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Aug. 23, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:09:45
The Attack On Capitalism: Exploring Socialism’s Shortcomings
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Peace.
That's kind of a shocker.
In the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a going theory.
The theory was that we had reached the end of history.
That from here on in, it was basically going to be liberalism and laissez-faire economics.
That the fall of the Soviet Union had definitively shown that the end of government redistributionism and centralization had come.
That obviously was untrue because it turns out that the pitch of Marxism in the end is not really a pitch about efficacy or utilitarianism.
It's not about making you wealthier or making you happier.
It's about changing the nature of man.
The basic idea of Marxism, the basic idea of socialism, is that human beings are inherently good.
And the only thing that wrecks that inherent goodness is the systems around us.
So when we see bad things happening, when we see inequality, when we see cruelty, when we see crime, that is all a result of the evil capitalist system in which we are plunged.
So if we just change that, if we just destroy the entire system and replace it with something quote unquote fairer, if we get all of our rights from government as opposed to God, if we stop worrying so much about individual fate and start worrying a lot more about our community as a whole, then life will be better.
Now, wherever it's been tried, communism has been a failure.
And wherever socialism is tried, it has only been a success to the extent that capitalism supports it.
When you look at democratic socialist countries in Northern Europe, for example, it is perfectly obvious that these are capitalist countries with some social welfare policies.
However, the rise of Marxist theory, a new, I mean pure, uncut Marxist theory, the idea that income inequality is in essence immoral and exploitation, the idea that free market economics is again exploitation, the basic notion that free exchange is somehow a violation of personal rights, that is on the rise.
That's why you've seen the rise of the Squad and the Democratic Party.
It's why you've seen the rise of Bernie Sanders, who doesn't really advocate for a Denmark-style system.
He more likes the centralized government systems of open communist systems.
He's been praising those for literally decades.
Now the fact is that the rights-based system of the United States is a good system.
Capitalism, free markets, they're not just effective.
They're based on the principle that you are an individual human being and that your labor belongs to you.
That you have the right to alienate that labor voluntarily.
That it requires your consent to remove that which belongs to you from you.
And that the best thing that can happen for the world is for people to engage in mutual exchanges.
Because the bottom line when it comes to socialism is, I'm here, I'm breathing, give me stuff.
The bottom line of capitalism is, I'm not gonna get anything from you unless I give something to you.
That free exchange makes the world a better place.
It leads to technological development.
It leads to prosperity.
A part of what's happening here is that so many Americans believe that they hit a triple when in reality they were born on third base, meaning that all of the prosperity they've been experiencing is the result of a system they now decry.
They tend to pretend that prosperity is the natural state of man.
That being rich, being powerful, being free, all of these things are just how the world works.
And so if we chip away at the foundations of our society, everything will be fine.
That isn't true.
Not only is it not true, it's immoral.
Personal responsibility lies at the root of capitalism.
Systemic responsibility lies at the root of socialism.
There's only one problem.
Socialism is not only immoral, it is ineffective.
And yet the slogans of Marxism have become ever more popular.
Well, this week, we're bringing you the best moments from the last two years of the show, with unique perspectives surrounding a topic and some of my own reflections on the collection.
This week, we're looking at the distortion of the terms capitalism, opportunity, and hard work in favor of socialism, free money, and a desire for coddling from the government.
We'll jump right into it with Peter Robinson on the communist threats of yesteryear.
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Let's start with a man who literally faced communism head-on.
Peter Robinson was the chief speechwriter to then-Vice President George H.W.
Bush from 1982 to 1983, and then special assistant and speechwriter to President Ronald Reagan from 1983 to 1988.
It was Peter who wrote the address from Reagan in Berlin in 1987 that called for General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down this wall, which at the time was incredibly controversial.
During his six years at the White House, Peter wrote 300 speeches.
For the last two decades, he has hosted Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson at the Hoover Institution, where he has interviewed an enormous number of political leaders, writers, and thinkers over the years.
He's authored books including How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life and It's My Party, a Republican's Messy Love Affair with the GOP, and has been published in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and many others.
When Peter Robinson found out that he was going to be featured on the Sunday Special again, he sent us this letter.
The United States of America as a miracle.
Free, democratic, enterprising, and the one country to which millions of the rich and the poor alike on every continent on the planet dream of moving.
That's the theme to which Ben and I kept returning when we recorded this conversation several months ago.
What has happened since?
Ben has published a book entitled, ironically, of course, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.
And the Democratic Party, failing, as usual, to display any sense of humor, has adopted a platform that takes him up on the suggestion.
As Ben knows, as Michael Mowles and Drew Clavin and all students of history know, America has always been a close-run thing.
The Revolution might have failed.
The Civil War might have ended in a stalemate instead of a victory for the Union.
The Cold War might have continued for decade after decade, the Soviet Union steadily expanding its influence in the 1990s and beyond, as it did during the 1970s.
None of these things happened for one reason.
In each generation, Americans—not all Americans, but enough—recognized what was at stake, remained true to their principles, stood their ground, and fought.
Now, it's our turn.
That's Inspiring Stuff from Peter Robinson.
Interviewing Peter was just an absolute thrill and an absolute pleasure.
He's a tremendous historian.
His breadth and range of knowledge is incredible.
And of course, he is himself a part of history, a key cog in the wheel that led to the fall of the Soviet Union, the actual evil empire.
In episode 75, Peter and I talk about whether Americans can unite without an existential threat like communism facing us and the tension of not having a shared view of American history.
But first, Peter tells me the story behind writing the tear down this wall line in Reagan's historic speech.
Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
1987, spring of 1987, Berlin is celebrating its 800th anniversary.
Gorbachev is going to visit, the Queen of England is going to visit, and the West German government, remember it was West Germany and East Germany in those days, the West German government asked President Reagan to make a visit.
I got assigned the speech and flew to Berlin before, this would be six weeks or so before the president was to speak there, to do some research.
I went to the wall, I went to the place where the president was going to be delivering the speech.
It's all gone now, but the wall was there, the Reichstag, which was still pocked with shell marks from the bombing at the final battle of Berlin, and behind me was West Berlin, modern city, color, life, movement, recent model cars, and then you look over the wall, And there was almost no motion.
Guards marching back and forth.
It was as though the color had been leeched out of it.
Everything was gray, brown, the buildings even looked dilapidated.
So this was a place where you could feel the weight of history.
Communism there, capitalism here.
This was the place where the Soviet advance stopped at the end of the Second World War.
This was the place where the Americans and the British had taken over.
So, at that moment, I was a young speechwriter in trouble because what could I write that would equal what you felt there, the felt weight of history?
Several other stops in Berlin, including one to the ranking American diplomat who was full of ideas about what Ronald Reagan should not say.
West Berlin is surrounded by East Germany.
The people who live here are very sensitive to the nuance and subtlety necessary for East-West relations.
Don't have Ronald Reagan sound like an anti-communist cowboy.
And by the way, don't have him make a big deal about the wall.
They've all gotten used to it.
And that evening, I went to a dinner party West Berliners whom I had not met, but we had mutual friends back in Washington.
And so they put together a sort of a buffet for me, 15 or so people, different walks of life, a professor, a couple of students, and my host and hostess were lovely retired people.
