MINUTES OF THE FLOOR MEETING OF

THE YALE POLITICAL UNION

21^st APRIL 2009

The Floor Meeting of the Yale Political Union held on Tuesday 21^st April 2009 was called to order at 8:40 p.m. in SSS 114 with the Speaker, Mr. Adam Hirst, presiding.

The Chairs and Chairmen announce the current happenings of their respective parties. Among these announcements, The Chair of the Party of the Left, Mr. Adam Stempel, announces that his party debated “Resolved: Ban Smoking” last night. Mr. Dick Morris asks if the Chair of the Party of the Left will yield to a question: “smoking what?” [The body laughs a great deal.]

The Speaker informs those present, especially pre-frosh, that if we have any questions about the format of the debate or how to ask questions, we should speak to the Floor Leaders.

The President, Mr. David Manners-Weber, welcomes us to the Yale Political Union. He extends an especially warm welcome to the pre-frosh here tonight. He advises them to come to Yale. To those of us who are here for the first time, the President explains who we are and what we do. We are nearing our 75^th Anniversary this fall and serve as the center of debate on campus. True to the British parliamentary system, we pound tables to express support and hiss to make known our disagreement. Heated disagreements on the floor often turn to fast friendship over pizza. The President sees that he has no love from the Party of the Right after making this statement. In the President's time in the Union, Justice Antonin Scalia, Governor Howard Dean, Senator Rick Santorum, and many other illustrious guests have come to the YPU. The President recalls the debate with Justice Scalia his freshman year. He was able to attend the dinner with Justice Scalia and found the evening an incredible experience. The questions that we ask are not softball questions, such as questions about the basketball court that is in fact at the top of the Supreme Court. They are questions about the issues. Sophie Brill, a senior who was going to law school, had to rebut a Supreme Court Justice at the debate that the President recalls. She gave a good speech and then had to take questions. Justice Scalia had some questions for Miss Brill. He started grilling her on her legal arguments. The President has never seen an organization that has the kind of confidence in its members that the Yale Political Union does. The YPU believes that we can speak, that we have principles, and that we should express them. The President encourages us to join the YPU in the fall once we have decided to come to Yale.

Dick Morris rose to national prominence as a close adviser to Bill Clinton. In 1978, Mr. Morris helped to mastermind Bill Clinton's retaking of the Arkansas governorship after Clinton was defeated at the end of his first term. Following the Democrats' crushing defeat in the 1994 "Republican Revolution," President Clinton began to secretly consult with Mr. Morris, known only as "Charlie." Faced with looming defeat in the 1996 presidential election, Mr. Morris encouraged President Clinton to adopt a strategy of triangulation and politically popular “third-way” policies that helped position the President for his successful reelection. As George Stephanopoulos said of Mr. Morris, "Over the course of the first nine months of 1995, no single person had more power over the President." Since leaving the Clinton White House, Mr. Morris has shifted to the right and has become a vocal critic of the Clintons. He writes a weekly syndicated column, appears regularly on Fox News, and has written six New York Times best-sellers.

In January, President Barack Obama saw his $787 billion economic recovery plan pass the House without a single Republican vote. In April, Congress approved the President's $3.5 trillion budget. His Treasury Secretary has been using bailout funding to try to stabilize the financial industry, with plans for new financial regulations for the banking sector. On April 15th, President Obama spoke of laying a new foundation for the American economy, arguing that a reinvention of health care, energy, and education is necessary to help ward off another economic collapse: "If we don't lay this new foundation now, it won't be long before we're right back where we are today." Is President Obama moving the country dangerously far from the free market principles that have brought this nation unparalleled liberty and prosperity? Or is President Obama simply trying to curb capitalism's worst excesses and so save it from itself, as FDR did with his New Deal? Or should we be looking to move away from a more capitalist economy and towards a more welfarist or socialized one?

Mr. Dick Morris noticed that there was no metal detector outside or a rotten fruit detector. He hopes that he will not get hit tonight. Someone in the middle might not like him on general principles. Many of us are thinking of coming to Yale, and even though Mr. Morris went to Columbia, he would like to share a great argument for coming to Yale. His close high school friend got accepted by Cornell and Harvard. Cornell offered him money, so he went there. Mr. Morris gave him a copy of his rejection letter from Harvard. He copied it and adapted it to be a rejection letter directed to Harvard explaining that he went to Cornell.

