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March 2, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:01:21
Governance By Chaos | Ep. 487
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President Trump endures staffing problems, announces tariffs and tanks the markets, and says we should give drug dealers the death penalty.
So things are going awesome.
Ben Shapiro, this is the Ben Shapiro Show.
It's been a rough 48 hours for the President of the United States.
It has not been solid.
And we'll go through all of the non-solidity in just a second.
There are some real staffing issues over at the White House, some chaos in terms of the internal dynamics at the White House.
Plus the President of the United States unleashed The most ignorant tweet storm I have ever seen from him, and that is saying a lot.
This one was on trade policy, and it is just freaking egregious.
I mean, really.
My four-year-old daughter can probably do a better explanation of trade.
And if it sounds like I'm being too harsh, I'm being not harsh enough.
It's that bad.
So, I will explain all of that.
Again, guys, don't take it as though Trump's never done anything good.
He's done lots of good stuff, but his trade— I'll get to it.
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Today is at 24,300.
That's a 2,000 point drop in about five weeks.
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Okay.
So as I mentioned, the market's not having a couple of good days.
They're down five straight days.
And they've dropped in the last five days approximately a thousand points.
Now, is that the end of the world?
No, it's not the end of the world.
Except they dropped a thousand points the month before.
So, one of the reasons they continue to drop is because the President of the United States does not know what the hell he is talking about on trade.
And I say this advisedly.
The President, I don't know if he got his degree from Wharton Business School on trade from turning in Cracker Jack.
Box tops?
Honestly, I don't know if he got like a decoder ring in the mail.
I don't know where he learned his economics, but it is awful.
It is just awful.
And he's actually implementing it.
So, as I said yesterday, he said a bunch of stupid crap on guns, and then he's not going to implement any of it because Congress is going to stop him.
On trade, the president has plenary power essentially on trade because Congress has abdicated its duty over the past 50 years and given the president the ability to raise and lower tariffs essentially on his own for virtually any purpose.
Here is what Trump tweeted out today.
It's really, really dumb.
Okay, this is six hours ago.
When a country, USA, thank you, Mr. President, is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good and easy to win.
Example, when we are down 100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don't trade anymore.
We win big.
It's easy.
The levels of stupidity are like a Russian nesting doll here.
You open up the top level of stupidity and there's another level of stupidity beneath it, except it's an infinite regress of nesting dolls because there is no tiniest nesting doll of stupidity in this tweet.
Okay, so we'll go through this sentence by sentence.
When he says that we are losing many billions of dollars on trade, you don't lose money on trade.
When you go to Amazon.com and you buy yourself a used book, did you lose money on the trade?
No, you voluntarily opted to buy a product.
When you go to a grocery store, And they give you an apple, and you give them 50 cents.
Did you lose money on the trade?
No, you bought an apple for 50 cents.
This is the necessity of how trade works.
It is a two-sided exchange, a voluntary consensual exchange, demonstrating both that you have consented to the exchange and that you have Free will over your own labor and can trade your own labor and the products of it for something else.
This is the magic of free trade.
It's not just that free trade is more efficient, though it is, it's also that it is more moral because you get to determine how much your labor is worth and how much your money is worth.
And if you don't like paying 50 cents for an apple here, you can go down the street and you can pay 40 cents for an apple somewhere else because of competition in free trade.
When he says that trade deficits necessitate trade wars, and when he says trade wars are good and easy to win, name one.
Name a trade war that was good and easy to win.
You can't win a trade war.
Let me take my example a little bit further.
So, you went to the grocery store, and you bought $100 worth of groceries.
But the grocery store does not contract with you.
The grocery store doesn't buy anything from you.
The grocery store doesn't use your services.
Because, after all, you're a garbage man, and the grocery store doesn't need you.
So, Do you?
How do you retaliate against the grocery store?
Are you angry at the grocery store because they didn't use your services?
And do you decide that what the best possible solution would be is to not go to Ralph's but instead to go to Gelson's where everything is twice as much and go over to Gelson's and pay twice the amount because Ralph's isn't using you and Gelson's might?
Is this what you're going to do?
Or forget about whether Gelson's is using you.
Right?
Gelson's may not use you either.
But you decide that you're going to penalize Ralph's because Ralph's used to use you and now they're no longer using you so you decide to pay twice as much for your groceries.
Does this make any sense?
If Amazon.com is not hiring you as a contractor, do you stop shopping at Amazon and instead go over to the local bookstore and pay twice as much money?
Of course you don't because that would be stupid.
Your trade deficit with Amazon is Whatever it is that you paid for the product, when you buy from the grocery store, you now have a trade deficit of $100 if you spent $100 on your groceries because the grocery store didn't buy anything from you.
Does that mean you should go to a more expensive grocery store?
And that if you boycott the grocery store, you have somehow won?
No, it means that you just chopped your own leg off because you're stupid.
Okay, that's what trade wars are.
This has been known since the days of Ricardo, David Ricardo.
This has been known for 300 years.
This is 16th century mercantilism he's talking about here, and it's a giant fail.
When he says, when we're down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don't trade anymore, we win big.
There are many countries in the world that have trade surpluses, overall trade surpluses.
Let me name one of those countries that has a trade surplus for you.
Venezuela.
Venezuela has a trade surplus.
You know why?
Because no one in Venezuela has the ability to buy anything foreign.
They put up enormous tariffs.
And so Venezuela has a trade surplus.
And people are eating dogs.
People are literally eating dogs in the street.
Trade surplus, trade deficit mean nothing.
Because all a trade surplus or trade deficit recognizes is that you are paying another country for a product.
You are voluntarily participating in an exchange.
And then that money is not being paid back by that country to you.
But here's the magic of trade also.
When you pay a dollar for a Chinese product and it ends up in China, what do you think happens to that dollar?
Do you think they just take it and store it somewhere?
Do you think that it magically turns into yen?
Yuan?
So they can now turn around and use it in China?
No, they have to use it in the United States because we have a different currency than they do.
So they turn around and they invest it back in the United States, in our stock market, in our bonds.
This is how the economy works.
You have to be so economically ignorant to tweet something like this.
It is truly amazing.
But Trump didn't stop there.
Here's some other stuff that he tweeted.
We quote, "We must protect our country and our workers.
Our steel industry is in bad shape.
If you don't have steel, you don't have a country." Now?
Again, this is very stupid.
Our steel industry is not in bad shape.
Our steel industry, as I told you yesterday, was up 5% in production last year, and all of our steel companies have had stock increases over the last 10 to 15 years.
Nucor, which is the top steel producer in the United States, its stock price is at $12 in 2000.
It is now at $65.
You're telling me that the steel industry is dying in the United States?
It's doing just fine.
72.5% of all steel consumed in the United States is also produced in the United States.
Our steel industry is not dying.
Also, somebody should inform Switzerland that they're not a country anymore, because Switzerland does not produce its own steel.
In fact, many countries don't produce their own steel.