He had worked at the World Bank in Washington and retired back to West Berlin.
And I asked the question, I said, I've been told by the American diplomat that you've all gotten used to the wall by now.
And there was a silence.
And I thought, I've made just the gaffe that the diplomat doesn't want Ronald Reagan to make.
But then one man raised his arm and pointed and said, my sister lives just a few kilometers in that direction, but I haven't seen her in more than 20 years.
How do you think we feel about that wall?
And they went around the room.
They'd stopped talking about it.
They had not stopped caring about it.
They had not stopped hating it.
And each person told... One man talked about walking to work each morning, and each morning he would walk under a guard tower where there was an East German soldier with a rifle over his shoulder who would peer down at him with binoculars.
And the man said, We share the same history, we speak the same language, but one of us is a zookeeper, and the other is an animal, and I have never been able to decide which was which.
And then our hostess, a lovely woman called Ingeborg Eltz, who just died a couple of years ago.
She must have been younger then than I am now.
She was in her, perhaps in her early fifties.
She was a very gracious woman.
She'd been charming throughout the dinner party, but now she became angry.
And she said, if this man Gorbachev – she smacked her, made a ball of one fist and smacked it into the palm of her other hand – if this man Gorbachev is serious with this glasnost, this perestroika, he can prove it by coming here and getting rid of that wall.
And that went into my notebook, because the moment she said that, I knew that if Ronald Reagan had been there in my place, he would have responded to that remark.
The simplicity, the dignity, and the power of that remark.
So the answer, that's a long way around to get to the answer to your question, but if the question is, where did that phrase come from?
The answer is, it started with a German woman who lived behind the wall herself.
As somebody who was five when the Berlin Wall speech was spoken, the impression that was left in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the communist regime in the USSR, is that it was the end of history, that now everybody was friends again.
I mean, even if you watch Terminator 2, you have characters saying to each other, why did the Russians have missiles pointed at us?
We're friends now.
And there's this great feeling that arises in America that basically it's all over.
And it seems as though we've sort of turned our guns on each other as opposed to the existential threat that used to exist out there.
Maybe that was temporarily lifted for a brief moment in time after September 11th, but we're certainly back at it to an excessive degree right now.
Do you think that Americans have enough in common now to actually hold each other accountable?
To see each other as non-enemies in the absence of an existential threat like the Soviet Union.
I do.
I do believe so.
I also believe we have to work at what we have in common.
So, I'm trying to say something, I'm trying to put this in a way that gives it some sort of edge or some sort of interest, because this is the kind of thing that you say on the radio every single day, and God bless you for saying it, but I didn't come here just to agree with you.
On the other hand, I will.
Identity politics, the politics of dividing Americans, that's not only wrong, that approaches, in my mind, that comes close to a kind of wickedness.
Because, why is it, think about this, immigration is a problem, we have to, blah blah blah, all that is true.
But why is it that a Mexican who just crosses that border within a few months finds himself in a position to better the lot of his, not just his family, but his village back in Mexico?
What is it about this country that permits remittances back to Mexico of almost $30 billion a year?
Why is it that one of the first things that Chinese do, the Chinese who since 1979 when Deng Xiaoping had his opening to markets, and now there are lots of people in China who are rich.
What do they do?
They try to buy real estate, right here in Southern California.
They try to invest their money in this country.
What is going... And the answer, of course, is that the United States of America is a miracle.
And it needs to be cherished and sustained and nurtured in every way we can.
People who come here... I'm trying to think... Back... Now, Ronald Reagan didn't live to see the kind of uncontrolled immigration that we have witnessed since he left office.
And so he was fundamentally pretty relaxed about immigration.
But what he always understood, what people of that generation always understood, was that people come here to become American.
So the idea that it is in the interest of certain politicians, you and I, I'm sure, could go off and do a whole show on the problems with California, this spectacular state, so blessed in so many ways, so beautiful, so filled with enterprising and talented people.
And the homeless.
And, yes, okay.
The problem with California is the government of California, in whose interest it now is to colonize certain groups or communities of people when they come here for political purposes and try to trap them in a certain kind of mindset instead of permitting them to enter into the fullness of American life.
That's just wrong.
It is just wrong.
So, the answer is, yes, I do believe we have enough in common.
We have our ideals.
We have American history.
The resources of American history From the Revolutionary War, where you see, it seems providential, the way Washington is able to escape from Brooklyn across to Manhattan.
The wind blows it the right way at just the right time.
The courage to stand up to what was then the greatest empire on Earth.
The Civil War.
Lincoln, this martyr, giving his life to hold the Union together and to abolish slavery, the greatest generation in the Second World War, I would argue that the Cold War, which is a bipartisan project, it begins with Harry Truman, it ends with George H.W. Bush, and in between, intellectuals behave, by and large, pretty badly, really, during the Cold War.
But it's ordinary American people who continue to vote, to sustain the politicians who want to spend the money to do what we need to do, that this country is able to sustain that kind of a project across four and a half years, four and a half decades rather, until communism collapses and the Soviet... By the way, this is a pet peeve of mine.
It is now, we're not allowed to say, That our side won the Cold War?
It just ended.
Nobody won, nobody lost, it just ended.
Well, let me point out one thing.
The United States is still here, and the Soviet Union went defunct.
We won.
So, the resources of American history, the ideals that we have, the ability, the... This is your book on the right side of history.
The astonishing thing about the Western civilization is not that it's Western.
It's that it consists of permanent truths which are open to anyone, from anywhere.
And the greatest exemplar of that tradition in the world today is the United States.
Yes, of course we have enough resources if we choose to sustain them.
Longtime friend of the show, Senator, presidential candidate, and host of the podcast Verdict with Ted Cruz, it's Ted Cruz.
From 2003 to 2008, Senator Cruz served as the Solicitor General of Texas, essentially hired to handle appeals involving the state from a constitutionalist perspective.
He argued before the Supreme Court of the United States nine times, winning five of those cases.
Cruz was then elected as a U.S.
Senator from Texas.
The senator first became widely popular in 2013, when he gave a 21-hour speech on the Senate floor to hold up a federal budget bill in order to defund Obamacare.
It led to a government shutdown and ruffled a lot of feathers, but it also showed supporters that Senator Cruz was committed to walk the walk of a conservative political leader.
You can hear him tell this story in the full episode.
Cruz joined us and gave his perspective on being raised by a father who fled communist Cuba in the 50s.
In regards to America's size of government and its control, and the ever-growing sentiments with regard to socialism, Senator Cruz's story hits home on the need to fight against tyranny.
When we let Senator Cruz know that he was going to be in this episode, he sent us this letter.
This November, the American dream is very much at stake, as the precious rights and freedoms we cherish are under assault by the radical left.
Months ago, following the horrific death of George Floyd, thousands of Americans across the country exercised their First Amendment right to peacefully protest against police brutality and for equal justice.
However, these protests were hijacked by violent Antifa members and other anti-American anarchists who would arrive at protests with weapons, rocks, commercial-grade lasers, sledgehammers, and weapons-grade fireworks to use against the men and women of law enforcement, the very people who put their lives on the line every day to protect our lives and rights.
