What Happens when Companies Are Bigger than Countries?

0:00 This is a business, or it was.

0:03 Now it’s one small part of a massive operation that spans the globe.

0:08 The business has factories in China and India, design offices in California,

0:14 sells its products in every continent but Antarctica,

0:18 and…it has a dozen employees in Ireland.

0:22 And that is a problem.

0:24 Because here, in Ireland, is where the business somehow pays most of its taxes,

0:29 where it owes a a tiny percentage of its corporate profits.

0:33 The business is Apple.

0:35 The business is Microsoft.

0:38 The business is Google, Johnson and Johnson, Pfizer, and Coca-Cola.

0:43 (K) The business *is* the modern multi-national corporation,

0:47 and every year *this* costs the world half a trillion dollars,

0:52 that instead of going to the countries and communities that these companies are

0:56 built on, go straight into the pockets

0:59 of the world’s already fabulously wealthy.

1:01 (L) And it’s all possible because, look at it,

1:05 this financial Frankenstein is bigger than any country.

1:09 It spans the globe, and no one country can

1:13 rein the monster in, make it pay its fair share.

1:17 Want them to pay higher taxes?

1:19 Someone else will be happy to take…1%.

1:24 Want them to pay their workers a decent wage?

1:28 Someone else will let them do slavery.

1:30 Want them to stop dumping cancer in the rivers?

1:33 Someone else will take the bribes and look the other way.

1:38 Because even though it would be in all these countries’ interests to put a stop

1:43 to this, it’s in each individual country’s

1:46 interest to take whatever deal they can get.

1:50 *This* is the world in 2026.

1:52 But what if I told you this wasn’t a new problem?

1:56 What if I told you you could replace all these countries with American states:

2:01 coal mines in West Virginia, steel mills in Pennsylvania,

2:07 offices in New Jersey, and railroads nationwide?

2:10 And what if I told you the men who owned these businesses paid no taxes,

2:16 abused their workers without punishment, and dumped pollution into the rivers,

2:21 because no one state could stop them?

2:23 *This* is America in 1900.

2:26 The national corporation was just invented,

2:29 and individual states—where almost all

2:32 politics happened—were left helplessly scrambling,

2:35 until one man came along with a new

2:40 vision for America’s future: Teddy Roosevelt.

2:44 His idea was simple: make politics national.

2:48 Make the government bigger than the corporation again.

2:53 Once you see it, it seems so obvious!

2:56 But back in Teddy’s day, this was a revolutionary idea.

3:00 For decades, politicians had promised

3:02 industrialization would make everyone richer,

3:05 despite the widespread suffering deepening every day.

3:07 Or they clamored for a return to the past:

3:11 a breakup of big business and a return to localized economies.

3:16 Nobody was thinking nationally.

3:18 Today, we face the same problem, with the same stupid politicians.

3:23 Globalism was supposed to make us all rich,

3:26 but so far it seems to have made an elect few insanely wealthy,

3:31 while gutting good jobs across the country.

3:33 And the only solution on offer,

3:35 whether from Trump or Bernie seems to be to just…abandon globalism.

3:41 But imagine Arkansas trying to just…opt out of the national economy.

3:47 Nobody is thinking internationally.

3:50 Teddy gave us the blueprint 100 years ago.

3:53 In his own words, “In a rich and complex industrial society…corporations become

3:58 so very big that the ordinary individual is utterly dwarfed beside them,

4:05 and cannot deal with them on terms of equality.

4:08 It therefore becomes necessary for these ordinary individuals to combine

4:13 [and] to act in their collective capacity through…the Government.” (M, ch.

4:20 XIII) In other words,

4:22 we must make the government bigger than the corporation again.

4:27 But of course, that’s easier said than done.

4:30 So, this is the story of how Teddy made it happen,

4:34 and how we can do the same thing again today.

4:37 And while this story is about one vital parallel between

4:40 our own time and the corrupt Gilded Age of the late 1800s,

4:44 there are a ton of other similarities.

4:47 Mr.

4:47 Beat: You might even say the 2020s *are* the 1890s!

4:50 Philip: Oh hey Mr.

