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March 16, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
58:14
Does The Free Market Work? | Ep. 497
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Hello there.
American Split.
I'm the gun control walkout, the right splits on free trade, and we'll check the mailbag and do many other fun and amusing things.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
So if you hadn't noticed, I'm just in one of those moods because I watched the Avengers Infinity Trailer.
And all I can say is, does every character from every movie have to appear in one movie?
Should we just make, like, isn't that called life?
Where we're all in the same movie together?
But I guess that's the way we're gonna do movies now.
So I'm doing movie mashups.
I think Sleepless in Seattle and Contagion should be in the same universe.
Chief and Meg Ryan finally find stomachs.
And then they both die of a horrible disease.
Okay, we'll get to actual news in just a second.
But first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Skillshare.
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Alrighty, so.
The fallout from yesterday's gun control walkout continues, and I'm getting tons of emails from kids who feel like they were essentially discriminated against at these walkouts.
I just got one from a kid who wrote to me and said that he wanted to—that he wasn't intending on being political at this walkout.
He waited until people brought out the gun control signs, then he brought out a Gadsden flag, and he was immediately shut down by his school.
He was immediately told he had to put it away.
This is not rare.
I'm getting, again, tons of these emails on a minute-by-minute basis at this point.
It's pretty astonishing and pretty shocking and demonstrates, once again, that there are too many teachers across the country who think that they get to propagandize and use their students as these propaganda outlets.
Now, not every teacher is in favor of this.
In fact, there are many teachers who are not in favor of this.
And there are lots of states like California where you have to be a member of a teacher's union in order to teach.
And if you are a member of a teacher's union, you are expected to toe the party line.
One of the close family friends of ours growing up was a guy who was a member of the teacher's unions because he had to be.
And he would constantly get the updates from the teacher's unions, and they were all left-wing updates.
This is a coordinated effort from the top.
And it really is quite awful.
One teacher has actually been suspended for questioning the gun control walkout.
Her name is Julianne Benzel, and she says that she opened up the discussion in her classroom about the politics of the protest, and she was subsequently told to stay home on Wednesday because the administration didn't like it.
Here's what she had to say on CBS 13 Local.
This is in Northern California.
Julianne Benzel says she never discouraged her students from participating in National School Walkout, but she did question whether it's appropriate for a school to support a protest against gun violence if it's not willing to support all protests.
It's the best example I thought of at the time.
If a group of students nationwide or even locally decided, I want to walk out of school for 17 minutes and go in the quad area and protest abortion.
OK, and she's, of course, exactly right.
If the students decided to walk out and protest abortion, they would have no capacity to—none of the teachers would sponsor it, right?
But because this is a national gun, anti-gun walkout, all the students were expected to walk out.
I've gotten notes from students who say that they wanted to stay in class because they didn't feel like creating a hubbub.
They were just going to stay inside the school.
And they've actually been getting notes from teachers, you know, threats of suspension for staying in the school during the walkout.
So it's really astonishing stuff.
And it demonstrates once and for all that something really nefarious has happened at a lot of our public schools.
our public schools have become a tool for left-wing propaganda.
They really have, especially in classes like social science, what they used to call history, but now they call social science.
Those classes, or social studies rather, those classes have been taken over by the left.
And this is why so many parents are pulling their kids out of public school and putting their kids in private school.
They're saying, you're not even doing a good job of ensuring that my kids are getting an education, but you can certainly ensure that my kids get to walk out of class and miss class in order to make a political statement that has nothing to do with their education.
Because of course, these kids can't vote.
Their parents can.
If their parents want to do something, they are free to lobby.
Why these kids should be leaving school in order to do what they're doing is beyond me.
It doesn't seem like it makes any sense at all.
These teachers are political actors, and teachers unions are political activist schools of thought.
That's what they do.
If you look at just how teachers unions work, the way they bargain with the state is they are basically democratic tools.
And that was predicted long ago by Ludwig von Mises in his book, Bureaucracy, talking about how any employee of the state ends up being a propaganda outlet.
And this is certainly true with regard to teachers' unions, because the way it works with teachers' unions is you want to support Democrats, because if you elect Democrats, Democrats will then give you a cozy union payout.
And that's the way that it works in the state of California, where the CalPERS system, for example, is bankrupting the state, where teachers have signed union contracts with the state.
They give them these very, very rich pensions.
And these pensions are trillions of dollars, unpaid trillions of dollars, at least hundreds of billions of dollars.
And the state lies about it.
And the state says, well, don't worry, we're going to pay out.
We'll never have to tax people additionally, because we're just going to have a certain growth rate in the CalPERS fund.
None of that's ever going to happen.
But again, if you're a teacher's union, then this is all great for you.
All you have to do is support Democratic policies and get Democratic politicians elected with all of the union dues that the teachers pay in, and the state mandates that you pay your union dues in order to work.
So you have this guild, and this guild is mandated by the state.
You have to work for the guild in order to work for the schools.
And then the guild takes some of your money and pays those politicians to keep that system going, keep that rigged system going.
And those politicians get to push legislation, and all they ask in return is that the teachers' unions push all of their ancillary causes.
And that's what a lot of these teachers' unions are doing.
It's really shocking and appalling.
And again, Most of these students who are walking out have no political bent one way or another.
It's not like most of these students who are walking out are passionate about gun control.
The vast majority of students who walked out probably have no idea anything about gun control.
They probably don't know any facts about gun control.
In fact, there are some students who are walking out just because they want to walk out and go do stupid things.
Like this is film from Chicago.
Students walked out and they proceeded to trash a Walmart for no reason.
Oh my God, look how they tore up our store.
Insulanti's.
Kids!
She ran to the bathroom and said, I'm taking off my vest.
Oh my God, look at this s***.
Oh my God.
They got the noodle palette.
They didn't get, they gon' make us work today.
Oh my God.
So these students charged into a Walmart and they upturned all the stalls.
I like the security guards laughing about it.
Well done, security guards.
But it's just demonstrative of the fact that young people sometimes are stupid.
This does not mean that all young people who walked out don't have any political knowledge.
Some of them do.
Some of them are politically active.
Some who oppose my position.
Some who support my position.
Some who are in favor of Second Amendment rights.
Some who are in favor of gun control.
But to pretend that all of these students are the wisest and fairest of all beings, they're the elves in our little morality play of Middle Earth, It's just it's foolish and it's not true at all, especially when you look at what actually happened in Broward County.
So this video came out yesterday and it really is shocking.
It's video from Broward County of the sheriff's deputy.
This is the on school site deputy.
He obviously, first of all, does not look like he should be on school site security.
One of the big problems that you see when you talk about in-school security is very often these are rented cops.
Very often these are people who could not pass a physical.
These are people who could not run a block without losing their breath.
