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Feb. 1, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show

58:13

Eat The Rich! | Ep. 708

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	Spartacus declares for president a new democratic fresh face.
	So fresh, so face.
	Proposes an insane tax rate and Republicans pounce.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	Well, you know Democrats are having a bad week when every headline is about how Republicans are pouncing, like a bunch of cats, hiding in the shadows.
	We pounce!
	Well, there'll be a lot of pouncing on today's show, because Democrats, not good at what they do.
	Also, lots of making fun of Cory Booker coming up, because come on, man, if I can't make fun of Cory Booker, what was I born to do, people?
	We'll get to all that in just a second.
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	All right, so I'm very excited because for a long time, I've been eager to see the Kamala Harris versus Cory Booker versus Elizabeth Warren primary.
	Who will be the most minority candidate?
	I mean, Elizabeth Warren, as we all know, is 1 1,024th Native American, and Cory Booker is 1 1,024th Spartacus.
	As you recall, the senator from New Jersey back during the Kavanaugh hearings, he's such a bag of tools, Cory Booker.
	I mean, like...
	It's amazing that people take Cory Booker seriously because everything he does is so over-dramatized.
	I like Senator Ted Cruz.
	I'm friendly with Senator Ted Cruz.
	The rap on Senator Cruz back in 2016 when he was running is that everything that he did seemed like it was overthought by a couple of steps.
	Well, if everything that Cruz did seemed like it was sort of manipulative or overthought during the 2016 campaign, Cory Booker, it's like the guy, it's like the guy writes a script in his head and then he says, you know what?
	This needs more explosions.
	And then he rewrites the script in his head and then he does it live.
	It's amazing.
	So that's why you have situations like Cory Booker during the Kavanaugh hearing, you will recall.
	But there was a series of documents about Brett Kavanaugh that were actually released publicly, like the night before Cory Booker did this.
	Cory Booker then went out and said, I am violating the rules and I may be banned from this Senate committee for violating the rules by releasing these documents, which were released legally yesterday.
	And then he said, and these documents will show that Brett Kavanaugh is a vicious racist.
	And the documents showed no such thing.
	But he said, if ever there was something like an I am Spartacus moment, This is my I am Spartacus moment.
	Which is like, you're reading the stage direction, dude.
	Don't read the stage direction.
	If you want people to call you Spartacus, that's when you have your press guy call up a friendly outlet and say, you know what, call him Spartacus in the press.
	This is when you do the Donald Trump as John Miller routine.
	And you call up and you say, this is definitely not Cory Booker.
	But if it were Cory Booker, he'd be telling you to write a piece about how he's Spartacus.
	Instead, he just goes out fully publicly and is like, this is my I am Spartacus moment.
	That's Cory Booker.
	So, Cory Booker is now running the Faux Sincere campaign.
	And if you fall for this, you are a dolt.
	You are a dolt.
	I mean, I just, I gotta say.
	So, Senator Booker, on Thursday, began calling members of Congress and informing them he is running for president.
	The least surprising announcement since Rosie O'Donnell came out of the closet.
	He's quietly making overtures to members for support according to three congressional sources.
	That was yesterday.
	And then within hours, he had openly announced his intentions.
	And here is his launch video.
	And to say that this thing is overproduced and staged and ridiculous would be understatement by omission.
	It's incredible.
	It's incredible.
	I'm going to describe it for you if you can't actually see it.
	You should go and see it.
	You should subscribe to Daily Wire so you can see all of the clips that we play and see my reaction to them.
	But this video is just wonderful because basically the theme of the video is Cory Booker is just a boy from Newark.
	He's a boy from Newark who made good because he's overcome racism and homophobia and sexism and all.
	He's not gay, by the way.
	And all these other things.
	He's overcome everything in life.
	He was a Newark boy who became mayor of Newark and still lives in Newark.
	Now, what's hilarious about this video, as you will see, is that his main message is that he was mayor of Newark and grew up in Newark and spent his entire life in Newark.
	And it sucks just as much as when he was a kid.
	That's the underlying theme of the video.
	So he spends his whole life there trying to make things better, supposedly, and nothing is better in Newark.
	And, by the way, spend some time in Newark, man.
	That is not a place.
	No insult to people who have spent their time in Newark.
	Newark is not one of America's most comfortable cities.
	Let's just put it that way.
	And Cory Booker's tenure there didn't do much to help the city of Newark.
	It's like when Kamala Harris talks about her record in California.
	And those of us in California are sitting around going, uh, what now?
	Crime rose while you were the AG, and you were the district attorney in San Francisco, which is now a whole.
	So, well done.
	It's amazing how failing upward in politics just seems to be endemic.
	Like, the worse you do, at least on the Democratic side, At least when Rick Perry ran for president of the United States, he'd been a good governor of Texas.
	Kamala Harris was an awful AG.
	She'd been an awful senator.
	She was an awful district attorney in San Francisco.
	And now, you've got Cory Booker, who is a garbage mayor of New Jersey, a garbage senator from New Jersey, and now he's going to run for president of the United States.
	Being crappy at your job is almost a prerequisite to becoming President of the United States if you are a Democrat.
	Like, what did Barack Obama do as Senator in Illinois that radically made Chicago better?
	Is Chicago way better now than it was, like, when Obama got to Chicago?
	Not seeing a ton of evidence of that.
	Anyway, here is Cory Booker's ridiculous ad.
	We can build a country where no one is forgotten.
	No one is left behind.
	OK, pause for a second.
	Sorry.
	So he so we're going to stop and start this.
	He says we can build a country where no one is left behind.
	It's a picture of reams of just homeless people.
	Like, you've been in government, dude.
	What have you been doing about this problem?
	Anything?
	You got a thing?
	Also, his dramatic reading is so great.
	So, over here at The Daily Wire, we have an executable host named Michael Moles.
	And Michael Moles is a former actor.
	And when he acts, he sometimes tends to overdo it.
	That is nothing compared to Cory Booker.
	I mean, Cory Booker is chewing the scenery like he is a starving man on a desert island.
	He's chewing that scenery.
	It's just great.
	So continue, Mr. Booker.
	Food on the table, where there are good paying jobs with good benefits in every neighborhood.
	Where our criminal justice system keeps us safe instead of shuffling more children into cages and coffins.
	Okay, so can we pause it there for a second?
	- Leaders on television can feel pride. - And then the picture of him, no kidding. - It's not a matter of can we.
	It's a matter of do we have the collective will. - Okay, so can we pause it there for a second?
	I'm just wondering, at what point do we actually get the big screen reveal that this is actually the movie drum line?
	Because you'll hear throughout this ad, people drumming.
