In their debate Sunday night, Ben Shapiro and Cenk Uygur clashed on the use of money in politics. It was just another in a series of verbal beat-downs Shapiro executed throughout the evening.
Uygur opined that the 2008 economic crash occurred because of the banks’ use of financial derivatives, which he termed “gambling.” He added that banks bought politicians with “our money,” bemoaning the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. He slammed corporations for “using our money.”
Shapiro eviscerated that argument:
As far as the idea that all money should be taken out of politics, here’s the problem. TYT, I, we both have corporations and we expound upon politics every single day. And we motivate thousands of people, every single day, on both sides of the political aisle. That is, effectively, an in-kind contribution. Now you campaigned with Bernie Sanders. Did you do it because you supported Bernie Sanders or did you do that because you expected some “gimme” for TYT in return? I assume you did it because you supported Bernie Sanders, right?
So the point that I am making is to attribute to everyone else bad intent when it comes to political spending in politics but to yourself it’s totally fine, but when it comes to other media entities that give in-kind contributions on a regular basis in their coverage, this is — when The New York Times, which is biased to the Left, spends an inordinate amount of time and money reporting on Mitt Romney’s idiotic stories about how he was in high school and cutting a gay kid’s hair in 1932, (laughter), if you’re saying to me that that is less impactful on the political sphere than a corporation, which is a group, giving money to a political candidate for purposes of supporting that candidate, I fail to see how you can say, for yourself, that you are innocent in this but everyone else is guilty. I don’t believe it. Either everyone is guilty or everyone is innocent, or, if you can find the actual cases of guilt where there’s a quid pro quo, than we can agree, that’s prosecutable.
Other point: when you talked about the 2008 economy, you talked about Glass-Steagall, and how this led to the crash, the real reason that the crash happened had far less to do with Glass-Steagall, I opposed the bail-outs, by the way, it had far less to do with Glass-Steagall than it had to do with the fact that the federal government was actively promulgating the notion that corporations should give sub-prime mortgages to people who were not qualified as people who should take out loans. This meant, that as you say, corporations are not inherently conservative; they are not inherently free-market; they are inherently profit-driven. So if they felt that they could give a bunch of sub-prime mortgages and this would inflate the real-estate prices, and if things went wrong they would just foreclose on the nearest house, and the market just keeps going up and up and up, and they can, as you say, turn these into derivatives and sell them on the open market, by pretending that these are all good loans, because they have government backing, then of course you’re going to get an inflated, overheated real estate market.
But the question there is not the workings of the free market, it’s the combination that you like in a mixed economy, that I hate. I hate mixed economies in the sense that I don’t believe that capitalism and socialism should be mixed, that corporatism is the solution. What you’re talking about is corporatism; you’re talking about getting rid of Glass Steagall. It freed the corporations to invest in a free market manner, but also they gave a bail-out to all of these corporations by essentially incentivizing them to give a bunch of bad loans knowing that if things went bad, then all the losses would be socialized. The problem there is not the free market; the problem is a government that is acting as a backstop for bad decisions in the free-market by profit-driven corporations.
Video below: