All Episodes
Previous Next
March 10, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
22:43
Ep. 266 - Women March For Something Or Other
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Over the next few days, President Trump is slated to usher a bevy of Republicans into the White House to whine and dine them over Trumpcare, the replacement plan for Obamacare that looks much more like Obamacare lite than like an actual liberty-based reform destined to free Americans from regulatory burden and allow them freedom of choice in a competition-based marketplace.
Undoubtedly, some Republicans, those most in danger of a primary challenge and most fearful of Trumpian vengeance, will cave, but the whole scenario reveals a few basic truths.
First, President Trump is not ideologically driven.
Anyone who thinks Trump is ideologically driven rather than driven by desire for popularity and power should be disappointed by this Trumpcare rollout.
Trump doesn't know what the details are.
He clearly doesn't care very much.
His plan is simple.
Boil down the healthcare choice here to two binary options.
Option one, ram through this deeply flawed bill that minimizes political harm to him by trimming around the edges of Obamacare while fibbing to the base that has been repealed and replaced.
Option two, push the bill as hard as possible, watch it fail, then blame Republicans for presenting him with a flawed plan he pushed like a good soldier, and blame Democrats for blocking much-needed reforms.
Second, nobody knows anything about basic communications.
Trumpcare was rolled out amidst questions about secrecy, just like Obamacare.
It was rushed, just like Obamacare.
And when conservatives objected to its provisions, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Team Trump answered, but it's just part one of a three-part plan.
Question.
Shouldn't you have led with that, you idiots?
If you're going to throw out an unpopular, largely unworkable bill that adds to the debt while continuing to undermine free markets, shouldn't you tell us what the non-crap in the crap sandwich is gonna be?
But no.
Also worth noting, Republicans don't have to do a massive replacement package.
They could simply pass repeal, then pass a series of shorter bills aimed at freeing the healthcare markets.
Daniel Horowitz over at Conservative Review has a pretty good summary of such actions.
Third, congressional Republicans have no spine.
It is no surprise to see congressional Republicans on the verge of being wooed by Trump with bowling and pizza.
Yes, seriously, bowling and pizza.
This allows them to avoid responsibility.
Obamacare, like all other redistribution programs, has a set of specific beneficiaries and diffuse victims.
Which means it's more politically popular than unpopular at this point to keep big swaths of it.
Trumpcare allows Republicans to do this while blaming Trump.
But Republicans elected in 2010 and 2014, they should be wary of the blowback.
You can't keep promising the moon forever and then deliver some moldy cheese as a replacement.
Fourth, Steve Bannon is sitting pretty.
In the White House power game, it's Bannon vs. Priebus.
Priebus is the man allied with Paul Ryan.
He's Ryan's man on the inside, attempting to shape policy by coordinating with Congress.
Bannon is the smash-em-all outsider who couldn't care less about Congress, hates Paul Ryan, and thinks Priebus is a gormless wussy boy.
However, this thing now shakes out.
Bannon is in solid position.
If Trump care keeps getting crushed in the press, that's on Priebus.
If the thing passes and it's unpopular, that's on Priebus.
If it falls apart, that's on Priebus too.
And Bannon can point to Priebus and whisper in Trump's ear that if he'd only followed his instincts, all would have been well.
Well played, Steve Bannon.
Well played.
Republicans lost the healthcare argument because they aren't willing to fight.
Republicans essentially acknowledge, by embracing main aspects of Obamacare, the leftist argument that the government ought to be involved in ensuring that everyone obtains health insurance or healthcare.
That's crap, as I've explained before.
A market-based system that recognizes free choice and individual responsibility for health decisions, and that incentivizes lower costs and higher supply through preservation of a demand structure, will not only work better, it will represent a commitment to liberty spelled out in the Constitution.
But it's always easier to declare something a right than to be provided by government than to declare a right to be free from government.
As always, Republicans have seeded this critical battlefield.
Trumpcare looks bad for conservatives.
It isn't a major improvement from Obamacare.
It represents retreat from central conservative principles.
It won't make Republicans more popular.
But it does show how cowardice and lack of principle result in horrible policy.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
So I come back from Legoland and Disneyland with my wife and my daughter and my son, and you've ruined everything.
You've ruined everything.
Okay, that's not really true.
There's some good stuff that's happening in the Trump administration, and then there's this healthcare rollout, which is a bit of a disaster, and there's the Women's March, the day without a woman, which, shockingly, was not a day without women.
Women were everywhere in the press.
They were wearing red, and lefty women were being bothersome, but we'll get to all of that in just a second.
We have to say thank you to our sponsors over at Legacy Box.