They don't produce their own steel because sometimes they don't have the actual materials available to produce their own steel.
Does this mean the country doesn't exist anymore?
I'm not aware that Israel produces lots of its own steel.
I don't think Israel has great steel deposits or deposits.
They import most of their steel.
Is Israel not a country anymore?
And not a powerful country anymore?
Of course not, because that's stupid.
And then he says, he explains further, Professor Trump, He explains, Again, this is dumb.
Let's say that China taxes our products, 50% coming in.
at, say, 50%, and we tax the same products coming into our country at 0%, not fair or smart.
Right?
We will soon be starting reciprocal taxes, so we will charge the same thing as they charge us.
$800 billion trade deficit.
Have no choice.
Again, this is dumb.
Let's say that China taxes our products 50% coming in, right?
They tax every product that we send them 50% coming in, which means presumably we're not selling as many products there.
You know what else is happening?
Chinese citizens are paying at least 50% more for the same product.
They're impoverishing their own citizens.
They're just making their own citizens pay more for a product they could have gotten more cheaply elsewhere.
So is the solution for the United States to jack up its own prices?
Remember, everyone in the United States is both a producer and a consumer.
In the steel industry, there are going to be a lot of people who are very happy with the tariffs because now they don't have to compete with foreign sources.
But for every steel job, there are 45 jobs in this country that use steel inputs whose prices just went up.
So Wilbur Ross, the Commerce Secretary who's most famous for falling asleep in cabinet meetings and drooling.
I'm serious.
Okay, this is not a joke.
That was reported by the New York Times.
Apparently Trump got pissed at it because he would legitimately fall asleep in cabinet meetings.
Top men.
Okay, and Wilbur Ross goes on television today and he says, you know, there's a ton of steel in American cars and that means that if you raise the tariff by 25%, it's only raising the amount of the car by like half of 1%.
Trump change.
Number one, not necessarily chump change to the guy who's paying for the car.
An extra $175 on a $35,000 car is not necessarily chump change to everybody.
Okay, that's number one.
Number two, you're assuming that you can just make the calculation by the amount of steel in a car.
That's not correct.
There are lots of contractors between the ore and between the car.
Okay, and at every step of the way, there is markup.
So, if there is a steel product that is used in the making of an engine, that is very often outsourced to another company.
That means that that company now has to pay more for the steel, which means that they manufacture the product, and they don't just pass the amount of the cost on, they pass the amount plus the labor plus the profit.
Right?
So that means now they're charging more for that input.
And let's say it's a piece of an engine.
Now somebody has to put that engine together.
And so they have to buy that product, which is already marked up, So they mark it up even more.
And this is how tariffs snowball.
When the President of the United States, Barack Obama, raised tariffs on Chinese tires, we lost 12,000 jobs in the auto industry because Barack Obama raised the prices of tires.
Okay, and tires are a lot cheaper to manufacture and make and sell than cars are.
Hey, this is all stupid.
It doesn't make any sense.
It's economically illiterate.
And it's so funny.
There are all these people today who are, oh, well, this is what Trump ran on.
He ran on this.
So obviously he's going to do it.
Yeah, I didn't hear you saying the same thing about Barack Obama.
He ran a lot of garbage, too.
And then he did a lot of that garbage.
And we were all kind of pissed about it, I recall.
I was angry when Trump said this stuff during the campaign.
This is not me new to the game here.
I was writing full pieces in March 2016 about why Trump's trade policy was idiotic.
He and Bernie Sanders basically have the same trade policy.
Note to everyone, if you have the same policy on anything as Bernie Sanders, you're stupid.
You should not have the same policy as Bernie Sanders on things.
Bernie Sanders' policy is awful, awful, awful.
So, in just a second, I'm going to explain to you all of the reasons why tariffs are bad.
We're going to go back to economic rudiments.
We're going to go back to the very beginning, and I'll speak in short words and phrases so that people can understand.
Because it seems like there are a lot of people who don't understand.
If it seems like I'm angry about this, it's because I am.
This is legitimately Econ 101.
This is not complex.
This is not difficult.
It really is not.
Just take it down to your normal, everyday interaction with other people, and you see how dumb this argument is.
The other reason I'm angry is if you want the president to have a successful term, then you would like for the economy to be good.
There are a lot of people saying today, well, don't worry about everything he says.
Don't worry that 57% of the American public by polls think the president's a racist.
If the economy is good, everything will be fine.
And the president says, hold my beer, I'm starting a trade war.
OK, great.
Great.
All right.
Well, we'll explain all of this a little bit more in just a second.
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Okay.
So as I say, the president's tariff policy is full-on radikalunk.
Okay?
It is not good.
And here is why.
Number one, tariffs are an unfair tax.
You are taxing one industry on behalf of another industry.
You are taxing people who buy cars on behalf of the steel industry.
And jobs will be lost in the car industry because you are attempting to save jobs in the steel industry.
As I said yesterday, there were 200,000 jobs that were lost in the United States between 2001 and 2003 because of George W. Bush's far less stringent steel tariffs.
And Trump isn't just talking steel tariffs anymore.
He's talking about full-scale trade war with everybody who has tariffs on our products.
Which is just brilliant.
If all of these countries wish to charge their own citizens more for products to protect their domestic industries, then fine, we should take advantage of that.
You get richer when you buy cheaper products.
If you don't have to pay as much for stuff, you're getting richer.
And we're not all reliant on foreign trade.
The United States is a massive market economy.
We generate most of what we produce.
I mean, most of what we produce, we consume here in the United States in most businesses.
So if everybody else decides that they are going to try to destroy our ability to import into their country, to export into their country, then why exactly would we cut off our nose to spite our face by making our own consumers pay more?
It just doesn't make any more sense.
As I say, tariffs also destroy jobs.
When you remove money from profitable industries, people who don't need tariffs and subsidies to survive, and you give it to those who are inefficient, it keeps jobs in industries that are less efficient.
And if competition is never allowed, then product quality actually declines over time.
So you're buying worse cars over time if you tariff foreign cars.
And then when you open up the market, because people are tired of buying crappy American cars, for example, this is what happened in the 1970s, then we're flooded with a bunch of Japanese cars and suddenly the American market share goes down dramatically.
This is exactly what happened in the 1960s and 1970s in the American auto industry.
Tariffs actually create zombie industries.
Okay, America is not, as I say, damaged by unfair trade practices of other countries in the sense that they put a tariff on us and therefore we are greatly hurt.
Currency is an exchange unit.
So all of the talk about how China also is manipulating its currency.
Okay, if manipulating currency were that easy and that profitable, if that were really the big issue in America, then we would just print a bunch of money and we'd walk around with wheelbarrows like Weimar Germany.
And the people in Weimar Germany or in Venezuela today or in Zimbabwe where inflation was at one point at 1000% a day.
Those people were not immensely wealthy.
They were immensely poor.
Inflation, inflating your currency is a sign that you don't have a strong underlying fundamental economy.
