's program, I have something new to do, which I am proud and pleased to be able to do. I want to recognize here the generous contribution of the Shriver Hanna Charitable foundation, who have graciously agreed to partner with us to produce and to bring to you these weekly programs. So we're starting off with them. And so a special thank you to the Shriver Hanna Charitable Foundation. If anyone listening would like to become a sponsor as well, to work with us and partner with us, please don't hesitate to go to our website, democracyatwork.info that's all one word, democracyatwork.info sponsor. Find that page. It's very easy to do on the website and it'll go through what is involved in partnering with us in this way. Indeed. While I'm mentioning the websites, please make use of them. We have two. The one I just mentioned, democracyatwork.info and another one, rdwolff with two Fs.com these two websites allow you to communicate with us. Your likes, your desires, your criticisms of what we are doing here, which we welcome. These websites allow you to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and in that way, partner with us today. I would particularly like you to go to the websites and sign up there for our email list. It's a way for us to keep you informed of things we are doing to let you know new things that are happening, events that will be happening and are happening all the time. There's an events page, etc. But go there, make use of it. These are websites updated every day. They contain oodles of material that expand and extend on what we do on this program. They're available to you 24, seven, no charge whatsoever. These are services we provide and we urge you to make use of them and partner with us in sharing them with others who might likewise be interested. Okay, let's get into the last days of October and early November of 2016. The first story I want to bring to your attention today has to do with an action recently taken by the United Nations Children's Fund, famously known as unicef. And they did something the economics of which I want to bring to your attention. They have recently concocted a deal, signed a contract with six vaccine manufacturers that will do something extraordinary. Basically, it will cut in half the price of a shot that protects children against five childhood diseases. To be precise. This deal struck by UNICEF with six drug companies will reduce the dose of a vaccine I'm about to describe for you from $0.84 to per shot. Excuse me, $2.84 a shot from what it was before, namely $1.84. In other words, this deal cuts the price of drugs more than 50%. Considerably more. Here's what UNICEF agreed to. It will buy 450 million doses for 80 of the world's poorest countries. Wow, what's going on here? The vaccine protects against five Diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, hepatitis B and a special flu known as the Hib. These shots will, and this is the thing that caught my attention. These shots will save more than 5 million children from dying by the year 2020. That's over the next four years, folks, or less than that. Five million children will live because of this deal, because they can now afford shots they could not afford before. And the mechanism here, the economics, Simple. If individuals, or even if individual clinics or even if individual countries bought these vaccines, which in the past is what they've done, they would have had to pay much, much more. But by the benefits of buying a huge quantity, UNICEF is in a position to negotiate a much lower price and then to pass on those savings to the mass of families who want to save the lives of, of their newborn children, which is most of us. Why do I bring this to your attention? Well, it's a story that's worth it in and of itself. It's a lesson in economics that the way to get drugs to the people who need them, in this case for matters of life or death, it's much cheaper for the mass of people and therefore to save lives if a major national or even better international institution like UNICEF purchase them in bulk. And then, because UNICEF is not a profit making enterprise, it's not a capitalist outfit, it is not in the business of making profits. It's in the business of human life saving and of service. And having that institution buy in bulk and thereby realize a much lower price is a way of helping everybody. Here's the. This should be done everywhere. It should be done, for example, in the United States, where The government of this country could behave exactly like UNICEF did in this case. Not for the world as a whole, which is the most ambitious way to do this, but at least for the 325 million American citizens. If the government bought the drugs in bulk, it could negotiate very quickly the appropriate price and turn around and provide that much lower price to you and me and all the American citizens listening to this program. And of course the same thing applies in every other country. And again, it would be even better if this were done internationally. It raises the question of why we allow so something as important as the drugs that keep us healthy or save our lives to be handled by companies whose first interest is profits and who therefore can and do as the headlines have screamed at us, jack up the prices when and where they can to make the money, with the result that all kinds of people can't afford these medicines that are matters of life or death. They could afford them if they were charged what they cost, but because we add profit and the drive of companies to maximize profit, we all lose out. And that's a lesson of the UNICEF program that is estimated to save millions of children's lives because of learning and applying a simple economics lesson that could and should apply elsewhere. The second story for today has to do with Harvard University. They're cropping up in my reports now a bit more often. Last week I spoke to you about a strike. 