	And there's actual video of random people drumming.
	It's like some white chick in her apartment and she's drumming away and then he's walking through a high school corridor and people are drumming away.
	I was hoping that maybe he would break into song or maybe he'd just start breakdancing in the middle of the video.
	Just for entertainment value.
	But it's like he took all of the cliches and he put them in a cliche nuclear reactor.
	And out came a cliche nuclear rod that is radioactive, but also extraordinarily powerful.
	Continue.
	I believe we do.
	Together, we will channel our common pain back into our common purpose.
	Together, America, we will rise.
	I'm Cory Booker, and I'm running for President of the United States of America.
	Wow.
	Wow.
	So together, we will rise.
	Yeah, so much excitement.
	So much fake excitement.
	It's just, you gotta love it.
	You gotta love it.
	It's just spectacular.
	And here's the thing.
	He's gonna crowd that lane, right?
	There's an intersectional lane that he's trying to run in.
	Now, what's funny about Booker is that when Booker started, his entire pitch is that he actually was the bipartisan Democrat.
	So you'll recall, if you look back at his career, Jim Garrity does this at National Review, that he started by taking on a Democratic machine in Newark, and he ran in Newark on the platform that I'm not a radical Democrat.
	He first lost, and then he won.
	And his big thing when he was mayor of Newark was making these big dramatic announcements, so...
	In 2010, he joined Chris Christie, who was then the governor of New Jersey, with whom he was very friendly at the time, and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg on the Oprah Winfrey Show to accept an eye-popping gift, $100 million to reform Newark public schools with local philanthropists and others matching it and raising it to $200 million.
	It was a really good day for Cory Booker.
	And then you'll recall that as mayor of Newark, he decided that he was going to do like the food stamp test and try to live on supplemental nutrition assistance.
	Every day for a month, which didn't even make sense because it's supplemental nutrition assistance.
	It's not supposed to be like the entirety of your income for the entire month.
	But then when he went to the Senate, he just decided that he was going to give up being bipartisan at all.
	That was because there was real backlash to him in 2012.
	People were attacking private equity and Booker fought back against that.
	Booker said, you know, why are we attacking private equity?
	He says, we're getting to a ridiculous point in America, especially that I know I live in a state where pension funds, unions, and other people are investing in companies like Bain Capital.
	If you look at the totality of Bain Capital's record, they've done a lot to support business, to grow business, and this, to me, I'm very uncomfortable with.
	The last point I'll make is this kind of stuff is nauseating to me on both sides.
	It's nauseating to the American public.
	Enough is enough.
	Stop attacking private equity.
	And then the Democrats came down on him, and then he flipped.
	And then he released a video that completely reversed himself.
	Now, private equity was absolutely terrible.
	Now, when he left as mayor of Newark, nothing actually had happened in Newark.
	Here was the New York Times upon him leaving.
	When snow blanketed this city two Christmases ago, Mayor Cory Booker was celebrated around the nation for personally shoveling out residents who had appealed for help on Twitter.
	But here, his administration was scorned as streets remained impassable for days because the city had no contract for snow removal.
	Last spring, Ellen DeGeneres presented Mr. Booker with a superhero costume after he rushed into a burning building to save a neighbor.
	But Newark had eliminated three fire companies after the mayor's plan to plug a budget hole failed.
	In recent days, Mr. Booker has made the rounds of the national media with his pledge to live on food stamps for a week, but his constituents do not need to be reminded that six years after the mayor came into office vowing to make Newark a model of urban transformation, their city remains an emblem of poverty.
	So there he is, like, walking around, doing his, I'm cool, Newark's an awesome place thing.
	He didn't make it an awesome place.
	It continued to be Newark.
	And again, credit to people who live in Newark.
	They're braver than I. But, come on.
	Come on.
	Cory Booker is a fraud.
	He's been a fraud for a long time.
	And he is just maintaining his fraudulent status.
	Doesn't mean he won't get the royal treatment from the media, of course.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	Now, when I say that Cory Booker is a fraud, I mean that in the most literal sense.
	I mean, the man is legitimately a fraud.
	You'll recall that a few years ago, there was a big controversy because he made up a friend.
	He made up his Newark friend.
	Eliana Johnson, who's now a reporter for the Washington Post, at the time writing for National Review, talked about this street character who he'd known, who it turned out was a composite from his life.
	Here is Eliana Johnson writing about this.
	this she says the tale is when booker admits he's told a million times according to the newark star ledger ronald rice jr a newark city councilman and booker ally who has known the mayor since 1998 says the t-bone story was a fixture of booker's unsuccessful 2002 mayoral bid against corrupt newark political boss sharp james what exactly was the story t-bone was a drug pusher that the mayor said threatened his life at one turn and sobbed on his shoulder at the next The problem is that T-Bone does not exist.
	The T-Bone tale never sat right with Rutgers University history professor Clement Price, a Booker supporter who told National Review online he found the mayor's story offensive because it pandered to a stereotype of inner-city black men.
	T-Bone, Price says, is a southern inflected name.
	You would expect to run into something or someone named T-Bone in Memphis, Not Newark.
	So T-Bone, it turns out, is fake.
	And this is not the first time that bookers lied about things.
	But it just shows that the guy is just a fraud.
	And the media are going to treat him as the second coming.
	Because they've always treated him as the second coming.
	Because he does weird, quirky things that the media likes.
	Like he's a vegan.
	And he likes to talk about how he gets manicures.
	All right.
	So he left his city in shambles.
	He's been a garbage senator.
	He came into the Senate promising bipartisan cooperation.
	And then one of his first moves was to endorse the awful Iran deal.
	Over the objections of a lot of his own Jewish supporters.
	Who were very upset with him.
	So Cory Booker, in the race, just another candidate for you to learn to dislike.
	Very exciting stuff.
	Meanwhile, the Democrats continue to promote their most radical proposals.
	And this is also the problem for Cory Booker.
	Booker's main appeal, originally, was that he was a guy who could reach across the aisle.
	But the Democratic Party no longer wants to reach across the aisle.
	They want to push further and further to the left.
	And this is why they've endorsed legitimately bad people like Ilhan Omar, the representative from Minnesota.
	So, she had a couple of viral quotes in the last 48 hours.
	Viral quote number one, she said that Israel should not exist.
	She's an anti-Semite, Ilhan Omar.
	There's just no doubt about this.
	I mean, she's associated with people who are terrorist-friendly.
	She's now calling for the abolition of the only Jewish state on planet Earth.
	She has suggested that Israel has deceived the world and may Allah lift the veil from people's eyes.
	You know, Ilhan Omar is a bad lady.
	She's a bad lady.