Trade is not a zero-sum game.
This is from Thomas Sowell.
In general, international deficits and surpluses have had virtually no correlation with the performance of most nations' economies.
Germany and France have had international trade surpluses while their unemployment rates were in double digits.
Japan's post-war rise to economic prominence on the world stage included years when it ran deficits and years when it ran surpluses.
The United States was the biggest debtor nation in the world during its rise to industrial supremacy, became a creditor as a result of lending money to its European allies during the First World War, and has been both a debtor and a creditor at various times since.
Through it all, the American standard of living has remained the highest in the world unaffected by whether it was a creditor or a debtor nation.
Thomas Sowell points out that if Japanese sold us a lot of cars and we send them lots of dollars, they're going to use those dollars to buy American assets.
Scott Lincecum, who is a trade lawyer at Cato, he says, "Every dollar traveling overseas to buy imports in excess of our exports eventually comes back to the U.S. in the form of investment.
Our trade deficit is matched by a capital account surplus.
In other words, we buy goods and services from foreigners, they buy an equal amount of our exports plus our financial assets, aka foreign investment in the United States." And here's the key.
If trade were really about just beating the other guy to prevent them from importing stuff, why not just sink all the Chinese ships bringing products into the country?
Does anyone think that'd be good for the economy?
No, because this is stupid.
S-T-O-O-P-I-D.
Stupid.
Okay, so.
In a second, we're going to move on from Trump steel tariffs.
Apparently, virtually every country in the world is now threatening countermeasures for steep new tariffs.
And remember how President Trump put on a bunch of tariffs on Canadian lumber?
We now have a shortage of lumber in the United States.
That's been working out fantastically well for people in the United States.
OK, we're going to get to other things that are happening in the White House.
Again, it's been a rough 48 hours for the White House.
It's not a pylon.
It's just the truth.
We're going to get to that in just one second.
OK, so.
Here is the latest on the chaos inside the White House.
So, right now, here is where things stand.
Hope Hicks, the president's top aide, is stepping down.
Jared Kushner, one of the people the president is closest to, just lost his top-level security clearance.
Gary Cohn, who was discussed as chief of staff to replace John Kelly about a week and a half ago and is the head of Trump's economic program, is now threatening to quit.
And National Security Advisor H.R.
McMaster is apparently on the ropes, as well.
So, basically, every top-level administrator, except for John Kelly, is on the ropes.
That is not the sign of a healthy administration.
Even John Kelly doesn't sound super enthused about all of this.
Here is the White House Chief of Staff yesterday talking about taking the job as White House Chief of Staff and moving on from Homeland Security.
Truly, at six months, the last thing I wanted to do was walk away from one of the great honors of my life, being the Secretary of Homeland Security.
But I did something wrong and God punished me, I guess.
Now there's an enthusiastic guy about his new job of keeping the president under control.
God punished him by moving on to the White House.
He talked about how he's happy to be helping the president push the agenda.
I'm sure he is, but it is not an easy job.
The reason the turnover at the White House is so high is because everything is variable over there.
Now, let it be known, this does not mean that everything that Trump is doing is bad.
The president of the United States, by the time he has finished his first term, will have replaced almost half of all of the judges on circuit course across the country.
That's a wonderful thing.
He's doing a great job on that because he's delegated it out.
But when Trump is bored and he gets his hands on the gears of power, when he grabs those levers and he starts playing video games, all that comes out is bad stuff.
The president needs to be disciplined.
This is not because I want him to lose, it's because I would like for him to be a good president.
And I would like for the country to win with him.
I like winning.
The president supposedly likes winning, too.
I'll tell you what is not winning.
What is not winning is putting forward gun proposals to seize weapons from a huge variety of citizens.
What is not winning is suggesting a massive trade war across the board.
As I said earlier, the EU is now threatening massive retaliatory tariffs on the United States, which is just wonderful.
It's a great way to tank the economy.
We've tried this before, by the way.
The Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930 are widely perceived to have led to the Great Depression and helped exacerbate it into a 10-year Great Depression as opposed to a relatively insignificant recession.
None of this makes any sense.
One of the reasons that Trump is doing all this stuff now is because when Trump is isolated, when he feels like he doesn't have all the people around him he likes to have around him, when Hope Hicks is gone and Jared and Ivanka have been marginalized, and it's just a bunch of people he doesn't know, like John Kelly, sitting around him, he feels like he has to go back to his gut.
And his gut on certain issues is not bad, and on other issues, it is sheerly terrible.
And on trade, it is sheerly terrible.
The New York Times is reporting on the situation in the White House.
Apparently, people in the White House did not even know that Trump was going to announce the steel tariffs and aluminum tariffs yesterday.
By the way, the price of beer is going to go up, too.
Every beer can in America is used—is made with aluminum, which means that if you like your beer, you're not going to get to keep your beer.
The price on it is going to go up, which is—I think most Americans are not going to be super happy with that.
The previous day, according to The New York Times, Mr. Trump's chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, warned the chief of staff, John Kelly, he might resign if the president went ahead with the plan.
According to people briefed on the discussion, Cohn had lobbied fiercely against the measures.
We'll see if he quits next week, if Trump actually implements this stuff.
As I said, the stock market today has taken a dump.
Yesterday it also took a dump.
It's down about 200 points right now.
That is better than it was earlier this morning when it was down about 380 points.
So we will see.
Usually it's around 3 o'clock in the afternoon that you finally find out what exactly the market's going to do today.
But as I say, the five-day forecast on the market has been pretty garbage.
The high was 25,761.
Today it is now at 24,400.
So that means that we've lost well over 1,000 points in the last five days on the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
The reason we haven't lost more than that is because people don't know if Trump's actually going to do what he says he's going to do.
People are pricing uncertainty into the market.
Well, anyway, White House aides arrived at work on Thursday.
They had no clear idea of what Trump would say about trade.
He had summoned steel and aluminum executives to a meeting.
When the White House said only that he would listen to their concerns, it seemed to signal that Cohen had held on.
But at the end of the photo session, a reporter asked Trump about the measures, and he confirmed that the U.S.
would announce next week it is imposing long-term tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum.
Now, how can you tell this is not the effect of Trump's massive expertise on trade?
Even his guy on trade, a guy named Peter Navarro, who is not good on trade, Peter Navarro had recommended a 24% tariff on steel.
He went to Trump, he said, 24% tariff on steel.
What did Trump do?
He said, no, 25, because it's a round number.
If we are going to be setting tariffs based on multiples of five, let me suggest this is not an outgrowth of economic expertise, it is rather an outgrowth of economic foolishness.
Obviously, there's been tremendous turnover in the White House, and the discomfort that Trump is feeling is obvious to everyone.
Again, when he says things like the WTO has been a disaster for this country, and it's been great for China and terrible for the United States and great for other countries, why is it the United States still has the most powerful economy in world history?
And why is it that we generate virtually all of the economic growth on planet Earth?
Why is that?