750 workers at Harvard who work in the cafeterias, basically preparing and serving food for people, students and faculty who eat in the universities dining rooms. These people live at the very low end of the economic scale. Their average income is 30,000 a year for a full time job. These are people who are the bottom of the economic pile, serving people, most of whom come from the top of the economic pile. And indeed the whole strike reeked of this inequality. The richest university in the world, Harvard, with assets 35 billion and up richer than any other university in the United States and probably the world. Nickel and diming. The people at the bottom resisting the effort of the union to move their salaries on average from 30,000 a year, way less than what it costs for a student to go to Harvard per year, raising it to 35,000. So I did the arithmetic of it. We're talking 750 people and you're raising them $5,000 a year. That comes to the royal sum of 3 1/4 million dollars for Harvard. That is absolute. That's a dime in their pocket. It is inconsequential. Let me drive that point home. Bloomberg News on Oct. 27 carried a story based on information from one of the biggest consulting firms in America about Harvard. The name of the consulting firm, McKinsey and Company. It inspected Harvard's management of its endowment, its wealth, and found it to be awful. Words like lazy, fat and stupid are in the headlines of the article because Bloomberg. And by the way, the story in Bloomberg is on October 27, Bloomberg noticed that Harvard was being raked over the coals, not least because the 11 top money managers over the last few years were paid a total of $242 million. So let me drive it home, folks. Harvard paid 11 people who manage their money $242 million. But it cannot find it in its heart and soul, if it has one, to come up with 3 1/4 million dollars for 750 people who work full time for them. That's as gross an inequality as one can find in our culture. But it's worse still. Over this last week, Harvard boasted in its November December issue of the Harvard magazine, that's a glossy magazine that is mailed out to Harvard alumni. And I have to admit here for full disclosure, I am one of those. And so I get this magazine and there I read the boastful claims that Harvard is now well on its way to achieving the $7 billion fundraising goal it set for itself over this current fundraising drive. They boast in the Harvard magazine that this will be the most successful drive any university has ever had. It's a record. And they point to the last big collector, Stanford University, which in 2011 collected 6.2 billion. But Harvard is beating them. Sounds like a football game description, doesn't it? By raking in 7 billion, the university raking in 7 billion can't raise the low pay of the 750 people who live in the New Haven, Connecticut area from 30 to $35,000, a cost of 3.75 million because it's too busy fundraising 7 billion and paying the top 11 managers 242 million for a poor job with of managing their money. Last week I said in response to the strike there of shame on Harvard. But this additional information, shame squared, by the way, the strike ended. Three weeks of striking got the workers apparently, from what we know so far, pretty much what they asked for. Of course, having been on strike each week for three weeks means that they lost 6% of their annual income. That's the price they paid three weeks at roughly 2% of your annual salary per week. So they had to pay out 6% of their income to get the gain, which is therefore less than it might otherwise have been. So, yes, Harvard shmubbledom out of 6%. Shame, just shame. Next update, women in Iceland. Why am I going to talk to you about women in Iceland? Because on Monday, October 24, the women of Iceland staged a walkout, a strike across the country. Thousands and thousands of women in Iceland went on strike from all kinds of workplaces. And they went on strike at a particular 2:38pm on the afternoon of October 24th. Why 2:38? Because they calculated in their anger and in their protest that, that women in Iceland earn on the average between 14 and 18% less than men doing the same work. And so they calculated that that works out to that every minute after 2:38 each day of the week, they're working for free. That is, they're getting paid so much less than the men for the entire time they're working that in effect after that they're not getting paid at all. Wow. Powerful. And it turns out when you look into this story, that it has a past. It turns out that on the 24th of October, 1975, that's 41 years ago, women took an entire day off. 90% of the female population of Iceland left work, refused to cook or look after children to draw attention to their importance in society, to their lack of political power, and above all, to their lack of equal pay for the work they did. Nor was that the only time they did it in 2005. They did it again in 2008. These women are determined to use the power of the strike, something learned in economic conflict, to improve the condition of women in the life, in the work, in the economy of Iceland. Has it worked? The answer is yes and no. Let's do the yes part. At a wage gap of 14 to 18% less than men for the same work, Iceland ranks number one in the world for the treatment of women. In other words, women are still discriminated against in pay where they work and in society as a whole, particularly economically. But they are discriminated against less in Iceland than in any other country that keeps such records. And that's most of them. So the strikes have worked. They obviously have not worked to the satisfaction of Icelandic women. That's why this last week they did it again. Because 14 to 18%, even