Professor Mark Paul joins Emma Vigeland on The Majority Report podcast, diving right into the inspiration for his piece on an Economic Bill of Rights (and his economic work as a whole) in seeing the richest nation in history make its citizens suffer through the 2008 financial crisis, both conceptualizing that wealth and why GDP doesn’t present the full picture of a country’s well being under capitalism. Expanding on this, Professor Paul steps back and examines the difference between the negative rights (freedom from X) outlined in the US Constitution, and the positive rights (freedom TO X) that folks like FDR – and some framers – enumerated, and the central importance of promoting freedom – not just protecting it. After walking Sam and Emma through the role of the Civil Rights Movement in carrying forward FDR’s anti-capitalist torch, and touching on the role of the Federal Reserve in abandoning its responsibility to manage employment, Mark Paul tackles the complimentary prongs of a jobs guarantee and a universal basic income, working together to rebalance the labor market and present a genuine choice in how workers contribute to society. Wrapping up, they parse through the more abstract element of what “freedom” can mean and assess how the US still fails to deliver on its negative freedoms.