So there's that as well.
So all of this is just wonderful.
And another piece of bad news coming down for the White House.
I'm sorry to give all this bad news today.
Another piece of bad news coming down for the White House that I will discuss in just one second.
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Another piece of unfortunate news for the White House.
So, President Trump has been on a tear against Andrew McCabe, the ex-deputy director of the FBI.
And the reason that he's been on a tear against Andrew McCabe is because his supposition is that McCabe and Comey and the rest of the FBI were out to get him during the last election cycle and in the post-election period.
Well, now it turns out that a Justice Department review is actually expected to criticize Andrew McCabe, the former FBI deputy director under Comey.
It's expected to criticize McCabe Why?
Because he was too mean to Hillary Clinton.
So Trump's own Justice Department is about to find that Andrew McCabe, the guy that Trump has been ripping on, it wasn't that he was too hard on Trump, it's that he was too hard on Hillary Clinton.
They're going to condemn him for authorizing the disclosure of information about a continuing investigation to journalists, according to four people familiar with the inquiry.
Such a damning report would give Trump new ammunition to criticize McCabe, who's at the center of Trump's theory that deep state actors inside the FBI have been working to sabotage his presidency.
But Mr. McCabe's disclosures to the news media do not fit neatly into that assumption.
They contributed to a negative article about Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration's DOJ, not Mr. Trump.
The Department's Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, has zeroed in on disclosures to The Wall Street Journal as part of a wide-ranging investigation into, among other things, how the FBI approached the 2016 inquiry into Mrs. Clinton's handling of classified information.
Mr. Horowitz said he expects to release a report this month or next.
So, McCabe already said he was going to step down.
He stepped down as deputy director in late January.
So, all of this is fodder for Trump, that the FBI is corrupt, but unfortunately, the corruption doesn't seem to run toward Trump.
It seems to run toward there are a bunch of people in the FBI who are deeply discomfited with Hillary Clinton's corruption, and we're releasing information to the press, which cuts against Trump's argument.
That is not good for Trump.
Trump's whole argument is the FBI is out to get him.
I've been skeptical of the story that the FBI was out to get Trump.
I still think there are open questions about how the FISA warrants were used against Carter Page, whether the FISA courts in general take bad information and turn them into warrants.
But I've been unconvinced by the evidence produced so far that the FBI was out to target Trump, out to destroy Trump, out to destroy his administration.
I think there are bad people inside the FBI like Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
Those people should have been fired and Mueller did fire them.
I think the FBI's current investigation into Trump-Russia collusion is going to come up with nothing.
I think that what the FBI is doing right now is overblown.
But I don't think that during the transition period, the evidence is there yet.
Maybe it'll be shown.
Maybe it will.
I don't think the evidence is there yet that the FBI was quote-unquote out to get Trump, as opposed to they're overzealous on virtually everything, and this is just another thing that they are overzealous on.
OK, so in other bad news for Trump, again, it's been a bad Trump day.
And I hope that by the time we get to Monday, he's turned it around and things are going great again.
But, OK, this is not a great indicator.
Yesterday, the president did a hearing, an open forum on the opioid crisis.
And it was very moving.
Eric Bolling did a video message about his son who died of an opioid addiction, died of an opioid overdose.
And Trump showed up.
And in the process, he said that we should execute drug dealers in the United States.
And we have drug dealers that don't I mean, they kill hundreds and hundreds of people, and most of them don't even go to jail.
You know, if you shoot one person, they give you life, they give you the death penalty.
These people can kill 2,000, 3,000 people, and nothing happens to them.
And we need strength with respect to the pushers and to the drug dealers.
And if we don't do that, you're never going to solve the problem.
If you want to be weak and you want to talk about Just blue-ribbon committees.
That's not the answer.
The answer is you have to have strength and you have to have toughness.
The drug dealers, the drug pushers, are... They're really doing damage.
They're really doing damage.
Some countries have a very, very tough penalty.
The ultimate penalty.
OK, when he says some countries have the very toughest penalty, the ultimate penalty, he's talking about the Philippines, where they legitimately execute drug dealers.
So there are already laws on the books that if you're a drug kingpin and your drugs result in death, that you can actually get the death penalty in the United States.
But if we're going to extend this to all drug dealers across the country, that if you're dealing pot, that we're now going to execute you, I think this might be a little bit over the top.
So in the last 48 hours, the president of the United States has suggested, number one, removing guns from people without due process if they are alleged to be mentally ill.
Number two, he has started a trade war.
And number three, he has suggested that we execute drug dealers.
So it's been a very solid 48 hours for the White House.
Now, he walked back a lot of the gun stuff yesterday.
So the president did walk back some of the gun stuff yesterday.
He tweeted out last night that he had met with people over at the NRA, the same NRA that he was ripping as corrupt just two days ago.
And even I think Trump's feeling some heat from his right, which is good.
You know, one of my great fears before Trump was elected was the soul sucking of the Republican Party, the soul sucking of the conservative movement, that a lot of people were just going to follow Trump wherever he goes because the president is the president and he has a lot of public sway.
And I do think that we've seen a couple of areas where the where the conservative commentariat is not willing to go, even a lot of Trump supporters.
So Tucker Carlson is a good example of this.
So, Tucker, yesterday I had this to say about the president's talk, his loose talk about guns.
At one point, the president said the government should, quote, take the guns first, go through due process second.
Now, I mean, how honest do you want to be?
Imagine if Barack Obama had said that.
Just ignore due process and start confiscating guns.
Obama would have been denounced as a dictator.
We would have denounced him first, trust me.
Congress would be talking impeachment right now.
Someone would be muttering about secession.
Well, the media agreed with what the president said yesterday, so they've underplayed it, or they presented it as just a little battle between the president and the NRA.
Okay, so there's Tucker Carlson ripping into Trump.
Pretty rare thing when you see Tucker ripping into Trump.
But, again, Trump's not had a good 48 hours.
Good for Tucker and good for conservatives who are saying when things are wrong, they're wrong, whether it's Trump saying it or whether it's Obama saying it.
Okay, so we'll continue with this and also a poll that shows that Democrats really do want to grab guns.
I don't just mean some Democrats.
I mean a majority of Democrats.
It's an amazing poll.
I'm going to tell you about that in just a second.
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So Democrats are jumping on board with what Trump was suggesting.
And this is why I said yesterday, I'm not super worried about what Trump had to say yesterday, because right now Republicans are in charge of the Congress.
What happens if Democrats win control of the Congress?
Well, I have a good hint for you as to what happens.
They listen to what Trump says, they go and they talk with Trump, and then Trump says this sort of stuff and they draw up Legislation specifically to his specs.
They draw it up for him, and they pass it through the House, and then it's up to Mitch McConnell to stand between you and doom.
And everybody who's ripping on Mitch McConnell is the weakling who had to be defeated by the Trumpists that Mitch McConnell was the guy who had to be stood up to because he was too weak in caving to the left.