though that's less discrimination than women face in England, in Western Europe, in North America and so on, is still not tolerable to them. They demand, they want equal pay for equal work, and they won't rest until they get it. And they show that strikes by women to make this point work. They may not work as fast as we would like and it didn't work as fast as the women of Iceland demand. But it does raise a question for women elsewhere and for everybody else who take seriously the notion that there ought to be equal pay for equal work in a modern economic system. Next update. Well, one of the biggest items in the news this last week was an announcement of yet another merger of mega corporations. I talked about one last week, American Airlines, USAir. We explained how it was the Obama government was against it because it would hurt the consumer and three months later reversed itself and suddenly found there to be no reason to oppose it. And I went through with you what the reasons were for the shift of position. Well, no sooner were we done than we hear this last week that AT&T, the phone company is going to merge or wants to merge with Time Warner, the entertainment company, for lack of a better term. These are two mega corporations, among the biggest already in their industries. And so this will make a mega megacorporation where there used to be just 2 megas. What does this do? What is this about? Well, this is called the problem of monopoly. It is as old as capitalism because it turns out that the capitalist system has built into it mechanisms which we call competition. We like to talk about competition, but we are hesitant most of the time to ask and pursue the question where does competition lead? And it turns out that competition leads to its own extinction. Competition wipes itself out and becomes instead monopoly. In other words, if two or more companies compete, one of them makes a better product or one of them lowers the price, or if they're really good, they can make a better product at a lower price. And that destroys the business of the of who their competitors were. Where there were many companies, those who do the best job at lowering the price and or improving the quantity quality of the work, they win. And typically the winner in competition eats the loser. That is, the loser goes out of business. The people who worked for the losing company now look for jobs in the company that won. The people who supplied the losing company look for customers in the companies that won. And so the many become few. We're familiar with that. All of us who pay attention, we know that there are very few car companies in the world and very few cigarette companies and very few fill in the blank companies. Capitalism leads to monopoly. Why? Well, by the way, monopoly is not the only thing capitalism leads to in this way. It will often lead to a situation where there isn't one company left standing but maybe a handful, a small number. The kind of small number where they can get together legally or illegally, publicly, publicly or privately, and work things out amongst them. Something much harder to do if there are hundreds, let alone thousands of companies when you have just a few and they can control the situation. We call that an oligopoly rather than a monopoly, when there's literally only one left. So what's the point? The reason companies merge is it's profitable. It's a way to be able to charge higher prices because having merged with the company that might have competed with you, they're no longer an independent company. You control them and they will not compete with you anymore because you've literally absorbed them. You're now the decision maker. They're not. And that's what I want to focus on. When AT&T and Time Warner merge, the if they pull it off, if the government permits it, and that means ultimately, if you and I permit it, then where we once had two boards of directors, two groups of 20 people, and the big shareholders that stood behind them, we will now only have one oligopoly. Mergers like this reduce the number of people from the already small minority of that control our economy to an even smaller one. The shareholders of the combined company will be richer. They will select a board of directors that will now preside over the lives and fortunes of many more people than either of the two boards of directors of AT&T and Time Warner separately had been able to do. So for those of you who don't like concentrated power, for those of you who think that competition is what capitalism ought to foster, you're watching that capitalism does the opposite. And you're watching something develop that ought to have been prevented from even being on anyone's mind, but now is getting as close to reality as you probably can before the deal is done. And you can be very sure that AT&T and Time Warner will spare no millions of dollars to achieve this merger. Just as last week I detailed for you how American Airlines and USAir did the same. This is the concentration of economic power in a society where economic power is already concentrated. It's a little bit like my having to report to you over recent years that the inequality of the United States was actually becoming worse, that the people at the top were using their wealth to become even wealthier, to widen the gap between rich and poor. And here we see the same thing going on in this capitalist system that pushes in that direction. Now, my last point about Is it happening across the board? Yes, it is. Let me just read off to you a list of some of the mega giants planning to merge or already underway. Among drugstore chains, Walgreens and Rite Aid are planning a mega merger. They've delayed it but not canceled it because people are saying, oh my God, goodness, what a monster. Will now control the drugstores of the