Many people think that President Obama wants to end the recession, wants to stabilize the banking community, wants to fix climate change, and wants to reform the regulatory system. Mr. Morris thinks that President Obama wants to increase government spending. He uses the stimulus package as an excuse to do so. Mr. Morris thinks that President Obama wants a regulator to make the decision as to who should have CAT scans, MRI's, and bypass surgery, and he uses 47 million uninsured as an excuse to do so. “Good thing none of you have a lisp,” Mr. Morris says in response to hissing from the Left. Mr. Morris thinks that President Obama wants to take over the banks of the United States because he believes that the government can do a better job of capital application than the private sector can, and he is using the need for funds as an excuse to do so. President Obama is not a William Ayers or a Reverend Wright, but he is a European socialist. There is a wonderful book that Mr. Morris hates called The European Dream by a man whom Mr. Morris hates called Jeremy Rifkin. He writes that it is the alternative to the American Dream. It is a fair and reasonable assessment of the different priorities of the European socialist. The European socialist emphasizes wider distribution of wealth rather than growth of wealth. He emphasizes the need to have a rational application of resources rather than entrepreneurial spirit. He believes that we need collective action of the nations and opposes unilateral actions by any one nation, except when 250,000 people are being killed by genocide in Bosnia and the United Nations is too paralyzed to act. President Clinton bombed Serbia and ended the genocide, and then they did not mind too much. There was no outcry for Rwanda. There, they wanted collective action and would have blasted the United States if we had sent in troops to save lives. Mr. Morris believes that there is in fact climate change happening and that it is man-made. He believes that within a few years, we will all be using electric cars, the internal combustion engine will be a thing of the past, and the high price of oil and gasoline on the market will be enough to prevent the carbon footprint from growing. Those who advocate cap-and-trade want a redistribution of wealth from richer to poorer countries and use global warming as an excuse to achieve this.

Mr. Morris believes that in President Obama, we have someone who has a very different system of priorities and values from those which have traditionally animated the United States. We have always read about the quintiles of our population. A study was done in 1980 where researchers identified people in the bottom 20% and 20 years later interviewed the sample. Only 17% of those who were in the bottom 20% were still there 20 years later. 15% had made it to the top 20%. The other 70% were in the second, third, and fourth quintiles. It is true that the bottom 20% make very little profit and that the top move up disproportionately, but this study shows that it is a different bottom 20% at different times. It is new people coming in legally and illegally who are the new bottom 20%. The old bottom 20% move up and up as per the American Dream. The fundamental defect of socialism, from the time that Karl Marx first invented it, is that it does not concern itself with the creation of wealth. The fundamental defect of capitalism, since it was first articulated by Adam Smith, is that it does not concern itself with the distribution of wealth. You need both. You cannot distribute it if it is not there, and if you do not distribute it, it becomes a self-defeating process. Trickle-down is a ridiculous notion. What Mr. Morris calls “irrigation” is not. President Clinton made welfare recipients work. He expanded the earned income tax credit, eligibility for Medicaid and food stamps, housing subsidies, transportation, and day care, so that when you went to work, you did not lose those subsidies. This fundamentally conservative bill, welfare reform, which was opposed by liberals, lowered child poverty by one-third in the United States of America.

That concept of animating growth and animating distribution is crucial. Mr. Morris used to work for hours at a time in the Oval Office with President Clinton. President Clinton would submit a huge budget to Congress, would negotiate every deal with it. Republicans asked to cut capital gains taxes from 28% to 20%. Mrs. Clinton opposed it, but President Clinton did it. There was such a surge of growth in revenue that the budget was balanced in 18 months. We have all heard that President Bush cut taxes on rich people. In 2001, when he took office, the top 1% paid 32% of the taxes in this country. On the day he left office, they paid 41% of the taxes, even though they had had a tax cut. The top 1% of the country paid 48% more in taxes adjusted for inflation at the end of the Bush administration than at the beginning, because it was of a bigger number. If you seriously want to tackle poverty and lower it, and President Clinton did so more than anyone since FDR and LBJ, you should understand that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” We should irrigate, although perhaps President Kennedy did not use that metaphor.

Now, we have a President who does not focus on wealth creation. He penalizes wealth creation. In President Clinton's time, a family that made $10,000 on welfare a year could get a job for $13,000 a year but would lose benefits. The Clinton administration changed it so that such a family would make money by working, not lose it. Now, our President tells a family who makes $160,000 a year combined and are considering a promotion to make $200,000 a year that they cannot. Their taxes will go up, and they will make less money for working harder, so they do not take the promotion. Rich people and poor people both know which way is up. If you offer them incentives, they will move in and exploit those beautifully.

The abuses of capitalism in the last two or three years are horrific. We should understand where they came from. In 1996, when Mr. Morris was in Washington, the Democrats came to Clinton and said that they needed to expand home ownership among the poor. President Clinton agreed. Fannie Mae should lend to everyone, they said. President Clinton set a requirement that 50% of loans had to go to poor people. President Clinton waived down payments on houses, lent part of the interest rate on the mortgages, and gave money. His actions resulted in a situation in which the house that was worth $100,000 would have a $135,000 mortgage on it. In three years, the house would be worth $150,000. But when the economy stagnated, this became a problem. The capitalists wanted to participate in this program. President Bush did not regulate them. The bankers decided that they would carve up these mortgages into little thin slivers which were basically good mortgages, just a few cancer cells in each one, and then sell them on Wall Street. Bankers went to AIG, who gave them an insurance policy, and a bank in Singapore. By the time finished, they were leveraging this garbage 30 to 1 or 40 to 1. That greed and misallocation of resources happened because a Republican administration would not regulate and because a Democratic administration insisted on making sure that everyone owned a home whether he could afford it or not.

This is a problem, but the solution to it is not to eliminate capitalism. It is to stop investors and bankers from acting like idiots. That is called regulation, and we need it. If we did not regulate an incinerator, it would become a forest fire. If we did not regulate a nuclear power plant, it would become a bomb. If we do not regulate capitalism, it becomes the mess in which we are today. But you do not eliminate it; you regulate it.