4:52 Beat!

4:52 That’s right, and if you want to learn more

4:55 about that, check out *his* video that just came out!

4:58 Mr.

4:59 Beat: *After* this video!

5:01 Stay tuned, because you’ll be hearing from me again in a few minutes!

5:09 Our story starts in the 1860s with the railroads.

5:19 Trains offered the chance to unify America’s fragmented local economies,

5:24 and whoever owned the rails could make it big.

5:27 So everybody and their uncle jumped in on the craze.

5:31 Soon, America was home to 45,000 miles of track.

5:34 (A) But there was a problem.

5:37 Every single community had its own local rail startup

5:40 and its own rules and regulations, if it had any.

5:44 The result was hundreds, if not thousands of companies all across

5:48 the country building tracks with basically no coordination.

5:52 Different rail widths required different trains,

5:54 while precious few lines actually connected between different states.

5:59 In turn, by the 1870s, the startups began failing…fast.

6:04 Rail bankruptcies swept the nation, as the investment craze met with harsh

6:09 reality and took the nation’s economy with it.

6:11 (A) But one rich coal mine owner named James J.

6:15 Hill had an idea.

6:17 The issue was fragmentation.

6:19 His solution was the opposite: consolidation.

6:23 Railroad companies just had to get…bigger.

6:28 So, Hill snapped up a small failing Minnesota line for pennies in 1878.

6:32 Within a few years, he snapped up another failed line, then another,

6:37 all the while building out as much rail as he possibly could.

6:41 By the middle of the 1880s,

6:43 he had his eyes set on buying out his largest competitor: Northwest Pacific.

6:48 (B) If successful, this merger would mean, in Roosevelt’s words,

6:52 “control of practically the entire railway

6:55 system in the Northwest—possibly as the first

6:58 step toward controlling the entire railway system of the country.” (M, ch.

7:03 XII) Luckily for Hill though, Roosevelt wasn’t president just yet,

7:07 and the government was still on Hill’s side…for now.

7:12 We’re about to see the birth of the monopoly:

7:14 businesses so big that they basically control entire industries.

7:17 This is a story we’ve wanted to tell for a long time,

7:21 so before we go any further,

7:23 I want to thank AnyDesk for making this video possible

7:26 and tell you a little bit about what they do.

7:28 If you’ve ever been somewhere away from home

7:31 and been sidelined by the sinking feeling

7:33 that you forgot to do something on your computer

7:35 or left a crucial file on your desktop, then AnyDesk is for you.

7:40 It's a free remote desktop software that allows you to connect to and use

7:44 any of your devices from any other device from anywhere in the world.

7:49 Whether you’re at a cafe, at the office,

7:52 or globetrotting thousands of miles away,

7:54 AnyDesk lets you control your computer back

7:57 home from your laptop or even your phone.

8:00 Even on slower internet, AnyDesk’s proprietary codec technology will give

8:04 you minimal latency and consistent, crisp visuals.

8:07 AnyDesk also has lightning fast remote file transfer,

8:11 allowing you to grab pictures and documents off any device,

8:15 from anywhere, using any other device, without relying on cloud services.

8:20 Best of all, AnyDesk is totally free for personal use.

8:23 Whether I need to access my computer back home while traveling,

8:27 grab forgotten files, or just stream my desktop to the TV while

8:31 I play games with the boys, I use AnyDesk.

8:34 It’s a great service, and it’s honestly amazing that it’s free for personal use.

8:39 Don't wait until you wish you had

8:44 it—visit anydesk.com/spectacles to download AnyDesk for free today.

8:49 That’s anydesk.com/spectacles.

8:51 Thank you, AnyDesk.

8:53 Now, back to 1880.

8:55 So Hill has a scheme to take over the entire rail industry

8:59 of the American northwest and maybe the rest of the country too.

9:04 If successful, he’d single-handedly command

9:06 a vital trade connection to the Pacific

9:08 and be able to set exorbitant rates for the freight that needed his rails.

9:13 His monopoly would be bad for consumers and deadly to competitive business.

9:17 And Hill wasn’t alone.