It's not everybody who's a school deputy, obviously, but it is true for a certain number of them.
And it is important that you have some people who actually are in good shape, know what they're doing.
This guy I don't feel bad ripping on because you'll see in the video that they hear the gunshots, he takes off on his little golf cart to go over to the area where the shooting is happening, and then you'll see in the video he stands around and does nothing for 20 minutes.
Here's what it looked like when the Broward County Sheriff's Office released the tape.
So you can see him.
It's a silent video, so I'll narrate it.
You can see him, Scott Peterson, the BSO, school resource officer, who looks like he's maybe in his 50s, and he drives over to the area where the shooting is happening, and then he proceeds to legitimately just stand outside the building.
He's just standing around outside the building doing nothing.
I mean, it's an amazing thing, right?
And there's part of this video that we cut out where you can actually see students fleeing the building through another one of these doors.
Does he charge in?
Does he do anything?
No.
And according to the Broward County Sheriff's Office, the orders that are given to their officers are that if there is an active school shooting, you are supposed to engage.
You are not supposed to stand outside.
So the talk about how these guys were told that they were supposed to stand outside, how that was the policy of the department, that was not true.
So there's one problem with the department with regard to policy, and that is this policy that says we're not going to arrest anyone because we don't want to increase the arrest statistics on students.
We want to show that our students are doing really well, and so we'll just pretend that no crime is going on.
But this one looks like it was on Scott Peterson and not on the Broward County Sheriff's Office, per se.
Nonetheless, this is not stopping the agenda from rolling forward.
Mika Brzezinski over on MSNBC, she says the NRA should be sued.
Some things have changed, at least in the state of Florida.
The NRA, with their inflammatory ads and threatening ads, should be sued.
Okay, on what grounds should the NRA be sued?
In order for you to sue somebody, you actually have to have legal grounds.
There actually has to be a legal purpose for the suit.
Otherwise, it'll be thrown out.
But according to so many people on the left, lawsuits happen when you're angry at something.
So you don't like the NRA's ads, you get to throw it out.
Okay, the NRA was not responsible for this shooting.
One of the most astonishing things I saw yesterday was Code Pink calling for an end to funding for JROTC on campus.
They were saying, well, we don't want campuses militarized.
We need to stop funding JROTC.
There were three kids who were killed who were members of JROTC, and one of those kids actually threw himself in front of bullets to save other kids.
While this idiot cop was standing around outside doing nothing, One of these students, a 15-year-old, he ran out there and he tried to stop the shooter.
He got in the way of the bullets.
He saved his students.
He died in the process.
And Code Pink is saying we should get rid of JROTC?
Again, the big problem with evil is that evil cannot be prevented simply by legal mechanisms, usually.
Evil can only be prevented by good people.
It can only be prevented by good people doing the right things.
And unfortunately, the left does not want to recognize the real possibility of human evil.
They're just not interested in recognizing that possibility.
It's pretty, it's pretty horrible.
So meanwhile, President Trump is embracing this new bill, the school safety bill.
And the school safety bill really does not have much gun control attached.
So everybody on the left is, of course, very upset about that.
They thought that President Trump was going to break the impasse on gun control.
That, of course, was never really going to happen.
So in just a few minutes, I'm going to talk about what exactly is in the school safety bill, and we'll talk about that.
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Alrighty.
So here's what's in the school safety bills.
So, So it passed the House.
It has the support of a wide variety of senators, and it doesn't do anything about gun control per se, but it does do some things about school security.
So there is no parallel measure pending in the Senate.
Right now, they're trying to push gun control in the Senate, of course, but that's not going to happen.
This bill is instead a bill that doesn't allow, that is seeking to increase security at schools.
So it does not, Let me bring up the actual provisions of the bill right here.
given for school security, be used for arming teacher or other school personnel.
The White House wants that restriction lifted, but the bill itself is filled with some measures that are designed to ensure that this stuff doesn't happen again, or at least that there is better security on campuses funded by the federal government.
So the school safety bill, let me bring up the actual provisions of the bill right here.
So the school safety bill is, let's see, it passed by an overwhelming margin, by the way, in the House of Representatives.
It has not yet been brought up, as I say, before the Senate.
Again, all the people on the left are very upset because they think the only measure that can be taken here is going to be gun control.
But it steers clear of the demands of gun control advocates.
It is the Stop School Violence Act.
It provides $50 million a year for a new federal grant program to train students, teachers, and law enforcement on how to spot and report Okay, so this is a good start.
But they say this doesn't do enough.
Republicans say this is only the beginning.
systems where people could report threats of violence and authorizes 25 million dollars for schools to beef up security in ways such as installing new locks metal detectors and panic buttons okay so this is a good start okay white house Democrats overwhelmingly supported the school safety sorry the house Democrats overwhelmingly supported the school safety measure according to the hill but they say this doesn't do enough Republicans say this is only beginning this is the first steps and okay these should be the first steps I'm Obviously, I think that the states should actually take precedence here.
I'm not sure that the federal government should be leading the way on any of this stuff in the first place.
But I think that it is it is pretty clear that these that the school, the school safety bill should pass with flying colors through the Senate.
OK, meanwhile.
This is another story that I think is worth talking about.
Huffington Post has done something pretty amazing.
So, Huffington Post is obviously a very left-wing outlet.
And the deputy opinion editor of the Huffington Post is a person named Chloe Angle.
Okay, Chloe Angle triumphantly tweeted out the demographics of people they have published this year.
It just shows how crazy the left has become with regard to their politics of intersectionality.
Here's what they say.
Month two of HuffPost opinion is almost done.
This month we published 63% women, including trans women, 53% writers of color.
Our goals for this month were less than 50% white authors, Asian representation that matches or exceeds the U.S. population, more trans and non-binary authors.
And then say we also wanted to raise Latinx representation to match or exceed the U.S. population.
population.
We didn't achieve that goal, but we're moving firmly in the right direction.
Making the improvements we made took work, no doubt about it.
We all tapped our networks and made moves to expand our collective Rolodex.
I check our numbers at the end of the week because it's easy to lose track or imagine you're doing better than you really are, and the numbers don't lie.
The numbers also don't tell the whole story about disability, geography, socioeconomics, and more.
But the work is not onerous, and it's definitely not impossible.
If we can do it, every other opinion page can do it, too.
And if you have an op-ed to pitch, here's how you can do that.
So what I love about this is that the deputy opinion page editor over at the Huffington Post doesn't make any case with regard to the quality of the submissions over at Huffington Post.
There's nothing to be said here about how great Huffington Post's quality is.
Instead, all they care about is the racial breakdown of the people writing, which used to be called racial quotas and were obviously Latinx.
Sorry, not Latinx.
OK, this is all supposed to be a guarantor not of quality on the page, but instead a guarantor of of demographic equality.