However, that distinction is lost on President Obama. He is very smart, but he simply mixes up means and ends. Because he is ultimately more committed to redistribution of wealth, he is willing to accept a sharp attenuation in the growth of wealth. He says that we have had forty years of growth, forty years of concentration of wealth, and that it is time to give up some of that growth to distribute wealth more fairly. The defect of that is that Europe can accept a stagnant economy. Europe has a decreasing population. But in the United States, where we have 4 to 5 million new Americans coming in every year, those people need a growing economy, and the rest of us need it to keep our society moving up. Since 1980, 80% of the new jobs created in the industrialized world were in the United States. 10% were in Britain, and 10% were in all of Europe and Japan combined, because they undercut capitalism for redistribution. They forsake growth for “fairness.” They have a system dedicated to giving everyone a piece of it and nobody too much of it. Ultimately, they run out of it entirely. It is important that we defeat President Obama's move towards socialism.

The Floor Leader of the Left, Miss Naomi Lisan, asks: if much of the current financial crisis is due to too much government interference from Democrats and not enough from Republicans, why are certain banks in pretty good shape while several others have collapsed miserably?

Mr. Morris replies that there is not much discrepancy between the “good” banks and the “bad” banks. We are dealing largely with paper transactions. None of them is healthy enough to really act as a bank and make loans. What is going on is that the banks want to give the money back. Goldman Sachs wants to show up with a $40 billion check and hand it to the Treasury. Even stupid AIG is working on selling off its assets. Why? Because if they keep that money, they cannot pay themselves $10 million a year. They wanted to get out from under government regulation, but the Treasury cannot take their money. President Obama wants to nationalize the banks and cannot do it. The proof is that yesterday, he announced that he was going to switch preferred shares into common shares. That means that instead of you getting the dividends but not voting, you do not get the dividends and do vote. The top 500 banks and financial institutions will have the government holding 51% of their shares.

Mr. Trevor Wagener, the Former Floor Leader of the Right, asks if the problem with the U.S. economy is that we have become a services economy.

Mr. Morris replies that the United States produces 24% of the world's manufactures. This figure was the same in 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2009. The value of manufactured goods produced by the American economy has grown by 50% in the last ten years, but the labor force dedicated to manufacturing has dropped from 18% to 11%. Soon, one robot will do everything. Politicians are not protecting American workers but robots.

Mr. Noah Kazis believes that in Northern Europe, the economy grows as fast as it does in America. How does Mr. Morris respond to this?

Mr. Morris replies that we are dealing with very small populations there. If we include Germany in Nothern Europe, Mr. Kazis is wrong. The German economy grows an average of 1% a year. Our economy grows an average of 3-4% per year. The current growth rate last year was even between the two because of Germany's surge of exports to the Untied States. Sweden has grown because they have cut back their taxes. Norway has grown because they discovered oil. There is a woman here from Finland who could perhaps tell us why it has grown a lot, but Finland has 5 million people. The euro zone as a whole in 2008 had a positive growth of less than 1%, and the United States had a positive growth of over 3% adjusted for inflation. They do not create jobs in Europe because they cannot fire anybody. If you choose to work more than 35 hours a week, you can be fined for it. It is a crime.

The Chairman of the Party of the Right, Miss Nicola Karras, asks Mr. Morris if, if this debate were happening 15 years ago, he would argue in the affirmative of the topic “Resolved: Save Capitalism from President Clinton.”

Mr. Morris replies that if he did so, President Clinton would fire him, for one. He would like to leave us with one thought on President Clinton: he was a damn good President from the neck up.

The Speaker encourages the parents in the room, this being Bulldog Days, to bang and hiss more.

Mr. Bradley Pough wants to talk to us about the American Dream, the idea that with enough hard work, anyone can participate in our economy and eventually find success, that capitalism, the great liberator, can save us from poverty as long as we play by the rules, that our only limitation is our own work ethic, and that if we work hard, our children, will live better. There has never been a better-sold lie in all of American history. We espouse globalization as we ship jobs to countries with no work standards. The American worker cries out for justice. Mr. Pough does not know what Mr. Morris wants us to save. The word “capitalism” has morphed into a grotesque caricature of its former self. Bankers buy and sell air, profit off debt that was not theirs, and treat lines of credit like gold. There is no capital in the system. It grew legs and walked out along with human manufacturing and the means of production. We have deluded ourselves as we shoved people into houses they could not afford and told them that they were living the American dream. Now, we have a President who wants to make amends, who wants to inject equality into the system. Poverty, in all of its ugly forms, cannot be remedied by capitalism. The American billionaire builds his empire on the backs of the lower class. If this is the capitalism that Mr. Morris wants us to save, perhaps it is time that we let it die. This excess and this culture of risk are dangerous. Capitalism is not what needs to be saved tonight. It is the American dream that is at risk of dying. It is only available to a select few, and if we continue on our current path, we might lose it all. If we have to bail out state governments so that they do not close schools, so be it. If we have to establish a fair system of health care, that is what we have to do. We have deluded ourselves for far too long. We should not save capitalism from President Obama; we should help him save the American Dream.

Mr. Dick Morris has to ask a question of the audience. How many of us who have parents who either did not go to college or who could not have gone to a college as good as Yale? Mr. Morris sees many hands raised in the room. He asks Mr. Pough to comment on the alleged lack of upward mobility in the United States in light of the number of hands raised.