9:19 Monopolies were spreading all over the place,

9:22 springing up in practically every industry:

9:24 in coal, steel, and oil, even tobacco and sugar.

9:29 These were companies that owned 90,

9:32 sometimes even 100% of entire industries in vital goods that everyone needed.

9:36 (M, ch.

9:37 XII) So why did the government let all this consolidation happen?

9:42 Well, they actually tried to stop it, but there were problems.

9:46 First, the states were practically helpless.

9:49 These massive companies were just bigger than any one of them,

9:52 and if threatened with penalties or high taxes,

9:55 there were always other states willing to undercut each other for a dollar.

9:59 New Jersey, for example, amended its constitution in 1875 so

10:03 that corporations could register in the state without

10:06 paying basically *any* taxes on revenue

10:08 in the state where they actually operated (C, 680-681).

10:12 Sound familiar?

10:13 I hope so.

10:14 And then, even when important states *did* try to do something,

10:18 they got blocked by the Supreme Court.

10:22 Because big railroads crossed state lines, the Court ruled that states really

10:27 couldn’t regulate their behavior, block mergers, or stop price-gouging,

10:32 because the Constitution clearly tasks the federal

10:35 government with regulating “interstate commerce.” (M, ch.

10:37 XII) But here’s the kicker.

10:39 When the federal government passed a bill

10:41 to rein in monopolies—the Sherman Antitrust

10:44 Act—the Supreme Court said it couldn’t apply

10:47 to Hill’s company and others like it.

10:50 Because Hill and his business partners, including J.P.

10:53 Morgan, these guys were clever.

10:55 Instead of just buying up other rail lines and forming

10:59 one big company that could be targeted by the Sherman Act,

11:02 Hill went around to all the companies he

11:05 wanted to buy and offered to exchange stocks.

11:07 Hill gave them some stock in his rail company,

11:10 and in exchange he took all the stocks in the other company.

11:14 In the process, he gained control of the businesses,

11:17 but they technically remained separate companies.

11:20 (M, ch.

11:20 XII) This structure,

11:22 called the “national trust,” put the business in a legal grey area,

11:27 and The Supreme Court said it didn’t constitute interstate commerce,

11:32 meaning the federal government wasn’t allowed to regulate it,

11:35 even if the trust controlled 100% of a nationwide industry!

11:39 So not only were the states helpless in the face of these massive corporations,

11:45 the one body who *could* do anything about it now wasn’t *allowed* to!

11:51 It was a catastrophe for American democracy—no matter who the people elected,

11:55 at any level of government,

11:57 they were completely blocked from having their voices heard.

12:01 This was a *crisis*.

12:03 It was so bad I can’t even explain it, so I’ll phone a friend to help me out.

12:09 Mr.

12:09 Beat: Hello?

12:10 Mr.

12:10 Beat speaking.

12:11 Philip: Mr.

12:12 Beat!

12:12 Got a minute?

12:14 I need YouTube’s favorite American history teacher to help explain the 1890s.

12:19 Mr.

12:19 Beat: I’m so glad you *trust* me to get this right.

12:23 Philip: Oh, trust!

12:25 [chuckle] Alright, well let’s start here.

12:29 Tell us about these monopolies.

12:31 Were these big businesses good for consumers?

12:34 Mr.

12:35 Beat: So yeah, by the 1890s you had

12:37 these big monopolies where basically one giant corporation was

12:40 dominating a market and the way they were

12:43 able to get so big was because rapid industrialization.

12:46 The national economy was all tied together now thanks to railroads.

12:49 And so it was easier for companies to make

12:52 a lot of money using both horizontal integration,

12:55 which just means one company's buying out the competition,

12:58 or vertical integration, which means one company owns the entire supply chain.

13:01 Am I right?

13:02 A lot of price gouging going on.

13:04 That's where we started to see ridiculously high prices.

13:07 Big businesses were certainly not good for consumers.

13:11 Philip: What about for the workers who kept these big monopolies going?

13:16 Mr.

13:16 Beat: Oh, the workers.

13:17 Oh, man.

13:18 This made it easier for the workers to get exploited.