This violence should be universally condemned, but unfortunately, Democrats have been largely silent.
They've made a cynical political decision and believe it's politically expedient to stand with the rioters.
I chaired a hearing just a few weeks ago.
Not a single Democrat who participated in the hearing would criticize Antifa.
Instead, many Democrats across the country are actually supporting calls from the violent mob to defund our police departments.
This is the face of the Democrat Party.
A Democrat Party that refuses to condemn Antifa violence, refuses to stand with the men and women of law enforcement, and has Bernie Sanders running the show.
That should scare every American.
We need to stand for justice, stand with the men and women of law enforcement who by and large engage in proper conduct, and stand for freedom.
That is how we protect the American Dream.
That's from Senator Ted Cruz.
Full disclosure, I've been friends with Senator Cruz for a very long time.
I backed him in his original race against David Dewhurst, then the Lieutenant Governor of the state of Texas.
I've always found Senator Cruz to be charming and fun.
I know you don't always see that side of Ted, but he really is quite fantastic.
In episode 54, here Ted tell me about his family and about how his community, the Hispanic community, is a fundamentally conservative community.
But conservatives need to communicate the message that connects with them.
Politics is my family story.
I mean, look, all of us are products of our family story.
And my dad, as you know, my dad fought in the Cuban Revolution.
I mean, when he was a kid, when he was a teenager, he was fighting alongside Fidel Castro, fighting against Batista, who was a corrupt dictator, and was thrown in prison and he was tortured.
And my dad came to Texas when he was just 18.
And I grew up as a kid hearing stories, hearing stories about being a freedom fighter, and it actually works out.
My father fought with Castro, didn't know Castro was a communist.
Anytime I really want to yank my father's chain, I'll call him a communist guerrilla, and it drives him nuts.
What he knew was that Batista was corrupt, he was in bed with the mob, you know, Godfather II, you know, that whole... I mean, that was what it was.
It was a completely corrupt dictatorship.
And the revolution, as my dad describes it, were a bunch of 14- and 15-year-old kids who didn't know any better.
My dad left in 57, and he fled Cuba because Batista's army was going to kill him.
The revolution succeeds in 59.
So 59, Castro declares he's a communist, begins seizing people's lands, begins executing dissidents.
And my aunt, my tia Sonia, who I'm very close to, she was still there.
She's my dad's kid sister.
And she fought in the counter-revolution.
She fought against Castro.
She ended up being imprisoned and tortured by Castro's goons.
And then she ultimately fled Cuba too, came to Texas.
And so my cousin Bebe and I, Bebe is Sonia's daughter, the two of us as kids, we literally grew up sitting at the feet of my dad and my aunt and listening to them tell stories of fighting for freedom.
And that's what I've wanted to do my whole life for as long as I can remember, since I was a little kid, is in our house, you know, it wasn't that politics was something you just kind of read the paper and, oh, that's interesting.
I mean, there was an urgency to it.
It was having principled men and women in office.
That's how you protect yourself from tyranny.
And so that's what I wanted to do my whole life.
One of the things that's been fascinating to me, I'm from California.
The Republican Party has been eviscerated among Hispanic voters in California.
That is not what has happened in Texas.
In Texas, what is it, a 55-45 or 60-40 split in favor of Democrats, but it's certainly competitive with Republicans.
Here it's something like 80-20 in favor of Democrats.
If that, it may be higher.
So what has been done in Texas?
What have you done in your races to help draw Hispanic voters?
So look, in Texas in 2012, I got 40% of the Hispanic vote.
In 2018, I got 42% of the Hispanic vote.
And that is despite the media demagoguing like crazy.
And listen, I think the Hispanic community is a fundamentally conservative community.
If you look at the values in our community that resonate.
Faith, family, patriotism, hard work.
You know, a friend of mine years ago asked an interesting question.
He said, when's the last time you saw an Hispanic panhandler?
I gotta tell you, I don't think I ever have.
Because frankly, in Hispanic culture, it would be seen as shameful to be out there on the streets begging.
And yet, You look at hard work, individual responsibility, and those are conservative values.
And you also look at what unifies the Hispanic community, which is the immigrant experience, coming to America seeking freedom.
That is a message that resonates.
But I'll tell you, I had the exact same message in the Rio Grande Valley and overwhelmingly Hispanic communities that I had in Deep East Texas.
And the message of jobs and freedom and security, that's a message that resonates.
Look, I think the Hispanic community is a conservative community, but we've got to respond to the needs and interests and values in the Hispanic community.
If you look right now, today we have the lowest Hispanic unemployment ever recorded.
We've also got the lowest African-American unemployment ever recorded.
The clown show that is the Democratic 2020 primary?
None of them are going to admit that.
They're going to go to Hispanics and African-Americans that are seeing the lowest unemployment ever recorded, and they're going to say, these policies are terrible for you.
You should go back to the Obama era policies where you had much higher unemployment, much higher poverty.
That is nonsense.
Let me give you one of my favorite stats of the last two and a half years.
The last two and a half years, five million people came off of food stamps.
Five million.
And look, as Republicans, we've got to be able to articulate that and explain it in a way that that's not just a number on a pie chart.
Those are five million real human beings.
Those are moms and dads who two and a half years ago, they were dependent on the federal government for their basic food needs, who now presumably they've gotten a job.
They're coming home tonight.
They're carrying a bag of groceries.
They're setting it down on the kitchen table.
And those moms and dads are looking their kids in the eyes.
They're having the dignity of work, the self-respect of work.
That is what the American dream is all about.
Being able to provide for your family, achieve your dreams.
But we've got to communicate and tell you in the Hispanic community, that is a powerful message.
Hispanics don't want to be dependent on government.
And what, what, what the socialists, what the Democrats say is they want them to be dependent on government.
They want them to be a vassal dependent state, vote for Democrats and be trapped in dependencies.
What I, what I know Hispanics want is the independence to chase their dreams.
That is a conservative message.
Back in episode 13, we were joined by one of the most influential writers of the last half century, David Mamet.
Author of a variety of books, plays, and films, including Glengarry Glen Ross, Heist, The Untouchables, and the Academy Award nominated The Verdict and Wag the Dog.
A rare outspoken conservative among the mainstream culture, and a critic of communism and fascism, David grew up in Chicago.
His parents were first generation Americans.
He began writing while in high school and college, and then after graduating, worked any and every job in the city.
This introduced him to what the actual working middle class of Chicago was like in the 60s, which refined his style and even drew him towards projects like The Untouchables and one of his more recent books, Chicago.
Sitting down with David Mamet was truly incredible.
It really was an honor.
He's a creative, eclectic guy, and his view on the world as command of language is just incredible.
David Mamet had to work to stand on his own two feet.
It paid off in a claim down the road doing work he loved.
We'll be discussing that here.
But for starters, listen to David debunk the phrases economic justice and social justice and discuss with me the dangers of democratic socialism in American government.
Thanks for watching.
But it sounds like, you know, your basic view of human beings, that all human beings are basically at each other, and that's why we have to come to these basic agreements to leave each other alone.
Well, yeah, I was watching yesterday that the great Tucker Carlson, I'm crazy about him, he had some cockamamie, I think Democrat something or other, you know, congressman or something like that.