	And here is Ilhan Omar explaining on Yahoo News that Israel really should not exist.
	It should just stop existing.
	When I see Israel Institute law that recognizes it as a Jewish state and does not recognize the other religions that are living in it and we still uphold it as a democracy in the Middle East, I almost chuckle because I know that if You know, we see that in any other society.
	We would criticize it.
	We would call it out.
	We do that to Iran.
	We do that to any other place that sort of upholds its religion.
	She's a crazy person.
	I mean, what she's saying here is patently false.
	It is patently false.
	The reason that we criticize Iran is not because it is a state that has Islam as its official religion.
	The reason that we criticize Iran is because Iran is a repressive dictatorship that murders gay people, imprisons dissidents, and prevents people from freely exercising their religion.
	Israel doesn't do any of those things.
	There are many states, by the way, in Eastern Europe that have Christianity as their official religion.
	The idea that an internal Jewish state law that says that Judaism is the official state religion of the Jewish state, that this isn't in any way controversial in a country where Christians are free to live, work, and prosper.
	Muslims are freer in Israel than they are in any Muslim country on planet Earth.
	That you can compare that to Iran.
	And this lady is on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
	She's on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
	That's where they put her.
	The Democrat, but they're not radical.
	She also said, Ilhan Omar, that Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez's proposal to tax the super wealthy, people who make above, what was it, 70, about $10 million a year, to tax them at 70%, she said that doesn't go far enough.
	Here was her explanation of what she thinks the tax code should be.
	There are a few things that we can do.
	One of them is that we could increase the taxes that people are paying who are the extremely wealthy in our community.
	So 70 percent, 80 percent.
	We've had it as high as 90 percent.
	I think what picks up for a lot of people is taxing the rich up to 80, 90 percent or 70.
	One percent must pay their fair share.
	Okay, the 1%.
	Let me explain something.
	The 1% are not people making $10 million or above per year.
	They're people making about $400,000 per year as a couple.
	And she's talking about now taxing them at 90%.
	At 90%.
	And by the way, if you think the Democrats are going to stop there, you're totally wrong.
	I mean, they're not going to stop there because the truth is there just isn't enough income From that group, to support any of the programs they're talking about.
	As I've said repeatedly on the program, if you want Denmark-type socialism, you have to have Denmark-type tax rates.
	And that means 60% taxation, leaving aside the VAT tax, on people who are making like 60 grand and above.
	Because we're going to spend even more than Denmark on these programs.
	So this is just, it's just madness.
	The Democrats have gone completely radical on all this, and that's why Cory Booker can't run as old Cory Booker.
	He can't run as the bipartisan guy who is going to reach across the aisle.
	No one in his party wants that.
	Even his opening campaign ad, which is purportedly about unity, all that's going to go by the wayside.
	It's going to be about who can punch Republicans more strongly in the mouth.
	And Democrats now have to engage in this sort of self-delusion where they are actually moderate.
	It's pretty amazing.
	It's pretty amazing.
	The leader in self-delusion in the country right now is Paul Krugman.
	Now, Paul Krugman won a Nobel Prize, not for economics generally, I mean, because economics is an entire field.
	He won a Nobel Prize for his trade theory stuff.
	His trade theory stuff is quite good, Paul Krugman.
	On everything else, the man is a dunce.
	And when it comes to politics, he's particularly ridiculous.
	So he has an article today ripping on Howard Schultz, which has become the stock in trade for the entire left-wing media.
	Howard Schultz is the bad guy.
	Howard Schultz is a bad guy because he's a centrist.
	We don't need centrists right now.
	Here's what Paul Krugman writes, trying to convince himself almost that Democrats are not in fact radical.
	He says, Why is American politics so dysfunctional?
	Whatever the deeper roots of our distress, the proximate cause is ideological extremism.
	Powerful factions are committed to false views of the world, regardless of the evidence.
	Notice that I said factions, plural.
	There's no question that the most disruptive, dangerous extremists are on the right.
	Well, I mean, there is a fair bit of question about that, considering that Democrats are now talking about overthrowing the entire American healthcare system, overthrowing the entire American transportation system, and restructuring the entire American economy.
	If I had to make a bet, I would say those people are slightly more dangerous than Donald Trump tweeting stupid crap from the White House.
	He says, but there's another faction whose obsessions and refusal to face reality have also done a great deal of harm.
	But I'm not talking about the left.
	Shocker.
	It turns out that there are factions that are bad, but not the left.
	The left is not a bad faction.
	Radical leftists are virtually non-existent in American politics.
	This is Paul Krugman writing this.
	A radical leftist.
	Radical leftists are virtually non-existent in American politics.
	Can you think of any prominent figure who wants to move up, move to the left of say, Denmark?
	Denmark is pretty far left, dude.
	Denmark, as I just mentioned, has tax rates that are unbelievably exorbitant on people who are lower middle class.
	What are you even talking about?
	But I guess when you reshift the entire framework of politics so that suddenly Denmark becomes middle of the road, alright, I mean, I guess it's a thing you can do.
	He says he's really worried about fanatical centrists.
	Fanatical centrists.
	He says, First, there's an obsession with public debt.
	This obsession might have made some sense back in 2010, when some feared a Greek-style crisis, although even then I could have told you that such fears were misplaced.
	In fact, I did.
	Right?
	You also said the internet would not be a thing in the economy, Paul Krugman.
	So, if we're going to go back to your record of predictions...
	There's been some good and there's been some bad.
	He says, in any case, however, eight years have passed since Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson predicted a fiscal crisis within two years unless their calls for spending cuts were heeded, yet U.S.
	borrowing costs remained at historical lows.
	And then he says that anybody who thinks that the debt is a problem is crazy.
	That's crazy.
	It's not crazy to say that you want a Green New Deal that would cost $50 trillion over 10 years.
	It is crazy, however.
	It is totally crazy to say that the national debt is a problem.
	And then he continues along these lines.
	He says, And he's not alone in saying things like that.
	to any proposal that would ease the lives of ordinary Americans.
	Universal health coverage said Schultz would be free healthcare for all, which the country cannot afford.
	And he's not alone in saying things like that.
	A few days ago, Michael Bloomberg declared that extending Medicare to everyone, as Kamala Harris suggests, would bankrupt us for a very long time.
	Now, single payer healthcare actually called Medicare, hasn't bankrupted Canada.
	In fact, every advanced country besides America has some form of universal health coverage and manages to afford it.
	First of all, America does have a basic form of universal health coverage.
	It is basically Medicaid.
	It is Medicaid and emergency room forced care.
	Right, so the idea that people are dying on the streets in America is simply a left lie.