13:21 In the 1890s, factory workers faced long hours,

13:24 low wages, freaking dangerous conditions.

13:26 This led to massive strikes like the Homestead strike or the Pullman strike.

13:31 big uprisings where you had violent confrontations.

13:34 Philip: So what did all this horrible stuff do to American politics?

13:40 Mr.

13:40 Beat: Well, in response to these horrible

13:43 working conditions and these monopolies,

13:44 you did have a legit populist movement that sprung up.

13:48 You had farmers that were frustrated

13:50 with railroad and bank monopolies in the country.

13:53 And then in the cities, you had workers frustrated with industrial monopolies.

13:56 and they all joined forces to form what we call the populist party or people's

14:01 party which was one of the most

14:03 successful third party movements in American history.

14:05 The populists were interesting because they called

14:08 for things like making the wealthy pay more taxes,

14:11 getting off the gold standard,

14:12 which is kind of hard to relate to today, but you know,

14:15 a bunch of other big reforms that ended up becoming part of the progressive era.

14:19 Philip: You know, this is starting to sound pretty familiar.

14:23 Mr.

14:23 Beat: Unfortunately, you’re right!

14:25 That’s why I made a whole video

14:27 about the similarities between the 1890s and 2020s.

14:32 Philip: Well, that sounds like a great video.

14:34 We’ll send our viewers your way after this.

14:37 And Mr.

14:38 Beat, this whole 1890s situation isn’t going to end well, is it?

14:44 Mr.

14:44 Beat: Not at first, but eventually it turns out okay.

14:48 Philip: Okay, thanks for stopping by.

14:51 And he’s right.

14:52 It didn’t end well, at first.

14:55 On September 6, 1901,

14:57 an anarchist shot and killed President William McKinley at the World’s Fair.

15:02 This was America at rock bottom.

15:05 The killer hoped to spark a revolution.

15:08 Instead, he just helped make the one man president who

15:11 had the vision to see America through this crisis peacefully:

15:17 McKinley’s Vice President, Teddy Roosevelt.

15:32 We know a lot about Teddy.

15:34 His personality?

15:36 Larger than life.

15:39 His imperialism?

15:41 Reprehensible.

15:43 (N) His conservationism?

15:46 Truly admirable.

15:49 Less is known, believe it or not, about Roosevelt’s most important achievement:

15:54 how he managed this crisis of American democracy.

15:58 So I dug into his autobiography and speeches to get a sense of his perspective.

16:03 The problem he saw was that, in his words,

16:06 “The power of the mighty industrial overlords

16:10 of the country had increased with giant strides,

16:14 while the methods of controlling them, or checking abuses by them,

16:17 on the part of the people, through the Government,

16:20 remained archaic and therefore practically impotent.” (M, ch.

16:24 XII) Roosevelt got the problem:

16:26 these corporations had grown more powerful than their governments.

16:30 But he didn’t want to go back, either:

16:33 “It is practically impossible…and undesirable to try to break up

16:38 all [big businesses] merely because they are large and successful,

16:42 and to put the business of the country back

16:45 into the middle of the eighteenth century.” (M, ch.

16:47 XV) Times had changed.

16:49 The Industrial Revolution had transformed America,

16:52 and in some ways for the better.

16:55 Railroads connecting the country boosted economic growth.

16:57 Coal mining and steelmaking built more homes and kept them warmer.

17:02 The future held promise, *if* it could be harnessed for the good of the public,

17:08 rather than the good of the few.

17:10 Roosevelt attacked the problem with his typical energy.

17:13 Remember the Sherman Antitrust Act,

17:15 the bill to rein in monopolies that the Supreme Court shot down?

17:19 Roosevelt wasn’t intent on taking no for an answer,

17:22 so as soon as he took office, he sued to break up James J.

17:26 Hill’s northwest rail monopoly and, hopefully,

17:28 overturn the Supreme Court’s decision.

17:30 (M, ch.

17:31 XII) It had only been six years since the Court gutted the Sherman Act,

17:35 but things were so bad in America—horrific working conditions,

17:40 massive inequality, widespread unrest,

17:43 an anarchist assassinating the President—that the Court

17:47 saw the writing on the wall.