So, one of the things that I care about most in life is family memories, which is why I do things like go on vacation with my wife in the middle of the week.
And because I care about family memories so much, I've always been a big advocate of making sure that you've protected your photos and your old videos.
All those memories, they can disappear so easily, because you don't remember everything that's happened in your life.
But Legacy Box ensures that all that stack of old tapes that you've never watched before, all those old pictures that are just moldering out in the garage, All of that can be preserved, and it can be put on an easy-to-use thumb drive, and put on a DVD for you, so you can have access to it right away.
You just take all your stuff, you dump it in a box from Legacy Box, you throw it to them, and then you send it to them, and they take it, they put barcodes on it so that you can track every piece that's been sent to them, and then they send you back a DVD or a thumb drive with all the material on it.
So instead of you having to worry that if there's a flood or a fire or something goes wrong in your house, it's gonna ruin all your memories, you've got it all available digitally.
and at the touch of a button.
So that's pretty awesome.
Legacy Box makes sure that it happens.
If you go to LegacyBox.com right now, slash Ben, go to LegacyBox.com slash Ben, you get a 40% discount on your order, heavy discount, great service. LegacyBox.com slash Ben, LegacyBox.com slash Ben.
You can take all those film reels and photos that don't get watched or taken out, send them to Legacy Box, and they'll take care of all of it for you.
Again, it's LegacyBox.com slash Ben.
You get a 40% discount on your order.
Very important service.
Something you should certainly do for your family.
Okay, so we'll begin today by talking about this idiotic day without a woman routine that happened yesterday.
It did not serve its purposes.
So, if you're going to hold what they call a general strike, if you're going to hold a general strike, and a general strike just means everybody doesn't go to work, if you're going to hold a general strike, the purpose of the general strike, presumably, is to show how horrible things would be if these women didn't show up to work.
Did anyone have a real rough time yesterday when women didn't show up to work?
It wasn't even a huge percentage of women.
When a certain number of women didn't show up to work because they're lefty idiots, did the world stop turning?
Did everything implode?
No, it didn't.
And so that sort of undermines the idea of the general strike in the first place.
Also, if they are marching against the wage gap, it seems to me one way that you could help close the wage gap is by, hmm, working.
If you take the day off, and you don't get paid, and then you blame men, well, that's not part of the so-called wage gap, that's you taking the day off.
Plus, you have to acknowledge that there is a little bit of income bias here.
The only people who are going to take the day off are, number one, people who can afford to take the day off, and number two, people who aren't working.
Everybody who actually has to be at work was at work.
So a lot of the people who showed up were members of the American Federation of Teachers, which is a major public sector union, or the National Education Association, another major public union.
And it's easy for them to do that because they're basically striking against the government.
Other things that were idiotic about this.
The ancillary causes in this date without a woman.
So, Linda Sarsour was arrested.
She is the radical Muslim spokesperson for the Women's March.
She was arrested at the Women's March for no apparent reason.
But one of the event organizers was also a lady named Razmia Youssef Odeh, who is a Palestinian terrorist convicted of killing two Israeli men in a terrorist attack.
So she was there, so that's exciting.
Also they talked about abortion and what they called solidarity with the sex workers' rights movement.
Okay then.
That's weird.
Okay.
So they were very focused on the key issues that matter.
My favorite story that came out of the day without a woman was according to the Washington Post, some feminists spent the day refusing to smile.
Seriously.
This is the Washington Post reporting.
Some feminists say the happy face they sport by habit or on command is a form of unpaid emotional labor.
Okay, this is fake news.
Feminists don't smile.
So I'm not sure which feminist.
They say, the happy face they sport.
Has anyone ever seen a feminist who sports a happy face by habit?
They're the most miserable people on earth, self-described feminists who march and things like this.
The happy face they sport by habit?
My goodness, yeah, I always think brightness and sunshine when I think militant feminists.
That's always what I think of.
Also, if you want to win friends and influence people, don't call smiling emotional labor.
Like, was anyone forcing you to smile?
Was anyone putting a gun to your head?
Like, I understand that in our society, in a civilization, we try to be generally pleasant to one another, and I think that's a good thing.
I think that it's good that we are pleasant to one another, as a general rule.
It doesn't seem to me to be emotional labor, that people expect you to be pleasant to one another, otherwise everybody, then every, then, do you really want the world to work like the TSA at LAX?
Is that really what you want the world to look like?
Like people glaring at you?
And getting angry at you while they force you to stuff your oversized baggage into that stupid little metal thing?
Is that what you want the world to look like?
Apparently feminists want the world to work like that.
Also, there are all these people wearing red in solidarity for something or other.