	It is also true the vast majority of spending on health care in the United States is done in the private sector by people who voluntarily pay into the private sector.
	The United States spends something on the order of 60, I believe it was 60 trillion dollars a year?
	I'll have to look this up.
	Sorry, it would be 60 trillion dollars over the next decade that America could be expected to spend on healthcare.
	Obviously not 60 trillion a year.
	60 trillion over the next decade that we could be expected to spend on healthcare.
	About 28 trillion dollars of that was expected to be public and about 32 trillion was expected to be private.
	Okay, so that means that a lot of the spending that's being done is voluntary spending by people who are freely alienating their money in return for quicker health care.
	But according to Paul Krugman, it is not radical at all to say you're going to completely abolish one-fourth of the American industry.
	So, radical centrists are the real problem.
	He says, where does the fanaticism of the centrists come from?
	Sheer vanity.
	Both pundits and plutocrats like to imagine themselves as superior beings, standing above the political fray.
	I mean, does Paul Krugman own a mirror?
	Somebody.
	We need a government program to buy Paul Krugman a mirror.
	If we tax everybody one cent, we can buy him a magnificent mirror.
	They want to think of themselves as standing tall against extremism right and left, yet the reality of American politics is asymmetric polarization.
	Extremism on the right is a powerful political force, while extremism on the left isn't.
	The answer, for centrists, is retreating into a fantasy world, almost as hermetic as the right-wing Fox News bubble.
	In this fantasy world, social democrats like Harris or Warren are portrayed as the second coming of Hugo Chavez, so that taking what is actually a conservative position can be represented as a brave defense of moderation.
	So now Howard Schultz is an out-and-out conservative.
	So in order to defend the extremism of their own cause, Howard Schultz becomes a conservative and Ilhan Omar becomes a moderate.
	Pretty amazing stuff.
	But this is how the media generally have treated the extremism of the Democrats.
	So, what's hilarious over the last week?
	Is that we have seen in the last week Kamala Harris embrace Medicare for all, abolishing private health insurance, and then run screaming from it.
	We have seen Democrats embrace murder of the unborn up to point of birth, including dilation, according to Kathy Tran, the state senator in Virginia, the state delegate in Virginia.
	We have seen Democrats embrace tax rates that would make Hugo Chavez extraordinarily happy.
	I mean, 90% on the top 1%.
	That's a pretty solid tax rate right there from Ilhan Omar and company.
	And yet the way that the media have covered these things is always Republicans pounce.
	It's an amazing thing.
	I've never seen, I really have never seen a bevy of headlines.
	Whenever Republicans make a mistake, it's never Democrats pounce as Republicans, as Republicans reel.
	It's never Democrats pouncing.
	But Republicans pounce has become such a meme that people on the right know that as soon as Democrats do something bad, there will be a bevy of articles about Republicans pouncing.
	So here is an actual headline from the Washington Post.
	I kid you not.
	I'm reading it straight.
	I'm not making it up, okay?
	Okay, quote, "Republican sees on liberal positions to paint Democrats as radical." Do you mean we quote them?
	Like we play clips of them?
	Like on places like this show?
	and then we say they're radical because they're like, you know, radical?
	It's by Matt Visor.
	Senator Kamala Harris is raising the possibility of eliminating private health insurance.
	Senator Elizabeth Warren and other prominent Democrats are floating new and far-reaching plans to tax the wealthy.
	In Virginia, Governor Ralph Northam voiced support for state legislation that would reduce restrictions on late-term abortions.
	Democrats, after two years largely spent simply opposing everything President Trump advocated, are defining themselves lately in ways Republicans are seizing on to portray them as far outside the American mainstream.
	Well, the Those Republicans, dastardly Republicans, suggesting that these positions are outside the mainstream, what if there were, you know, like some poll data?
	Well, let's assume maybe there were companies that did polls about these issues, and then we could actually determine whether these were extreme positions, for example.
	Oh wait, there are.
	When people are told that Medicare for All would raise their taxes, only 26% of Americans support that.
	When Americans are asked about whether they would ban all semi-automatic weapons, as Kamala Harris suggested, only 40% of Americans back that.
	When Americans are asked whether they support the ability to abort a baby at dilation, 81% of Americans oppose.
	Yes, these numbers are available.
	But no, it's Republicans pouncing.
	It's all about the pouncing.
	Republicans are like the bobcat.
	They're just gonna pounce on you.
	That's their thing.
	I love it.
	That's not the only one.
	New York Times doing exactly the same thing.
	Trump, Pence, lead GOP seizure of late-term abortion as a potent 2020 issue.
	They seized it.
	The GOP seized it.
	Okay, you know what's a way that the Republicans couldn't have actually seized on the issue?
	Is if Democrats hadn't tried to pass bills in Vermont, Virginia, and New York, and Rhode Island in the last week, trying to say that late-term abortion was an affirmative good.
	Then there wouldn't have been anything like... Let's say the Republicans tried to seize on Democratic support for murdering all people above the age of 80.
	It would be hard for them to seize on that because Democrats haven't actually made that proposal.
	It would be hard to seize on it.
	But whenever a... This is the Andrew Clavin rule of the media.
	Whenever a Democrat screws something up, the story is the Republican reaction.
	Whenever a Republican screws something up, the story is the Republican screwing something up.
	But no, don't worry.
	There is no bias in the media, Virginia.
	Don't worry.
	No bias in the media whatsoever.
	They are just even-handed truth-tellers seeking to be firefighters, bringing you the realities of life.
	By the way, it is worth noting here that for all of the talk from people like Paul Krugman and folks in the Democratic mainstream about the realism of their proposals taking crises like climate change super seriously and all of this, as soon as you dig beneath the surface, you realize that even their more mainstream positions are actually pretty radical and pretty dumb.
	I'll explain in just a second when it comes to climate change.
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	Man, I'm glad it's a Friday.
	Anyway, so China's coal plants, this is great.
	So Democrats have been saying that climate change is something we have to take so seriously, we have to hamper and destroy the entire fiscal stability of the United States.
	Worth noting, by the way, that despite all of the talk about the American economy slowing down, U.S.
	employers added 304,000 jobs in January.
	So the worries about the economy may be overstated.
	We'll find out.
	But Democrats are firmly convinced that climate change is the most pressing issue on the agenda.
	This is what all of the Democrats say.
	If you ask them, what is the existential threat to the United States?
	They will not say China.
	They will not say Russia.
	They will not say Islamic extremism.
	What they will say is climate change to a person.
	And what they suggest is that America radically restructure our economy in a green new deal.
	Yay!
	We're going to abolish the driving of private cars.
	We are going to cut our military in half.