If the Democrats win the House, things are going to get real nasty, and Mitch McConnell could be the guy standing between conservatism and disaster.
And we will see how that goes.
OK, but here is what the Washington Examiner reported this yesterday.
Senate Democrats said they will introduce a gun control bill that would expand background checks, ban certain weapons, and give the courts the power to temporarily take guns away from people who are deemed to be a threat to themselves and others after President Trump offered support for these goals in a White House discussion on Wednesday.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said the only way to advance the measure in the GOP-led Senate is with the endorsement and help from President Trump.
He described a scenario in which the Senate could pass Schumer's proposal with mostly Democratic support and a few Republicans encouraged by Trump.
And Schumer then reached out to Trump directly and said that the president should endorse the Schumer plan.
He said the president is the first step.
He said that McConnell would not bring up the bill without the president's persuasion.
So, as I say, Trump had the NRA in the room, everything was hunky-dory, but House Democrats, Senate Democrats, they've put together basically a gun ban bill, and they're asking Trump to take the lead on it.
If they were to take control of the House and the Senate, you can't rely on their good graces to maintain gun rights.
Hey, here is a poll.
A poll from YouGov.
It asks people whether they favor or oppose banning semiautomatic weapons.
Not semiautomatic rifles.
All semiautomatic weapons.
That means all semiautomatic pistols, semiautomatic handguns, semiautomatic rifles.
Here are the poll numbers.
Are you ready for this?
Okay, 55% of Americans say they support, they favor strongly, or favor somewhat, banning all semi-automatic weapons in the United States.
Okay, that is the removal of 300 million guns from people in the United States.
Okay, and by party ID, 82% of Democrats, 82% of Democrats are in favor of removing all semi-automatic weapons from the citizens of the United States, banning them.
OK, that is the question.
The question was banning them.
OK, now here's where it gets totally crazy.
OK, then they followed up by asking people how they feel about banning all handguns, which would include revolvers.
So now we're not talking just semi-automatic weapons.
We're talking all semi-autos and all Well, revolvers.
The difference between a revolver and a semi-automatic weapon is that when you shoot a revolver, then the cylinder moves, and it re-chambers by moving the cylinder, and when you shoot a semi-automatic handgun, one bullet pops up into the chamber automatically every time you fire a bullet until the magazine is empty.
Okay, here are the numbers on people who would ban all guns.
All of them.
Okay, you ready?
So, favor strongly, favor somewhat.
Only 26% of Americans favor strongly or favor somewhat banning all guns, banning all handguns.
Hey, among Democrats, among Democrats, you ready for this?
40, let's see, this is 44% of Democrats, 44% of Democrats say they favor it.
46% of Democrats say they do not.
Okay, so that means that they are basically split 50-50 on repealing the Second Amendment, like taking away all guns in the United States.
They're split 50-50 on whether to remove all guns in the United States.
In other words, they are exactly what you thought they were.
Hey, Democrats are people who want to remove as many guns as possible in the United States, and then they have the gall to tell people like us that they don't actually want to remove the Second Amendment from folks.
No, they're all good-hearted.
No, they don't want to take away your gun.
They want to take away your gun.
It's obvious they want to take away your gun.
And this is why it matters when the President of the United States endorses their program and why it is imperative that Republicans keep the House and keep the Senate in next year's election cycle.
Now, there are a couple of obstacles to keeping the House.
The latest polls are one obstacle.
The second obstacle is if the economy doesn't particularly do well.
Then that's going to hurt them.
And the third obstacle is a lot of the gerrymandering, a lot of the redistricting that's happened over the past several years actually has not been particularly good, as good for Republicans as they thought that it was going to be.
So, G. Elliott Morris, who is a dated journalist at The Economist, he says, So, in other words, Republicans were trying to gerrymander so that there was, you know, 2% more Republicans than Democrats in a particular district.
But off your election, those people don't show up.
And so, they actually created fewer hard red districts and hard blue districts than created a lot of purple districts in the hopes that they would win.
That means a lot of seats are vulnerable.
That means there are a lot of seats that are vulnerable.
So, if you look at the R-plus district, if you look at the Republican voter share districts, There are, at last count, let's say the R plus, so first of all, I'm just counting the numbers here.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21.
There are 22 seats.
four, five, six, seven, eight, ten, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21.
There are 22 seats.
There are 22 seats in which Democrats hold a majority of the vote and in which Republicans hold seats.
Republicans have a 23 seat majority now, okay?
So, that means they're one seat away from taking it.
Here's the problem.
There are also another, there are also another hundreds, legitimately, there are another several dozen seats.
There are several dozen seats that are R plus 10 or less.
There are another dozens of seats.
I mean, I'm just looking at in the R plus 1 category.
Okay, in the R plus 1 category, In districts, by the way, that are dead even, there are another two districts there.
So that's 24 seats that are either dead even or Democratic plus in a midterm election.
If you add in areas where it's slightly R plus, there are another 10 seats that are R plus three or so, within R plus three.
Okay, so that means if Democrats have a wave, they could easily take 50 seats in this election cycle.
If there's a wave, Democrats could easily take 50 seats in the House.
Okay, this is dangerous, dangerous stuff, and it is not good news.
So, this is why it is imperative the President govern well, it's why it's imperative that the President be popular, and it's why it's imperative that the Presidents of the United States not do stupid things and sink the trade policy of the United States.
Meanwhile, in other news that is worth discussing, Twitter, so Facebook has been just destroying everybody who is in the news business, just destroying it.
There was a big company yesterday that went under because Facebook cut their revenue 75%.
It's not just Facebook that's messing around with the algorithms in order to hurt news companies.
It is also Twitter that's about to do so.
So Jack, who is the head of Twitter, he's tweeted out today that he wants to commit Twitter to help increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation and hold ourselves publicly accountable to our progress.
That means shutting down more accounts, presumably.
It means banning more language.
It means that Twitter is sick of the blowback it's getting from the left, and they're going to start banning right-wing accounts.
And you can see that this is happening on a broader level.
There's a case that was brought before the Supreme Court about whether you could wear certain types of t-shirts into polling places.
In this case, was pretty amazing.
The state of Minnesota was trying to ban people from wearing shirts that said the text of the Second Amendment to the polls.
They're saying, oh, that's electioneering.
So Justice Alito asked, he went through a bunch of different permutations of this.
Could you wear this shirt?
Could you wear that shirt?
So he said, could you wear a shirt that said, I love abortion?
And the people in Minnesota, the Minnesota lawyers said, sure, that's no problem.
He said, well, could you wear a shirt that said, I love guns?
And they said, no, you can't wear that shirt.
Okay, so in other words, there are lawyers in all of these states who are now attempting to ban free speech from people on the right.
It's not a shock.
It is not a coincidence.
This is a severe movement on the part of the left in order to prevent anybody from having an open and honest conversation.
Listen, is there nastiness that happens on Twitter?
Yes, I was the number one recipient of it in 2016.