But what's really funny about this is that if you were actually going to be demographically equal on the Huffington Post page, it would be about 70% white, it would be 50% males, it would be 90% straight, it would be almost 0% transgender because that's 0.3% of the U.S. population is transgender.
But they're not trying to do that.
Diversity only exists for those who are marginalized groups, and those marginalized groups must now become a majority, according to the left.
All of this is incredibly stupid and has nothing to do with the quality of the work on these pages.
So pretty astonishing stuff.
Okay.
Meanwhile, President Trump continues to forge forth on his anti-free trade program.
And this is obviously not good policy.
Tucker Carlson made the best case on this last night.
There are a bunch of folks who are on the Trump side of the aisle who are trying to make the case for tariffs, who are trying to make the case for protectionism.
My problem with tariffs and protectionism, obviously, is that they believe in the power of centralized government.
Here's Tucker trying to make his strongest case.
For technology and trade being the downfall of American civilization.
It's not a horrible case, but I don't think it's a convincing one either.
Lawmakers in both parties, for example, have heartily embraced self-driving vehicles and drone delivery of packages.
It's all impressive technology, but what would be the effect on employment?
Has anyone asked that?
There are more than 3 million professional truck drivers in this country.
It is the most common job in the majority of American states.
More than 90% of drivers are men.
Thanks to technology, many of these men are about to lose their jobs.
That's a lot of unemployed Americans.
That's a lot of broken families.
Washington is not worried at all about this.
Lawmakers and business leaders assure us that those truck drivers will be just fine.
They'll find something else to do.
Something better, in fact, with higher pay!
And maybe they will.
But keep in mind, our leaders said the very same thing about manufacturing jobs 30 years ago.
Okay, so this is, what Tucker points out here is, I think, a generalized argument that can always be made in favor of centralized government.
What he's saying is there's a group of people in the United States, they are lower educated white men, basically.
These are people who are living in the middle of the country and people who are working in non-technology jobs.
These are people who are working on lines.
These are people who are truck drivers.
And these people are going to be hurt by technology and trade and we have to do something for these people.
But the implication is...
and throughout this monologue was that these people, if they're not taken care of, number one, that they are going to not get married, they're not going to stick around for their wives and children, that they are going to start acting in worse ways.
There are a couple of assumptions embedded in Tucker's notion here that I think are problematic.
So problem number one is he seems to suggest that poverty and lack of job opportunity cause immorality.
I don't actually think that's the case.
I think that moral people tend to act morally, whether they are poor or whether they are rich.
There are lots of terrible rich people.
There are lots of wonderful poor people.
There are lots of people who make a lot of money in their jobs, and there are lots of people who make very little money, and all of them go to the same church.
So, when Tucker suggests that people who are earning a lower wage are suddenly going to not stick around for their kids, I'm not sure I see the correlation there, or at least I'm going to resist the correlation.
The other thing is that this is not really a case for tariffs.
It's not really a case for shutting down trade or shutting down technology, so I'm not sure what Tucker is actually arguing for here.
I agree that a lot of this stuff is a problem.
I agree that we have a problem with people who are not lawyers or doctors, people who don't have higher education degrees.
And what do we do with them?
As the technology develops and they lose their jobs, what do we do with those folks?
But the answer is not to stifle the technology.
Tucker seems to be making the case against self-driving trucks.
Okay, but you could have made that exact same case against cars back in 1910.
You could have said there are a bunch of wheelwrights who are going to lose their jobs.
This is true with every technological change.
Every single one.
There are a bunch of people who lost their jobs over at AT&T when people stopped using landlines.
There are a bunch of folks who lost their jobs when dial-up internet went away.
There are a bunch of people who lose their jobs when any new technology is developed.
There are a bunch of people who lose their jobs.
The question is, are a consummate number of jobs created on the other end?
Are there more jobs that are created on the other end, or just as many jobs created?
And, by the way, that isn't even really the question.
The question is, does quality of life go up for the vast majority of Americans every time there's a technological change?
Because the goal of an economy is not to create jobs.
The goal of jobs is to create an economy.
Meaning, the purpose of a job is to create a product or service someone else wants to buy.
It is not the job of the economy, per se, or the government, per se, to ensure that anyone has a job.
If you get that polarity backwards, you end up with communism, where everybody has a job, but they're not producing anything anybody wants.
Centralized government is not the answer here.
Now, there is a piece that I referenced a little bit yesterday I want to go through in a little more detail here.
Regarding tariffs, there's a piece over at the Journal of American Greatness.
The Journal of American Greatness was an outlet devoted to President Trump's purported philosophy.
And it's kind of lost some of its luster because President Trump doesn't have really a coherent philosophy.
But there's a piece there that was taking on something I said on the show about free trade.
And this piece is by a guy named Spencer Morrison, who's a law student and editor-in-chief of the National Economics Editorial, which I've never heard of.
And here's what he says.
He says, the piece is titled, Why Ben Shapiro is Wrong on Free Trade.
Let's just make something clear.
My perspective on free trade is backed by essentially 100% of economists.
There are very few economists who believe in tariffs.
When I say very few, I mean that if you polled actual economists, the number of economists who would dismiss free trade in favor of tariffs, that number is very close to zero.
Here is what this article says.
I think it's worth discussing in detail.
So, Morrison argues in favor of tariffs.
And he begins with an analysis of a three-minute segment of video from this podcast in which I talked about the flaws in tariff-based economics.
I specifically talked in that segment about the fact that trade deficits don't matter.
about the fact that if you have a trade deficit with your grocery store, your grocery store is not screwing you, nor are you being screwed by your grocery store.
And if we buy more product from China than China buys from us, that does not mean that we are losing to China.
China just has a bunch of dollars it has to spend, which it then has to invest back in American bonds or back in American businesses or in American real estate.
Now, obviously, I've done a lot of work on tariffs on the show, but there's a new argument that Morrison presents that I think that you should know about just so that you know what you're talking about when you talk about free trades.
So, first, Morrison sort of misrepresents my argument.
He suggests that I think trade deficits are an act of good.
I've never said trade deficits are an act of good.
They're not an act of good.
They're not an act of bad.
They're just a thing.
You sometimes have a trade deficit with your grocery store, sometimes you're a contractor to your grocery store and you have a trade surplus.
None of that means that anything inherently bad or good is going on.
As I've quoted before, Thomas Sowell says this, 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 as well as years when it ran surpluses.
The U.S.
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.
Now, Morrison, this author, claims that I have called Trump a flip-flopper on free trade, which I never have.
He's been very clear that he's anti-free trade.
But here's the central argument that's made, and this is the one that I think we should spend some time talking about, just so that you know the arguments that are being made against free trade and why they are wrong.
So here's what Morrison says.
He talks about comparative advantage.