Mr. Pough replies that the people in this room have done a lot of work to get to Yale, but just because a couple hundred people in this room have achieved upward mobility does not mean that everyone has done it. Mr. Pough comes from central Florida, where there are families who have been in disgusting poverty for generations.

Miss Brooke Willig wonders how Mr. Pough responds to the assertion that the American Dream is fundamentally based upon a capitalist society.

Mr. Pough replies that if the American Dream is that everyone has equal access to this capitalist society, that is not what we have right now. Not everyone can achieve at the same level because not everyone can get the same kind of education and health care. If the American Dream means equal access to the economy, that is not what we have.

The gentleman hears a lot of proposals from Mr. Pough about what we should do, but he never hears an actual solution. [The Secretary does not hear the rest of the gentleman's question.]

Mr. Pough feels that regulating capitalism is what President Obama is trying to do. If we are going to quibble over what kind of regulation, that is a different question. Mr. Morris and President Obama are both advocating regulating. Mr. Morris has given specifics; President Obama has not. The bailout money that President Obama is giving to these banks has requirements that come along with it. If you are going to spend this money, you must do so wisely. That is regulation. Mr. Morris wants regulation, but Mr. Pough does not know what regulation he wants.

Mr. Jake McGuire introduces himself to those not present. He has a speech prepared but will leave it on his chair. Mr. Pough had the most pessimistic possible conception of the American Dream and what it has done for this country. Mr. McGuire will argue with Mr. Pough's definition, which is that the American Dream is equal access to the capitalist system. That is not Mr. McGuire's American Dream or that of most. The American Dream was born of a people who survived the Depression and World War II. They came home, worked hard, and had families. They had something they could call their own for the first time. People like to make fun of suburbs, but the idea of living in them was so significant compared to what came before. The idea of being an individual in control of your own life is the American Dream. It has nothing to do with equality. Mr. McGuire wishes to make one observation, which is the change in quality of life for the poorest 5% of Americans over the past 50 or 100 years. John Stossel is a philistine. He investigated what people living below the poverty line actually live like. Some of these people have homes, many have cars, and most have color TV's. Most are not hurting for food. Compare that to the poorest 5% in 1900, when we still had child labor, or after WWII and the Depression, when people would actually starve. These gains were not achieved through a redistributionist socialist system. Johnson's Great Society did not do half as much for the poor in this country as the Reagan Revolution did simply by making more wealth. Mr. Morris said at dinner that he is a redistributionist, but he wants to make the pie bigger. President Obama is making the pie smaller. We should not be making anyone's slice bigger, but if we choose between policies which make the pie bigger and which make the pie smaller, the choice is obvious. Mr. Pough's moral justification for his system of economics is need. That is perverse. These policies do not help the needy. They create more need. LBJ's Great Society created more needy. Instead of giving people jobs and a piece of the American Dream, we shoveled them into cheap housing developments where we could forget about them. We did not care about the more human aspects of their well-being. We cared entirely about Marxist, material need and not spiritual and human needs.

Mr. Dick Morris says that when LBJ took office, 18% of America lived in poverty. When he left, 15% did. When Nixon took office, 15% did. When he left, 14% did. When Clinton took office, 13.5% were in poverty. When he left, 10% did. That is a consistent change of progress that flies in the face of Mr. McGuire's characterization and also Mr. Pough's.

Mr. McGuire believes that we changed the definition of what it meant to be impoverished. Some people became less poor, but we did not do anything systematically to change the system in this country.

The gentleman says that we have talked a lot about regulating capitalism or instituting new policy. He asks, what are specific bills that President Obama and Congress are passing that kill capitalism?

All constraints of parliamentary procedure aside, Mr. Morris replies to the gentleman's question. Mr. Morris says that President Obama is saying that you cannot make more than $200,000 a year. As your income goes up, you will be paying two-thirds to the government. Those policies are directly anti-growth, whereas regulatory policies are regulation that does not impede growth. By changing the fundamental incentive to work, President Obama is discouraging economic growth. Under the Obama administration, there will probably not be one single quarter in which we grow more than one percent a year.

Mr. McGuire gives his reply to the gentleman's question: “um, yeah, what he said.”

The Speaker explains how questioning works to the pre-frosh present.

The gentleman responds to the idea that the American Dream consists of the idea of calling something one's own. Is it intrinsically wrong or right to try to make this dream available to more Americans?

Mr. McGuire believes that we can have a mentality that we can try to go about doing it, but specifics are very difficult. The Bush administration put homes in the hands of Americans who could not afford them. The Bush administration tried to expand home ownership and ultimately worsened the situation for many people.

The gentleman responds to Mr. McGuire's point about suburbs. He wonders how that point contradicts what Mr. Pough had to say, since real estate in the suburbs was only available to white people.

Mr. McGuire gets upset when people say that the American Dream is a lie. We can do things that help people. To throw the baby out with the bathwater is foolish. We should not compare European socialism to socialism in the United States. They are founded on two completely different sets of premises. He simply says that it has done a lot of good for a lot of people. It has been unjust, but we should move forward and do good for people instead of throwing out the system because of certain flaws.