This is confusing.
Here's a montage of some of the people in media wearing red.
I mean, look at this.
Look at all these women wearing red.
Women in science, technology, engineering, and then all these women wearing red.
You know, talking on CNN, so you've got a bunch of people wearing red, and then you have people on Fox News wearing red, and it's just, like, a huge number of people wearing red.
It looks like NBC News there.
Okay, and it just goes on and on and on, all these members of the media wearing red, all these women wearing red.
Okay, ladies, turns out something.
We knew you were ladies.
We did.
I know.
Shocker.
We knew you were women.
And it doesn't help your case when you wear ugly red cardigans or what looks like a magic eye poster on your shirt that is red.
And it just goes on and on.
Again, what statement are they trying to make other than we are women?
Yeah, we know!
That's why you're on TV in part, okay?
Women actually have a relatively large advantage when it comes to getting bookings on TV because people like to look at women in ways they don't like to look at men.
Sorry to break it to you, ladies.
This is why pretty women are on TV more often than not such pretty women.
But, you know, all the women on TV wearing red, oh, well this demonstrates their strength and power.
Actually, it just demonstrates that whoever had stock in the red fabric dye yesterday did really, really well.
The other things that were idiotic, Anne Hathaway, you know, the super, super wealthy actress?
She spoke at the UN about equal pay.
Anne Hathaway.
Oh my goodness.
Somehow, we, and every American parent, were expected to be back to normal in under three months.
Without income?
I remember thinking to myself, if the practical reality of pregnancy is another mouth to feed in your home, and America is a country where most people are living paycheck to paycheck, how does 12 weeks unpaid leave economically work?
The truth is, for too many people, it doesn't.
One in four American women go back to work two weeks after giving birth because they can't afford to take off any more time than that.
Okay, Anne Hathaway, I have an idea for you.
I have an idea.
You see that very, very, very expensive blazer that you're wearing?
How much does that cost?
How much paid leave could you provide to a poor working mother if you just sold that very, very expensive blazer and then used it for the paid maternity leave?
You can do it.
It's a free country.
Here's what I don't understand so much.
I don't understand why, you know, I have a wife.
We have two children.
My wife took maternity leave with both our kids.
Not paid maternity leave, just maternity leave.
And we covered it, because that's what we do.
We decided that was a decision we wanted to make as a family.
I don't understand why it's incumbent on my wife now to work longer hours and see her kids less, so that other people can have paid maternity leave.
Also, worth noting, most companies now grant paid maternity leave.
Most companies do make sure that there is a paid maternity leave or a paid parental leave if a major corporation.
Most are offering this because they understand it's a competitive way of grabbing up labor, of grabbing up solid labor.
But I love these uber wealthy celebrities who sit there and act like there's nothing that can be done for these poor women who can't take maternity leave.
Anne Hathaway gets paid millions of dollars to act in movies, okay?
She's perfectly capable of helping out these people, but instead it's got to be the government forcing it, or the government taxing people in order to do it, and then she takes all her money, I'm sure, and stashes it in an overseas bank account so that it doesn't actually have to be taxed in the United States, just like all these people in Hollywood do.
So that is just delightful.
Other aspects of the day without a woman.
Again, it was a long litany of irritation.
Other things.
This was an image that was very celebrated.
There was a statue, I guess somebody put up, of this little girl staring down the bull.
On Wall Street.
Okay, and the bull on Wall Street is supposed to represent Wall Street.
And there is this statue of this brave little girl standing down the bull.
A couple of facts that should be noted here.
One, little girls, please do not stand in front of enraged bulls.
It's just not smart.
Okay, don't take this literally.
I feel this warning has to be issued because we now live in a world where people make movies about how this little girl has superpowers and could punch the bull into the next county.
In reality, that bull would trample the little girl and it would be very sad and terrible.
So please, parents, don't let your little girl stand in front of bulls.
Okay, let's just put that out there.
Number two, what exactly is she facing down?
Wall Street?
Wall Street is bad to women.
America is the greatest country for women in the history of humanity.
And that's largely because we have a thriving marketplace, including Wall Street.
What is little girl standing for?
Communism?
Is she standing against the bull?
Again, all of this is just images of female strength.
Let's talk about female strength in the context of what women actually do.
They work, instead of going on stupid marches.
They bear children and bring up those children, as opposed to asking the government to do so.
And they actually take place in a marketplace, as opposed to standing against the marketplace.
That's what they do in America, and that's what makes women fantastic in America.
It does not make the feminist movement fantastic.
Finally, Hillary Clinton felt the necessity to come out of hiding.
Apparently, she had her hair done by the same people who did N'Singh's hair.