17:50 They had to comply.

17:52 So the Court gave way to Roosevelt.

17:54 They ruled the federal government could break up big trusts and monopolies,

17:59 and Hill’s rail trust was shattered.

18:01 Now, the Federal Government truly had the power

18:05 to navigate a way out of America’s crisis.

18:08 Roosevelt didn’t relent.

18:09 He continued to sue and sue and sue,

18:13 using the Sherman Act to break up the country’s biggest

18:17 and baddest monopolies that each controlled 90-plus-percent of their industries,

18:23 like American Tobacco, John D.

18:25 Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, and others.

18:27 (M, ch.

18:28 XII) Yet Roosevelt’s mission wasn’t just to break up businesses.

18:32 His promise to the American people was the “Square Deal”—

18:36 a series of policies that would make America fair again,

18:40 competitive and innovative yet decent and egalitarian.

18:45 (O) This is why he established the US

18:48 Forest Service and expanded the National Parks:

18:51 to prevent a wealthy few from destroying America’s shared wilderness.

18:55 It’s why he established the Food and Drug administration:

18:58 to prevent a wealthy few from poisoning the American public.

19:01 And it’s why he created the Department of Commerce and Labor:

19:05 to prevent a wealthy few from gouging rail prices,

19:09 busting up unions, and abusing workers.

19:12 (P) In Teddy's own words,

19:14 “Our country- this great Republic- means nothing unless

19:18 it means the triumph of a real democracy,

19:22 the triumph of popular government, and, in the long run,

19:26 of an economic system under which each

19:28 man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show

19:31 the best that there is in him.” (Q)

19:34 Roosevelt’s visionary square deal was the product of crisis.

19:39 In fact, I think it’s the result

19:41 of a pattern of politics that we still see today.

19:44 So I just want to recap how Teddy got there real quick,

19:48 because I think it will help us understand our own time.

19:52 In the 1860s, the industrial revolution and railroads

19:55 promised to knit together the nation’s disparate economies.

19:59 But localized politics and businesses weren’t capable of meeting the moment,

20:06 and economic dysfunction and disaster followed in the 1870s.

20:10 Innovation, then dysfunction.

20:12 Then, those with resources like James J.

20:15 Hill saw a chance to consolidate control of industries.

20:19 By the 1880s, businesses like his had gone national, forming trust companies.

20:26 Meanwhile, politics was still local, leaving the government behind the ball:

20:31 stuck in old ways built around the old economy.

20:37 Innovation, dysfunction, then consolidation.

20:40 By the 1890s, the rich were getting richer, the American people were hurting,

20:46 and democracy itself was threatened,

20:48 as the people had no real means to correct course.

20:52 By the turn of the century, crisis fully arrived, politics went crazy,

20:57 and a President was shot in an effort to spark revolution.

21:04 Innovation, dysfunction, consolidation, then crisis.

21:08 As deep as the crisis was, though, the problem was essentially simple.

21:14 Corporations had gotten bigger than the government.

21:17 Fixing it required clarity and courage,

21:20 and luckily Teddy Roosevelt was the man for the job.

21:23 He broke up some massive monopolies but more importantly

21:27 he moved economic regulation up to the national sphere,

21:31 matching the new scale of the country’s businesses.

21:35 He made the government bigger than the corporation again,

21:40 preserving innovation and growth while putting the people back in charge.

21:45 His policies were neither perfect nor seen through to their fullest conclusion,

21:50 but they made a lot of people’s lives a lot

21:53 better and restored some faith in the political system,

21:57 staving off immediate crisis and collapse.

22:00 So that’s the cycle: innovation,

22:04 dysfunction, consolidation, crisis, and hopefully resolution.

22:08 But where are we in that cycle today?

22:13 Teddy’s story began in 1860, but ours begins in 1960.

22:17 After two world wars and a lot of improved ship and air transport technologies,

22:23 the world was ready to trade more than ever before.

22:27 But the world wasn’t ready for multinational corporations.

22:30 You see, to avoid another Great Depression,

22:33 the United States and most other countries had agreed to restrict

22:37 how much money their citizens could move across international borders.