Is there nastiness that happens in public discourse?
I'm the guy who gets banned from campuses.
Yes, there is.
I try to be civil.
I like being civil.
I think it's worthwhile to be civil.
But I don't want an enforcement body sitting above anyone, either on Twitter or Facebook or in the government, saying that we are going to pass rules about civility and then ban people for it.
I'd much rather have a raucous, nasty exchange of opinions than have no exchange of opinions at all or an approved exchange of opinions by our masters.
That's really gross.
Okay.
So, in just a second, we're going to do some things I like and some things I hate, and then we'll get to the fabled mailbag.
So, let's jump in with some things that I like.
So, the new Star Wars movies have left me cold, as you may have noticed.
So I thought that The Force Awakens was wildly overrated.
I also thought that the sequel, The Last Jedi, was better than The Force Awakens.
I'm the only person who believes this, apparently.
I think the Last Jedi was significantly superior to The Force Awakens, which I thought was derivative, and destroyed my childhood by turning Han Solo into a loser single dad who gets murdered by his son.
So that, yuck.
But, if you actually want to read Star Wars-related stuff that's good, Timothy Zahn is a very, very good science fiction writer.
And I remember reading these when I was a kid.
And he wrote a three-part series That starts, picks up right after the destruction of the second Death Star, and it starts with the book Heir to the Empire, and it tells a whole different story than what's told in The Force Awakens, and it's way better.
They should have just adapted these.
Honestly, they should have just gone back and adapted these, because the books are much, much better.
It's about the rise of a particular admiral, who's a brilliant admiral who's sort of on the outskirts of the galaxy, and how he manipulates things so that the Empire actually has a comeback.
It's not just fast-forward 40 years and the First Order is back, and we don't know how they got here or why they're here.
The book is well-written, it's clever, and also all of your favorite characters actually appear, so we don't have to deal with all of the new characters that nobody cares about, right?
And is hoping die as soon as humanly possible, right?
It doesn't cannibalize the characters that you love in order to preserve characters who you don't give a damn about.
So check that out.
Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn.
Okay, other things that I like.
So good for Kandi, Rise Kandi.
When I came out and she said that we need gun rights because there are victimized people who still require guns.
She said, guns helped my father protect our family during segregation.
She said this on The View.
Let me tell you why I'm a defender of the Second Amendment.
I was a little girl growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, in the late 50s, early 60s.
There was no way that Bull Connor and the Birmingham police were going to protect you.
And so when white night riders would come through our neighborhood, my father and his friends would take their guns and they'd go to the head of the neighborhood, it was a little cul-de-sac, and they would fire in the air if anybody came through.
I don't think they actually ever hit anybody.
But they protected the neighborhood.
I'm sure if Bull Connor had known where those guns were, he would have rounded them up.
And so I don't favor some things like gun registration.
Okay, good for Condi.
This is exactly right.
I wish Condi were the spokesperson for the Republican Party, not Trump, on guns.
I mean, she's doing a much better job there.
Okay, now, time for a couple of things that I hate, and then we'll get to the mailbag.
Okay, things I hate this entire week.
Other than that, things that—at least on policy—things that I hate.
So the Oscars are coming up on Sunday.
No!
So we're all going to sit around and pretend to watch a three-hour show full of obnoxious people who made movies no one saw this year.
No one saw any of these movies.
There were like two of these movies that anybody saw.
One was Get Out and the other was Dunkirk.
No one has ever seen any of these other movies.
Okay, the one that's going to win is, so here's what I'm going to do.
I'm going to describe who I think is going to win, but I'm going to do it in terms that you're going to understand, because I'm going to use projects that you've actually seen.
Okay, so here's who's going to win.
Everything.
Okay, first of all, the movie that's going to win is Grinding Nemo.
Okay, that's The Shape of Water.
About a woman who has sex with a fish, basically.
It's overrated leftist splash.
So check out, so that's what's going to win, Grinding Nemo.
Okay, the best director is the guy from Hellboy.
That's Guillermo del Toro.
The best actor is Commissioner Gordon.
The best actress is the lady from Fargo.
The best supporting actor is that weird guy from Iron Man 2.
And the best supporting actress is the lady from Roseanne.
There, now you know.
You haven't seen any of these movies, but that's how you're going to know who these people are.
You know there was a long period in America where at the Oscars, every picture that won had been a box office top 20 film?
That's because it used to be that the critics respected the American public enough that if the American public actually liked to go watch something, they gave it a little bit of respect at the box office.
But it just shows you, anything that the American people actually like to watch, the critics are going to denigrate as Crap for the masses.
Unless, of course, it fulfills certain intersectional checkboxes.
That means that we can already write in Black Panther for Best Picture next year.
I'm really looking forward to that.
In fact, they should give it all the Oscars, I think.
First of all, I actually do think that Michael B. Jordan should probably be nominated for Best Supporting Actor for Killmonger, because he's actually pretty great in the film.
But I think we should just write it in for a sweep, because it's very important.
Honestly, the only big shock this year is that Wonder Woman didn't win everything, because it was the greatest movie ever made, according to the critics, because women.
OK, so time—you know what?
I have to show you Alex Jones, just because Alex Jones, man.
So Alex Jones, yesterday, he was fighting back against accusations of anti-Semitism.
The way he fought back was not the strongest way in the world.
Here's Alex Jones, fresh off his supplement, talking about why he's not anti-Semitic.
And, oh my God.
Wow.
My new wife, her pedigree's German, three quarters German, from Omaha, and a quarter Irish, and I'm proud of that background.
And any Semites call her Jewish and everything else, and if she was, I'd be proud of it, but no, she's got a noble nose, but she's not Jewish.
So, you know, that's what all this comes down to, ladies and gentlemen.
So, I am not anti-Semitic, but my wife has a giant nose and people think she's a Jew.
Yeah.
Strong defense there, Alex.
I got handed to the man.
Power move.
Power move, Alex Jones, right there.
My wife's not a Jew, but she has a big nose.
So people think she's a Jew, but I'm not interested.
All right.
Time for the mailbag.
Let's just do it.
There are no more words to be said.
Thomas writes, Hi, Mr. Shapiro.
My name is Thomas.
I'm a really big fan of the show.
I'm a freshman at the University of Southern Mississippi, and I just got out of high school.
I firmly believe the reason for school shootings is social outcasting.
The issue is not about easy access to guns, like the left believes, but an issue of values within those students.
Teenagers today are not being taught good values such as humility, amiability, and self-discipline from their parents.
How should public schools go about teaching good values and prevent kids from becoming anti-social outcasts?
So I think it's very difficult for public schools to actually do that.
I think that there can be lessons in virtue.
I think personal responsibility starts at home.
Kids who lack that are going to have trouble learning it at school.
I don't think schools can necessarily fill that gap.
But a school that treats everybody as a victim is not going to succeed either.
Schools used to generate a better feeling of community when communities were stronger themselves.
Again, I'm not going to put it on the schools to teach virtue to kids.