And she... I don't know what happened to that.
It did not look like that when it came in the mail.
But now, she's just donning this wig that looks like some sort of... It's like she took... I don't know.
It's like a dead parrot on her head.
In any case, Hillary Clinton did a Snapchat for the children.
You know, the Snapchat for the children.
And she talked about what women are supposed to do while wearing, again, a very expensive jacket that is painted red.
There's a lot to fight for.
Planned Parenthood, education, healthcare, jobs.
Every issue is a woman's issue.
So stand up, resist, run for office, be a champion.
I can't believe we didn't elect this woman.
How did we not elect this bag of charisma, this giant oversized bag of charismatic genius?
Wow, how did we not make her president?
I can't freaking imagine.
Further note, when she says stand up and resist, Hillary, women tried to resist.
Your husband didn't let them.
Okay, so, just putting that... Okay, so, before we get to the actual breakdown in healthcare, because that I think is just an important topic.
Again, this just demonstrates the left doesn't know what the hell they're doing.
They're terrible at everything, and they demonstrate it each and every day.
Before we get to what Republicans suck at, which is apparently replacing Obamacare and repealing Obamacare, we have to say thank you to our sponsors over at MyPatriotSupply.
So, Right now, if you are concerned about the possibility of war or natural disaster, and you should be, I mean, everyone should always be concerned about these possibilities, you should make sure that you go to MyPatriotSupply at preparewithben.com.
You go to preparewithben.com or 888-803-1413, 888-803-1413, and for $99 plus free shipping, you get a huge supply of all the food that you're going to need in case of something terrible happening.
It's a four-week emergency food supply.
It's limited to two per person, so, you know, you don't have to worry about, you know, you're gonna buy a thousand of them.
You don't need a thousand of them.
It's a four-week food supply, emergency food supply, and that ensures that you and your family are taken care of in case of a natural disaster or some sort of emergency.
If you're concerned, again, about terror attack or tornado, if you're worried about earthquake or flood, then you have to have food in your home.
And my team has tasted it.
They tell me that the meals actually taste surprisingly good.
You know, it's canned food and it maintains for like 25 years.
It stays forever.
But they say that it actually tastes pretty good, which is shocking considering the conditions.
But again, you're buying this for emergencies.
And that's why you have to go to preparewithben.com right now.
Preparewithben.com right now.
Be prepared for emergency.
Preparewithben.com.
888-803-1413.
888-803-1413.
803-1413, make sure that you and your family are prepared in case of emergency.
So, you may have noticed from the top of the show that I am very, very critical of the new Obamacare replacement.
And the reason that I am critical of the Obamacare replacement is because it absolutely sucks.
Okay, there are a bunch of problems with the Obamacare replacement.
The biggest problem with the Obamacare replacement that is being proposed, the sort of Trumpcare or Ryancare, Friends of Trump call it Ryancare, Friends of Ryan call it Trumpcare.
I'm gonna call it Trumpcare because the president gets credit for the health plan he's proposing.
Okay, we didn't call it Pelosicare, it was called Obamacare, so it seems fair to me that we're gonna call it Trumpcare now, especially since Trump keeps saying how wonderful it is.
Trump just tweeted out minutes ago, quote, despite what you hear in the press, healthcare is coming along great.
We are talking to many, many groups.
It will end in a beautiful picture.
...of like a pony, like a beautiful picture of like a doggy, like I don't even know what that means.
But okay, I'll tell you what's not a beautiful picture is the actual thing.
So, I've looked at the bill.
There are a bunch of problems with the bill.
First thing to note about this Obamacare bill, the free market is a great structure...
The minute you start intervening in the free market, the minute you poke your thumb in in order to quote-unquote fix the free market, you start a chain effect.
You start a domino reaction by which you have to get more and more and more involved in the market.
And this is a perfect case in point.
So, this all starts from the premise that insurance companies are evil because insurance companies will not cover pre-existing conditions.
Or they will charge you more if you have a pre-existing condition.
This makes sense, as I have explained one bajillion times on this program, because, again, if you have an insurance company, you don't insure things that have already happened.
That's not an insurance company anymore, now that's just a pyramid scheme.
If I burn down my house and then apply for fire insurance, no one will grant me fire insurance because the house has already been burned down.
They're not going to say, hey, sounds great, pay us $100 a month and we will pay you $100,000 for the house you just burned down.
They won't do that because that's stupid.
Okay?
The economy can't work that way.
And yet, we are all fighting mad about the pre-existing conditions stuff.
Here's the fact about pre-existing conditions.
The reason health insurance is useful is because you're supposed to buy it before you have a pre-existing condition.
