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Aug. 29, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:38
August 29, 2013, Thursday, Hour #2
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Hi folks and welcome back.
Great to have you, Rush Limbaugh, the EIB Network and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Telephone number is 800-282-2882 if you want to be on the program.
Look, this thing with McDonald's.
I'm glad that I got the call from Sean.
It's time for another teachable moment.
There have been plenty of these over 25 years.
But we haven't done this one in a while.
And in 25 years, the cycle starts to repeat.
Young people who have not been taught things need to hear them again.
And even though I might be blue in the face saying things over and over again, some of you might be blue in the face hearing them over and over again.
You must understand that to a lot of people, what I'm going to say next and what I did start to say with Sean is the first time that they've heard any of this.
This is, you know, the people 725, unfair.
That's not fair.
They need at least 10, 15.
It isn't fair.
Don't have any idea how the market works.
They're not taught how the market works.
And if you don't like $7.25 an hour, then go work somewhere else.
And if you're not qualified to earn more than that, then go get qualified.
That's how things work.
Businesses do not exist like government does.
Businesses are not entitlements.
Employers are not buying your support or your loyalty.
They're buying your work.
And they're paying what the market says it's worth.
And the market is determined by a lot more than just them.
Now, one thing about this, the protesters, and even Sean, who called it, citing Australia.
I don't know if you've noticed this, but they're all talking and citing Australia.
And they say Australia, well, the minimum wage in Australia, $15.
Well, guess what?
That is not the minimum wage for young adults.
You know what the minimum wage for young adults in a McDonald's is in Australia?
It's $8 an hour.
It's not $15.
But anyway, we're not Australia.
By the way, there's a settlement.
I want to get this out there, and I'm going to talk about it later.
There's a settlement between the NFL and the 4,000 some odd players in this concussion lawsuit.
$765 million settlement.
Now the kicker in this story is this line.
The timing of the settlement allowed the NFL to drop the issue from the national conversation before the start of the new season.
Really?
They think this settlement is going to end the conversation about this.
This is only the beginning.
I don't understand what people cannot look at history and learn from it.
This settlement doesn't end anything.
They just opened a whole bunch of doors now at the NFL.
But that in just a moment.
Teachable moment, market economics.
As much as Obama wants to socialize everything and make everybody equal in terms of their outcomes.
It hasn't happened yet, and he's never going to be able to fully do it.
If you want, and I want to, if if you are a millennial, if you're a teenager, I don't care who you are.
There are certain facts of life that have not changed and aren't going to change no matter how much you want them to.
If you want a living wage, if you don't like what fast food restaurants pay, then do something else.
Just that simple.
Go to a trade school.
Go to another business, start your own business.
Maybe the work that you are capable of isn't yet worth $15 an hour at a fast Food restaurant.
Maybe the consumer doesn't want to pay $10 for a big Mac.
So that people working at McDonald's make $15 an hour.
It's not just a one-way street.
You don't just sit there and double what the employees at McDonald's make and keep the prices the same.
Now you may think this is obvious, folks, and you may think, come on, Rush.
You'd be amazed at how many people do not understand the push-pull in economics.
You'd be amazed at the number of people who've taken economics courses who think that the truth about economics is that the boss is a cheap skin flint and wants his employees to starve and wants to screw his customers.
And that's the basis of their understanding, and they go from there.
And they are applauded by left-wing Democrat politicians for holding that belief, and they're encouraged to have it.
Now, to those of you who sympathetic, like Sean from San Diego, you're sympathetic to this demand for the minimum wage at Mickey D's to go from $7.15 or $7.25 an hour to $15.
Let me ask you this.
When you buy a meal, do you make sure that when you buy a meal that you're paying a fair price for it?
Do you walk in there?
Do you ask the employee, look, am I paying enough here so that you can get a livable wage?
When you go in and buy a Big Mac or a quarter pounder with cheese or a double quarter pounder with cheese, do you look at the price and say, are you sure that this costs enough that you can make a livable wage?
Or do you just get a little upset when you think it's a little too expensive?
When you pay for a you buy a meal, you pay a fair price for it.
Are you doing this to ensure that the employees get health care?
You walk into Mickey D's, you buy a Big Mac.
Do you ask him, by the way, is this thing cost enough so that you get health care here?