I just don't think that's how it works.
I think that the vast majority of children are taught virtue by their parents.
This is a parental problem.
There's a reason a disproportionate number of these school shooters don't have a biological father living in the home.
Thank you, Liz.
So, there are a couple of good books.
What is a good book to read about the history of the Second Amendment?
Thank you, Liz.
So there are a couple of good books.
I believe Gordon Wood talks about the history of the Second Amendment in some of his books on the foundation of the Constitution.
that's the solution.
There's I believe Paul Johnson may talk about a little bit in history of the American people.
There's also a bunch of actually his name escapes me right now.
It's right on the tip of my tongue.
There's a professor at Yale who's actually on the left who does an excellent analysis of sort of originalist doctrine on the Second Amendment.
And when I remember his name, I will bring it up.
But it's a lot of con law stuff, so there's some good con law books on it.
Justice Bork has a couple of books in which he discusses the Second Amendment.
Dean says, Hi, Ben.
My name is Dean.
I'm a 17-year-old junior in high school, and I'm a firm believer in the Second Amendment and a member of the NRA.
At the moment, myself and others in my school are being threatened by the leftist narrative that we are a heartless coward for defending our rights.
My school will allow students to do a walkout.
I and others will not participate because it is obviously all about gun control.
Ben, how should my friends and I exhibit our First Amendment during the walkout?
It's obvious that myself and other conservative high schoolers are being threatened.
Do you have any advice for us?
Thanks for all you do.
God bless.
Shapiro 2020.
Okay, so here is my advice.
I think that you should walk out with all the other kids, and I think you should bring a sign that says, here to save lives, I love the Second Amendment.
I think that you should say both of those things.
I think that you should make it clear that you are there to help save lives and prevent school shootings, and that these two things are connected.
The reason that you like the Second Amendment is so good people can stop bad people.
Kyle says, "Hey Ben, what do you think the next large-scale global catastrophe will be?
Examples such as World War III, U.S. Civil War, global economic collapse, global pandemic, and so on." Well, it's hard to predict a pandemic.
I would say that, you know, the chances of a pandemic have grown because of the resistance to antibiotics and some strains of disease.
So that's always a solid bet because pandemics do happen.
As far as global economic collapse, I don't think that's going to happen anytime in the near future unless we actually start—if by global economic collapse you mean a severe economic recession or depression, I think that you could see that, but I don't think it's going to last, you know, inevitably or interminably.
World War III?
I think the possibility exists, but it's not super high.
I actually don't think that we are on the verge of a global catastrophe.
I think the greatest catastrophe that could happen right now is America falling more and more into the trap of European-style thinking because we've abandoned American founding principle and a slow slide, I would say, into global degradation On the economic and moral scale.
I think that's probably the worst thing that could happen.
But I don't think it's going to be like a big flashpoint World War III.
Everybody's too afraid of nukes at this point for that to really happen.
Well, the reason it's so attractive to intellectuals is because intellectuals like to think that they are smarter than the common man.
And that the reason that the society has not worked is because they're not in charge.
Commands and control economies are very attractive to people who think they are much smarter than everybody else.
Capitalism, free market economics, laissez-faire, these assume that Joe Schmoe Plummer knows better to do with his money than you know what to do with his money.
And intellectuals don't like that very much.
Intellectuals like to think that they know better what to do with your money than you know what to do with your money.
They think that everybody is ruled by passion except for them.
They're the reasonable people at the top who can construct society in such a way so that everyone is happy.
Hence the drive toward that.
Hence the drive toward progressivism and bureaucracy and the notion of expertise ruling the roost.
The thing is that collective expertise is always better than individual expertise.
This is why command and control economies always fail, because when you have somebody at the top who supposedly knows about trade, that person knows way less about trade than the collective intelligence of the American people, for example, who trade with each other on a daily basis.
Spencer says, So I am writing a book on this right now.
I'm about halfway through that book.
I think it's going to require a renewed teaching of values that spring from Judeo-Christian culture as well as Greek reason.
So, the Greek style Enlightenment, the Lockean philosophy that combined these two forces, we're going to have to reinculcate a sense of community based on a value system that is Judeo-Christian in origin, and also based on a Greek teleology that suggests that you can discover morality by using logic and reason and the nature of the universe around you.
You can't just come up with moral systems in your head that have no relation to the nature of things and the nature of being.
But you can, by investigating the nature of the universe, see what the underlying cause of things is, and therefore come up with certain aspects of virtue.
In order to boil that down into practical practice, you usually need some form of religion, Judeo-Christian religion being the most prominent.
Matthew says, Dear Ben, with YouTube being as large as it is today, do you think there's an issue with the way they're handling their business?
Should we just attempt to take our business elsewhere if we do not agree with their practice, or is it possible that outlets like YouTube and Twitter need to potentially have regulations?
So, this is a serious question.
I know that PragerU has been suing YouTube over exactly this issue.
So, they're a private business.
I think they should do what they want, but they are violating their own terms of service, and they're lying about it.
This is my problem with Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook.
It's not that they're private businesses and they say, listen, we're going to crack down on conservative websites.
You do that?
Fine.
We all go form our own business.
The problem is they're lying.
They're saying, we're free speech outlets.
We're not penalizing specific people.
We're not setting up our algorithms to penalize, say, daily wire content while boosting TYT content.
And then that's exactly what they do.
They set up their algorithms that way.
When you lie, now you're talking about defrauding people.
And there you may have a legal case.
So I think that's the bit.
Like Facebook right now is screwing people so hard.
We spent a lot of money on algorithm, on trying to figure out their algorithms, building a Facebook following.
And then Facebook basically decided they wanted to downgrade certain kinds of content in order to upgrade kinds of content they find more genteel and amiable.
And that's, I think, defrauding clients.
I think it's just defrauding customers.
Phil says, hi, Ben.
Have you talked previously on homelessness, how homeless people do not have a right to the streets and that they should seek community support?
My question is, what do you think we should do specifically?
There's a large homeless population, many of whom don't have a community to fall back on.
I agree that people should set themselves up in a community.
That's not the reality in many cases.
What should be done now to fix the problem?
Well, the answer is that if you're living on the street, you should be arrested.
Okay, really.
If you are living on the street, you should be arrested.
And then, you are one of a few types of people.
Either you are mentally ill, you're one of the mentally ill who's on the street, in which case, we should be looking at commitment, and we should be looking at mental health treatment for you.
And if it has to be involuntary, because otherwise you're a schizophrenic and you're out wandering the streets as a danger to yourself, then that's the way it's got to be.
If you're a drug user, then drug use is still a crime in the United States, or at least living on the street is.
So if you're living on the street, we'll either arrest you or, you know, if you're using—we'll try to detox you.
We'll do our best to help you, put you in a community center.
But if you're back on the street again, we'll arrest you again.
Very little of this is economically driven, is the point that I'm making here.
