July 2, 2021 - Dennis Prager Show
09:10
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| I do live here. | |
| I live here in the middle of the country. | |
| I'm originally born and raised here, and I spent time on both coasts, but my family's here, and that's where I live. | |
| What is the mood like in Chicago today? | |
| I know in Minneapolis, to a large extent, there's a lot of depressed people. | |
| Yeah, it's been a real challenge here in Chicago. | |
| We've had a ton of violence and a ton of people overrunning the rights of the individual. | |
| And it's actually become very dangerous in the main downtown areas with carjackings and attacks and assaults. | |
| So it's definitely not quite as vibrant as it was maybe two years ago. | |
| So, that's exactly what's happened, what you delineate in your book, but it is not brand new to the pandemic, the war on small business. | |
| Is that correct? | |
| That is correct. | |
| That's the thesis. | |
| This has been going on for quite some time, the government tilting the playing field and moving out the way from true free market capitalism to them and inserting themselves into more and more cronyism. | |
| But what happened during the pandemic was so brazen, such a brazen choosing of winners and losers, of who's going to thrive and who's going to fight to survive. | |
| And it wasn't done based on data. | |
| It wasn't done based on science. | |
| It was based on political clout and connections. | |
| And what that enabled was the most historic wealth transfer that we have seen in our lifetimes. | |
| I mean, we saw seven technology companies gain $3.4 trillion in value in 2020, while you saw hundreds of thousands of small businesses shudder forever and millions more fight to survive. | |
| That's a very important thing. | |
| The greatest transfer of wealth. | |
| In American history? | |
| Did I hear you correctly? | |
| Correct. | |
| From Main Street to Wall Street. | |
| Because the government picked winners and losers. | |
| Right. | |
| And basically are standing in the way of our economic freedom, our ability to create that wealth and our ownership. | |
| If you think about what a small business is, it's equity ownership and something that you create. | |
| The same thing with investing in the stock markets. | |
| They disrupted the risk there, and it made it much more risky to try and gain wealth in that direction. | |
| They disrupted the ability to go out and buy a house, and now you have to compete with big hedge fund managers to go buy a house. | |
| So they're disrupting all of these wealth creation opportunities and in doing so continually transferring that wealth from Main Street to the people who are already the wealthiest. | |
| And it was just absolutely historic. | |
| But because there were so many other things going on and the media is so focused on the sideshow, this story isn't getting enough play. | |
| And so I appreciate you giving it a platform. | |
| I went out, in fact, and spoke at rallies for small businesses in the L.A. area that were being crushed. | |
| I'd like you to explain to me... | |
| What's happened to the Chambers of Commerce? | |
| They're supposed to protect small businesses. | |
| It's interesting with the Chambers of Commerce and also with small business itself because small businesses are so varied and so independent. | |
| Before COVID, we had 30.2 million small businesses in this country. | |
| And a lot of those are solo businesses, and many of them are on the small side. | |
| So some of the chambers, and particularly the larger chambers that have clout, not necessarily all the chambers, but they tend to focus on the bigger business interests. | |
| And it's very analogous to what the politicians do. | |
| It's easier to get people to pay you and to, you know, kind of wrangle up. | |
| A handful of big companies than it is to coordinate with all of these small, independent entities. | |
| And so it's sort of a mirror of what we see in the politicians that, well, half the economy is a small business, but the other half are these 10,000 to 15,000 big businesses. | |
| We'll just focus on them. | |
| And I think the Chamber's really mirrored that, where they've gone after not only bigger businesses, but quote-unquote bigger small businesses at the end of the spectrum, because that's where they're getting their scale from, and they're really not representing the interests of every business on Main Street. | |
| So there's no small business group. | |
| I was stunned. | |
| At the acceptance of the lockdowns crushing their businesses by restaurants, for example. | |
| I wanted massive disobedience to what wasn't even law because they weren't passed as laws. | |
| There were mandates or whatever term they wanted to use. | |
| And yet there was no... | |
| With almost no exceptions, every one of which I spoke at a rally for, I'm speaking in my area, Southern California, they all obeyed the laws that crushed their lives. | |
| Why? | |
| This is a fantastic question. | |
| We saw some examples of disobedience. | |
| We saw in Texas, Shelley Luther. | |
| She got thrown in jail. | |
| We saw Tillis Jim in New Jersey. | |
| They racked up more than a million dollars in fines. | |
| It's amazing that we didn't see not only more pushback, but also that we haven't seen more lawsuits, and perhaps those are coming. | |
| Because, again, if you're a business owner and you've got your property rights, the government can't take your property for the quote-unquote public good Due compensation, that's eminent domain. | |
| So the fact that these businesses not only were shut down but didn't receive the appropriate compensation, and by the way, it's not like the government didn't spend trillions and trillions of dollars, it's just that a tiny fraction of that went to small businesses that saw their property rights subjugated. | |
| It is amazing to me, and I keep telling small business owners, go sue, go sue, go stand up. | |
| But the fact that there was this wide compliance and that with all the things going on, this is where the law enforcement was spending their time going and serving cease and desist letters to small business owners. | |
| is probably the biggest head-scratcher that came out of the last year. | |
| I mean, my husband and I had this theoretical discussion in February about, like, could you even lock people down? | |
| Like, would anybody go for that? | |
| And we both said, yeah, probably not. | |
| And the fact that people did and went along with it, it really is a head-scratcher. | |
| I mean, do you have a take on that? | |
| I have only a conclusion. | |
| Not an explanation. | |
| It was, my listeners know this, so I hope they'll forgive me for repeating. | |
| Look, you asked me a question, here's an honest answer. | |
| In the last year and a half, I have come to a different understanding of much of my fellow Americans. | |
| I bought the belief, the land of the free and the home of the brave, and the ease with which Americans gave up freedom and the dominance of cowardice renders land of the free and home of the brave questionable. | |
| It bothers me terribly because I actually believed those words every time I heard or sang the national anthem. | |
| Something has happened to the American in the last 50 years, and I'm not shocked, but I didn't expect it. | |
| That's my answer. | |
| Yeah, I completely agree with that, and I guess perhaps... | |
| Maybe I should have expected a different outcome based on the way that we've seen people giving up freedoms so easily and not challenging so many of these unconstitutional actions and just letting them slide and letting the federal government become this sort of Frankenstein monster. | |
| But we're at a really critical path here, and we are sliding into an area where they're conditioning people. | |
| Yes, hold on there. | |
| I want to tell everybody about your book. | |
| Carol Roth's book is up at DennisPrager.com. |
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