Capitalism: A Debate Between Reason and Jacobin, 11/3, NYC

We've moved to a new venue because demand was so high! Buy tickets ($10) now!

Eventbrite

I'm very happy to announce a new, bigger venue for this debate between editors for the left-wing magazine Jacobin and Katherine Mangu-Ward and me.

Details below. Buy tickets now! (The last time, we sold out in mere hours! All tickets from previous sale will be honored at this venue).

Is capitalism the best way to improve standards of living, ensure political and economic freedom, and provide opportunity? Could socialism do better?

A debate between Reason and Jacobin magazine

Moderated by Michelle Goldberg, columnist for The New York Times

Featuring
Nick Gillespie and Katherine Mangu-Ward (for Reason)
Vivek Chibber and Bhaskar Sunkara (for Jacobin)

The debate will be held at Cooper Union's historic Great Hall,which has since 1858 hosted critically important debates and political speeches from Abraham Lincoln, to Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stantion,to Ralph Nader, to Bolivian President Evo Morales and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

Reason is the libertarian magazine of "Free Minds and Free Markets"

Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture.

Tickets on sale here.

About our speakers

Michelle Goldberg is an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, and the author of several books including "Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism," "The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World."

Nick Gillespie is editor in chief of Reason.com and Reason TV, the online platforms of Reason.

Katherine Mangu-Ward is editor in chief of Reason and a Future Tense Fellow at New America.

Vivek Chibber is a professor of sociology at New York University and the co-editor of Catalyst. His latest book is "Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital".

Bhaskar Sunkara is the founding editor of Jacobin.

Comments

[Tony]

Isn't Jacobin what the literate Bernie bros read?

[Citizen X - #6]

The illiterate ones read Mother Jones.

[Scarecrow Repair & Chippering]

What does Tony "read"? He sure doesn't read Reason for the pictures.

[Tony]

The tattoos on your mom's undertits.

[Chipper Morning, Mean Girl]

"Your mom" jokes from a gay dude are particularly disturbing. I think it is because you know he is not deriving any pleasure from the act, and in fact finds it repulsive, and thus his only motivation is to hurt you.

[Citizen X - #6]

In that, he takes after his mom.

[Domestic Dissident]

Mostly he reads the shitty blog that his wife Robin writes in his name.

[CooterBrown]

Mother Jones once had an extremely flattering article on Justin Amash.

[Mickey Rat]

There are followers of that rampant ignoramus that are literate?

[MarkLastname]

Employing a liberal definition of the word 'literate?'

[Hello Clarice]

I would like to request some of my own debate rules to spice up the conversation:
-Reason doesn't get to invoke Apple or Google as their go-to successes
-Jacobin doesn't get to use inequality or racism as counter points.

Let the battle for our economic souls begin!

[Citizen X - #6]

So you'd like to see a debate where the debaters are just shuffling index cards and glaring at each other?

[Hello Clarice]

I'm glad somebody gets it.

[Citizen X - #6]

They'd have to be real master-debaters to pull that one off.

[Libertarian]

That pun is so bad it sounds like something I would say.

[Chipper Morning, Mean Girl]

You know who else displayed some amazing master-debating while glaring?

[Citizen X - #6]

Harvey Weinstein?

[GILMORE?]

Jacobin doesn't get to use inequality or racism as counter points.blockquote>

They absolutely should. because socialist regimes have been some of the most racist and unequal on earth.

cuba is ~50% black, and the socialist regime kept blacks out of both the tourism sector (the only area in which money could be made by sycophants to the regime), as well as any govt postitions.

when even the NYT won't cover for you, you've got problems

[ChipToBeSquare]

I hear the Khmer Rouge fought for social justice* and that Che Guevara had very progressive views on race and homosexuality

*No joke, one of the former leaders said that about a year and a half ago

[GILMORE?]

Che Guevara had very progressive views on race and homosexuality

if by "progressive", you mean.... force people into slave-camps for re-education? yes, indeed.

[ChipToBeSquare]

Just looking at the names for Jacobin, they're going to call out the race of their opponents within 5 minutes

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

Buy tickets ($10) now!

Looks like the Capitalists have already won the first round.