By the way, is this is this Big Mac cost enough that you get a pension here?
Do you think of any of that when you go buy a Big Mac?
No.
You want it to be as cheap as it can be.
That's why you're there.
Am I right?
Plus it's fast.
Do you walk in to Mickey D's and say, look, double the price of my happy meal?
I want to pay double the price for my hamburger and my French fries and my soda and my cheap little cookie.
And by the way, I want you to double the price for whatever my kids get.
And I want you to double the price for whatever my wife orders.
And then I want you to go and make sure that the wages and benefits of the people who work here go up.
Do you do any of that?
No, no, you'll sit around.
You in general will sit around and demand that the evil owner pay a fair wage to people.
But when you walk in there, are you making sure you're paying enough for whatever you're buying so that the evil owner can provide all of those benefits?
Do you do that when you go to Walmart?
Do you do that when you buy gasoline at the gas station?
When you go to the dollar store, you say, nope, nope, close this.
I'm not coming back until it's the $2 store.
I'm not paying enough here.
You can't possibly provide your employees with good benefits if you're not charging me more than what you're charging me.
Do you ever do that?
Meanwhile, what about the other side of this?
The increased cost to the consumer.
Many of the people who go to these stores and restaurants are looking for bargains.
They themselves are on limited or fixed incomes.
They have large families or they're unemployed.
These people are consumers, too.
They have weekly budgets too.
And keep in mind, at the same time, the government is intentionally driving up the price of their electricity and their gasoline and their food.
What do you mean intentionally, Mr. Le?
What do I mean intentionally?
Obama's policies are designed to make things more expensive.
And even if they're not designed to, they are causing it to happen.
You cannot shrink the workforce by nine million jobs.
You cannot delay the implementation of new pipelines to get more oil in the country and not have the price of oil go up.
You cannot attack the coal industry and not expect the price of electricity to go up.
Everything this administration is doing is causing prices to go up.
Everything.
All the while they tell you it's these evil CEOs and evil Republicans and evil fat cats cheating you.
There is a war on the private sector in this country.
There is a war on capitalism.
There is a war on electricity.
There is a war on coal.
There's a war on oil.
And it's being conducted by the president and his party.
So this is not about compassion.
Much as you wish it were, but it's not about compassion.
Because the entire economic impact isn't being considered.
If you are sympathetic to somebody at McDonald's getting $15 an hour, then you had better be prepared to pay more.
You had better go in and volunteer to pay a higher price for your Mickey D double MacD or whatever it is, big Mac.
You better, or you're protesting McDonald's, Burger King or what have you.
But you don't do that, do you?
You're looking for the lowest price you can get.
You want the compassion to all come from the evil owner.
You don't want to participate in the compassion.
You want to sit around and beat the drums and say you hope people get treated fairly, but you don't want to be in the equation necessary to make it happen.
That's what I love about liberals.
That's why I say it's the most gutless choice you can make.
All you gotta do is sit there whine and moan and demand about it.
Demand talk about all the unfairness in the world, but never do a damn thing about it.
Always demand somebody else do it.
Always demand somebody else take the issue on the f by the reins, or also claim that nobody else cares like you do.
But the economy is push pull.
It's a two-way and often multi-way street.
Then there is the issue, and may I dare say there is the issue of private property rights.
You know, people go into business or invest in businesses to improve their own lives and that of their families.
They are pursuing the American dream.
And this is how we expand we expand an economy.
People go into business.
They invest in businesses.
This is how we create opportunity.
This is how we create jobs.
It doesn't come from the government, it comes from individuals taking risks or behaving in ways to improve their own lot in life.
That is not greed.
That is self-interest, and it benefits everybody when there's a payoff.
There's a huge difference in greed and selfishness and self-interest.
And a guy who goes into business or invests in a business to improve his own life is engaging in his own self-interest.
And it's not his responsibility to also take care of you.
If he has a business, his responsibility is to make sure it stays open, and the only way that can happen is if he makes a profit.
But then if he becomes successful, then we get nutcases like Elizabeth Warren telling him he didn't build it.
And Obama then echoes her.
You didn't build that.
You didn't build that.
The road to get people to your place.
We built it.
And so there is an all-out assault on individual achievement and entrepreneurism and risk taking.