And he says to the guy, the Democrat, he says, wait a second, he says, you guys got nothing left in a golf bag.
So what in the world are you going to run on in the midterms?
And the guy says, economic justice and social justice.
So I said, well, OK, you know, let's let's break it down to the English language, right?
What does economic justice mean at the end?
How is that different than justice?
Right.
It's communism.
What it means is somewhat it's statism.
It means that someone is going to Stand above whatever rules we have for commerce and decide what's just to whom, right?
So as Tom Sowell said, whenever anybody says it's going to help A, you say, well, who's going to hurt, right?
So economic justice is At the end of the day, it's communism.
And communism is someone's going to be in charge of saying what you have to give to me, and I'll keep what I think I want and give it back to you.
Which brings me back to when I realized that the whole Marxian idea, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need, really begs the question.
Because the term which is missing is, the state shall take.
from each according to his ability, which means the state's going to determine what your ability is.
The state shall give to each according to his needs. I'm the state, I'm going to determine what you need. You don't determine it anymore. You don't determine what your ability is, the state does. So, so much for economic justice. I thought social justice, how's that different than decaf justice, right?
Regular common garden decaf justice, right?
So, justice is drawing a line.
That's what justice is, like taking a line of type and justifying it.
I'm going to say, this is in, that's out.
Is there going to be injustice in terms of justice?
Yeah, sure.
Talmud says, right, where there's law, there's injustice.
Okay, great.
We're going to have a line, right?
Social justice means there's no line.
Whoever's screaming loudest gets to say, this is what you have to do.
So you say, wait a second, let's refer to the line, let's refer to the law.
They say, no, no, throw out that law.
The law is insufficient.
And I got a guy talking to a shul.
He said, well, obviously the Constitution's out of date.
How would a 2,000, a 230, a 40-year document possibly be relevant?
I didn't want to say, well, then why are we sitting here reading the Torah?
But, so what I said was, wait a second, okay, let's say it's out of date.
How are you going to fix it?
What do you suggest?
And more importantly, what are the rules by which you suggest we're going to go about fixing it?
Because social justice is fascism.
That's what it means.
It means that the group of people who has screams the loudest gets to determine what the law is, and that always ends in murder.
So, there are two wonderful phrases, economic justice and social justice, which don't mean nothing, as the Samanthists would tell us.
They mean something.
And the first thing they do is they're an anesthetic.
Are you optimistic for the future of the country, or do you think that... Yeah, I feel incredibly... You know, somebody said a long time ago, they said, no democracy survives more than 300 years.
So I think that this new shift to a constitutional republic, back toward a constitutional republic, is going to lengthen the viability of the American experiment by 50 to 100 years.
That's what I think.
What do you think?
I mean, I'm a little more pessimistic than you, just because I feel like the pendulum swings pretty far in this country.
And it's swung from Barack Obama to Donald Trump, which means that it's going to swing back even further to the left the next time around, just because the Democratic Party by default has made itself into a Democratic Socialist Party.
I don't think that there are a lot of substantive conversations being had because people are so angry at each other.
And I do think that has to do with the lack of a common base of values.
It sounds like when you were growing up, you were growing up with the feeling that, despite all the corruption in Chicago, if you worked hard, you could get ahead.
And it was actually your obligation as a decent human being to work hard and make something of yourself.
I feel like there are entire generations of people in this country who have been raised on the premise that America is actually a terrible place that is seeking to put its boot on your throat, and that anyone who proclaims that America is good is a perpetuator of this evil system.
That's true, but all these generations who were raised in the bubble, I don't think Starbucks can open outlets sufficiently enough to keep pace with that growing population.
So what are they going to do for a living after their parents die and they're sitting on the couch and working as a barista?
I don't get it.
Well, that's the big question, and I do wonder whether these folks have a skill set.
Well, they don't.
I mean, that's the other thing that gets me.
I have a lot of kids.
I mean, I want to go live in a shoe with the old woman.
That's how many kids I have.
But we talk a lot, and I talk to them, and some of them experience the great joy of doing something for a living.
Yeah, but I don't know that there are that many people in the United States who actually see that.
Maybe I'm the pessimist here, but I see a lot of people in the United States who see work as something to be avoided.
They attribute all of their stress to work.
Work is always a bad thing.
When they talk about things in their life that they want to get over, it's work.
You know, for me, my goal is to work until I die, because that's usually how it works.
The minute you retire, you're gone, right?
So my belief is sort of the belief from the book of Genesis, which is that you are put on the earth to cultivate it, and the minute you stop cultivating it, there's no reason for you to be here anymore.
But I think that there are a lot of people who actually believe that they are put here on earth for leisure time and enjoyment, and the more that we require of you, the harder you have to work.
That's an inherent flaw in the country.
According to Bernie Sanders' logic, we're so rich, why should anybody have to work?
Well, Bernie, I think I met him in the old days because I spent a lot of time about the same age overlapping in north central Vermont.
I don't think he's ever worked a day in his life.
Literally.
He hasn't.
I mean, he was kicked out of a commune for not working enough when he was in Vermont.
Legitimately, it's an actual thing that happened and now he owns a lake house, right?
So it's a great country where you can never work a day in your life and have a lake house where you vacation with Bill de Blasio.
Well, the question is, which the young won't address, is where does the money come from?
They say, from the government.
Well, all the government can do is either tax you or steal it from you, or waste it, or spend money on either things that everybody needs but nobody wants to pay for, or things that nobody wants.
Those are the only two things the government can spend the money on.
So the young person doesn't say, where does the money come from?
I mean, what I worry about, I'm not sure that we have a problem of economics so much as, you know, a lot of folks on the left think it's a problem of redistributionism and the economic system and all this.
I really don't think that's the problem.
I think we do have a problem of virtue and heart.
I agree.
I think there's a giant hole in the middle of the American soul that has been carved there by 40, 50 years of dependence on government and a belief that there is no higher calling for you.
That your job on this earth is basically to experience the most pleasure possible and then die.
I don't know what replaces that other than a return to some sort of centralizing values.
Well, I don't know either, except that I have a difficult time controlling myself.
I mean, I don't want to even attempt to try to control somebody else.
It's going to be what it's going to be.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, I'm not talking about compelling people, but I do think that the appeal of a moral lifestyle has always been a hard sell.
And it's a particularly hard sell when there are no consequences to immorality.
Well, there's a very good book on the subject, you know, which is called a Torah.
You know, what's the consequences for morality?
It's a it's a plague or 40 years in the desert or not a think twice about.
Let's talk a little bit more about hard work and skill sets with Mike Rowe.
Mike was host of the widely popular reality series Dirty Jobs, which, as his website puts it, transformed cable television into a landscape of swamps, sewers, ice roads, coal mines, oil derricks, crab boats, hillbillies and lumberjack camps.
Today, Mike Rowe hosts the podcast The Way I Heard It and the Emmy-winning Facebook Watch web series, Returning the Favor, in which he travels the country searching for remarkable people.
He also runs the Mike Rowe Works Foundation, which awards scholarships to students pursuing a career in the skilled trades.
Mike has made a business out of showing us that hard work truly matters.