Because if it were just a matter of economics, and therefore there are a lot of homeless people, then the answer would presumably be that there's not much you can do unless you generate more jobs.
But that's really not the biggest problem with homelessness.
Okay, let's see.
Zachary says, Ben, a couple of weeks ago in your mailbag you said the Federal Reserve wasn't a necessary component of the central bank.
Well, I agree that the Fed is mostly dead weight.
What are the consequences of allowing the inflation rate to rise or fall out of the constraints set by the Fed?
Who would adjust interest rates?
Thanks, Zach.
Well, I'm in favor of going back to a gold system.
I know that this is considered heresy now.
Or at least I'm in favor of pegging the price of the dollar to the price of gold.
So the gold system suggested you could actually physically turn in your dollar for a certain amount of gold, but I don't know that you actually have to do that.
What you could do instead is simply peg the price of the dollar to the price of gold, which was the Bretton Woods system up until it was revoked in the 1970s.
So I don't see a reason we couldn't go back to something like that, and it would be automatic.
Tyler says, Ben, can you give your opinion on capital punishment and how to argue for it, but still hold the belief that killing is sin?
So, the answer is, well, on the biblical level, the word that is used in the Bible is do not murder.
There's a different word in Hebrew for murder than for killing.
The word in Hebrew is lo tirtzach.
Lo means no.
Tirtzach means you shouldn't murder.
So, you should not murder.
Is that rule?
It is not lo taharog.
Taharog would be don't kill.
So on a biblical level, nowhere in the Bible does it say that you shouldn't have death penalty.
In fact, the death penalty is prescribed for a wide variety of crimes in the Bible itself.
On just a secular moral level, there are certain crimes that are so egregious that if you were to keep people in jail for them, you would be doing a disservice to the society at large.
So, I'm not even talking about it on a deterrent level.
There are two types of things you're trying to deter.
One is you're trying to deter people from committing the crime, because they know they'll get the death penalty.
And the second thing is you're trying to deter tribal vengeance.
And one of the reasons that the government has a monopoly on the legal use of force, except in self-defense, is because what we don't want is tribal warfare.
Tribal warfare usually happens when you have one tribe, and they kill somebody from the other tribe.
And then the second tribe says, you know, in revenge, we're going to go kill somebody from the first tribe.
And the first tribe says, oh my God, you killed that guy.
Let's go kill that guy from the second tribe.
This is how wars start.
This is how intra-tribal conflicts start.
It's why gang violence, which is basically just tribal conflict in the inner cities, is so awful.
That's why you actually need a system where people feel like the problem is being taken care of by a third party, and that problem does involve the execution of people who kill other people.
Jesse says, hi Ben, huge fan.
We're having elections for our city council and mayor this year, and campaign finance reform is a huge topic.
As I'm doing the research for myself, I'm curious as to what your opinion is on campaign finance regulation on a federal, state, and local level.
I do not think that the government ought to be involved in campaign finance regulation on any level.
I think they should be involved in bribery.
If you are bribing somebody to vote a certain way, that is a crime.
But if I decide to spend my money, and my friends and I decide to spend my money on an election, I don't see the problem with that, and I think it's an aspect of free speech.
It's my money.
I should be able to do with it what I want.
I should be able to say what I want.
I should be able to buy the free speech that I'm capable of having.
It is none of the government's business, because once the government butts in, it's pretty rare that it's not going to have some sort of impact that is politically motivated.
Campaign finance reform is being pushed by Democrats, not because Democrats actually care about corruption in the election system, because they're perfectly happy with watching unions spend millions of dollars—billions of dollars, actually—on politicians they like.
It's because they think that they're going to be ruling out the rich, fat cats on Wall Street while allowing the unions to do what they want.
Hal says, So, I'm sure this is true.
I mean, there are percentages of the population that can't have a normal job.
I don't know if it's 15%, but there's certainly a certain percent.
you as a libertarian support these people?
So I'm sure this is true.
I mean, there are percentages of the population that can't have a normal job.
I don't know if it's 15%, but there's certainly a certain percent.
And the answer is that community is supposed to pick up the slack.
that you're supposed to actually have local, viable communities, which is why you do need religious communities.
It's why you need to have local communities where people get together, know each other, and like each other, and it becomes a common commitment to help people who can't take care of themselves.
Otherwise, it's going to get thrown on government.
Kate says, hey, Ben, if you were a cheese, which cheese would you be?
I don't know.
That's not a good question.
I don't know the answer to that because I don't know cheese as well enough to have a solid answer to that.
that.
Off the top of my head, mozzarella, maybe?
Mild but completes every dish.
That's not right.
No, I'm getting booed in the studio by my own people.
Yeah, I don't know.
I pass.
What did you say?
Sharp cheddar?
Okay, maybe that's fair.
Jessica says, Hey Ben, I want to tell you that I love your show and no BS approach to politics and the many topics that come with it.
My question to you today is what brought you to be a diehard White Sox fan?
I'm a diehard Cubs fan.
I've been born and raised in Chicago, Northwest Indiana area.
The rivalry between the two teams is great.
So why the Sox?
Because my dad is a Sox fan.
You grew up a Sox fan?
We wrote an entire book called Say It's So about the 2005 White Sox championship season.
You can get that over at Amazon.
So we are huge Sox fans, because—and I will pass it down to my son, because suffering is just in our nature.
I need to pass it down to my son, rooting for a team that nobody else roots for, and that has only won one World Series in the past hundred years.
Let's see, one more question.
Chelsea says, hey Ben, what is it that makes children thrive more academically, socially, and emotionally with married parents than with cohabiting parents who do not separate?
What it is exactly that makes marriage so beneficial?
Thanks.
Well, number one, cohabiting parents who do not separate, there's still the possibility they're going to separate.
There's a burden to overcome.
When people get married, what you're really doing is you're setting up an obstacle to you getting out.
You're locking the door behind you.
When you're just cohabiting, there's always the feeling that one person has at least one foot on the threshold because there's no loss of income, there's no community property, there's no notion that you actually lose anything by walking out the door.
So every day is a re-evaluation as to whether this ought to happen.
Once you've pre-committed, It's sort of like a game of chicken when you put a brick on the accelerator and you show everybody that you've done so.
Once you've done that, you've pre-committed to everybody else that you are not walking out that door.
And children need to feel that sense of security.
I think it's very important that children feel secure in their upbringing, secure that mommy and daddy are still going to be there to help them.
And cohabitation, by the way, is a really bad indicator.
Cohabitation before marriage Okay, so, we'll be back here next week.
We can all hope and pray that policy gets better in the meantime, because the last 48 hours have been garbaggio.
So, Mr. President, do better, and I'll be happy to talk about that.
I hope you do.
as a statistic, are much lower than if you were just to get married without cohabiting first.
Okay, so we'll be back here next week.
We can all hope and pray that policy gets better in the meantime, because the last 48 hours have been garbagio.
So, Mr. President, do better, and I'll be happy to talk about that.
I hope you do.
Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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