[Fist of Etiquette]

How ironic.

[Chipper Morning, Mean Girl]

Not technically. Capitalism us about capital. Unless Gillespie uses the money to fund a leather jacket factory, it doesn't count.

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

Vivek Chibber is a professor of sociology at New York University and the co-editor of Catalyst. His latest book is "Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital".

A professor of sociology as a Marxist? This barely computes.

[Chipper Morning, Mean Girl]

I once dated a sociologist. It is now a deal breaker for me, like being a smoker or being into politics.

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

Bhaskar Sunkara

"largely the product of a younger generation not quite as tied to the Cold War paradigms that sustained the old leftist intellectual milieus like Dissent or New Politics."[3]

Clearly...

[MarkLastname]

The Nazis should use that excuse. "We're not like the old Nazis; we're not tied to old WW2 paradigms that sustained the old Nazis. We're a totes different kind of Nazi."

[End Child Unemployment]

Will anyone survive this? would you really trust a NYT opinion columnist to give a fair shake to Reason?

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

The fact that Reason was allowed in the building is the fair shake.

[Cy]

Apparently you never went the the parties in high school where they invited certain people as the unwitting entertainment.

Let the misquotes begin!

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

I don't remember the unwitting entertainment, so that probably means I was the unwitting entertainment.

[BestUsedCarSales]

Maybe you're like me, and you straight up weren't invited at all?

[Citizen X - #6]

Nice try, BUCS, but everybody knows that you're basically Queeblo.

[IceTrey]

I think I went to the most boring high school ever.

[Citizen X - #6]

Yeah, nobody at my high school was going to such lengths to pick on anybody. Of course, that was mostly because all the former middle school bullies discovered marijuana about a month into 9th grade and chilled the fuck out.

[Tony]

There were dickholes in the class ahead of us and the class behind us, but my class was peculiarly chill.

[IceTrey]

In other words is the government defending liberty or violating liberty better.

[Fist of Etiquette]

At one point we all agreed that "free market" was better. But here we are, back to using the pejorative "capitalism" for all to ridicule.

[Sevo]

"Could socialism do better?"

Given that there is more space than matter in most objects, it is theoretically possible to pass your hand through the side of a building.
Similarly, it is possible that socialism could do better.

[Libertarian]

It's 2017
This issue was decided, at a minimum, 100 years ago, not only in words and argument, but with real world examples. How can this even be debatable? As the short man said in the Princess Bride, it's inconceivable!

[IceTrey]

Apparently some people LIKE to be told how to live.

[Chipper Morning, Mean Girl]

They are called bottoms.

[Mickey Rat]

Lovely people who work for a magazine that names itself for the group that authored The Terror.

[Brandybuck]

"For a magazine that calls itself Jacobin..."

Drink!

[ChipToBeSquare]

Hardly the only group of mass murderers that they idolize

[Domestic Dissident]

A "debate" between Gillespie and Jacobin is basically just a rehash of Clinton vs. Sanders.

[Robert Arvanitis]

Debate rubric for fee markets:
1. Level set - freer (not perfect!) markets transmit information best. USSR, without markets, made too many size 18 boots, never enough size 8 shoes.
2, Level set - Claude Shannon applied equations of thermodynamics to information theory. We extend that to information from markets. When government distorts markets, there is a loss of allocative knowledge. Set one price e.g. for shoes, and there is total information loss. Set ranges, and there is marginal proportional loss. THAT loss counts as much as dollars spent, in cost/benefit calculations.
3. HOW much of GDP should government dictate? (A: Anything over 28% total, federal, state, local, mandates, regulations, all-in, is unsustainable.).
4. Currently, government arrogates 25% federal, 15% s/l, another 17% medical, plus 9% further regulatory. FAIL.
Anything Jacobin says that does not address core questions is mere distraction.

[ChipToBeSquare]

You could literally just pose the economic calculation problem to them and then stay quiet the remainder of the debate and you'd have a convincing victory. But I bet Gillespie blows it

[Lily Bulero]

Give it to them good and hard, Reason.

[MarkLastname]

With Michelle Goldberg moderating? May as well drop the fig leaf of neutrality and let one of the Jacobins moderate