Talking with Mike was a lot of fun.
His personal experiences differ so much from my own, but his transformation from sort of a news guy into a voice for the working classes is really an incredible story and a reminder that so many Americans are doing the kind of hard work and jobs that many of us don't hear about in our daily lives.
In episode 12, Mike tells me about his foundation's sweat pledge, skills and work ethic aren't taboo, and why some critics seem to hate it so much.
And we discuss the politicization of the skills gap and the large opportunity in America's workforce, the truth of which cuts against the narrative pushed in politics and in the media.
Every job eventually becomes a job, no matter how passionate you are about your initial belief in a job.
And I love my job and I'm sure you love your job.
Eventually it gets to the point where, yeah, I got to get up this morning, got to go to work.
And still you're getting up and going to work.
Happiness is a, it's a, it's a terrific symptom.
It's a terrible goal.
It's just a terrible goal, because it's a sucker's bet.
If happiness were that tangible, then the same thing would make everyone happy.
But obviously, it doesn't.
I'm sure of that.
I'm not sure of much, but I'm sure of that.
I wrote this thing.
You'd get a kick out of it.
It started, like most everything I do, as an attempt to amuse myself.
But after a bottle of wine one night, My foundation awards work ethic scholarships, so we need to have some mechanism by which we can Try to account for work.
I mean, how do you measure character?
It's virtually impossible, but I wrote this thing called a sweat pledge skills and work ethic Are not taboo.
Aren't taboo.
Sweat, right?
And you have to sign it.
It's a 12-point pledge.
Sort of part 12-step process, part scout law, right?
And some people really, really, really hate it.
But one of the first things is, you know, I'm grateful.
I won the greatest lottery of all time.
I live in America.
Two, I do not follow my passion.
I mean, it goes down all of these things.
It was like a little personal manifesto for me.
But I only bring it up because it's become increasingly more important to my foundation.
And now, the more I look back on it, it's hysterical, Ben, how outraged people get.
I give away maybe $5 million so far, right?
Not a ton by foundation standards, but it's a chunk.
It's money, yeah.
Every year, about $800,000 goes out.
And every year, people say, well, why do I have to sign the sweat pledge?
And I say, well, you don't have to.
It's entirely possible this particular pile of free money might not be for you.
And it goes, like, what do you mean?
I'm like, well, I mean, there are many scholarship funds that award academic achievement.
I'm more interested in awarding attendance, right?
I mean, athletic achievement, talent, there are all kinds of rubrics and metrics for measuring value.
But where's the work ethic?
So that's what we try and do. And forgive me, I'm trying to bring this back to the answer to the question you posed, but I forgot what it is again. So have I. I mean, you took me on the journey and now we're left adrift here. I'm going to send you a sweat pledge. I'm going to send you a sweat pledge.
Okay, sounds good. Well, let's hone in on that for a second, the first principle that you mentioned, which is that you won the lottery because you live here, which is something with which I totally agree.
But that's a pretty controversial proposition these days.
Sure.
And it's become almost partially a left-right proposition, unfortunately, where you see there's a poll that came out just within the last month that suggested that Republicans, particularly, were very proud to be members of the United States, very proud to be American, and they were very proud to be American when Obama was president.
This was not dependent on who was president.
It was 73% of Americans who were Republicans were proud when Obama was president, and 77% now.
And for Democrats, it was like 54% were positive when it was Obama, and now it's like 38% because of President Trump.
Why do you think there are so many people in the country who look at the situation that they've been handed, which is the freest, most prosperous country in the history of humanity, and think to themselves, I'm a victim in this scenario?
And not to discount anybody's actual hardships or past, but why do you think that that's become such a prominent thing in what clearly is a land of opportunity?
Because it's not clear.
It's not clearly.
Of all the divides, the one that worries me the most is the divide between people who are genuinely, genuinely convinced that opportunity is dead and those who are not.
Right?
The ones who are artificially convinced, or just, you know, paying lip service to it, they don't matter.
But there are a lot of people who really and truly, truly believe the system is rigged, and they truly believe opportunity is dead.
That's a... they scare me.
Not because I'm frightened of them, but because that belief is... that'll kill us.
I mean, if that belief really and truly spreads, it'll kill us.
This is why the skills gap becomes weirdly political.
It shouldn't be.
It's just opportunity.
It's just 6.3 million jobs sitting there, vacant.
But when I point that out, it's very difficult because everything is politicized today, right?
What comes back is, well, what does the existence of opportunity mean?
In a country where we're fighting over the fact that opportunity may or may not be dead, it's proof positive that it's not.
Now that's a problem, right?
The optics don't line up.
So then you have economic experts with whom I really can't engage because I'm not an economist, but they will tell you why the skills gap is a myth.
So here's how it breaks down.
If I point to six million available jobs, My friends on the right will tell me that those jobs are available because human beings are fundamentally lazy.
My friends on the left will tell me that those jobs are available because employers are fundamentally greedy.
And that's where we are.
We can't think beyond the fact that our basic philosophies require us to see humanity as either lazy or greedy.
Now the truth is, in my opinion, We're both lazy and greedy.
Right?
And we're neither lazy nor greedy.
We're all of it and none of it.
And all of it gets measured out in unequal amounts.
But we don't have time today to parse the nuance of that.
It simply has to be one or the other.
So when I post a picture of me standing next to the flag on the 4th of July, I get a lot of pushback.
And I think a lot of people who are pushing me back don't really want to push back.
They just don't want to see me doing something patriotic because the lines have been drawn.
And now if you're patriotic, well then you must be on the right.
That's also really super dangerous.
It's a false choice.
And we have to push back against that.
It's incumbent upon us.
I think you're doing a decent job of it.
I'll try, thanks.
I mean, no, honestly, look, you're as biased as I am.
You're as biased as the next person, but you can point these cameras at anything you want, and you're pointing them at honest, thoughtful conversation.
Longtime television personality, commentator, and Emmy Award-winning journalist John Stossel has spent his career espousing the virtues of individual freedom and exposing the evil of big government.
John has hosted and anchored for ABC News, including Good Morning America and 2020, as well as Fox Business.
He wanted to bring his message to younger audiences, so he left that show to now produce for his own YouTube channel, where he releases a video every week presenting the case that good things happen in free markets and under a smaller government.
Talking with John was a lot of fun.
I've been following John's career since I was very young.
I've read a lot of his books.
And honestly, his view on libertarianism has really affected my own and shaped how I think about the size and role of government.
In episode 27, John walks through how his media and journalism career made him hyper aware of the shortcomings of government, particularly in making life better for Americans.
We also discuss the countries that the left points to in regard to democratic socialism functioning well, and how the biggest capitalists in the country sometimes become capitalism's biggest enemies.
I just wanted to cover something that other people weren't covering.
So, at the time, all people did was politics, the weather, crime, disasters.
That was news.
I thought there's consumer issues out there, psychology, medicine, companies ripping people off.
I'll do that.
And I did that and won 19 Emmy Awards bashing business.
But I gradually watched the regulation that I was calling for and often getting.
Sometimes politicians would say, that was great, we're going to pass a law and fix that in Oregon.
They created a Department of Consumer Affairs.
