Richard D. Wolff - "Our Economic Futures: Can Democracy Cure Capitalism?" - Otterbein University 

Wolff is awesome. I enjoy listening to wolff's talks more than watching Netflix in my free time; odd.

Professor Wolff lectures so effortlessly and honesty. I'm glad he's touring the country to help people understand our status quo and instill in people the power for actual change.

39 minute we have to know a phrase from Karl Marx " the national dept is the wealth that was stolen from the people "

I think every american should see this video. This is truly the perfect mix between social needs, individual needs, and profit needs.

In 2012 the U.S. student loan debt was $1 trillion. Today, a mere two years later, it has risen to $1.2 trillion - an increase of $2 billion. The number of food stamps in the U.S. is 52 million. 20,000 people die every year in the U.S. for want of health care. The EMPLOYMENT rate in the U.S. is 58% which is Depression-level.

Our wealth never depended on second class technology. All our prosperity was due to unprecedented creativity, innovation and inventions. This is the only way we can keep it. If we can revive that level of creativity, by reducing government interventions, we can revive the growth between 1776 and early 1900s.

Democracy is not a cure of anything but it give you space to function.

And I've always known imbalance of power was the problem. Removing that imbalance of power will actually make capitalism infinitely better.

The Social Security Administration now reports 50% of all U.S. jobs pay less than $28,000 gross a year, and 30% all U.S. jobs pay less than $20,000. These are slave wages and starvation wages. And the new jobs created in the last three years pay less! We face a future of endless job destruction and decreasing wage buying power. This is ghastly horror.

Where there is capitalism there shall be; Air pollution, acid rain, toxic landfills, tainted and toxic drinking water, industrial pollutants in our rivers and oceans, toxic or cancer-producing pesticides on the produce we eat, poisons in the fish we eat, unhealthy hormones and antibiotics in meat and dairy products, nuclear waste and accidents, radiation testing by the government on unsuspecting thousands, ozone depletion and global warming-the list of bad news on the environment is seemingly unending.

I wanted to point to another historical period which I havnt heard anyone mention yet. In Athens prior to the formation of the democracy there was a debt crisis. It involved workers taking loans from the landed aristocrats where they could use their freedom as collateral. After a large portion if the pop. Had become slaves there was near revolution. Usury was abolished, land was redistributed and the Athenian democracy was formed. I imagine prior to that time the debt which the polis owed was considered legitimate. This is similar to the modern issue concerning ownership of the means of production. It is possible that we may need to change the way we govern control over how jobs are created and whether a single individual can own something as important as a factory which feed the families of three hundred workers etc.

Economic downturns adversely affect only the middle and lower classes. They never adversely affect the upper class.

And adding to this we can't pick one country that's going to win and the others lose. We need to stabilize capitalism around the world and stop having such short sighted visions.

you mentioned 'inversions' is there a way the people could demand from their governments that global corporations making profits from trading in our country pay the same amount of tax as national businesses. and if they did what would be the reaction of those corporations, I have just joined a newly formed political party in the UK and am trying my best to absorb as much information as possible in order to fight for a better world and I agree with the ideal of co-operatives.

1929 was not the failure of Capitalism. It was the failure of Federal Reserve and fiat currency.

Professor Wolff and I worry about many of the same issues, but we come to our views from rather different historical perspectives. He talks about the failure of "capitalism." I argue that "capitalism" has never existed, at least not the capitalism that (as described by Mortimer J. Adler) is characterized by the widespread ownership of actual capital goods, yielding significant income to all who own capital goods. An actual capitalist society would provide to all the goods (not only material but social and intellectual) of a decent human existence. So, if the system we have is not capitalism, what is it? Our system evolved out of agrarian landlordism, which added on to this basic system of landlordism systems of law that established privilege under law for corporate and financial sectors, both of which are beneficiaries of landlordism to a significant degree. The story was already well-developed when Adam Smith wrote "The Wealth of Nations." Smith identified the major forces at work, none of which have been removed from the systems of law and taxation that are pervasive in the world of the 21st century. The system we live under cannot result in a full employment society, a structure that would not be prone to periodic booms and busts. The reason is that our system of laws and taxation has benefited what Anne Robert Jacques Turgot and the other French Physiocrats identified as a "rentier" elite (i.e., those who are legally able to claim what others produce without producing anything themselves or offering anything in exchange). His description of why wages in the United States tended to be higher in the early decades of the nation is only partly accurate. A far more insightful analysis was provided by Henry George in his book "Our Land and Land Policy" published in the early 1870s, before the frontier actually disappeared under private ownership. The next phase of the boom-to-bust character of "the American System" was detailed by the historian Frederick Lewis Allen in 1931, in the book "Only Yesterday." Both of these authors (and many others) have documented the extent to which our fate has been sealed by a system of law and taxation that encourages "rent-seeking" above the production of goods or the delivery of services. What my own study of history reveals (to me at least) is that the drive to acquire personal wealth without producing, to engage in land speculation as the means, has been in the DNA of every generation of people born in or who have come to America. Where did George Washington's wealth come from? Far less from his plantation than from his lifelong land deals. He was far from alone.

Wages rose between 1820 and 1970 not because U.S. employers were nice guys. The employers were FORCED to raise wages lest they go out of business. There were tenements and poverty in Eastern cities but many of these impoverished immigrants moved farther west to start up farms and ranches, forcing employers to raise wages.

The voting idea is good. Remove the one person at the top of the corporation.

There is a way to indirectly tax unearned (i.e., rent derived) income at the state and federal levels, given the near-impossibility of getting every city, town, township, borough and school district to change their approach to the taxation of real estate. We could complete progressivity with tax simplification. First, exempt all individual incomes up to the national median (e.g., $50,000). Then, beginning with incomes above $50,000 impose an increase rate of taxation on higher ranges of income. There would be no other exemptions or deductions, and no difference in rates imposed on income based on its source. The highest rate of taxation would be established in order to achieve a balanced budget. The rates imposed by the states would be much lower than that of the Federal government (unless, in the interest of federalism, the pattern of revenue sharing was reversed so that states shared revenue with the federal government rather than the reverse).

So the main idea here I think is capitalism needs to take a new breed. The breed that levels off around the world. This constant fluctuation is unnecessary in the global economy. We need to say to ourselves infinite growth is stupid. Let's make a breed of capitalism where things are determined more directly by your output rather than your desires.

Put together the idle machinery and unemployed workers? Put together the homeless, evicted and foreclosed into the empty houses? The upper class doesn't want that so it is not going to happen.

somebody give spartaculus jones a chill pill. Great video though

Co-Operative Capitalism. That's what we should call this man's idea.

That is a ridiculous twist. High wages were the result of simple Capitalist principles of supply and demand. The decline in rise of wages was because starting from Teddy, government strategically started destroying Capitalism with ever increasing government interventions in free markets.

Holyshit, he looks like Bernard Madoff !! They have something in common: Jewish !!

He or She is done by whom. All is done by Kelvin. Most of them believe in God and Buddha.

The Upper Class CAUSES recessions, panics and depressions. Do you really think they are going to allow themselves to suffer from it?

Blame crony Capitalism of big government for stagnant wages.

shrink the public sector , then small business wouldn't pay so much tax

This guy's presentation style is insufferable.

when you have more government workers to pay for , no wonder private sector workers get poorer