Democracy Is Faltering. Business Must Help Strengthen It.

0:28This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. in tank top styles and even a dress. Now in new fun summer colors, Flow Eye brings a racerback shape to streamline styles you can wear anywhere. Our buttery soft Nulu fabric feels nearly weightless with sweat wicking four-way stretch for comfort you'll want to keep on after practice. Flow freely, on and off the mat with light support and refined design. Shop Flow Eye now at lululemon.com. Things are pretty bad. Democracy's in trouble. I hear more and more people saying, well, maybe what China is doing isn't so bad. What's so great about democracy?

1:06There's an increasing perception that elites run the show. A lot of people think that their vote doesn't matter. And all this talk about democracy is just talk. And that's really scary. So why do we need democracy? So in healthy societies you typically have a balance between business and the free market, a strong well-run government and a strong civil society, often supported by unions or organised labour but some way of giving ordinary people a voice. And those three hold themselves in check supported by free media and free courts. And one way to think about it is everyone is busy watching everyone else so nobody gets too powerful, and you're kind of working it out.

1:52You're always in this balance between how much public goods, how much government, how much business. You're always having that conversation. And one way to understand our current moment is that government has been systematically downgraded and despised. Civil society has been systematically fragmented. There is hardly any voice for labor or voice for ordinary people now, so business is by far the strongest voice in the room.

2:23I think some people have a fantasy that you could just do away with government. That market could completely self-regulate and we'd be good. It really is not going to happen. Completely uncontrolled markets are very, very dangerous. Let's take inequality. Capitalism generates inequality. If you're a capitalist, inequality is a feature, not a bug. You work hard, you get rich. That's excellent. But past a certain point when you get so much richer than everyone else and everyone at the beginning, at the bottom, can no longer play, that threatens the foundations of our society. If we don't have a government that can deal with those issues in a way that is fair and transparent, what we will get, what we are getting, is a push for populism.

3:10When it begins, a push for populism is a sort of listen to me, respond to me, make it work. There's nothing wrong in a sense with a populist impulse, but uncontrolled populism leads to autocracy. I don't care if they're Mother Teresa or the Dalai Lama. You give anyone that much power without checks and balances, and what you get is tyranny. What you get is a move away from democracy and an attack on the rule of law. We've seen this movie before and it doesn't end well.

3:47So sometimes people say to me, well, yeah, you know, I don't really care about free speech and autocratic regimes. They're much more efficient. Mussolini made the trains run on time. You know, I know the tyrant. He's not going to bug me. OK, why should you care about this as a business person? First, if you're friends with a tyrant now, you might not be in five or ten or twenty years. Under an extractive regime, it's all about making money for the people at the top and their friends and relatives. And if you're not a friend and relative, you can't play. Suppose you're a small entrepreneur. Try getting a license to start a new business.

4:23It gets harder and harder to start a business without paying people off. When you have autocracies running things, your skill as a business person puts a target on your back. I have a friend in one of the East European countries who's built a small business. And he's incredibly proud of it. And I asked him recently, I said, you know, Peter, not his real name, I said, Peter, how's it going? He said, we're going really well. But I can't make my business bigger. If I do, they will take it from me. That's what happens when the democracy goes.

4:58I think business has both an economic interest and a civic duty to fix the system. How might this happen, you're probably thinking. Give your employees time off to vote. Or another concrete thing you can do as a business person right now is stop talking about government as always and everywhere the problem. Start acknowledging that we need strong government. Absolutely, government has to be transparent and responsive, but the idea that we could just live without government is just a fantasy. Business uncontrolled is just as dangerous as government uncontrolled. and it's just as dangerous to business.

5:38If you as a capitalist care about prosperity and freedom, you should care about a democracy. Once I was trying to explain to a group of students why democracy was so important, and a student came down to me and he said, but Rebecca, isn't government tyranny? I said, well, if you don't vote for it, it is.

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