But then I'd go back and do the same story.
We'd send a TV set out to 20 repair shops.
Eighteen with a loose part.
Eighteen would say, oh, loose part, no charge.
Two would rip us off.
I'd go back and say, would you ever do this?
Oh, no.
Yeah, well, watch this.
Play the videotape.
And it was great television bashing business.
And then so we do it again.
Now there's the Department of Consumer Affairs.
The results are the same.
Most people are honest.
A few cheat.
So what's the Department of Consumer Affairs doing?
They have a big dreary room with a bunch of dreary people at desks filling out forms.
Now you have to get a license to be a team in your repairman.
And supposedly that will screen out the bad guys.
But it doesn't.
It just lets in the ones who are sophisticated enough to know how to get the license.
The immigrant maybe works under, beyond the law in the black market.
Everybody has to pay a few pennies more to pay for the lawyers.
And the consumer is no better off.
So I started reading more.
I didn't love the conservative press because it looked like your people wanted to police the bedroom and police the rest of the world, and I didn't like that.
And I discovered Reason Magazine, and that was an epiphany.
Oh my God!
These people get it better than I do!
And I became a libertarian.
Coming out of Princeton, I was going, oh yes, we know how to solve poverty.
My professor said, it's an outrage in this rich country that some people are poor.
But then I watched these programs fail.
They just teach people to be dependent.
And if you look at the graph, I have used this in my videos, of the war on poverty and the poverty line.
The war on poverty began and the poverty rate dropped for seven years.
And after that, it's gone up and down.
Improvement stopped because the government teaches people to be dependent.
If you've got a man in the house, your check goes down.
And then, most interesting, look at the chart from before the war on poverty.
The slope of the line was about the same.
Americans were lifting themselves out of poverty.
The war on poverty, trillions of dollars, continued progress for five years and then stopped it.
So what do you make of the new kind of left argument with regard to the countries they admire?
So for a long time, for decades, the Soviet Union was a place where they were kind of interested in the experiment and then for a little while they were interested in Hugo Chavez.
And they were interested in Cuba for a while, but now the modern iteration of the socialist movement is in favor of social democracy.
So they like Norway, they like Sweden, they like the Nordic countries.
This is the one that Bernie Sanders likes to trot out all the time.
What do you make of the argument that those countries are cohesive, that they are functioning well, that they have high standards of living, and they also have massive governmental burdens that are driven by enormous regulations and tax rates?
Well, first of all, they're not really socialist.
And the Denmark Prime Minister went on TV to say, look, we're a market economy.
We're not socialist.
Government does not control the means of production.
And that's the most important thing.
Scandinavian countries don't even have a government minimum wage.
They do have a big welfare state and they can afford that because they have a homogeneous culture and they have a fairly free private market to pay for it.
And the economic freedom indexes, they come out ahead of the United States.
I don't know how Bernie calls them.
Socialists.
Do they innovate?
Do they produce anything?
Is it an accident that Facebook, Google, and all these exciting wealth-creating companies, or podcasts, have come out of Silicon Valley and California, places far away from Washington, D.C.? ?
I don't think so.
Yeah, and that I think is always the big distinction that folks fail to make, that socialism freezes things in place and redistributes them, and capitalism generates new and innovative methods.
But when it comes to things like healthcare, where the left really is putting its heavy focus these days, what they say is, okay, well, fine, so we sacrificed a little bit of innovation, but there's an entire group of people who have pre-existing conditions, and they don't have a capacity to pay for the healthcare that they need.
So what's the best system for providing health care if we're not going to have some sort of baseline government provided health care?
It would be presumptuous for me to say what the best system is, but what I've learned is that the more market there is, the better.
And poor people with a pre-existing condition are not going to have a market solution.
But we have in America Medicaid for poor people, Medicare for us old people, and no hospital emergency room turns away any poor person.
We don't really have a free market system because the rest of it is paid for not by individuals but by insurance companies or governments.
So what really works is when you go to the doctor and you say, cheat doc, does it really have to cost 200 bucks?
I'm paying for this myself.
And this is starting to happen with the health savings accounts.
Instead of just having the insurance company pay for it, they give you some money and you make some of those decisions.
And doctors often say, really?
You're paying yourself?
Like now?
I don't have to wait two months for the insurance company?
Okay, well, $100.
And then they don't even know where to put it because they haven't had a cash box for so long.
But moving toward more consumer-driven, and that means high deductibles, which nobody wants to hear about.
Everybody hates that.
That's the only answer.
And single pay in Europe, you don't pay for anything.
That's true in England.
Forget about Norway.
England, Canada, Australia, and it's true, you don't pay, but the National Health Service in England was created the year I was born, and in some cases they still use that kind of technology, because innovation stops in government.
You don't get in trouble if you do what you did before.
You know, most young people won't read books.
That's why I'm making videos.
You mentioned Tucker.
I just released a video on Amazon, Jeff Bezos, and it was...
I started it with a video defending Bezos against Bernie, saying, how dare Bernie attack this man, who, yes, he's the richest man in the world, but he's made us all richer by lowering prices so much.
The Fed even lowered its inflation rate.
And they pay vast amounts in taxes, and their investors pay lots of money in taxes.
He's good for America, and he's being trashed.
But I'm midway through writing this piece, and Bezos caves in to the Progressives.
And says, yeah, I'm going to raise all my workers to 15 bucks an hour.
Cutting off performance bonuses.
Stupidly, perhaps.
Still, it's his company.
He can do that.
He'll find very good workers for that.
But then he goes on and says, I'm going to lobby like another craven opportunist rather than a capitalist.
I'm going to lobby government to force every company to pay $15 to get rid of the competitive advantage my competitors would have.
And since I got lots of robots replacing workers, I'm going to really crush these guys if they have to pay $15 an hour.
Capitalism's biggest enemies are often capitalists.
Yeah, and this is, I think, a great point that libertarians I wish would make more often, because the kind of pie-in-the-sky, rosy view of free markets is always that people are going to act morally within free markets.
But the truth is there are a bunch of people, as long as there's a big government capacity out there, who are going to take advantage of that.
This is why when folks say, well, big business is capitalist, like, have you been watching big business?
Have you been watching any business?
Human beings are willing to take advantage of each other, which is why you do need, and I keep coming back to this, and I think that this is the, not to promote my own ideology, but I'm going to because it's my show, that you do need a tremendous focus on bringing up virtuous people in a free system if the free system is going to last, because otherwise people are just going to try and pervert The system for their own ends, which is exactly what you're talking about with Bezos.
And when people say crony capitalism, that's not crony capitalism, that's economic fascism.
It's exactly the same sort of state-sponsored monopolism that you were seeing in early, you know, post-Weimar Germany.
So it's really, I think it's necessary for libertarians, and I include myself in this number, to spend an awful lot of time teaching people that virtue is necessary.
And that's why, you know, the markets are great.
But this is where I think Adam Smith differs from the Lord Mandeville bees metaphor.
Adam Smith recognizes... I don't know the Lord.
There's a very famous... There's a tract that was written right before Adam Smith all about... I forget the name of the tract.
It was written by Mandeville and it was basically the... It's a piece of poetry.
It's like 500 lines about the economy of the bees.