And you're supposed to buy it for your family.
You're supposed to have prenatal health insurance.
You're supposed to do all these things so that we don't have to worry about the pre-existing conditions that exist.
Right?
Because then it won't be a pre-existing condition, it will just be a condition.
That is the purpose.
And anything that refuses to acknowledge this problem ends up completely skewing and destroying the insurance market.
That's exactly what has happened here.
You end up regulating the living crap out of the insurance companies, then you have to subsidize it because the cost is higher, and then those subsidies don't work because people don't take the subsidies.
Instead, what they do is they sit around waiting for the pre-existing conditions to materialize, and then they jump into the insurance market, skewing the cost still further, creating what you call the death spiral in the insurance market.
Again, all of that starts from one simple premise.
Insurance companies are evil.
They're terrible, terrible, terrible because they won't cover pre-existing conditions.
So, Republicans, because they are stupid, instead of recognizing that the government really does not have a place in the health insurance market.
It really doesn't.
The government should not be part of the health insurance market.
If the government is going to be involved anywhere, the government should be involved only to the extent that it is necessary to prevent communicable disease, for example, if there's an epidemic, because that has externalities.
But if you are just somebody who is too stupid to get health insurance your entire life, and now you have heart disease, and now you want the government to take care of you, no.
The answer is no.
Okay?
Because the fact is that in a free competitive market, health insurance would have been available since you were young, and you could afford it if you had a steady job.
Okay?
That is the truth in the United States of America.
Or you saved up the money in some sort of health savings account.
Here's the reality, okay?
People talk about You know, poverty being the lead indicator of not having health insurance.
That's true.
Poverty is also a leading indicator that you're not making particularly financially sound decisions.
And so anything that is geared toward forcing poor people to make financially sound decisions is not going to work very well because poor people who are permanently poor, I'm not talking about people who are temporarily poor, okay?
That happens.
People lose their jobs.
We need to fix the health insurance system so far as government regulates it so that it's connected to your employer as opposed to being freely available to individuals.
Okay, that was a government outgrowth to begin with.
Again, another case of the government getting involved or wasn't wanted and that creating all sorts of terrible externalities.
Once you do that, you end up destroying the health market.
If you're going to talk about government being involved, however, there are certain places for government to be involved in minimizing government involvement so that we can get toward a better system.
There will have to be a transition here.
Now, if Paul Ryan and Donald Trump had come forward and said, this is a transitional part of the plan so we can move toward a totally free market, that would be one thing.
They didn't.
They're presenting this as part one of a three-part plan.
First of all, as I said earlier, They didn't even mention it was part one of a three-part plan originally.
They acted like this was the whole thing.
Okay, which is just idiotic.
If you're gonna feed me a crap sandwich, at least tell me there's some meat in it, not just crap.
Unfortunately, the original bill was basically just crap.
So, here are a few problems.
First of all, again, it retains all the requirements that insurance cover people with pre-existing conditions.
Once you remove that leg of the free market stool, the rest of it just collapses.
Then, in order to make sure that it pays for itself, you have to force people to buy health insurance.
So how are they doing that?
They're taking away the mandate, but they're now mandating, they have a different mandate, the mandate is that insurance companies have to charge you a 30% surcharge, a 30% fine, for those whose insurance has lapsed.
So that's the second problem.
It also creates individual health care subsidies.
So if you're high-risk, you have pre-existing conditions, well, we give you money to buy health insurance, which of course drives up the price of health insurance because you have additional demand.
It also subsidizes Medicaid for a greater period of time until 2020.
It subsidizes Medicaid, allows states to expand their roles.
Which is not good, because if you think, if you think that a future Congress is going to allow cuts to Medicaid, you're out of your mind.
There's never been an entitlement program that has had significant cuts from Congress without significant bravery.
And finally, it subsidizes high-risk pools on the state level.
A lot of people like this.
They say, okay, if we give $100 billion to states over the next 10 years, then it'll help them cover all of these costs, and they can figure out how to use that money.
Again, if you think that that's going to disappear, you are totally wrong, because again, anybody who vows to spend more money on this sort of stuff is going to win elections.
Which would require political bravery.
Now, this would be a good time, this would be a good time for Donald Trump to use that political bravery.
So is he going to do that?
Well, we shall discuss that thing.
But you will first have to go to dailywire.com to check it out, because we have a lot more to discuss.
Plus, a thing that I absolutely hate happening right here inside the office.
I love it and I hate it.
I've never loved and hated anything so much.
But you'll have to go to dailywire.com.
a month will allow you to become a subscriber to Daily
▲
Export Selection