	We're going to radically restructure all of the tax brackets.
	Weird how all of their solutions to climate change sound exactly like their ideal fiscal proposals just in a vacuum.
	Weird how those things line up.
	Wow.
	But there's one problem.
	It turns out that all of the highfalutin talk about how the United States has not done its share to fight climate change is ignoring the fact that the vast majority of emissions are not coming from the United States on an absolute basis.
	The vast majority of emissions are coming from China because China has a billion people and they're emitting without any regulations upon them.
	Despite the fact that they signed on to the much vaunted Paris Accords.
	You remember the Paris Accords?
	Donald Trump pulled out of it and the world was supposed to end.
	We were all going to die.
	Well, it turns out we didn't sign the Paris Accords and we lowered emissions more than any industrialized country last year.
	And China did sign the Paris Accords and they didn't lower emissions at all.
	Samini Sengupta writing for the New York Times, China, the world's coal juggernaut, has continued to produce more methane emissions from its coal mines despite its pledge to curb the planet-warming pollutant, according to new research.
	In a paper published Tuesday in Nature Communications, researchers concluded that China had failed to meet its own government regulations requiring coal mines to rapidly reduce methane emissions, at least in the five years after 2010, when the regulations were passed.
	It matters because coal is the world's dirtiest fossil fuel and China is, by far, the largest producer in the world.
	Coal accounts for 40% of electricity generation globally and an even higher share in China, which has abundant coal resources and more than 4 million workers employed in the coal sector.
	Scientists and policymakers agree that the world will have to quit coal to have any hope of averting catastrophic climate change.
	How quickly China can do that, therefore, is crucial.
	The Chinese government in 2010 required a state-run coal sector to reduce methane emissions by putting the gas to use, or by capturing methane from mines and flaring it, which is still polluting, but not as much as releasing the gas into the atmosphere, according to researchers.
	It required that 6.2 million tons of methane produced from coal mining be put to use by 2015.
	An examination of satellite data collected between 2010 and 2015 painted a different picture.
	Not only were the reductions not made, but Chinese methane emissions actually increased by 1.2 million tons per year during the five-year period.
	What?
	A communist dictatorship pledging to help the environment in order to shame Western countries into doing the same and then cheating?
	You mean communists lie?
	You mean communist dictatorships that have giant gulags don't care if they pollute at the expense of people other places in the world?
	That's crazy!
	But they're good because they're on the left!
	I mean, Thomas Friedman, I was assured by Thomas Friedman that if we had just run America as a one-party autocracy, that would have been even better than a one-party democracy.
	Because if the one-party autocracy is run by the geniuses like the people in China, the world would be better off.
	Obviously, the solution to this is we have to tax the 1%.
	The solution to the Chinese government just radically increasing their methane emissions, we have to tax the 1% in this country.
	That is the only way.
	Not only that, we should probably have a wealth tax.
	Not only that, we should probably boycott Israel.
	You know what?
	We should just do a bunch of things that have nothing to do with methane emissions, but we will pretend that they have everything to do with methane emissions while the other people who signed on to the Paris Accords and lied about what they were going to do continue to pollute.
	Clearly, that's the solution.
	It's our fault.
	Of course.
	I mean, come on.
	We're America.
	It's obviously our fault.
	It's just amazing that this continues to be portrayed as some sort of moderation.
	Just incredible stuff from the Democratic Party on a routine basis.
	Speaking of incredible stuff from the Democratic Party, you remember that time that everybody said that Donald Trump was a pawn of the Russians?
	You remember Hillary Clinton accusing Donald Trump of being a puppet?
	And Trump going, I'm not the puppet, you're the puppet, Pinocchio.
	Remember that?
	It was great.
	Well, now it turns out that the United States, being a puppet of Vladimir Putin, is withdrawing from a nuclear arms control treaty because of ongoing violations by the Russians.
	The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty has been central to limiting the kinds of nuclear weapons both countries can deploy.
	Without it, experts fear there will be a new nuclear arms race.
	Except that these experts are doltish enough to fail to recognize that the Russian government has been violating the INF for legitimately decades.
	Pompeo said, Pompeo first announced the U.S.
	The agreement is so brazenly disregarded and our security so openly threatened, we must respond.
	Pompeo first announced the U.S. intention to withdraw in December, giving Russia a 60-day window to come back into compliance.
	That window runs out on Saturday. - Okay.
	Withdrawal now requires an additional six-month window, according to the treaty's terms.
	U.S.
	officials have also been concerned about China's growing military prowess, as China is not a party to the Cold War pact.
	Officials worry that puts the U.S.
	at a military disadvantage, although the real reason that they're doing this is because the Russians are violating the treaty.
	So, all of the puppetry in which apparently Putin is engaged has resulted in the United States building up its nuclear arms in order to counter the violations of the Russians.
	So... Amazing.
	So much... So much puppetry.
	Obviously Donald Trump was a plant of the Russians, and he was put in office by Vladimir Putin specifically so that he could kill Russians in Syria, arm the Ukrainians with deadly weaponry, raise sanctions, for the most part, and also pull out of an intermediate nuclear forces treaty that allows the United States to build up its nuclear arsenal.
	Clearly that's why they put him in power, to do stuff like that.
	I mean, no question, right?
	I guess we'll still keep going with this Trump is a puppet of the Russians until Trump is out of office.
	That's the plan because none of this has to do with anything remotely resembling reality.
	Oh well.
	Okay.
	Meanwhile, let's get to the mailbag because it's been a long week.
	So let's mailbag it up.
	Here we go.
	So, let's see.
	Courtney says, When I was 25, I was newly married.
	So I got married when I was 24 and my wife was 20.
	We're about three and a half years apart, if you do that math.
	And what advice would you give your 25-year-old self or just some advice for 25-year-olds in today's world?
	Sincerely, one of your biggest fans.
	When I was 25, I was newly married.
	So I got married when I was 24 and my wife was 20, we're about three and a half years apart, if you do that math.
	And when you're 25, honestly, I think it's a rule.
	Anytime you're young, What makes you a better person is taking on more responsibility, not shirking responsibility.
	Taking on the burdens of responsibility for another human being makes you stronger.
	It makes you better.
	It makes you have to engage with your best self.
	Getting married was a life-changing experience for me in a variety of ways, but the first thing that it does is it makes you realize that your decisions have impact on people who are not you.
	When you're just a kid, you don't worry about the impact that your decisions have on your parents.
	Now that I'm a parent, you realize how much parents have to deal with the consequences of their children's decision.
	But when you're a kid, you think, oh, my parent's an adult.
	My parent can handle it.
	They're older.
	Once you get married, you realize that your decisions don't just impact you, they impact others.