Mr. Dominick Lawton rises to the podium and knocks the banner off the podium. The Speaker assists Mr. Lawton in replacing the banner, and Mr. Lawton thanks the Speaker for bailing him out. Mr. Lawton believes that the affirmative has been far too simplistic. It is far too simplistic to say that we will solve the energy crisis by 2050 through the use of electric cars. What we move away from is not capitalism, and what we move toward is not socialism. We are afraid to move too much in either direction. Our system is mixed. Neither of the approaches that we adopt is very good. This is not a new development. We have had this system for a long time now. President Reagan bailed out Citibank in the 1980's. If we are saving capitalism, it is not good. It is about protecting the people who screw up the economy from responsibility for what they do. We should restructure their firms and practices so that they do not do it again. We can do this through the extreme free-market approach, which is better than what we do now. We do it with Lehman Brothers, but there is an in-between period in which people who had stock in Lehman Brothers lose their financial futures. We should demand that firms structure themselves in the way that we see fit so that they do not do this again.

The gentleman would like to tell an anecdote. His parents came from Cuba in 1961. They came very soon after Fidel Castro came to power. He said that people above a certain income must pay more taxes. Is that not a bit similar to President Obama's idea that if you make more than a quarter of a million dollars, you must make more? Why not lower the minimum limit? How does President Obama's system even deviate from Fidel Castro's system?

Mr. Lawton replies that we have had a graduated income tax in this country for some time now. A move toward more government control of the economy is not inherently evil socialism. President Obama is not suddenly going to decide that the state has to control all of the means of production.

The gentleman asks if companies have a responsibility to understand the consequences of their investments.

Mr. Lawton did not say that companies do not have such a responsibility. He says that people such as his parents, who had their retirement plans and pensions put by their employers in companies like AIG, have suffered. It is not about most people being too stupid. It is a question of there not being adequate information. If you live in a poor neighborhood and get a sub-prime mortgage, you probably do not have very good access to the information that you need.

The gentleman says that we have the most transparent regime in the world. Sarbanes-Oxley requires corporate disclosure of risks and investments. He asks Mr. Lawton to name a country or regime that is more transparent.

Mr. Lawton replies that he is glad to stop the financial crisis before something really bad happens.

Mr. William Wilson says, “Mr. Speaker, if I knew it was going to be like that, I would not have put my hand up.” Mr. Lawton said something very perceptive, that Tim Geithner is a creature of Wall Street. Something else that he said was very naïve and almost refreshingly so: that we the people can somehow control this monster called the federal government. Who is the most powerful group of people in the United States? It is the corporations. They have the money, the ears of Congressmen. They make things work. There has been a lot of talk on this stage about socialism, which originally meant worker ownership of means of production. At some point, that turned into state ownership. Mr. Pough and Mr. Lawton were honest about that. As good liberals, we will believe that the state will be responsive to our concerns. This is crazy. If we actually think that Congressmen care a whit about what we think about financial regulation, we have something come to us, unless some of the parents here work on Wall Street. The key here is to go back to a fellow from the New Left neo-Marxist historiographers. Gabriel Kolko wrote a book called Railroads and Regulation. Like a good neo-Marxist, he investigated how the state brought railroad barons under control. What he discovered, which made him no longer a Marxist, is that the government went out of its way to destroy competition, stabilize the market, and ensure that the top three or four railroads did better than all others.

Mr. Wilson continues by asking: should this surprise us? It should not, because these regulations—and this still happens today—are by and for the people who have power, who are the corporations. Asking the government to regulate the corporations is like asking a chicken to go and regulate a den of foxes. It is crazy and has never worked. We need to eliminate regulation and barriers to entry; we need to allow more people to enter the market. Mr. Wilson is rambling and a little bit drunk, so he will yield to questions.

Miss April Lawson does not think that what Mr. Wilson proposes is particularly practical. America is not willing to accept the consequences of no regulation. “Buyer beware” is not an adequate answer. How would Mr. Wilson suggest that we ensure that products remain acceptable? Would a better model be to put liberals in power who do not have connections to corporations and have lots of regulation?

Mr. Wilson believes that corporations do not donate to liberals or conservatives; they donate to people who have power. “Buyer beware” works very well in new sectors that have not come under regulation yet. Laptops come with a label saying that they will not make airplanes crash. That label is run by electronics manufacturers. It works very well. The regulatory aegis is expanding. The free market is on the verge of death. The solution is probably not going to be electoral.

The Chairman of the Party of the Right, Miss Nicola Karras, asks, on information, if it is not in fact the case that voluntary groups of food manufacturers have more rigorous testing guidelines than the government does. The Speaker replies that he learns something new every day.

Mr. Mason Marshall asks, on information, if it is not in fact the case that the peanut factory from which the recent salmonella outbreak originated was regulated by a voluntary group. The Secretary does not hear the Speaker's ruling on this matter.

The President explains to those present that YPU debates typically wrap up after about two hours, and afterwards, we go to Yorkside and have pizza and milkshakes.

Mr. Morris asks the Speaker if someone has a bottle of something else.

