🏛️ Socialist policy turn across the industrialized democracies

“But really what I think we're seeing is a much bigger shift where there's this bigger battle between socialism and free market democracy.”

“Yeah, look, I don't think that the use demand for socialism is what's driving the results in France at all.”

“I do think Friedberg is touching on something, but I think the explanation doesn't have to be this idea that people are embracing socialism.”

“And I was looking at the total GDP of the United States is $25 trillion. The federal budget for next year is proposed to be $7.2 trillion. And state and local budgets combined is about $4 trillion. So if you look at government spending, it's about half of GDP now”

“I think that Elizabeth Warren and Bernie sanders are now the thought leaders and really the beating heart of the Democrat Party. I think what's happened is the Republican Party has moved to right-wing populism, and the Democrats in response to that have concluded that they need to basically move to left-wing populism in order to compete with that. So both parties are becoming fairly populist. Now, what does left-wing populism mean? It basically means soak the rich, right?”

“My big prediction over the next few years is you will see a more centrist Democratic Party as they try and re-incorporate.”

“They're not going to attack. If you think that the intelligentsia, quote unquote, the Bill Gates, Reid Hoffmans of the world that funds, Dustin Moskovitz that funds the Democratic apparatus at the highest level, if they can't change, what are the odds that the state infrastructure or the local infrastructure changes?”

“You know, GDP per capita in the EU, $60,000 a year, GDP per capita in the United States, like $82,000, but GDP per capita in India is $2,500 and China's $12,600. There's a greater incentive in those countries to manifest upside than there is for the United States and the EU who are more worried about manifesting downside. ... And the countries that are more techno-pessimistic are unfortunately going to find themselves asking for greater government control, government intervention in markets, government's creating jobs, government making payments to people, government's effectively running the economy.”

“The individual governments of Europe are vibrant and powerful. The European Union itself was created almost without any real teeth. And so what happened is the folks there started to pass inordinate numbers of laws. And that has made it really complicated to be a European company, a European citizen. And that has to get sorted out.”

“And that's why I said my contrarian bet for this year was this rise in socialist policy and the response to some of the actions the administration might take. But we'll see how it goes out.”

“For me, it feels like actually a little bit of a beginning of a wave that's going to continue to sweep over this country starting in cities. And I think that we're at the very early stages. I think we'll look back and I jokingly say that Kamala Harris is going to look like a conservative candidate pretty soon.”

“they don't see that socialism always fails wherever it's tried. San Francisco went through this. I mean, it was a doom spiral. Now, I think we've turned the corner. LA is in the midst of going through it, and a large portion of LA just burned down because there's no water in the fire hydrants. Basically, all the public services have been looted. And New York is about to learn this for themselves.”

“I think the three of you guys are a little exaggerated, to be quite honest. I mean, all the rhetoric sounds very clever, but I don't think it's accurate. I think the way that I see it is more nuanced than this.”

“And that's why I'm so convinced that there's a rise in socialism in this country because in this sort of an inflationary environment, like we're seeing so far this year, you don't see it in the dollar inflation numbers. You see it in the dollar currency numbers. You're going to say, man, I need an alternative.”

“And I think when everybody realizes that the alternative is essentially some insane form of socialism and redistribution, I think the alliance will hold and that they'll find some common ground.”