Cenk Uygur

Yeah, I think $5,000 is too high, but those are fine debates. Yeah, you know, but you basically want to create an incentive. Everything is about incentives and disincentives. Again, capitalists realize it's better than anyone else, right? So you want to set up an incentive to serve your voters, not your donors.

So if you take away private donors, well, there goes that incentive, and that's gigantic, right? And then if you set up small grassroots funding as a way to get past the threshold to get the funding to run an election... Well, then good, because then you're serving small donors, which are generally voters, right? So that's what you want. And ending private financing is critical.

But the second thing is ending corporate personhood. So this is where you get into a lot of fights because you have two reasons. One is some folks have a principled position against it and they say, well, I mean, the Sierra Club is technically a corporation. ACLU is technically a corporation. And so if you end corporate personhood, then that could endanger their existence, right?

No, it doesn't endanger their existence at all, right? So it doesn't endanger GM or GE's existence. It doesn't endanger anybody's existence. Corporations exist. We're not trying to take them away. I would never do that, right? That's not smart. That's not workable, et cetera. We're just saying they don't have constitutional rights. So they have the rights that we give them.

And by the way, read the Founding Fathers. This is also in my book. They hated corporations. The American Revolution was partly against the British East India Company. And so the Tea Party in Boston was against that corporation. They threw their tea overboard. It was not against the British monarchy. And all the Founding Fathers warned us over and over again Watch out for corporations, okay?

Because once they form, they will amass money and power and look to kill off democracy. And they were totally right. That's exactly what happened. And so it's not that you don't have them. It's that through democratic capitalism, you limit their power. You can give them a bunch of rights. You say, hey, you have a right to exist. You have a right to do this, this, and this, okay?

But you do not have constitutional rights Of a citizen. And so you don't have the right to speak to a politician by giving them a billion dollars.

Yes, you know why? Because I'm a real populist and I believe in the people. So I drive the establishment crazy because they don't believe in the people. They think, oh, Jake, have you seen MAGA? Have you seen these guys? Have you seen the radicals on the left? We're so much smarter. You know how many Ivy League degrees we have, right? And we know what we're doing. No, you don't.

Everybody, to some degree, looks out for their own interests, right? Why I like capitalism and why I love democracy is because it's the wisdom of the crowd. And so in the long run, the crowd is right. Oftentimes in the short term, we're wrong, okay? But the wisdom of the crowd in the long run is much, much better than the elites that run things.

The elites say, well, we're so smart and educated, so we're going to know better what's good for you. No, brother, you're going to know what's better for you. And so here's something that a lot of people get wrong on the populist left and right. They think, oh, those guys are evil. They're not evil. I've met them. I worked at MSNBC. I worked on cable. I went to Wharton, you know, Columbia Law.

I know a lot of those guys. And so they're not at all evil. They don't even know that they're mainly serving their own interests. They just naturally do it, right? And so they think the carried interest loophole makes a lot of sense, right? They think corporate tax cuts makes a lot of sense. You not getting higher wages, you not having healthcare makes a lot of sense.

It doesn't make any goddamn sense, but they get themselves to believe it. And that's another portion of the invisible hand on the market.

But if you say to me, trust the elites or trust the people, I'm going to trust the people every single time.

Yeah. Companies have so much power right now. This pendulum has swung so far and we're guys, we're almost out of time. The window's closing. The minute private equity buys all of our homes, the residential real estate market, we're screwed. We're indentured servants forever. Okay. There goes wealth creation for the average American. So your right likes this is that it's not a contradiction.

It's a tension that is inevitable to get to balance. The reason why people kind of can't figure me out, they're like, well, you're on the left, but you're a capitalist, etc., That's not a contradiction. That's getting to the right balance.

And in order to do that, like if you say, well, if we change the system, I'm afraid of change because what if the pendulum swings too far in the other direction, right? Well, then you would be opposed to change at all times. So if you do that, it actually reminds me of the Biden fight, right? So I'm like, guys, he has almost no chance of winning. He stands for the establishment. He can't talk.

But then the number one pushback I'd get from Democrats was, Yeah, but what if we change? It's so scary. We don't know about Kamala Harris. What if it's not Kamala Harris? It's so scary. Don't change. And I'm like, yeah, but if you say change might be worse, it also might be better. And you're at zero. Anything is better, right? And right now, in terms of corruption in America...

We're at 98% corruption, so we got 2% decency left. Brother, this is when you want change. And Lex, if you actually have wisdom of the crowd, just like in supply and demand and how it works in economics. It works the same way in a functioning democracy. You go too far, you come back in. So, for example, when Reagan came into office, me and my dad, my family, we were Republicans. Why?

At that point, the highest marginal tax rate was at 70%. 70% is too high, right? Then he brought it all the way down to 28%. That's too low, right? And that's how the system modulates itself. Already we were headed towards corruption because it's the 80s now. We're past 78, magic 78 marker, right?

So, and even Carter was way more conservative economically than people realize because we're already getting past it by the time it's in his administration. But the bottom line is, yes, whenever you have real wisdom of the crowd, whether it's in business or in politics, you're going to have fluctuation. You're going to have that pendulum swinging back and forth.