Miss Shaina Wright says that she is quite peeved, as usual. She agrees with Mr. Wilson that the way that regulation has been working is awful. If he is allowed to be so idealistic, she is allowed to be so idealistic as to say “let's fix government regulation.” Regulation is not sufficient to fix the problems in our economy right now. Miss Wright thinks that active stimulus programs and redistributionist packages are necessary to fix our economy. She questions many of Mr. Morris's statistics. She took a class called Inequality in American Democracy last spring. She disagrees with much of the narrative about the mobility that still exists. She wrote a paper about whether the lionization of the Horatio Alger story. She thinks that this story can delude us, but it should remind us of how critical it is that we keep open the channels to opportunity in our society. They have been getting more and more cut off. Miss Wright has three quick points. As Mr. Lawton did, she questions the narrative of our superior American growth. 40% of America's growth over the past decade was exclusively in the financial sector, and a lot more was in real estate. A lot of that has evaporated in the past six months. Secondly, regulation is not sufficient because we have gotten ourselves in a big enough hole. We actually need to make amends for deep problems that have happened in our society. Herbert Hoover said that we should just make sure that mistakes do not happen again. There was a mistake. We need to do something about it, or we are stuck in a big pit. The third point that Miss Wright has has to do with why a lot of Obama's policies are what Mr. Morris calls “irrigation.” No one on earth understands what has been going on with the banks, but Miss Wright wants to talk about general stimulus policies.

Miss Wright continues, saying that President Obama's efforts are irrigation efforts. How could fixing the education system possibly not help economic growth? We should fix our infrastructure. 70% of our roads and bridges are decaying. In order to create a new environmental sector and incentives for that technological innovation, we should provide a stimulus to entrepreneurship, which is not putting a cap on growth. At the rate we are going, we are not going to have health care anymore. For people with health issues, this is a huge damper to American entrepreneurship. You cannot take a risk in your 20's anymore. People cannot take risks, because the only way you can ensure that you will be taken care of is not to take any economic risk. All of this stimulus package is not sacrificing growth but creating real growth for society.

The gentleman asks, if our health care system is so terrible, why do people from Great Britain and Canada come to the United States to get health care?

Miss Wright always loves this dichotomy. Wealthy people in Europe who can afford to do so often come over because we have top-notch facilities. However, for people in America who do not have money for insurance, it does them no good that those facilities exist.

Mr. William Wilson asks, on information, if it is not in fact the case that American health care is expensive not because our facilities are nice but because we do not have tort reform. The Speaker rules that yes, as we decided two weeks ago with Professor Banzhaf, this is in fact the case.

The Chairman of the Tory Party, Mr. Alexander Ramey, thanks the sometime Chairman of the Party of the Right. He loves socialism, and all true Americans really should love it as well. The plane in which socialism exists is the plane of beautiful ideas. Every hungry child eats. Women are liberated. People go to big rock candy mountains on Sunday instead of church. Socialism is a probably a very nice Christian heresy. In this world, the world in which we live, the world of real things and money, which fuses economic existence and spiritual essence, socialism is not quite so beautiful. It is not actually possible to create it on this planet. Part of the greatest fallacy that the negative has been presenting is that President Obama is presenting some alternative to capitalism. What he is actually doing is moving from something real and actual to something insane and bureaucratic. Mr. Ramey has had one paying job in his life and two jobs in the government. If more government jobs were like this, it would be fantastic. His paying job was running a lemonade stand, perhaps the most capitalist of all enterprises. He was not paying taxes. If his sister was selling the lemonade, they could make far more money because she was cuter. If she got tired and angry, he could fire her, because there were no labor regulations. In his other jobs, the experience was far different. He was not creating value, selling things, and making people happy. We should be careful before sending mail to a government agency. If we send it to the wrong agency, they will have to send a referral. There is a complicated computer system which requires a 32-step process. This kind of excess runs throughout the government. One of Mr. Ramey's direct superiors when he worked at the Department of Homeland Security was an economist who had worked for the Department of Agriculture. He worked in Homeland Security because it is impossible to fire people who work in the Department of Agriculture. The principle that we should have here is that when we are choosing between capitalism and President Obama's system, there is no real choice here. There is merely the real world, where things actually have value and things change, and the world of ideas, which is lovely but should stay in the minds of college students.

The President, Mr. David Manners-Weber, responds to the comparison of the ideal of socialism to the realities of capitalism as represented by the lemonade stand. Is this fair? He remembers a movie called Office Space, in which a poor corporate drone had to draw up TPS reports all day. Was that comparison really fair?

Mr. Ramey does believe that the comparison was rather fair. Office Space is a fantastic film and shows some of the great problems of working in the soulless corporate machine. It does not illustrate that those who do not work in the office are out on the street without food and dying. The beauty of capitalism is that it offers you the opportunity to work in a soulless environment, but as the film teaches us, if you become deeply dissatisfied, you can go become a construction worker (although that is guild-run). In this movie, you can get a different job which fulfills you spiritually and economically. The message is that you should use your skills in the capitalist system to the best of your ability.