Comparative advantage is this idea.
Let's say that I, Ben Shapiro, I am great at making this podcast, but I also happen to be very good at growing oranges.
And I'm pretty good at it.
Not like the best, but pretty good, right?
And let's see that I can even make, I can even grow oranges better than my local grocery store.
But I am the very best at making this podcast.
So every minute that I spend not growing oranges is a minute that I spend on the podcast.
And every minute that I spend on the podcast is a minute I spend not growing oranges.
Should I spend my time doing the podcast or should I spend my time growing oranges?
The answer, of course, is that I should take all the money I'm earning from the podcast and go buy some oranges at a cheaper price.
The time value, the monetary value of my time is higher doing the thing that I am best at, even if it means that I'm buying from somebody else who's specializing in an area where I'm still the best, but it's just not the best thing I do.
I'm better at the podcast than I am at growing oranges, therefore I should spend more of my time doing the podcast than growing oranges, even if the second best guy at growing oranges Is not as good as I am at it, right?
He should specialize in growing oranges.
I should specialize in podcasting and then we should trade services for one another.
I should give him a subscription for $9.99 a month and he should give me a bag of oranges, right?
This is the idea of comparative advantage.
So here's what Morrison says.
His comparative advantage is an elegant theory, but too often is domain specific.
It only works when certain preconditions are met.
For example, capital must be immobile for the theory to apply, meaning that I can't just take my capital and go buy a Um, an orange farm in Brazil.
Shapiro ignores this crucial limiting factor and applies comparative advantage to just about everything.
This is his root error.
For example, comparative advantage suggests the key to getting rich is to specialize production regardless of what you produce.
That is, a country with comparative advantage in growing soybeans should focus on growing more soybeans, while a country with comparative advantage in manufacturing semiconductors should focus on manufacturing more semiconductors.
In either case, this supposes their relative wealth will correlate with the degree of specialization as opposed to the complexity of their production.
This is objectively wrong.
So what he says is that if you're a country that produces semiconductors, you're going to be richer than a country that produces soybeans.
There are a bunch of problems with this.
So first of all, it is important to note that countries don't just make soybeans or semiconductors.
They make lots of products.
Countries are not individuals.
Countries are broad amalgams of individuals, all of whom are in different industries.
So this guy says, well, this guy makes the obvious point that if you grow bananas, you're going to make less money than if you make computers.
This is obviously true.
OK, but of course countries that develop higher profit sectors are going to have higher growth rates.
And of course, the decisions that you make now are going to have impact on the future development of industry.
So this is his second argument.
He says, OK, so granted that a country that grows bananas makes less money than a country that makes semiconductors.
So if you are a banana growing country, comparative advantage would suggest you keep growing bananas.
But that means that you're never going to become a semiconductor making country.
Therefore, what you should really do is you should tariff semiconductors.
You should put a tariff on foreign semiconductors, and then you should grow your business in semiconductors from the inside.
Okay, this neglects a few points.
This neglects a few points.
First of all, you cannot tell which sectors of an economy are likely to be the most profitable.
This is something called, what he's talking about here is a term called path dependency.
Path dependency is, you made a mistake, you decided to grow bananas, and now you're stuck growing bananas forever, even if it would be more profitable for you to move into making semiconductors.
But this assumes that you can't just stop making bananas and start making semiconductors.
It assumes there's no bank that will lend you money if you get a computer education degree to go make semiconductors.
This assumes there's no mobility in the economy, which of course is not true.
And if the government were to say, listen, we're going to tariff semiconductors, we're going to tax all the banana growers and take all their money, and we're going to use it to subsidize semiconductors, who's to say the government knows which industry is going to grow fastest?
When government introduces subsidies into an industry, it usually makes that industry more profitable, but it doesn't end up picking the industry that always works.
This is a very important point.
Let's take Trump's steel tariffs.
Trump thinks the steel industry is very, very important.
So he's going to tax all of us, that's what a tariff is, and then he's going to take that money and he's going to give it to the steel industry.
It's the same thing as a tax and a subsidy.
That's all a tariff is.
A tariff is, I'm going to pay more for my car so that my money will go to the steel industry.
That's Trump saying he thinks the steel industry is particularly important.
But how does Trump know the steel industry is particularly important?
How does he know the future of what technological development is going to look like?
Now, there's a notion that you have to protect the steel industry from foreign predation.
But why?
Why?
I mean, for security reasons, you could.
But there's no indication that security is the problem here.
What's happening here is that Trump likes steel in a way he doesn't like other industries, so he thinks steel ought to be protected.
But what does Trump know that the economy doesn't?
This is the whole reason centralized government fails.
One guy at the top does not know as much about how products and services should move as the entire economy, as this diffused hands of the market, you and I choosing on our own what we want to buy and what we want to sell.
You can't tell which sectors are going to be the most profitable, and the government is actually far more likely to lock in particular path dependency.
Right now you're path dependent on steel in the United States, or path dependent on semiconductors, than to spur future economic growth.
And also, most market lock-in is self-correcting.
We develop new products on a routine basis that are different in kind from the products that preceded them.
So the argument for path dependency, that you pick a winner and now you're stuck, Or you pick an industry and now you're stuck?
It doesn't really hold.
The sort of example that people use when they talk about path dependency and trade is the example of your QWERTY keyboard, right?
There's this myth that there are two types of keyboard.
There's the QWERTY keyboard that everybody has on their laptop, and then there is the Dvorak keyboard that was invented at the same time and supposedly is faster.
Number one, there's no evidence that it's faster.
Number two, the cost of moving away from the QWERTY keyboard and towards something else have to be taken into account when we say, why don't we switch to a more efficient keyboard?
In other words, there are costs.
You could say, we should have picked the Dvořák keyboard, that would have been better.
But now there are costs attached to switching.
So the argument is, well, then maybe government should have subsidized the Dvořák keyboard, for example.
But that doesn't make sense, because the government didn't know that Dvořák keyboard was better.
And if the market had known that Dvořák keyboard was better, then it would have picked the Dvořák keyboard.
But that's not what happened, right?
So if we could see the future, the bottom line is that people who are in favor of tariffs think that certain industries are more important than others and that government can see the future and has to protect those industries.
But that makes no sense.
In 1947, the smart money in the United States would have been on subsidizing Would have been on subsidizing manufacturing, taxing all other industries in the United States to subsidize manufacturing.
And that would have been totally wrong.
In 1947, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, manufacturing represented a quarter of all GDP production in the United States, finance represented 10.3%, agriculture represented 8%.
Those would have been the three industries to dump money into.
But if we had taxed agriculture and finance to finance manufacturing, that would have been stupid.
By 2016, manufacturing had fallen to 11.7% of GDP, and finance represented 21%, agriculture represented 1%.