	And this makes you a more virtuous person.
	So, when you're 25, my first suggestion is seek responsibility, don't shirk responsibility.
	That would be, I think, the first thing that pops to mind.
	The other thing is that when you're young, you should be risk-seeking when it comes to career.
	What I mean by that is now is a good time for you to try and determine what it is that you love to do, you think makes a difference, and that you're good at.
	That is the confluence of factors that make for a good career experience.
	Find the thing that you are good at, the thing that you love to do, and the thing that other people will pay you to do and makes a difference.
	So making a difference, good at it, people will pay you for it.
	Those are the three things.
	When I was 25, I'd been working at a law firm, and I worked there for about 10 months.
	It was, you know, not a great experience.
	I didn't love it.
	It was a major law firm.
	It was during the middle of the real estate downturn.
	It was a real estate contract law firm.
	It was a transactional law firm.
	So I was sitting in my beautiful office in Century City, looking out at the ocean every day for like seven hours a day.
	Well, I couldn't bill any hours because there was no work coming in.
	I despised it.
	I hated it.
	And I was making a really good salary doing it.
	And I decided, you know what?
	I'm newly married.
	We're still young.
	We can afford a little bit of a hit.
	So if I'm ever going to change career paths, now's the time to do it.
	So I quit.
	After 10 months, I had a mortgage.
	I had a wife.
	And we decided that I was going to take a job for one-third the pay, doing legal work and also learning the production side of the radio industry.
	Because this is a good time for you to learn.
	It's a good time for you to jump.
	And I did that.
	It changed my career path entirely.
	I mean, maybe I would be a partner at a law firm right now if I had not done that.
	But I'm much happier with what I'm doing now.
	So, 25 is a great age.
	Harrison says hi, Ben.
	Milton Friedman commonly referred to inflation as the hidden tax because it pushes people's income into higher and higher tax brackets.
	He concluded that the only way to effectively get a tax cut is to cut government spending, because any tax cut that did not cut spending would ultimately lead to inflation.
	Do you agree with this analysis, and do you think Republicans will ever tackle government spending?
	Thank you.
	So yes, I agree with Milton Friedman's analysis.
	I think that that is correct.
	I think that if you continue to spend, then eventually you're going to have to increase taxes, or you're going to have to inflate the currency to pay off the debt.
	That you have incurred in order to make that spending happen.
	So that, of course, is true.
	I think that everyone is going to have to tackle government spending when the rubber meets the road.
	I mean, even the Europeans have had to tackle government spending because at a certain point austerity measures are necessary.
	You can't indefinitely pay bills with other people's money.
	Emily says, Ben, could you provide some recommended reading on intersectionality and where it came from and why it's become so popular?
	I sure could.
	I have a new book with an entire section on intersectionality.
	You can go check it out at Amazon or at Barnes & Noble.
	The Right Side of History, that is coming out in March.
	I have sort of a long explanation of the roots of intersectionality.
	You can also read the papers of Kimberly Crenshaw, who's the person who came up with intersectionality.
	So, a couple things about intersectionality.
	A friend of mine recently, on the left, sent me a paper by Kimberly Crenshaw about intersectionality in a legal journal.
	And the paper isn't actually bad, right?
	What the paper actually suggests, and this is true, is that if you are going to take into account discrimination based on a variety of factors, there are cases in which factors stack up on top of one another.
	So, for example, there could be a case, in this paper by Kimberly Crenshaw, she specifically talked, she's the person who founded the phrase, the term intersectionality.
	In the paper, she talks about a case where a black woman was discriminated on the basis of both her race and her sex, but because there was no law that said that the aggregate of those two factors was, could be a protected class, therefore she was left out of the law.
	Okay, that's a fair argument.
	I can see a situation in which a black woman is treated as lesser than a white woman.
	So in other words, she's treated lesser than a man because she's a woman, but also treated lesser than a white woman because she's black, right?
	You can see that sort of hierarchy in a discriminatory setting.
	The problem is that drawing the broad conclusion that simply by membership in a group, you are therefore victimized by necessity.
	It's not a baseline assumption.
	It's that we will ignore your personal experience and simply dictate that America is bad to people like you without reference to what you have done personally.
	That is, in essence, a form of racism.
	So, there's a great new book out by Noah Rothman.
	I recommended it earlier this week.
	It's called Unjust.
	It's all about social justice and it has a long explanation of intersectionality.
	I would check that out as well.
	But I was making this point to somebody yesterday about intersectionality and the real problem with it.
	Again, the idea of intersectionality is that we're all members of groups and these groups have been treated disparately in American history, which is obviously true.
	But that does not answer the question of what that means for us now.
	Should we look to your personal experience and your personal experience of discrimination?
	Or should we simply assume that your membership in the group means that you have been discriminated against in some way and therefore your opinion should be valued more highly when it comes to critiquing the United States and our hierarchies of power?
	It's that latter contention that is actually racist identity politics.
	That latter contention is racist identity politics.
	Thomas Sowell, the economist, has an interesting breakdown of discrimination that I found quite useful.
	He says that there are basically three types of discrimination.
	There's discrimination that we all find utterly benign.
	That would be discrimination between, do I want a hamburger or do I want a fish filet today?
	Right?
	That, we discriminate.
	If you have discriminating tastes, This does not mean you are a bad person.
	It means that you made a choice.
	That's the kind of discrimination that no one cares about.
	Then there is open discrimination.
	There's, there's, you're a black person, therefore you're lesser.
	That is racism.
	That is discrimination.
	Everybody finds that abhorrent of good, of good faith.
	Then there is the case of situ, there are situations in which you have no information about a person other than their group membership.
	So for example, You're walking down the street of a neighborhood.
	In that neighborhood, the black crime rate is higher than the white crime rate.
	And you're walking down the street at 2 a.m.
	And you're walking down the street and there's identical, identically dressed black guy on one side of the street and white guy on the other side of the street.
	And you cross over to the side where the white guy is because the black crime rate in the city is higher than the white crime rate.
	Are you a racist?
	Thomas Sowell says no.
	What you are is a person who is using risk assessment based on the only data that is available to you.
	Racism would be if you know that the black guy walking down the street is dressed in a medical outfit because he's from Johns Hopkins and the white guy on the other side of the street is smoking crack.
	If you then move over to the white guy side of the street, then you're a racist.
	In other words, you can only use the best data that is available to you.
	And our job should be to try and drill down so we get to the individual data.
	Well, intersectionality is the same sort of problem.
	OK, so if you were to say that in a vacuum, all you have about information about these two people, one is white and one is black, you don't know anything else about them.
	Can you say that they probably had different experiences in America?