22:40 On the one hand, that was good.

22:42 It meant that corporations stayed national,

22:44 where voters could keep them in check (E, 556-557).

22:47 But these rules kept the global economy fragmented and just as in the 1870s,

22:53 this spelled trouble.

22:54 By the 1970s, dysfunction followed innovation,

22:58 as the global economy, unable to keep up,

23:02 went haywire with an energy crisis, high inflation, and slow growth.

23:06 In turn, the governments of the world decided to try

23:09 to remove the fragmentation by letting go of the controls:

23:13 allowing money to flow across borders

23:16 and knit the world’s disparate national economies together.

23:19 Big businesses and the wealthy were best positioned to seize this opportunity,

23:23 and they quickly did so.

23:25 Private investment in manufacturing in low-income countries exploded.

23:28 So too, did a new type of financial arrangement,

23:32 whereby small countries slashed their corporate taxes.

23:34 And, through clever shell companies,

23:37 multinationals began parking their profits there.

23:40 By the late 1980s, Ireland was quickly becoming one such popular destination.

23:45 (G) So by the 1990s, dysfunction had given way to consolidation,

23:50 and the winning multinational corporations looked a whole

23:53 lot like the national trusts of the 1890s,

23:57 with no one capable of keeping them in check.

24:00 Then, between 1990 and 2006,

24:02 the number of multinationals doubled, from 30,000 to 60,000 (F).

24:07 Now, like industrialization, globalization hasn’t been without benefits.

24:11 During this period, global poverty has seen the largest drop in human history.

24:16 Medical advances have been enormous.

24:18 And digital communications have allowed the world’s

24:20 brightest minds to collaborate like never before.

24:23 Still, these multinationals were abusing workers

24:26 just like the industrialist of the 1890s:

24:29 excessive hours, child labor, unsafe working conditions, even slavery.

24:35 In fact, all of that is *still* business as usual

24:38 at the mines and factories that these companies are built on.

24:42 At the same time, this move toward overseas industry has also

24:46 annihilated huge swathes of jobs back in these companies’ home countries.

24:50 In turn, we’re seeing the same sorts of crisis

24:53 unfold as happened at the turn of the century.

24:57 Globalization ensured that the 2008 American

24:59 housing crisis sank the whole world economy.

25:03 Deindustrialization and rapid wealth consolidation has

25:05 led to a new wave of populism.

25:08 Political violence is surging.

25:10 Governments are struggling from holes

25:13 in their budgets created by multinationals’ tax avoidance.

25:17 In the 1890s and today, national and then multinational corporations have

25:21 been able to leverage their enormity

25:24 to get their way over the heads of average citizens like you and me.

25:29 This isn’t just ethically wrong.

25:31 It threatens the very foundations of social and political harmony.

25:35 People do not like feeling disenfranchised

25:37 and left out of the political process.

25:40 They *will* take action to make a change.

25:42 But those actions—whether assassinating

25:44 presidents or supporting incompetent populists—can

25:47 be as dangerous as the problem they’re attempting to solve.

25:53 Innovation, dysfunction, consolidation, crisis.

25:57 We are in the crisis stage.

26:02 And just as nobody was thinking nationally

26:05 when states fell behind the national trust, nobody is thinking internationally,

26:11 as countries fall further behind multinational corporations.

26:15 Trump, in both terms, has made a lot of noise about

26:19 fixing globalization’s failures and bringing manufacturing back home.

26:22 In his first term, he passed a tax law that did put

26:26 a stop to American companies using *one*

26:28 of Ireland's most obvious tax evasion tricks.

26:31 But it also left plenty of loopholes open and created a few new ones too.

26:36 And in this term, he’s mostly relied on tariffs.

26:39 Not only do his policies and tariffs simply not work— we actually *lost*

26:44 jobs in manufacturing and construction in 2025—

26:48 this whole nationalist mentality is simply archaic.

26:52 Again, imagine Arkansas opting out of the industrialized

26:57 national economy and returning to local agrarianism.

27:00 I mean, okay!

27:01 If you want to be really poor and probably

27:05 taken over by somebody else in 50 years.