So if we had had the government picking and choosing winners and losers, we would have put our money in the wrong place.
This is why central planning usually fails.
Paul David of Stanford University writes, "From the foregoing, it may be seen that a proper understanding of path dependence and of possibilities of externalities leading to market failure is not without interesting implications for economic policy.
But those are not all the sorts of glib conclusions that some critics have alleged must follow if one believes that history really matters.
Namely, the government should try to pick winners rather than let markets make mistakes." Quite the contrary.
Public policy could try to delay the market from committing to the future inextricably before enough information has been obtained about the likely technical or organizational legal implications of an early precedent-setting decision.
In other words, government picking and choosing winners actually ensures path dependency.
It ensures market lock-in.
Impoverishing profit sectors through tariffs in order to dump money into non-competitive industries actually impoverishes your country as a whole.
Economic flexibility requires that the government should not impede the free flow of capital within industries.
What about the idea that if you're a banana and producing economy, you'll never become a software-producing economy?
There's no proof of that.
Private lenders will pay the freight for new industries.
The United States, again, used to be a manufacturing economy, and then it became a service economy.
This happens.
It happens all the time.
So the central argument here just doesn't work in favor of tariffs, and I think that that is worth noting.
Okay, so.
I have a lot more to talk about, including an insane retraction that was pushed out by ProPublica about a Trump nominee in just a second.
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So moving on from trade policy, the Trump administration is still having high turnover.
There was a tweet earlier today from a reporter talking about somebody inside the Trump administration who said they were expecting large moves inside the administration.
Something is coming and we don't know what it is.
Which is?
Not a helpful report from the reporters, but the turnover is very high.
Well, one of the people who has been elevated by the turnover is the new CIA nominee, the new CIA director nominee, whose name is Gina Haspel.
And we talked about this yesterday about how Senator Rand Paul tore into Haspel, suggesting that she had overseen torture in foreign lands.
And it turns out that is not true.
He was basing that off of a ProPublica article that was printed yesterday.
They had to issue this retraction.
The story said that Haspel, a career CIA officer who President Trump has nominated to be the next director of central intelligence, oversaw the clandestine base while Abu Zubaydah terrorist was subjected to waterboarding and other coercive interrogation methods that are widely seen as torture.
The story also said she mocked the prisoners suffering in a private conversation.
Neither of these assertions is correct and we retract them.
It is now clear that Haspel did not take charge of the base until after the interrogation of Zubaydah ended.
So this is obviously a pretty egregious error, but it shows that people on the left are really invested in trying to suggest that Trump's nominees are awful, awful people.
Also, they're very invested in the narrative that there's a lot of chaos at the White House.
Now, there is some chaos at the White House.
There's no question.
There are a lot of people in the White House who are wondering what in the world is going on.
There were a series of competing rumors yesterday that were pretty amazing.
There was one that Chief of Staff John Kelly was going to be leaving.
There was one that the NSA General McMaster was going to be leaving.
There was one that the VA secretary was going to be leaving.
The administration keeps trying to tamp down these rumors, but it's hard to tamp them down when the president of the United States is constantly ripping his own cabinet members on Twitter, and also when he says things publicly about how he likes to watch them fight, like that guy from Godzilla, Let them fight.
He likes to watch his cabinet officers jockey for a position.
There's a rumor that Scott Prude over at the EPA was on the hot seat.
There's a rumor that Ben Carson is on the hot seat.
There's a rumor that Ryan Zinke is on the hot seat.
There are a bunch of rumors that half his cabinet is going to be gone.
But Sarah Huckabee Sanders yesterday was saying, don't worry, McMaster's not going anywhere.
Of course, they were saying the same thing about Gary Cohn five seconds ago.
Here is Sarah Sanders, what she tweeted out.
She said, just spoke to POTUS and General H.R.
McMaster.
Contrary to reports, they have a good working relationship and there are no changes at the NSC.
OK, well, that's not convincing, considering, again, that they've said this about every person who has ever left the administration.
Kellyanne Conway came out.
She said they keep recycling rumors, but the rumors have no verity to them.
Here's what she had to say.
They won't cover policy.
They cover personnel.
They won't cover principle.
They cover palace intrigue.
And they keep on recycling rumors and stories constantly that have no basis in fact.
I think they figure, hey, if a stop clock is at least right twice a day, eventually I'll get this right.
So if I predict a whole year in advance, So-and-so's on Thin Ice, so-and-so's gonna go, and they do a year later.
I could just recycle those clips where people said, the president has full confidence in X, and six months, a year later, it changes.
This president has every right to put the team around him that he thinks aligns with his vision, his values, but he is the one who controls the timing, the tone, and content of all substantive and personnel decisions.
So, obviously, the president has the right to do whatever he wants on personnel.
That's really not the question.
The question is, is it good that there's this much turnover?
Well, some of the turnover is good.
Like, Rex Tillerson leaving the secretary of state is good.
There's so much turmoil at the administration, though, that that was like the sixth biggest story of the week, that the secretary of state was booted out of office by the president.
Normally, that'd be a pretty big story.
Instead, that is downgraded to the lower end of the spectrum.
Listen, if Trump wants to make some moves, he should rip off the mandate, he should make his moves, he should be done.
The prolonged feeling of chaos is not good for the administration.
They have some things to do, and it's not worthwhile to have them dragging this process out over long periods of time.
I recommend to the administration that they just get done what they need to get done, because otherwise it's putting too much pressure on the American public to go along with the daily reality show that's happening at the White House.
I know a lot of President Trump supporters don't seem to care.
That's fine, but the American people do care.
Not because they're sitting around waiting for the next tweet to fire somebody, but because they do want a feeling of steady leadership at the White House.
Now, Obama was not a steady leader, but the media ensured that he felt like a steady leader, even though he was not.
They would continue to put out this vision of Obama as a cool-as-a-cucumber guy, which I don't think the evidence is quite there for, but they're not there for Trump, right?
They're going to up the amount of cash.
So Trump has to be twice as cool as anybody else who's been in the office, and I don't know that that's actually going to happen.
Okay, so, you know what?
Let's take some actual time with the mailbag today.
We'll go back to things I like and things I hate at the very end of the show, but let's go straight to the mailbag today.
So get in your questions right now.
We'll just jump right in.
All right, we begin today.
With Hendrik.
So Hendrik says, if you detest rock music, why does your show start with an electric guitar?
So I don't detest all rock music, Hendrik, number one.
Number two, my show starts with an electric guitar because that electric guitar is being played by the brother of the founder of the company, one of the founders of the company.
And we didn't want to pay right to actually buy musical cuts to use here.
So instead, we just had a guy play two notes.
Pretty awesome, right?
Okay, so James says, Hi Ben, I don't know if you've ever been asked about these particular questions, but I'm sure it's highly likely.