	Yeah, I think it's fair to say that they probably had different experiences in America because being black comes with certain burdens that being white has not had, historically speaking.
	We could probably assume, for example, without any other evidence, that you have a history of less wealth in your family because of historic discrimination against black folks.
	Uncontroversial.
	Here's where intersectionality goes wrong.
	Intersectionality suggests that even if you know now that that black kid is Colin Powell's son, and you know that that white kid is some kid who grew up in rural Appalachia with a single mom, that you can still assume that that white kid is somehow privileged by his race, and that black kid is somehow a victim because of his race.
	Now, you are actively encouraging discrimination.
	And that's where intersectionality has gone.
	And it's ugly, and it's gross.
	Once you start using group identity as a substitute for information that you have about individual decision-making, once you say that every disparity can automatically be attributed to discrimination because discrimination is obviously so endemic that it overcomes any other factor, now you have engaged in something truly ugly.
	You're seeing this right now with Howard Schultz.
	Howard Schultz grew up Jewish in a family where his father apparently beat him and was a truck driver and was unemployed.
	They were on welfare.
	They were living in public housing.
	He made something of himself and he became the head of an $84 billion corporation that he started from a coffee shop in Seattle.
	Amazing American success story.
	He is now being accused of having experienced white privilege and even Jewish privilege because his culture emphasizes education, for example.
	So we are going to value his group identity over his individual story?
	That's the essence of racism.
	It is.
	It's the essence of the bad kind of discrimination Thomas Sowell talks about.
	Alrighty, a couple more questions.
	Lee says, Dear Ben, wanted to know your opinion on mediums.
	I used to think all psychics are frauds, but one of my mom's friends, who's a medium, said my dad, who died 10 years before when I was 14, wanted to speak to me.
	I've rarely talked to her before, and at the time I was going through a really rough time in college with heavy drinking, depression, and losing out on a girl I had feelings for.
	Yet somehow, she knew everything happening, even though I told no one at the time, and that changed my opinion on the subject.
	Curious to know what your thoughts are.
	So my thoughts are that I think all psychics are frauds.
	I think there's no hard data to suggest that psychics are not frauds.
	I think that they tend to use outside indicators or, say, vague things that you can fit into What you think your story is, they'll say, you're having trouble with a romantic partner, aren't you?
	That fits like 90% of people.
	They're like, oh my god, how'd they know that?
	How'd they know that I'm having trouble with my romantic partner?
	That I have unrequited love?
	Okay, easy guess.
	You don't have a wedding ring on your finger, so unrequited love, and you are unhappy, which is probably why you're there, right?
	They can use pretty good outside indicators.
	They're good at this.
	I think psychics are frauds, because again, I have no evidence to the contrary.
	Rick says, Hey Ben, the other day you said that Switzerland has the best healthcare system right now.
	After looking over the particulars, it looks a lot like Obamacare, because of the mandate and some subsidies.
	This is correct.
	It does look a lot like Obamacare.
	Why do you like that system, since it resembles Obamacare?
	You've also said that for the US to allow the purchase of health insurance over state lines, but a plan in Montana won't pay the rate that doctors in LA or New York charge.
	Your thoughts?
	Well, you want to be able to have competition across state lines, and you're right that a health care plan in Montana is probably not going to be something that people in California buy, but a health care plan in South Dakota might be something that people in Montana want to buy.
	The prices differentiate.
	I might want to buy a New York health plan to cover people in California.
	You should be able to have competition across state lines.
	As far as Switzerland looking a lot like Obamacare, that's correct.
	Okay, the idea of the individual mandate itself I find to be a violation of basic principles of liberty.
	I don't think that the government should be able to force me to buy something that is for my own care.
	When you buy car insurance, it's to protect the other guy on the road.
	When you buy health insurance, it's to protect you.
	It's not the government's role to tell me what I have to purchase for my own good.
	I find that to be tyrannical.
	What I have said is that in terms of efficacy, if that's all you're looking at, Switzerland has a pretty nice system.
	Okay, Switzerland, but that violates certain core principles.
	And also, I'm saying if you're looking at mixed systems, nobody's actually ever tried a pretty libertarian system in which the free market tends to predominate, regulations are extraordinarily low, and people can buy healthcare simply by walking into the doctor and plopping down a $100 bill.
	Okay, one more and then we will move on.
	Let's see... Stan says, how are you doing, Ben?
	I know that you and your wife are happily married, but hypothetically, if she were to be unfaithful to you, how would you handle the situation?
	Is adultery a legit reason to divorce someone?
	I know in the Bible it says, till death do us part, but I think cheating is a horrible act, even if the person did it once.
	I would love to hear your thoughts on this.
	Thanks and happy belated birthday.
	So, you know, I...
	This is a complex topic, actually.
	So, on a sin level, obviously, adultery is not only divorceable, if you're going to do it biblically, it's death penalty worthy, right?
	It is one of the Ten Commandments, thou shalt not commit adultery, and it is indeed grounds for divorce in Judaism.
	What would I do if, God forbid, my wife did that?
	Thankfully, this is not even a thinkable hypothetical, but if I were married to somebody who cheated on me and I already had kids, honestly, I think I would probably do my best to keep the marriage together for the sake of the kids so long as she was still a good mother.
	Because after you have kids, the math changes.
	If I was just married to a woman, no kids, and she cheated on me, I'm out like that.
	If I have kids, that does change the math pretty radically.
	You have to do something to make sure that the kids still have their mom around, if she's a good mom.
	If she's a bad mom, then it's a different story.
	But divorce has impacts on people beyond you.
	This goes back to sort of the first question in the mailbag.
	As you have responsibilities to other people, the incentive structure changes and the math changes.
	I will also say that not all adulteries are equally damaging to a marriage, I think, is somewhat fair to say, meaning that I think that all adultery is evil.
	I think it's a great cruelty.
	I think it's a diminishment of your soul, and it is a violation of your responsibilities as a human being.
	It creates a breach in human virtue that is nearly irreparable.
	I will say that I think there's a difference between a man having a long-standing affair with a woman, not his wife, and a man who has a drunken one-night fling at a hotel in Iowa.
	I don't think that's quite the same thing.
	And I think that's true because men treat sex as a disposable thing, and emotional affairs can be a lot more damaging to marriages than even one-night stands, for example.
	But that's getting more complex than the topic requires.
	Again, it depends on where you're situated.
	It depends on your relationship with your spouse.
	That's sort of the basic answer.
	Alright, time for a thing I like and then a couple of things that I hate.
	So, things I like today.
	Ashton Kutcher posted a powerful pro-life video.