27:07 No, as Teddy Roosevelt understood,

27:09 going back to a prior era is neither possible nor really desirable.

27:15 Globalization and multinationals are not inherently *bad*.

27:19 Reductions in global poverty and extraordinary

27:22 technological innovations are proof of this.

27:25 This imbalance isn’t solved by breaking up big

27:28 businesses and restoring the power of smaller government entities.

27:32 Instead, the solution is to empower governments at the level that can

27:37 best regulate corporations in the public

27:39 interest and facilitate competitive— not consolidated— business.

27:43 In Teddy’s day, that meant a new nationalism.

27:47 In his words, “The New Nationalism puts

27:50 the national need before sectional or personal advantage.

27:53 It is impatient of the utter confusion that results from local

27:58 legislatures attempting to treat national issues as local issues.” (Q) Today,

28:03 though, it means internationalism.

28:05 It means we must be impatient of the confusion that results

28:10 from nations attempting to treat global issues as domestic issues.

28:14 And thankfully, over the last ten years,

28:17 many countries have actually agreed to a global minimum corporate tax.

28:21 The problem is way bigger than taxes, but it’s a starting point.

28:24 If every country shared such a tax,

28:27 it would prevent companies from playing countries against each other,

28:31 bring some money back to the people who make all that private wealth possible,

28:35 and give them some power to hold the powerful to account.

28:38 Yet, many countries,

28:40 including the United States and—shocker—the worst-offending tax havens,

28:45 have critically undermined this agreement

28:48 by demanding carveouts for—you guessed it—American multinationals,

28:52 which remain the most powerful, and worst, offenders in the system.

28:57 Cooperation is hard, because there’s a lot of money behind keeping us divided,

29:04 and because for many, internationalism is a scary idea.

29:09 People understandably fear being dwarfed by new,

29:13 bigger forms of political association.

29:15 But this is nothing new.

29:18 In the American Revolution, many feared banding the colonies together

29:22 but the reality was simple: JOIN OR DIE.

29:26 And in Teddy’s day his “nationalism” was denounced by many who feared a loss

29:31 of local power would mean a loss of their own individual power in politics.

29:35 But by 1900, Roosevelt’s response was simple.

29:39 “What local power?” National corporations had already dwarfed them.

29:44 Nationalizing politics actually made each voter more powerful.

29:49 And today it’s the same.

29:51 Those who fear internationalism claim it will

29:53 violate sacred “national sovereignty.” But I ask,

29:57 “what national sovereignty?” Today corporations

30:00 are running rough-shod over nations, just as they did over states in 1900.

30:06 Either we bind together to act in our common interest which knows no borders,

30:10 or we simply fall further behind:

30:13 victims of old prejudice who would rather live in fear,

30:17 letting some lines on maps define the horizons

30:20 of our future than seek to change them and free ourselves.

30:25 Obviously, that’s easier said than done.

30:28 And obviously, this is a YouTube video, not a detailed program for how

30:33 to establish functioning international legislative institutions.

30:36 We don’t have all the answers, but there are no answers in fear.

30:44 As Teddy said, “In facing the future…we

30:47 should be neither timid pessimists nor foolish

30:51 optimists…Grave perils are yet to be encountered…There

30:54 is every reason why we should recognize them,

30:57 but there is no reason why we should

30:59 fear them or doubt our capacity to overcome them,

31:02 if only each will, according to the measure of his ability, do his full duty,

31:07 and endeavor so to live as to deserve the high praise

31:12 of being called a good American citizen.” (R) Or perhaps today,

31:18 a good global citizen.

31:23 Hey, Both: thanks for watching.

31:25 Matt: And if you enjoyed that great video,

31:29 consider helping them tell more stories that matter

31:32 to democracy by joining their Patreon or grabbing some merch.

31:37 Philip: And don’t forget to check out Mr.

31:39 Beat’s new video, on the many other similarities

31:41 between the Gilded Age 1890s and the 2020s.

31:44 It’s a great video and a really important comparison.

31:48 Matt: And if you stop by, leave a comment to let me know Spectacles sent you.