Mr. Nathaniel Schwalb makes a note on the YPU. We have a pretty good Union right now. There is no reason to dissolve it. But if the Executive Board continues its tax-and-spend policies, the Progressive Party reserves its right to secede. The reason he got such a warm response from that crowd in the back [the Progressive Party] is that he paid them. The reason that capitalism is so great is that when I have the money, I can buy anything I want. Most importantly, money buys you love. Mr. Schwalb advises us to ask DMW what he is doing on Saturday night if we do not believe him, and he blows a kiss to the President. As Americans, it is our duty to hate on socialism. Do we ever stop to ask ourselves why? No, because that is our duty as well. The YPU is filled with a lot of talk but not a lot of action. Many have said that we need to save capitalism, but who will step up to the plate? The League o' Justice. Adam Smith was a black belt in jujitsu, killed two Welshmen with his teeth, and could use an “invisible hand.” Marcellus from Pulp Fiction is really scary. If you woke up in the middle of the night to him whispering “you should consider the way market forces ...” at you, you would switch your economic paradigm. John Maynard Keynes, the most brilliant homosexual economist ever known, will be chief style adviser. Milton Friedman will be the mastermind in the back, like Zordon in the Power Rangers. He finds the way out. Scene 1: Bill Buckley and J.P. Morgan. Morgan gets a call saying capitalism has been kidnapped. Scene 2: they encounter a group of hippies and savagely ripped [raped?] them. Adam Smith spits the bullet back when he is shot. NPR loses 4 listeners, but they never contributed during pledge drives anyway. Scene 3: Wallace will not go any further. He has seen too much death. He is visibly tearing but not actually crying. Keynes says he can sit it out. Scene 4: the League arrives at the White House. The super-villain is an overeducated intellectual who quotes Goethe and then reveals the master-plan. He is not white. Scene 5: capitalism and Jack Bauer make out. Everyone gets bonuses. The end. A quick serious note: Mr. Morris made a lot of good points. One point that was brushed over is that banks are handing back these bonuses for the sake of the bankers, not the banks. We are not necessarily living in capitalism as Mr. Schwalb would like to call it. Firms are so large that they can afford to pay their management without any correlation to the wealth that they are producing. The state will never enforce economic punishments the way a market will, but the market does not seem to be enforcing them either. The resolution is unfair for making us choose between [two things that the Secretary does not record].

Miss Victoria Lewis asks Mr. Schwalb: if Scene 5 is true, could he complete the following comparison? “Capitalism is like a woman because ...”

Mr. Schwalb completes the comparison thus: “Because it's a damn sexy way to spend your time.”

Miss Serrena Iyer recognizes that many of us in the audience are pre-frosh, so she will try to speak directly to them. We are at Yale in this beautiful town called rainy New Haven. Miss Iyer assumes that we worked very hard to get here. We played up our Judaism on our applications. What would we have thought, after all this hard work, if one day the college guidance counselor had said, “my dear young ____, you hvave a 4.0. Sally has a 2.0, but I would like to distribute the wealth in our school. If both have 3.0's, you'll all be equal.” Equality is great; would that not be excellent? Probably not. Miss Iyer hopes that we do not think so. When we are looking at these colleges, we are essentially in a free market. You work to get to these places, and now you have choices. Now you have options. You will make mistakes. You will visit Harvard, you will sit on the Left of the YPU, you will walk into the Asian-American house thinking that it is Chemistry class. Capitalism is amazing in completely objective, unbiased terms. It is the American ideal. It is independence of action and thought. The free market has something to do with freedom. Miss Iyer has gotten the impression that we like freedom. President Obama is against these American ideals. He is fighting capitalism, and in doing so, he is fighting freedom and independence of action. When the enormous stimulus package came out, Miss Iyer's liberal friend said, “Obama is doing such a good job.” President Obama says that paying money into the economy will help us, that holding our hand will help us. Holding people's hands does not stimulate anyone (laughter, oohs, applause). If we try to take away economic independence, it will kill our willingness to work hard to a future goal. What stimulates us is having independence of action and thought to work towards something we deserve. If someone told us in the college process that they would make it all work for us, we would stop working. We would arrive at college not knowing what to do. Eventually, everyone at Yale and Princeton would be stupid and lazy, and we would end up in a country ruled by hippie pot-smoking people. That is Brown. Miss Iyer does not want a death-by-prefrosh, so she will not say that Obama is killing America and its ideals. She will just imply it to us.

The Floor Leader of the Left, Miss Naomi Lisan, applauds Miss Iyer's contention that hard work should be rewarded, but many who rise to the top happened to be born into relatively wealthy families. That does not seem like hard work.

Miss Iyer says that you can be intelligent, but you have to work hard to get somewhere with that intelligence. In Good Will Hunting, the protagonist is in the slums because he does not work hard with his intelligence.

The Floor Leader of the Left follows up on her question by introducing the example of the Kennedy family. What about people who are born into wealthy families?

Miss Iyer recognizes that some people were born into wealthy families, but someone earned that wealth in the first place. If someone told your parents that they have worked hard, what would they say if someone wanted to take it away because it would be better for the kids to work harder? People work hard for the benefits of the family in posterity.