	I don't know that Ashton Kutcher is pro-life, but this video certainly is pro-life.
	It's testimony of a man with Down syndrome who is testifying in front of Congress.
	And he talked about how eugenic murder of the unborn is extraordinarily dangerous.
	Here is a little bit of that video posted by Ashton Kutcher.
	Good for him.
	I am a man with Down syndrome and my life is worth living.
	Sadly, across the world, a notion is being sold that maybe we don't need research concerning Down syndrome.
	Some people say prenatal screens will identify Down syndrome In the womb, in those parentheses, will just be terminated.
	It's hard for me to sit here and say those words.
	I completely, I completely understand that the people pushing this particular final solution are saying that That people like me should not exist.
	Of course this is true.
	And the fact is that one of the chief reasons that people say that abortion ought to be legal is to dispose of people with Down syndrome.
	This is one of the things people will say.
	They'll say, what if the baby is disabled?
	What if the baby is disabled?
	Is this guy's life not worth living?
	Is he worth less than a person who is fully abled?
	The same folks who will go crazy in social justice fashion if you use phrases like tone-deaf.
	I'm not kidding.
	There was a social justice warrior online today who used the phrase tone-deaf and then she apologized because she felt that it might offend people who are deaf.
	I wonder what her position is on choosing abortion for a kid who would be born with Down syndrome or with some other sort of disability.
	The utter disdain that so many folks on the pro-choice left have for people who are disabled, as long as they're in the womb, is pretty astonishing.
	Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
	So I think I'm actually going to do only one thing I hate.
	So I discussed this yesterday on my radio show, and if you subscribed to the last two hours of the show, you'd already know this.
	You'd already know this.
	But if you didn't, I'm going to explain it again.
	Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez said something completely insane yesterday.
	She was talking about the so-called Paycheck Fairness Act, which bars employers, it would bar employers from asking potential employees what they were paid at their last job.
	Now listen, if you go in for an interview, you don't have to tell your employer that, right?
	If the potential employer says, what were you paying?
	You say, listen, I want to negotiate not on the basis of what I was last paid, but on what I think I'm worth to you.
	You can still do that.
	Everyone has the ability to do that.
	It's a free country.
	She wants to bar people from asking that question.
	Are we also not supposed to ask employment history?
	Are we supposed to not ask for recommendations?
	Like, what are we not supposed to ask about?
	That wasn't the dumbest thing Ocasio-Cortez said.
	The dumbest thing she said was this.
	I'm so happy that the Paycheck Fairness Act addresses, among many things, two very critical ones.
	One is that we cannot ask for salary history and pay people depending on their salary history anymore.
	Anymore.
	Because it is time that we pay people what they are worth and not how little they are desperate enough to accept.
	That last comment, that's absolutely insane.
	When she says it's time to pay people what they are worth and not what they are willing to accept.
	Read a book.
	Read a book, okay?
	Or go to the grocery store.
	Who decides what something is worth?
	What are you worth?
	What is this pen worth?
	What is this cup worth?
	Hey, it's worth whatever you're willing to pay for it.
	That's how markets work.
	And the way that we determine what we think things ought to be worth is we look at the aggregate of information that amounts to a price.
	A price is simply an aggregate number that is put on how much demand there is for a particular product and how much supply there is of that particular product.
	So if it's very difficult to produce a product, and so there are only three of them, and there's high demand for it, the prices will be very high.
	If it's very easy to produce a product, and there's very little demand for it, you can produce a million of them, but there are only three people who want it, the price will be extraordinarily low, close to free.
	All of that makes perfect sense.
	What you can't have is people who sit at the top of the pyramid, who go, you know what?
	I think that that first product that there are only three of, it's really important.
	So the real price of it should be super cheap.
	I don't care what you think the price should be.
	That is not a reflection of reality.
	I think that pigs should be able to fly.
	That would be great.
	I don't know why, but it seems like it could be fun.
	And that doesn't make any sense.
	It doesn't matter what you think things should be.
	The Soviet Union tried this.
	They tried to literally control the price of every single element of Soviet society.
	And it turns out that was a giant fail, because there's no way to centralize knowledge that is greater than the knowledge of the entirety of the human race as to their own interests, aspirations, and desires for products, goods, and services.
	It is a fundamental rejection of free markets to suggest that you know what the proper price of a thing should be better than the market knows.
	In fact, you know better than the person who's accepting the wage.
	This is why when people on the left say, well, there should be a $15 minimum wage.
	It's like, okay, well, you're pulling that directly from your colon.
	I'm wondering why you think there should be a $15 minimum wage.
	For which job?
	And as opposed to what?
	They say, well, it should be more than $7.25.
	How do you know?
	Are you the person accepting $7.25?
	Are you the person paying the $7.25?
	Do you even know those people?
	What are you even talking about?
	What people tend to do is they tend to do this.
	It's an actual psychological phenomenon where they root into a price that already exists and then they pretend they know better than that price.
	So they will say, you know, a box of Cheerios, it turns out costs $4.79 at a California Ralphs.
	But it shouldn't cost $4.79.
	It should cost $3.
	Now, what they're doing there is they're saying, it seems like $4.79 is too expensive, so it would be better if it cost $3.
	But what if the actual price of the box of Cheerios was $50?
	Then they would say, well, it seems too expensive.
	I think the price of a box of Cheerios should be $40.
	Because they're just hooking into the information they have and then discounting it based on some vague sense of unease.
	It doesn't work that way.
	Prices are a reflection of the aggregate knowledge of the human race.
	Your perception of what a price should be is a sum of the aggregate stupidity of you.
	That's it.
	But AOC thinks that should dictate.
	If you think AOC, whose great life experience consists of winning a mildly contested primary in New York City, and also having poor drinks, if you think that she knows more than the entire human race about the price of goods, services, wages, and labor, Then, I don't know what to tell you.
	Go live in AOC land, man, because that place will be bankrupt so fast, it will make your head swim.
	There will be no production of products, there will be no goods, there will be no services.
	There will be a bunch of people who think that life is fair while they sit and play in the mud.
	That's basically what you will have.
	Because that's what the USSR ended up being.
	Alright, well, as you can see, I'm dying here, so we're gonna leave.
	And I'll be back here a little bit later, after I have sufficiently recovered.
	After I've gone and had a nice swig from the Leftist Tears hot or cold tumbler and have been re-infused with energy and health, then I will be back for two live hours later.
	This is why you should subscribe.
	Go check it out.
	If not, we will see you here Monday.
	Have a wonderful weekend.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Senya Villareal, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay, our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
	Edited by Adam Sajovic, audio is mixed by Mike Karamina, hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera, production assistant Nick Sheehan.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.

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