Your background in debate and evidence-based arguments is well established.
When it comes to the evidence concerning the existence of God, is the citation of an accepted religious tome of authority enough, or is it considered conjecture, and or not substantial enough?
Could a rational argument based on biblical evidence hold up in a rational legal court of law if the idea of God were put on trial?
Could, or rather would, ardent atheists like Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins find any substantive reason to find your arguments compelling enough to consider the religious position as tenable, or are the minds of such intellectuals closed off to the possibility of God to the point that any argument made by a believer would be seen as reaching and circular, such as the arguments for the existence of God made by Descartes in his meditation's treatise?
In short, is there any actual evidence in your mind that would hold water in a legal proceeding, or can faith and law not reasonably coexist without one co-opting the other in one way or another?
Jim.
Okay, so, Jim, I will say that I think that logical proofs of God tend to lack.
Yeah, I think that you can make a logical argument for God, But that's not the same as logical proof of God.
Because God hides himself in the universe, right?
This is the basic religious tenet.
God is incorporeal.
He doesn't manifest himself, at least in Judaism, right?
There's no idea of God actually taking corporeal form in the form of Jesus, for example.
So in Judaism, and this is true in Islam as well, and even in Christianity, where God has not taken human form for the last 2,000 years, There's a feeling that God hides himself in the universe, that God is something you have to discover.
Making an argument for the existence of God is possible.
In fact, I've recommended a book by Edward Fazer, a philosophy professor over at Grove City College in Pasadena, who has written a very good... I think it's at Grove.
He may be at Pasadena City College.
In any case, he's written a very good book called Five Proofs of the Existence of God, and he has an Aquinas proof, and he has a He has a proof from Pascal, and he has a bunch of different proofs.
And some of them I find pretty compelling.
But at best, you can make a probabilistic case for God.
It's very difficult to make an evidentiary case for God, because any piece of evidence in favor of God can also be interpreted against God.
So if you say, look at the beauty of the universe, the atheist will say, right, that beauty of the universe was created through sheer accident.
Or there are multiple universes.
If you say, God made this universe in a particular way, and the chances of the universe being made in this particular way to sustain human life are really, really, really unlikely, Then folks on the other side, atheists, will say, well, what if there are multiple universes?
What if there are parallel universes?
Or what if time is endless and the dice have been rolled a bajillion times?
In other words, these arguments come to a standstill.
The best argument for God that I believe exists, there are two arguments for God that I think are compelling.
Again, I don't think they are provable, but I think they are compelling.
One is that there is a system of logic that undergirds the universe that is the basis for all human thought and science.
Science is the idea that you are discovering consistent rules in the universe that pre-exist your being, and there is an objective truth that would exist regardless of your presence on Earth.
And so, the religious person says that's proof of a designer.
That these rules exist.
And the more you study the rules of the universe, the more you are shocked by the genius that created them.
Now, atheists will say there was no genius that created them, right?
This is all accident.
You're just a speck of dust moving through the universe on a meaningless rock.
You're a ball of meat moving without sentience through life, right?
You have a basic idea that you're here, but you don't really have control.
Which brings us to the second argument in favor.
And that is the argument of free will, the argument that you have something that allows you to supersede your own biological necessity and make choices every single day, and that all of civilization is based on this premise.
And in fact, all of atheistic thought, too, is based on this premise, because until very recently, most atheists believed in the concept of free will.
If you go back to the French Revolution and Enlightenment thinkers, even people like Laplace, there are a bunch of folks who are Enlightenment thinkers, who are atheists, who believed in at least a very contained notion Of free will.
Now, folks like Sam Harris, I think, are really consistent on this, right?
Sam says there is no such thing as free will, and he doesn't try to make the compatibilist argument that is made by some advocates of non-free will, where they say, well, you know, everything is biologically determined, but at the same time, there is a sense of free will because there is chaos built into the system.
That's not free will.
It's just chaos built into the system.
I actually agree with Sam on this.
I agree there are only two real positions on free will.
There's the hard free will position.
There's an ability to choose otherwise.
And then there is the deterministic position, which is that you, in this situation right now, have no choice but to behave as you are behaving, if you believe in free will, which is an experiential thing.
If you believe like Samuel Johnson, right, that it's tautological, that let's not argue about free will, it's here.
If you believe that, it's very difficult not to believe that there is at least some force in the universe that you just do not understand and that cannot be explained away by physical laws.
That at least gets you to a place where there's a supernatural element to life that we just don't connect with or understand.
And then you can move beyond there to, is there a logic to that supernatural presence that unites creation?
So those are the arguments in favor of God.
Again, they're arguments.
I don't think that they are completely provable, and I'm not going to pretend that I can prove to Sam Harris or Matt Delahunty or anybody else on the atheist left That God exists.
I just don't think that it's possible to prove God exists, and I think that that's one of God's points, right?
As a believer in God, I think God does not want you to be able to prove God exists.
If I could provide you proof right now, here and now, that God existed, then obeying God's law would be the easiest thing in the world, because you wouldn't have a choice.
The argument would be, God exists, and then if I could prove to you, just through sheer evidence, that the Bible was given by God, it's the unadulterated Word of God, then you would not have a choice.
The Creator of the universe has ordered you to do things, you must do these things, or the punishments that God provides in the Bible will come true.
But I don't think God wants us to behave that way.
I think God's whole purpose in creating the world was to create beings in his image, meaning they have free will and the capacity to create and choose.
People who believe, by the way, they have free will and the capacity to create and choose.
As my friend Jordan Peterson likes to say, people who are trying to generate order from chaos, these are people who find fulfillment and purpose in life.
It's very difficult to build either an individual or collective system of meaning on the basis of your meatball floating through space.
Kyle says, what do you think the world would be like if there was a second species on Earth as intelligent as humans?
Well, you know, I think that we'd have conversations with them, and I think we'd have to take into account common interests.
Frankly, I do think that there are such differences between people that we are not separate species, but there's enough for us to talk about to get past our differences.
Men and women are different enough that having conversations that way is hard enough as it is.
Adding a second species would make things even more difficult.
Joel says, how can we innovate in music if only one genre is correct?
In your case, classical.
Um, you can innovate within classical music, right?
Stravinsky is very different from Beethoven.
Bartok is incredibly different from Brahms.
There are certain rules that you can imagine abiding by and still work within those rules.
In fact, I think most great art is created within the confines of particular rules.
I think most great novels are written in complete sentences.
I think most great novels are written using typical rules of human English.
In fact, I think that there are a few that break the rules, but most of the novels that break those rules at least know where the rules are.
If you read Ken Kesey, who's a fan of breaking grammatical rules, or if you read A Clockwork Orange, in which an entire new language is developed, all of that is based on knowledge of the rules and then specific breaking of the rules to a particular end, a feeling of chaos, a feeling of newness, a feeling of generating language beyond our typical language. a feeling of generating language beyond our typical language.