country. Alaska Air and Virgin America are in a similar situation. Dow Chemical and DuPont are merging as well. They may face problems from the Europeans, who give more difficulty to these things than Americans do, don't you know? Well, all of this brought to my attention a recent paper, a scholarly paper, the kind that I don't normally bring to your attention, but this time there's a good reason to here's the title of the paper, which tells you pretty evidence for the effects of mergers on market power and efficiency. In other words, here's a paper about what the mergers do to two the market power of the company, its ability to jack up prices and profits on the one hand, and the efficiency of production on the other. Here's why this paper is first, typically, people who propose mergers like AT&T and Time Warner want us to all get excited about how much more efficient they'll be. They can save on work and they can save on duplication, and they will be so much more efficient. So these scholars looked into that. The critics usually say, yeah, but they're going to have a lot more market power, and they're going to use it to jack up our prices and make more money off of us. Who are the authors of the paper? Bruce Blonigan, economics professor at the University of Oregon and researcher at the National Bureau of Economic Research conservative outfit Second author Justin Pierce, who works for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System paper written and published October 2016. Basically, their findings are the having looked at many mergers using careful techniques of analysis over a long period of time. Bottom line, it didn't do much for efficiency, but it did do a lot for market power. In plain English, mergers are not about becoming more efficient, which they don't care much about. Mergers are to make one company more powerful than the two were separately before, so they can jack up the prices and make more profits off of us, which is why we have opposed them throughout our history, although the companies have figured out how to get around those regulations as well. We've come to the end of the first half of the economic update for today. Please stay with us. We will be back in a very short time and we'll have a second half, which I promise you will be as interesting if not more than the first half was Stay with us. Come gather round people wherever you roam and admit that the waters around you have grown and accepted that you soon you'll be drenched to the bone if your time to you is worth saving Then you better start swimming or you'll sink like a stone or the times are changing. I'm right at the end and critics who privatize with your pen and keep your eyes wide the chance won't come again and don't speak too soon for the wheel still in spin and there's no telling who that it's naming was the loser now will be later to win for the times they are welcome back. Welcome friends, to the second half of Economic Update for this final part of October into early November 2016. Once again, I'm your host Richard Wolff. I've been doing this program now for over five and a half years, enjoying really every minute of it and wanting to open again by asking you to make use of our website, particularly sign up, give us your email so that we can stay in touch with you, let you know what we're doing. But with or without that, make use of these websites to communicate with us, to partner with us, to share what we do here that you find useful with others that you may know to follow us on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and all the other ways of making this a successful, growing project. Okay, now to some major discussions of topics, most of which you have through the websites communicated to us about. And again, the names of the democracyatwork.info all one word, democracyatwork.info and the other one rdwolff with two f's.com democracyatwork.info and rdwolff.com well, I'm going to talk about the Affordable Care act, an act that was passed, often referred to as Obamacare, that was passed during the president's administration. And one of the things his supportersand that includes Hillary Clinton point to as reasons why one should be happy with his performance and happy with Mrs. Clinton's proposal to continue that performance, more or less. Obamacare, what was it about? Well, it was about catching up. The United States lags far behind most other industrial countries in providing both the quality and the quantity of health care that the population needs. That's a painful thing to have to say, but it is the truth. Obamacare was supposed to reduce that or in its more explosive defenders, minds, get rid of it. Well, let's give it its due. It has increased the number of people who get some form of medical insurance. It has reduced, not eliminated, not even close. It has reduced the number of uninsured people relative to what we had before. And it has in some other ways improved access to medical care. However, even after Obamacare has been established as it has now, the truth of it is that the United States ranks very poorly even after Obamacare, relative to to what other countries, including many less wealthy than the United States. We rank below those countries in the quality and the quantity of the health care. Let me give you some examples, and I rely here on the superb research into the whole medical care medical insurance issue of a foundation here in the United States called the Commonwealth Fund. And you can find them on the Internet. They do the research upon which many people, myself included, rely. Okay. And I am particularly relying on an article that appeared in the New York Times on October 26th of 2016, an article written by a professor of medicine. Indeed. The man's name is Aaron Carroll, two Rs and two Ls. Aaron Carroll, who's a professor of