Professor Richard Wolff debates Republicans

Generic conservatives are so clueless and cringey. The Wolff needs to school more of these guys

why are those two old faggots laughing the whole time? Why invite somebody if you're not even gonna listen to them?

These generic republicans are generally anti-academia and anti-intellectual so they may just think of Wolff as just a cooky old man. But they seemed fairly respectful throughout the podcast and I think they were nervously laughing cause The Wolf was completely demolishing them.

why do we want to save this world? let it burn.

This is incredible to listen to. Wolff has the patience of a saint.

Indeed. I would've gone full "Eat the rich, class war now!" a few times over if I was in his shoes.
He really succeeded at remaining admirably calm and sensible in front of the lighthearted and spooked bullshit they might call banter. He was completely cool, played and blocked their nonsense rather than aggressively combating it.

i liked that richard wolff didn't fall into the trap of labeling himself at the beginning

Wolff Dominated at best all they could squeak out is "De-regulation and Reagan though". He was very good at detaching the emotion to all of it. He really framed it in a way "hey this is just a way to organize ourselves. You want the worker to pay their way and do it their own way right?"

The ending was a little demoralizing though. Wolff had explained exactly how it was possible, examples of it already occurring, and why corporations are not going to switch to a co-op model overnight, especially in light of how much the owning class stand to lose. And yet, the same incredibly trite "it just doesn't work" "sure sounds real nice" republican capitalist apologism was trotted out with seemingly no acknowledgement of being confronted with direct counter evidence and reasoning to their worldview. I guess I shouldn't expect anything different given the sheer illiteracy and retarded american outlook of the two hosts but even in a best case scenario like this, with someone as affable and convincing as Wolff, these two morons learned precisely fuckall. Maybe it will gnaw at them later, I guess that's the best we can hope for.

You just know these guys have like 3 divorces under their belts and tiny dicks that don't work good no more

I'm at the dry mouth ad right now. This is really boomer the show. I'm hoping it'll gnaw at them or at least make them more sympathetic to "why those damn kids are into communism".

One of the guys pulled an okay joke about Wolff hitting Hegal on the nose. As far as generic conservatives go they did a good job interviewing. If this was say Hannity or Alex jones you know they would be asking crazy shit like "Why do you want to make eating babies legal?"

Really hard to listen to after a while, it felt like everything Wolff said went in one ear and out the other

Well he was educated at the Harvard economics department in the 70s, so he must have a high tolerance for bullshit.

This was pretty good, I wish he talked about workers keeping more of the value they produce.
I would also really like someone to take these people to task about how the current tax structure forces people to invest in the stock market as the only reasonable thing to store your long term savings.

I mean they wrote on their website that he was a Marxist, they had to see that right?

Conservatives annoy me so fucking much. They think in such simplistic terms. There's something that enrages me so much about how they say the word "government"

yeah, I honestly don't know why so many people ITT are getting that annoyed. these people are extremely well-mannered for conservativs

I was just reading this thread and I had to check the dubs.
But seriously, what caught my attention was literally at the very end when they were doing their silly parting shots, especially about their comments on upside. They have a very simplistic notion about how businesses operate in general, particularly concerning how people get paid, and conveniently omit most of the important details concerning business strategy and levels of investment. Their comments on upside revealed the most to me, since it showed me their particular attitudes towards how they think people get motivated to start businesses.
Upside is a jargon term for the potential profitability for a business, and the boomers in question operate on the naive assumption that the reason anyone starts a business is because they wish to risk a shitton for a potential growth to where only the sky is the limit. That is upside. Theoretically, your upside is unlimited, because you have anyone and everyone you can potentially sell to, which is unlimited.

The problem with assuming there's a potential for unlimited upside is that you never know how big your market will really be, particularly if you are the founder of a startup with some as-yet-unproven technology. In fact, once your company gets big enough, everything you do will cost money, even shitty little reorganizations of offices to large strategic pivots, not to mention bills and daily operational costs. Sooner or later, the startup founder will realize that his growth potential is really quite small, and he will have to court the influences of larger companies or even local politicians for his sources of growth, and thus only end up a mid-sized business instead of the next Google as he wanted to be. And then you will end up like this guy here:
desplainesvalleynews.com/hoist-liftruck-quits-bedford-park-for-indiana-blames-business-climate-p2449-90.htm
Read the comments especially. Assholes like these are plenty, where they want muh upside at the expense of the rest of the state.
The real reason anyone wants to be a business owner is the relative independence it gives you, whether you realize you hate your old job and want to start fresh, or if you want to become just another silk-shirt-gold-chain wearing, chest-hair-showing, power-tripping asshole who gets to be the one being the dick.
One of the other hidden reasons why the state should provide for worker coops is, besides efficiency, is that it provides for a tighter business security climate; there is less room for those business owners (read:wannabe mobsters) to form those kinds of empires that allow for people to be pushed around in the first place, and removes business owners from being those types of assholes because they realize now that they can't be such dicks anymore to people around them businesswise.

shit sorry forgot to make my point.

The point is, regardless even of the business's larger growth potential, responsible business owners who look out after their own capital know the various vagaries of the world and market and hedge their bets all the time. Day-traders do that whenever they sell covered calls on the stock they are holding; they deliberately are holding stock because they think it will rise in price, but also hedge this bet against a slight drop; this means they limit their total upside on that stock purchase. The idea that any real business owner who stays in business does so because of some imagined unlimited upside is ludicrous.