All of that can be broken, but that's not what Rock does.
Rock is not people who learned the rules and then decided in ordered fashion to bend or break them.
It's a bunch of people who don't know the rules, who hit the drum on two and four and who play three chords.
And that's not breaking the rules.
That is not only not breaking the rules, it's not even...
It doesn't even acknowledge that the rules exist.
And so you actually end up with a much more primitive form of music than anything that was developed in the classical era.
No, but I think that you should be able to apply, if people have dementia, to have those guns removed from people's homes.
I'm not sure that age is a good argument.
There are 80-year-olds capable of having a weapon.
If you're a law-abiding citizen and you need to defend yourself, I don't see the problem with you owning a shotgun.
Yeah, that said, if you are senile, then I do see the problem with you owning a shotgun.
Thanks, love the show.
Well, James, I can't believe that they put you in the mailbag, but I will say that just because the original saying was, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, does not mean that the proof is in the pudding is not the modern saying, or at least the bastardization of that saying.
Well, James, I can't believe that they put you in the mailbag.
But I will say that just because the original saying was the proof of the pudding is in the eating does not mean that the proof is in the pudding is not the modern saying or at least the bastardization of that saying.
So it's less a correction than I think an addendum by Michael Knowles.
And Michael has corrected me on occasion about things like writing words in books.
That apparently was a complete waste of time.
But it does not feel good to be corrected by Michael Knowles.
Listen, I've had to pay him more money than I thought humanly possible, right?
He works for me.
It means I pay him a salary.
I lost a bet to him.
Our relationship is not going well.
I had an idea for a YouTube series where I talk about struggling with depression and anxiety.
I hope to use my experiences to help others realize they can reach out to their families and communities with their struggles and get the help they need.
My only worry is that if I admit to some of the darker problems I faced, I could lose my Second Amendment rights.
I haven't ever attempted suicide and it has been years since the worst of my depression, but I live in New Jersey and gun laws are tough to begin with.
My fiancé also worries that this may affect his ownership rights when we live together.
Am I worrying over nothing or am I right to be hesitating?
Well, I don't know what the current status in law is in New Jersey, but typically you have to prove that someone is a current danger to themselves or others, not that they once had issues with depression ten years ago, five years ago, two years ago.
You actually have to have hard proof that somebody is a threat to themselves or others.
You don't sound like that's the threat.
I think that your series sounds like a wonderful thing.
I think there are a lot of people out there who are suffering with depression and anxiety who don't even know what it is they are suffering with, and a little solidarity along those lines would be a perfectly wonderful thing.
Jordan says, The Libertarian Party today posted on Twitter that they support the students and their political works from the walkout yesterday.
Why would the Libertarian Party support gun control?
So I haven't seen the post, so I'm gonna hesitate to attribute to, I'll take you out your word.
Okay, if what you are saying is correct, assuming what you're saying is correct, that's because the Libertarian Party is ridiculous.
And they ran Gary Johnson for President of the United States twice.
This party's in disarray.
It's really frustrating because as a conservative slash libertarian, I would love to see a vital and working libertarian party, but this is the party that trots out John McAfee at their events, and then also trots out a naked guy wearing an iron cross tattoo.
So I'm gonna go with they're crazy.
At least the party.
Pete says, Hi Ben, I'm with you on the immigration question.
Let's keep those that are behaving in accordance with American values and customs.
Playing the tape forward concerns me, however.
Say the wall does get built.
What happens then?
Does the black labor market disappear?
How are labor laws going to change?
What benefits are guest workers going to be entitled to?
Is it unreasonable for me to have doubts as to the ability of the U.S.
government to administer such a program effectively?
Well, you're never wrong in doubting the ability of the U.S.
government to administer any program effectively.
But the idea here would be that there probably be guest worker programs, there are H-1B visas.
But this is why I don't think the wall is the be-all end-all.
I mean, the whole point here is that half illegal immigrants in the United States are people who overstayed their legal visas.
So that means that we really should be focusing on ensuring that we are enforcing the laws that are already on the books.
I'm fine with a wall.
I'm in favor of a wall.
But I don't think the wall is going to solve the problem.
I've been following your show for the last few years, but just recently subscribed.
I use part of my tax refund because what's more American than that?
My question is regarding taxes and the latest tax reform.
My sister and brother-in-law are big liberals, and at that last family get-together we're saying that without the inheritance tax, the rich could and would put all their money in a trust fund and then claim a lower tax bracket.
I wasn't sure of the logistics, so I had to debate them using all of their premises.
Is this true?
Are there loopholes that are now possible without the inheritance tax?
Thanks for all you do.
Okay, so, the inheritance tax is ridiculous.
The inheritance tax is disgusting.
I already paid tax on that money.
So when you get income, you pay tax on your income.
Then the money goes into your estate.
If the estate accrues money, if it accrues capital gains, then you pay capital gains tax.
You don't pay income tax.
The rate on capital gains and income is not the same.
Now, there's a case to be made that you should pay the same tax on capital gains as you pay on income.
That's actually not a terrible case.
But the solution to this is not to claw back half the money that you already paid taxes on.
I mean, every year I'm paying an enormous sum of taxes and then I'm taking the leftover and I'm putting it into savings for my kids.
And by the way, when I put that money into a trust fund for my kids, the bank is taking that money and borrowing against that money.
The bank doesn't just leave the money sitting in a lockbox somewhere.
The bank actually takes that money and lends it out at interest to other people who are starting businesses.
So all of this is economic ignorance on the part of these folks.
The whole point of working hard, one of the reasons that you work to make a profit, is that you can take that money and pass it on to your children.
I would be supremely pissed if I did not have the ability to dispose of my money as I saw fit at the end of my life.
So, I think that the National Archive is fantastic.
You can actually go see the actual original Constitution of the United States and Declaration of Independence, which is super cool.
I think that the Supreme Court is really fun to visit.
The Smithsonian Museums are, of course, really neat.
You should walk through the Capitol and check that out because it's kind of neat to see that this isn't some sort of faraway place.
These are actual people working on the ground who are just normal human beings.
It's cool to visit the White House.
Honestly, I've visited the kind of private part of the White House more than I visited the public part of the White House.
But the White House is a really neat place to visit.
All the typical sites that you see are really neat.
The Washington Monument is great.
The Jefferson Memorial is great.
The Lincoln Memorial is great.
There are so many sites in D.C.
It's really a tremendous place to visit.
I just wish that they would decentralize it and destroy it.
One of my big problems with D.C.
is that I think that you can tell whether a country is run well or not by whether the buildings that are government buildings are nicer than the private buildings.
In D.C.
they are, and that's a problem.