And his basic idea is that economies develop because people have vices.
Private vices become public virtues.
In other words, you want to buy a nice piece of jewelry, and therefore, this creates economic growth because you want something that you didn't have before, and maybe it's coming from selfishness or greed, right?
It's sort of an objective disposition.
So my wanting it is a vice.
So my wanting it would be the vice in this particular scenario.
But what Adam Smith says, and he's correct, is that while that's true with regard to vices that are not inherently damaging to the system, there are vices that are inherently damaging to the system.
And so we have to teach people that freedom can only be preserved by people who actually spend an awful lot of time thinking about virtue.
Wow, that's bigger than I can digest.
Or put into one of my five-minute videos.
Yeah, well, let's talk about, for a second, the changes... It's hard for a Bezos to resist.
He's almost not doing duty to his shareholders when there's this monster government over here doling out... Put your headquarters here, I'll give you a tax break.
In some ways, he'd be a fool not to ask for it.
The only solution is to shrink the state.
And why did Japan and Germany do so well after World War II?
Because we bombed them to smithereens and they had to start over.
And they got rid of all the guilds and the special interests that were holding progress back.
And then they grew so fast.
It's a horribly depressing idea to say that's the only way to stop the growth of government.
Maybe it is.
Well, I'm not going to go to bombing play because it's hithering.
I'm not advocating that.
I'm just saying, you keep asking me, how do we convince people?
Can we teach virtue?
And I don't know that you can.
There's perhaps no one who proclaims the glory of capitalism more than radio host and financial guru, Dave Ramsey.
As a best-selling author of multiple books, including the widely popular book, The Total Money Makeover, the host of a nationally syndicated radio show and podcast, The Dave Ramsey Show, and the creator of classes and training, like Financial Peace University, Dave Ramsey is a figure of eliminating debt and reaching financial prosperity.
Having had great successes, not without hardship in the business world, Dave now spends his time passing on the knowledge he has acquired as a proponent of personal responsibility to achieve personal success.
Meeting Dave was really awesome.
I know so many people who have turned their lives around because they followed Dave's steps to success.
His realistic view of human nature and his reality-based view that you have to take personal, responsible decisions rather than blaming the system is a refreshing one in this particularly system-based thinking time.
In episode 36 of the show, Dave and I discussed the myth of cheating your way to the top in business and other victim mentalities, the data on life choices that lead to success, and how wealth equality is actually not fair.
When it comes to kind of personal character, how much do you think that financial decisions are about education of people to make the right decisions, and how much is it about actually being able to put off what you want for what you need.
That's called maturity.
The ability to delay pleasure.
And that is a character quality.
Integrity, there's a high correlation between integrity, wholeness, not just telling the truth in honesty, but this full-on integrity.
You are who you are all the time, that's integrity.
And not only do you tell the truth, not only do you honor your word in situations.
High data point correlation between that and the ability to build wealth.
This idea that you cheat your way to the top is mythology.
It truly does not work out there.
I mean, think about it.
If you go to the local car place and get your car worked on and he cheats you, you tell everybody you know.
And you don't tell everybody you know.
And if you go in there and he says, oh, it was 35 cents.
I fixed it.
Don't worry about it.
You tell everybody you know, because you just found a unicorn.
You know what I mean?
So where the guy just did the right thing.
And you send your family, your friends.
And that's how you succeed in business, is you do the right thing.
It's how you succeed in life.
You do the right thing.
Integrity, the ability to delay pleasure, the ability to say, you know, I'm going to give up something today.
I'm going to live like no one else so that later, I can live and give like no one else.
That's the way we say it on the show.
You know, one of the things that I think is so fascinating about your approach is that it is an approach that is driven by personal responsibility.
So much of what's going on in the country, in politics generally, is driven by precisely the opposite attitude.
So, you're smart.
You stay away from politics.
I'm in politics full-time, and it seems like politicians make bank off of basically telling people that nothing they do is their own responsibility, and that everything that is wrong in their life can be blamed on outside forces.
In America, how much of what's bad in people's lives do you think can generally be blamed on the decisions they make, and how much can be blamed on outside forces, if you had to balance that out?
Well, I think you can be born into a situation where you don't, you know, I grew up in a neighborhood where people said stuff like, the little man can't get ahead.
It was a victim mentality.
Blue-collar thing.
It's like, you know, the union will take care of you.
The government will take care of you.
I sure hope we can elect a, you know, a president or a congressman will take care of us, because the little man just can't get ahead on his own.
And is that a reality?
Yeah, if you think it is.
If you think you can or you think you can't, you're right, Henry Ford said, you know.
And so there's a reality to this.
And so the belief is the real privilege.
It's not the skin color, and it's not the socio-economic thing.
It's the belief in the culture you come out of.
I mean, I grew up in Tennessee, and we're hillbilly culture.
My family's Scotch-Irish, and proud hillbillies of the best kind.
And an interesting bunch.
They'll fight you.
For their freedoms.
And yet sometimes they'll adopt that victim mentality.
And a whole bunch of those folks, I mean, J.D.
did a nice book, Hillbilly Elegy, that indicated that probably that's a bunch of us are who elected Trump.
But it was all that he was a little bit Reagan-esque in that it's up to you.
I'll just make it where you can win.
I'll do it for you. And there's a different message there in that ideology.
But you know the problem is if you start to believe someone else is going to fix your life, whoever it is, your employer, your mommy, the president, the Congress, you're screwed. Yeah well this is one of the things I really fear because I am seeing it rise on both the left and the right. There's a sort of new right-wing populist movement that suggests okay well you know all the problems that you're having life you didn't get married because you couldn't afford it.
And it's like, well, maybe you should have made some different decisions.
And single motherhood is not a financial decision.
It's not that you got pregnant out of wedlock because you couldn't afford it.
The classic studies are that 97% of the 30-year-olds that graduated from school, high school, Before they got married, and got married before they had a kid.
That's all they did.
High school, and they did it in the right order, in other words.
97% are above the poverty level.
Almost everyone below the poverty level somehow got that out of order.
They got pregnant before they got out of school.
They got pregnant before they got married.
They got married before they got out of school.
They got it out of order.
It's the success order.
All kinds of data points on that.
It's statistical evidence.
And it's not a political statement.
It's just, this is the proper way to live your life.
Turns out morals have implications.
Character has implications.
I fully agree with this.
I think that the supposed crisis that we're having in terms of happiness, the rise in the opioid epidemic, although some of that is due to bad diagnoses and people being given medical opioids and all of that, the rise in suicide, the rise in single motherhood, that in the end, these are mostly personal problems.
These are people making bad decisions, and they're making bad decisions because they've been taught by society, by the government, by the culture, that if you make a bad decision, it's not really your fault.
And at the beginning of wisdom is recognizing that it's probably your fault.
Where do you think things start to fall apart, or do you think things are really not that falling apart?
You know, it's strange.
There's pockets that are falling apart, and there's sometimes a malaise or a fog over some things, but then there's entire segments of the population that are booming like never before.
They're having the best years of their life right now, and maybe did even under Obama, you know?
They had the best years of their life.