pediatrics at the Indiana University School of Medicine. And he wrote this article as a plea. You can read between the lines and you can see it. A plea that we understand how poorly we serve ourselves as a nation with medical care. And here are some of the highlights of the report from the Commonwealth Fund that struck Professor Carroll in his article. When asked patients when they are asked in a survey, could you get same day or next day appointment when you were sick or needed it, 52% of Americans said no. The majority of Americans cannot get a same day or next day appointment with a medical care provider who when they were sick or needed it. This is incredible. There's only one country on earth, as measured by the Commonwealth Fund, that got a worse rating than the United States. We're next to last. Wow. When asked whether it was very easy or somewhat easy to get care after regular working hours, the United States ranked eighth. Seven other countries did better. Wow. But I want to continue with a couple more. So you get the picture. The United States has many fewer general practitioners, your regular doctor, per thousand of its people, than most other countries. For example, in France and Germany, the number of general practitioners available to the mass of people is five times the number of the United States per person. Wow. No wonder you can get to see your physician more quickly if there's many more of them. Turns out general practitioners is not what Americans go in for. They go in for being specialists. Wow. It gets worse. If you don't have coverage, if you're too poor to get coverage. If the coverage you get isn't of high quality, which is usually goes together with the price you have to pay, well, then you wait a long time or you have to visit the emergency room. Something that happens in the United States more than in other countries, and on and on and on. The bottom line, as Professor Carroll recognizes, is that what we have in the United States is a medical rationing system. That's right, rationing. We don't deliver same day care to everybody equally. We don't deliver next day care. We don't deliver after hours care. We don't deliver access to a general practice. We don't deliver those things to people who don't have the money to buy them. Price is a way of rationing. We don't call it rationing because I suspect the defenders of a market system want the price to be looked at as somehow neutral or somehow general or somehow other than rationing. But it isn't. The market rations, it gives scarce things to the people with the most money. That's a system of rationing. You could ration differently. You could give something that's scarce to the people who need it most, to the people who haven't used it in recent past and so kind of get ahead of the line. Uh, not in a market system. We don't care about need. We don't care about when you last got it. We don't care about who might be hogging it. We simply care. Can you afford it? Then you get it. And if you can't, you don't. And Professor Carroll concludes, and I don't want to take away from his language because it's perfect. Last line of the article, the New York times he wrote Oct. 26, access to medical care. I'm reading from his article. Access to was a problem before, access is a problem now. Americans can't seem to have a discussion on how to make that better. But without that, it's hard to see how things will improve. Yes, Obamacare was a step in the right direction, but it was a long time coming. It was a very hesitant step taking, and it hasn't begun to deal with the basic inequality with which we treat our people's medical needs, most of which are not about them or their fault or their failure. Either we take care of our medical needs helping each other as illness strikes, as injuries occur, or we don't, or we ration the care because we don't produce enough of it the way other countries manage to do. And then we say, well, it's scarce. And so the Market will ration things. Scarce things go up in price. Those with the money will get it and those without it. Try to keep in your mind the next time you hear some politician tell us about family values or the sanctity of life or the commitment to democracy and equality when it comes to medical care, we're nowhere close. And while I'm on this question of how markets work, let me take a moment to connect to the market in yet another way that touches base with something we talked about in the first half of the program, and that is, yet again, Harvard University. The New York Times gives its pages, I believe, on a weekly basis, or nearly so on a regular basis, in any case, to a professor of economics at Harvard named N. Gregory Mankiw, M A N K I W. And his latest, and I've noted them before, his latest is wonderful, and let me tell you why, because it reveals, it exposes one of the major defenders of market capitalism in a way that a critic could never match. It turns out on October 23, Professor Mankiw had another one of his comments, his columns in the pages of the New York Times. Here's what this column tells us. It's very chatty. Professor Mankiw and his family, living in the Boston area, where Harvard is located, made a trip recently to New York City. And there they wanted to go to the theater, and they particularly wanted to see the widely praised play Hamilton. The problem was that tickets for that program, for that theater sell out long in advance. And Professor Mankiw had not bothered or been able to acquire tickets in advance for the time he was arriving in New York. But he tells us with great joy that he was nonetheless able to go to a website. He did a little product placement by telling us which website it was. I won't. He went to a website and is so happy, he really gushes in this piece, that he was able to get tickets for himself and his family. And