I like countries where, I like areas, like state buildings are usually worse than the private buildings in the same city.
I think that's the way it should be.
I think we should decentralize Washington D.C.
and make people live in their home districts and then vote from their home districts.
This is what the internet was created for.
Trump has nominated Gina Haspel to replace Mike Pompeo.
The biggest criticism of her is her work in a secret prison in Thailand where at least one terrorist was waterboarded, and then she subsequently ordered evidence of the waterboarding destroyed.
So again, this was retracted today by ProPublica.
So, the justification for using torture on terrorist suspects is twofold.
Terror suspects are not accorded protection under the Geneva Convention.
As I explained yesterday, the Geneva Convention was designed to ensure that soldiers stayed in uniform.
If they got out of uniform, they're no longer protected by the Geneva Conventions.
Go back and watch The Great Escape, and you'll see this is a major issue.
As soon as people try to escape the prison and dress up as civilians to escape, they're no longer protected by the Geneva Conventions, and this is a major risk for them.
This is for a reason.
You don't want people dressing up as civilians, going into civilian areas and using those civilians for cover.
It gets more civilians killed.
One of the purposes of the Geneva Conventions is to prevent that from happening.
So, terrorists should not be treated as members of an enemy army.
They should be treated as terrorists.
Second of all, is torture useful?
Well, it was for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
We waterboarded him a bajillion times and we got some good information from him about Al-Qaeda and its leadership structure and all the rest.
So there's a really strong open debate going on about whether torture works or whether it does not.
I'm not going to pretend that I think that waterboarding isn't a form of torture.
It's not the form of torture that does permanent damage, but it's certainly torturing the person psychologically.
Do I think that it's called for in certain circumstances?
I think probably.
But I think there's a good argument to be made on the other side.
I mean, there's some people who say that torture doesn't work at all.
I find that dubious.
That's the argument.
Anyway, Jade says, do you use an e-reader like a Kindle or do you prefer physical books?
So I tried a Kindle.
I tried it.
I prefer physical books.
I strongly prefer physical books.
One of the reasons for that is, number one, I just like the feel of a book in my hand.
I like to be able to turn the pages.
I feel like I'm making progress in a book.
One of the things that drives me nuts about Kindle is that it tells you percentage of the book that you've completed, not page numbers, which is annoying to me.
And then beyond that, I have another problem, which is I can't use a Kindle on Sabbath, and I get a lot of reading done on Shabbat.
So if I'm in the middle of reading a book on Kindle, I can't read it on Sabbath, so I have to buy the physical copy anyway.
Anyway, Josh says, "I'm a senior at Stoneman Douglas.
My government teacher recently asked for a conservative and a liberal student to go on, Trevor Noah.
I offered to be the conservative.
Any tips for if I go on?" Well, number one, just research the facts all the way up and down and make sure that, you know, Trevor Noah may try to suggest that you care less than your liberal friend.
And if he does, then what you should say to him is, "Listen, Trevor, I'm one of the people who is at the school.
You don't get to call into question my sincerity on these issues.
We need to have an open debate about these things, and that has to start with people stopping questioning other people's sincerity.
And it's not just me, right?
I think you should say to Trevor, no, you've been here ripping on the NRA, ripping on Dana Lash, suggesting that she doesn't care about dead kids and all the rest of it.
I am one of the kids who's victimized.
I believe a lot of the same things that Dana Lash believes, and I don't think that makes her uncaring.
And I think that you need to stop that if you want to have a valuable conversation.
Like, this is a good, valuable conversation we're having.
Conservative, liberal, Trevor Noah, right?
We're all having a conversation together, not doubting each other's motives.
If you can't grant that same capacity to so many other people in the political sphere, we're never going to get anywhere.
I would start with that point.
First of all, you should do it.
Second of all, it would go totally viral, so you should totally do that if you're on Trevor Noah's show.
Carl says, Hey Ben, if you had, Carl, if you had an opportunity to overhaul the public education system, what would you do?
What curriculum changes would you make?
And would you remove or include any courses of study?
Do you believe there should be an early separation of students into different tracks, like for students that plan to go to college versus to trade schools straight to the workforce?
Big fan of yours.
So yes, I do think tracking should start earlier.
I don't think it should start, you know, once you're, now you don't even start until you're in grad school.
So certainly by the time you're in college, you should be tracked.
Now, the way it works in Israel is that you start getting tracked at age 17, which makes some sense to me.
Curriculum changes.
You need a strong course in Western Civ.
I don't just mean you read about the history of Western Civ.
I mean, you actually have to study the philosophy of Western Civ.
You have to take the Bible seriously and Plato and Aristotle seriously and Aquinas seriously.
And you have to take the philosophes seriously and you have to take the English Enlightenment seriously.
I think a good course of Western civilization would be useful.
In fact, the book I'm writing is essentially that.
It's basically a primer on Western civilization.
So I hope that that will be helpful.
Okay, time for a quick thing I like and a quick thing I hate, and then we will break for the weekend.
So, a thing that I like today, we've been doing books on socialism.
There's a book called The God That Failed, which is really a compilation of various essays from great thinkers, many of whom used to be socialists and then decided that was stupid.
The best one in the collection is by Arthur Kessler, who's also the author of a fantastic book called Darkness at Nude.
It's a novel.
It's about 100 pages, maybe.
And it's an amazing book.
It's basically about a Trotsky figure who's captured by his own revolution and thrown in jail and his experience before he's executed.
So it's, you know, light reading.
But The Book, The God That Failed, is definitely worth reading.
Check that out.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
All righty.
So the quick thing that I hate today is Vanessa and Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., are divorcing.
And the media are making a huge deal out of this, right?
This is a big deal because, of course, he is a public figure.
They've released a joint statement.
Apparently Vanessa didn't like being in the public eye.
They have five children, so it really is tragic.
Here's what they said.
After 12 years of marriage, we have decided to go our separate ways.
We will always have tremendous respect for each other and our families.
We have five beautiful children together.
They remain our top priority.
We ask for your privacy during this time.
That's the way you should handle this.
Although, you know, obviously I wish that they would work to put it back together.
I'm not in their situation, but it's just, you know, obviously divorce is a terrible, terrible thing.
What's really gross is there's so many people on the left who are celebrating this.
Oh, Don Jr.
getting what he deserves.
Okay, this is a family.
I wouldn't be excited if the Obamas divorced, right?
That would be terrible.
They have children.
I don't like it when people divorce.
When bad things happen, to people, even if you don't like them politically, and it's just, and their children involved particularly, there's nothing to laugh about.
When it's Hollywood celebrities who are married for three months and then they get divorced, then you can laugh at them.
But if they have children, then it becomes a tragic situation.
Alrighty.
So we will be back here on Monday with all the latest.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Mathis Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
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The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
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