Miss April Lawson, Former President, believes that the previous speech identified what is wrong with the way America relates to capitalism. Capitalism has become part of American culture. Americans should value capitalism because it flows from American ideals. What happens now is that we see capitalism and take capitalist orthodoxy and insert that as our American ideals. America values freedom and opportunity and social mobility. We value hard work as a measure of moral desert. This makes sense in the American way of thinking because one of only things over which you have control in your life is how you work. Miss Iyer is correct about that moral reasoning. Capitalism in some ways fulfills this and in some ways very badly fails. Other American ideals include valuing self-sufficiency and disparate power. One of the best things about capitalism is that it should give us some degree of democracy of the dollar. The problem is that the way the economy functions now, there is enormous concentration of power in large corporations. We should either de-regulate the economy or regulate it heavily. The final reason for which American values should lead us to value capitalism is in the Declaration of Independence: the idea that all men are created equal. We are all equal, and therefore the only way in which it makes sense for us to allocate rewards in life is through hard work. For these reasons, Americans should value capitalism. However there are also a lot of capitalist ideals that we have swallowed that are bad because we see capitalism as a moral system. These include consumerism, the idea that the good life is defined by material things ...

Miss Lawson continues: capitalism has caused us to have a culture where the primary mode of human interaction that we understand is bargaining. This is why marriage is thought to be a contract rather than a relationship and the foundation of a family. It makes self-replication a legitimate end and teaches that we should value leaders, not followers. It damages the idea that those who have been given much have a duty to give much more than anyone else. Capitalism has become the master of American culture, and we must take American culture back from capitalism. The good thing about President Obama's policies is that they are rooted in American identity, understood properly as the root of capitalism.

Mr. Matthew Gerken senses that many thinkers, from Schopenhauer to Tocqueville, saw this progression coming out of “American values” hundreds of years ago. Is the problem, then, not so much that capitalism has usurped American values but that the usurpation of American values is a natural progression from the values themselves? Should we re-evaluate “American values,” particularly equality of opportunity?

Miss Lawson does believe that we should do so. We absolutely value freedom but have taken it way too far. We see individuals' being able to make choices as the defining aspect of their personhood instead of their relationships with other people. Enlightenment thinking and empiricism as a natural philosophy in the West make it hard to sustain a religious society or one that says that there is something that matters more than oneself. It is entirely possible to have a re-evaluation of American values. This will probably come mostly from American conservatism, which will hopefully produce an American way of thinking that does not fall into these traps.

Mr. Dick Morris says that one of the most important things in his personal education was that after going to really good schools, he realized that he could compete in any environment in which he was put, including the White House. He knows that every one of us should be able to say the same thing about ourselves if we have been here. Where is the hissing, he asks? (The Secretary hears applause.) Miss Wright criticized him for a lack of specificity. He will give a list of regulations that he would support and oppose. We should replace the state usury laws and limit credit card interest rates by federal regulation. We should pass the Obama proposal, originally Clinton's, to eliminate private student lending. Anyone here who has a loan from Sallie Mae is a sap. Speculation in commodities should be limited to those who work in the commodity. Oil prices are a good example. Education tax credits should be pegged so that you can always guarantee free attendance at a state university. Everyone should be able to give $100 to any charity he wants and take it off taxes. We now have a debtor's prison in our bankruptcy law. The liability for corporate malfeasance should be restored to the accounting firms that enabled it. Firms like Arthur Anderson should be suable. The deductibility of large massive corporate bonuses on corporate tax returns should be restricted. It should be harder for a company to give away $10 to $20 million in compensation. There should be a requirement that stock is redeemable to a certain amount. Family and medical leave should be extended dramatically. Many people talk about education and the need for education reform. Until we restrict the power of the teachers' union, we will not be able to fix the education problem. We should limit the ability of teachers' unions to restrict education to students. Lobbying registration must be extended dramatically. As for liability, Mr. Morris believes that the trial lawyers who litigate over everything are the bacteria who keep our system clean. He trusts a liability lawyer a lot more than a bureaucrat. The minimum wage should be indexed to the cost of living. When this was proposed in the Clinton administration, Mrs. Clinton defeated it, because she said she needed the issue every year to get the Democratic Party elected. Social Security used to not be indexed. President Nixon changed it so that the Republican Party would not be defeated by the issue. The Republicans were willing to accept indexation, but the Democrats would not. Next, Mr. Morris lists regulations that he is worried that Obama will do, as opposed to the good regulation. One worrisome regulation is instructing banks as to to whom to lend money. In Japan, the Japanese ministry in charge of regulation made a brilliant decision in the 1990's. They said that laptop computers were a the thing of the past and put money into large main-frame computers. American bureaucrats agreed, but we did not have money, so we have laptops and are 20 years ahead of Japan. There should be no restriction on corporate-paid corporate bonuses. They should not be deductible on tax returns but kept in place as a reward for achievements. Legislation giving United States preference is protectionism. Next, Mr. Morris explains the check-off union proposal. If a majority of the workers check off, there is a secret ballot. The issue here is the coercion in the original check-off. Mr. Morris believes that the secret ballot is essential. Trade barriers like those Obama is trying to erect against Colombia and Peru and efforts against NAFTA are a bad idea. We must have free trade and resist Obama's tendency toward protectionism. Labor laws and regulations must not be extended to restrict hours more than just child labor. European legislation that prohibits firing effectively prohibits hiring. In France, when they fire a nanny, they still have to let her live in the house, which leads to an odd ménage à trois. There should be no regulation of the Internet. Mr. Morris believes that he has just defined centrism and sense.

This Floor Meeting of the Yale Political Union is adjourned at 10:40 pm.

Respectfully Submitted,

Gabriel P. Ellsworth

Secretary of the Yale Political Union