then he tells us he paid $2,500 per ticket, five times the face value. I'm going to do that again because I suspect many of you did not hear me because you couldn't process the information. The face value was one fifth of what he paid. He paid five times the face value. What did he pay? $2,500. So the face value was $500. There are tickets to theater in New York that cost $500. He paid $2,500. What does he tell us about this? He tells us it's a marvel of the market. I kid you not. It's A marvel, you see, without a market for secondhand tickets, for tickets that somebody bought. But thanks to this website, that person can now sell the ticket again to somebody else. Thanks to the market, Professor Mankiw was able to get tickets at the last minute for his family. He only had to pay $2,500. And he's so happy. In this article, it's clear that that paying $2,500 for tickets, and from the story you can guess it's for at least three persons. That's $7,500 for an hour and a half in the theater in New York is no problem for Professor Mankiw. And that's probably the biggest clue to how and why he thinks like this. He celebrates markets and he wants us to understand why whoever bought the ticket in the first place paid the face value of 500. But clearly that person was more interested in having $2,500 in cash than to go and see the theater he paid $500 a ticket to go see. So he's better off by cashing in the ticket for more money. And Professor Mankiw is better off because the theater for $2,500 is more of an experience and more valuable to him than the $2,500 in cash. So both sides win. The seller of the ticket and the buyer of the ticket. Each one is better off than they would have been had the transaction not be possible. This is how Professor Mankiw and the profession of economics that he represents, that's how they reason. Markets are wonderful because the buyer and the seller both benefit. It's a voluntary transaction. They both enter into it only if and when they're better off afterwards than if they had not done it. It's a voluntary win win situation. We're supposed to believe this. That's why people like him find the employer employee relationship mutually beneficial too. The worker wouldn't work for somebody else for 8 hours drudgery unless he or she were better off with the income they got for doing it than they would have been if they chose not to do it. Meanwhile, the employer who makes a fortune off of these workers, he's better off paying them their wage and getting from them something much more valuable and in the way of output. So it's again a win win situation, isn't it? Every market leads to the best of all possible worlds. Of course, this logic, and I'm being polite by using the term this logic only works if you do not care how a person got into the position having to make this voluntary transaction in the first place, let's take the workers. Sure, they're better off working, no matter how awful, no matter how low the pay, no matter how bad the working conditions, no matter how awful the supervisor. Why? Because if they didn't, they'd be even worse. This is not a voluntary choice in any meaningful sense of the word voluntary. Because the condition of keeping people so desperate that they're willing to work for you under awful conditions because you pay them a pittance, because without it, they'd be even worse off. That's not a successful outcome. Professor Mainkiw, you ought to look at the question, how did a large number of people get themselves into such an awful situation that this that's offered by the employer is better than not doing it at all? The answer is the employers who collect all the wealth of society have organized that society, controlled its politics, managed its economy in such a way as to produce and to maintain a group of people so desperate about getting through life that they'll make this awful deal. But because the alternative is even worse. The employer is not some innocent entering into a condition. He is actively worsening the condition. I report in this program month after month, the tax evasions of big employers, the ploys that they use, legal, illegal. I tell you about the biggest banks having committed virtually every crime in the financial business they're in that one can. And having been caught at most of them, they're not innocent. They create a society unable to provide for people, unable to give them the conditions which, if they had them, would make them reject the employment contract for the outrageous exploitation that it is. But then they want us to believe, oh no, because the worker agrees to come, since the alternative is even worse. It's a win win situation. It's unbelievable, the whitewash. And you know, in this article by Professor Mankiw, he kind of admits it. He shows that there are people who go and buy up tickets for scarce theaters in New York City, for successful theaters. They buy up whole bunches of them legally, illegally, because they know they can resell them to the richest people in the world later and make a killing. It wasn't some person who chose to be better off by selling the ticket. It's a business, Professor Mankiw, and you admit it here. It's a business. And let's remember the bottom line. Something favored by Professor Mankiw when he bought that ticket and when other people like him paid that kind of money to all the ticket scalpers, as they're often called, the end result is that the people sitting in that Theater watching another performance of Hamilton. Are the richest people around because they're the ones with the money? That's what a market does. It gives whatever is scarce to the people with the most money. Are they the most deserving? Are they the most in need? Will our society be better off if they see the program rather than young children? Who knows? My guess is it may be a