But, I mean, we share a book in our faiths, in my Christian faith through Jewish faith, the Book of Proverbs, the Book of Wisdom.
And all throughout the Book of Wisdom, the fool is juxtaposed with the wise.
The wise does this, the fool does this.
Wisdom is this, and wisdom is, in the Hebrew, you know this probably, is the art of living life well, is really what it means.
And that's what we've lost.
It's wisdom, not knowledge.
But we've lost wisdom, as juxtaposed with a fool.
And if you read through Proverbs, you go, well, I've done that.
I'm a fool.
I've done that.
So I'm going to quit doing that.
So I'm going to be wise.
In the house of the wise are stores of choice of food and oil.
But a foolish man devours all he has.
If you spend everything you make, you're a fool.
Fool, fool, fool.
I've done that.
And then when I quit doing that, I actually saved money.
I had some money in the house of the wise.
I mean, it was just, it's remarkable, isn't it?
And so the art of living life well, and when you start to believe that if I plant corn, I'm going to get corn, if I'm going to reap what I sow, if I'm going to live in a cause and effect world where I actually can impact my own destiny, there's variables around me.
There's isms.
I mean, there's racism and sexism and baldism.
There are people that won't let me do stuff because I'm bald.
Hadn't been a bald president elected since television.
Go look that one up.
It's interesting.
But I mean, you know, these kinds of things are very interesting.
We've got one with bad hair, but we don't have any with no hair.
Sir Jerry Ford was not elected.
There's always, you know, I've got a southern drawl, and for years in the radio business, now we've got 600 stations, but for years people in Boston thought we broadcast from a double-wide because we were in Tennessee, you know, with no shoes, you know?
I mean, there's all these isms, right?
Everybody's got an ism they've got to bust through.
I don't care who you are, but if you truly believe because of your ism, whatever it is, that you can't win, you're not going to get corn if you plant corn, then why would you ever plant corn?
That's hopelessness.
And that's the path of the fool.
Yeah, the way that I've put it on my own show is that I root for reality because there's nothing else to root for.
There's a lot of folks out there who are rooting against reality.
And you see this not only in politics, but you see it in culture, just the general thing where people look at their life and they go, X or Y isn't fair.
Here's a person who's really rich, and I'm not really rich, and that's unfair.
And you see politicians say this without any solution.
They just sort of put it out there.
And this is their actual talking point.
You say, OK, well, let's assume for a second that that is unfair, and that if you were God, you would even all that out.
You're not God.
You're not evening all that out.
And even if you would even all that out, it wouldn't result exactly in what you want here.
Maybe you should stop fighting reality and deal with reality instead.
You know, actually, wealth equality is unfair.
Because effort is not equal.
Smarts is not equal.
I'm not as smart as Bill Gates.
He's helped more people than I've helped.
And as a result, he has more money.
I mean, I haven't changed the world with a computer.
He did.
I'm not Steve Jobs.
I didn't do that.
Now, I've made a good bit of money.
I've helped a whole bunch of people.
But, you know, I was arguing with this lady, liberal lady, and she was mad at me because I had made a lot of money selling books to people, helping them with money.
And she's like, well, you're taking advantage of all these people that are broke.
And I said, You know, when I sold 5 books for $10, nobody was mad.
But all you people got pissed off when I sold 10 million of them.
And I helped 10 million people.
And so, you know, your level of return is the level of help.
And so that just defeats the wealth equality argument completely.
Because we now know that 79% of the millionaires in America today, 8 out of 10, inherited zero.
Zero.
Which means they did something in the marketplace.
So the American dream is alive and well.
And one of the things that I love about your show is that you actually do defend the morality of the free market.
And that's something that very few people are willing to do in this day and age.
It's all about the shortcomings of the free market, income inequality, the idea that people are being exploited.
And it seems like they're coming from this perspective that even basic elements of life, in the intelligent gaps, this should be somehow rectified.
And you see this with, they'll use Bill Gates as an example.
How is there a Bill Gates in this country who's worth this much money, and then you'll see somebody who's worth no money?
And you know, you say, well, he's contributed more.
He's, he's, and they say, well, but that wasn't his choice.
He was smarter, right?
He was smarter.
He grew up better.
What, how do you answer that?
Well, he did.
And he is.
And, you know, George Clooney's prettier than me.
So, I mean, so what?
Deal with it.
I mean, this is your hand.
Play your hand.
And, you know, we had a leadership event.
We did our entree leadership event last summer and got to spend some time with Condoleezza Rice.
And she grew up in a In a segregated neighborhood outside of Birmingham.
And she was talking about coming out of that segregated neighborhood to become Secretary of State.
She's brilliant.
Brilliant lady.
And she said, my parents told me my whole life, it doesn't matter where I'm coming from, what matters is where you're going.
And you just decide that's what we're going to do.
But that has all this all the way back to the do with this thing called hope and this belief that if I plant corn, I shouldn't be shocked if I get corn.
If I plant nothing, I can't gripe about the farmer who planted corn and was out there toiling to kill the weeds and in the hot sun.
Meanwhile, I'm standing over here watching the guy.
And then I go, well, it's not fair that he's got some corn.
I mean, I wonder if some of the complaints that are cropping up, particularly among young people, and I speak a lot on college campuses where there are a lot of young people who make exactly these complaints, that this is coming as the result of a breakdown in religious community.
Because, you know, I'm a religious person, you're a religious person, there are a lot of rich people, people who have been, you know, I've been a lot poorer, I've been, you know, I've done well.
That's changed, but I've watched the same thing happen to people in my community who I grew up with, and so I know all of them.
And so it's a lot harder to be jealous of the guy that you've known and grown up with and he can go to for help than some random guy on the street who you have no association with.
And as we fragment as a community, there's more of a feeling of, well, maybe that guy owes me money, as opposed to, well, I've known my next-door neighbor my entire life.
We go to the same church or the same synagogue.
The one area of equality that matters more than any, we are equal, which is we are all equal before God, right?
God sees us all exactly the same.
With that breakdown, I'm wondering if maybe that's what's caused a lot of the feeling of dispossession.
Well, and it also contributes to racism.
Also contributes to arguments between religion.
I mean, if you sit down and spend time with people and actually develop a relationship with people that have different situations than you've got, you're going to learn there's good people and there's bad people in almost every one of those things.
I know wealthy people all over the world that are worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
They're some of the best people on the planet.
And I know some of them that will cut your throat.
Just to see if you bleed.
I mean, and I know some poor people that are some of the best people on the planet.
And I know some of them will cut your throat.
Hasn't got anything to do with the money.
It's got to do with their character or their lack of it.
The money just revealed it.
If you've enjoyed hearing from our past guests in this collection, be sure to check out their full episodes and hear more of The Conversation.
Links to those are in our description.
This is the last collection of great moments from the Sunday Special we're bringing you.
We will see you here again in two weeks with brand new episodes of the Sunday Special.
We're super excited for our upcoming guests.
I think you're going to like them.
We'll see you here next time.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Associate producer, Katie Swinnerton.
Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynard.
Post-production is supervised by Alex Zingaro.
Editing is by Jim Nickel.
Audio is mixed by Mike Coromino.
Hair and makeup is by Nika Geneva.
Title graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.
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