complicated decision, but we don't get society one step forward by avoiding that complicated decision through the rationing system we call the market which gives the scarce things, the things that are useful to the people with the most money. Shame on Professor Mankiw, shame on Harvard, and shame on those gullible enough to not see the writing on the wall. Markets are a way of pandering to the richest amongst us. They get to buy by jacking up the price what no one else can afford. They lead the producers to make more of what is going up in price, thereby depriving other outputs from ever being produced. Because the resources needed to produce what we need is going instead to what price is jacked up and why? To serve and pander to the richest amongst us. No wonder they celebrate markets. That's their system that serves them first and everybody else later, if at all. Last item that we have time for today. One of you sent in a message and that person informed us that he or she is a driver for the UPS United Parcel Service Corporation. And having listened to the program and having heard us talk about worker co ops as an alternative way of organizing the production of goods and services, wondered out loud in his or her communication by email to us how in the world that could happen in something like the ups. How could you ever get that? He or she was finding it hard to imagine. Good. Glad you sent in the question. Thank you for doing so. And here's at least the beginning of an answer. UPS drivers know, as employees in most big companies do, that the company is always looking for ways to make more money at your expense. Make UPS drivers work longer hours, pay them less, take away their pensions, give them shorter breaks. You know the drill. It never stops. No sooner do you have something, then it's eaten away, or in the next contract something is proposed that takes away what you got before, etc. Etc. It never stops. And there's a lesson there. So long as workers have to struggle with employers over their jobs, their incomes, their working conditions, and as long as the employer can make more money by deteriorating what is provided for workers, you're going to have an endless struggle and you'll be lucky if you don't slip backwards through all the machinations of all the high paid hustlers that employers do give reign too. So the ultimate logic, if you think about it as a working person, is that it would be better if instead of bargaining with an adversary, you controlled the business yourself, that you worked out with others together what would be good for all of you, rather than setting business up as an adversarial proceeding with two opposing interests who of course clash all the time. How would it work? UPS would be run by the drivers. UPS would become a worker collective. It wouldn't be bargaining with an adversary looking to gain an advantage. It would be bargaining with itself. It would be working it out. And you know how this would be done? As follows. The next time UPS as a company comes to you at contract time or another time with a proposal that's good for them and bad for you, your reaction won't be, oh, let's bargain, let's struggle. No, you'll say, we've had it with this sort of situation. We don't want to bargain with you, we want to run the thing ourselves. And guess what? The workers then go to the local politicians and they say, we want a conversion. We don't want UPS as a private corporation. It's constantly damaging or threatening our work situations. It disrupts our lives, it threatens the communities where we are taxpayers and et cetera, et cetera. And guess what? We're going to start preparing now, long before the contract expires. We're going to learn and study how to run this company so that when the crunch time comes, we can say to them, either you give us a good contract or we're not going to negotiate with you anymore. We're going to go to the political authorities and say, use the laws and power you have. For example, eminent domain, that law which gives political authorities the right to command the sale of private property when it's in the community's interest. Good. You could say it's in the community's interest that this enterprise pass from a private, profit making, threatening institution to a democratically run, collectively owned and managed worker co op. Use eminent domain, use all the other authorities of the government not to make another rule and regulation, but to convert a capitalist enterprise that doesn't run democratically, where a tiny number of people make all the key decisions, into a collective one. And we, the union, have planned and prepared to be the ones who can make the transition work. We've been studying their accounts, we've been studying management and supervisory skills. We can do it and we'll do it better for the community than they do. Let's see how some of those work so that we can compare whether our society is better off leaving production in the hands of profit making capitalist enterprises or rather in the hands of democratically run community minded worker cooperative enterprise. The time has come and that's a way for any enterprise and the workers in it to begin to become part of moving society forward. The only way to answer the question can we do better than capitalism? Is to make the effort to see how it works. And that's what this response is trying to thank you so much for spending your time with me. I want to thank truthout.org, another partner of ours that helps make these programs possible. Check them out@truthout.org for the Independent and courageous news and analysis service that they are. Thanks again for all of you for partnering with us and I look forward to speaking with you again next week. Going to be my time, my time babe. They ain't gonna change. Things on the change. Yes it is. Sam. It.