And when you let Democrats run the show, success is going To be punished.
Because it's not fair.
And that's what we're living today, folks.
And that's why there is a malaise and a depression.
It's because the American dream is being snuffed out.
Success now has a stigma.
It's unfair.
It's mean spirited.
And besides that, you didn't really do it.
The government did it.
Taxpayers did it.
You don't deserve a profit.
Somebody at McDonald's isn't happy with 725 an hour and they want 15.
Give it to them.
It's only fair.
But that's not how you create opportunity and jobs.
It's not how you grow wages and benefits.
It's not how you create life-improving and life-saving products.
The government doesn't know how to do that.
They're not interested in it.
They don't do it.
All they do is destroy that.
The government cannot create wealth, but they are experts at destroying it.
We expand the economy and economic opportunity, the processes I've just described.
So many of these liberals act as if working the fry machine at a fast food restaurant is the glass ceiling.
That's it.
If you're working the fry machine, if you're flipping the burgers or if you're at the counter, that's it.
That's the end of your day's working.
That's the highest you're gonna go.
And so if that's the highest you're gonna go, we gotta make sure you have a livable wage.
But it's not the highest you're gonna go.
You're gonna leave that job behind you as you get experience, as you discover what you want to do, what you love, but everybody's gonna have an entry-level job in their resume.
Some people may have five or six.
You may be fired three or four times along the way.
But somehow to the left, the hamburger flipper has reached the top.
And let's not forget what Dr. King said.
Street sweeper, if that's your lot in life, be the best damn street sweeper there is.
His point was that there's virtue in every job, virtue in every work, and the only way to get better work is to be excellent at what you're doing now.
Not a whining, complaining boob running around whining and moaning about unfairness.
But if you're the fry cook at a fast food restaurant, well, you I guess that's your glass ceiling.
I thought liberals oppose the glass ceiling.
Yet that's all they see.
That's all they promote.
Glass ceilings, but capitalism, capitalism, freedom, liberty, being the best you can be, do it what you want.
That's about breaking glass ceilings.
It doesn't know discrimination.
It doesn't know any limits.
It's about success.
That's the defining characteristic of capitalism.
Success.
Sure, you're gonna run it at cheats and sharpens along the way, just like you will in every walk of life, anywhere you go.
You overcome it.
You deal with it.
It's called life, and everybody faces it, and you cannot legislate that out of life.
You can't legislate risk out of life, and you can't write failure out of life, and you can't write pain out of life.
But the Democrat Party can write and legislate success out of your life if you let them.
They need a permanent underclass of dependent people.
Do not be one of them.
Capitalism equals success, fulfillment, growth, which leads to more of the same.
And it spreads throughout society.
It isn't theoretical either.
We have a world in which authoritarianism exists and capitalism exists.
The latter works, the previous doesn't.
I've got to take a break.
We'll be back.
All that I just said, ladies and gentlemen, is not theoretical.
We live, we have a world in which authoritarianism exists, And in which capitalism exists.
The latter works.
Do you know there's an economic boom going on in this country right now?
North Dakota and Texas.
You know what's causing it?
Fracking.
Finding oil a new way.
Obama can't stop it.
He wants to, but he can't stop it.
It is a living, breathing textbook example of how this entire country's economy can be revived.
With jobs created out the wazoo.
The states are the laboratories that counter what is happening in Washington under the leadership of Obama and the Democrats.
Capitalism works.
It created the world's lone greatest superpower in human history.
Authoritarianism does not work.
It never has.
It doesn't and hasn't worked in Cuba, in China, the old Soviet Union, anywhere, everywhere it's been tried, failed dismally.
There is no group of people that can make it fair.
There's no group of people that can make it work.
Today's modern Democrats are no better than any of the other failures who have tried socialism or authoritarianism in the past.
We live in a free country.
And yet so many people insist on being treated as if we don't.
So many people would rather be dependent.
Demanding the government force people to pay more.
Force people, be it wages for a hamburger, it's not about growth and opportunity, it's about the iron fist that some people would rather have the government used at their disposal on other people.
Not good.
Just one more thing, since the minimum wage is up again.
And folks, I know that the vast majority of you in this audience, because of your long time, long-term listenership understand this.
But again, I uh I ask your indulgence because as you know, there are new people tuning in each day, many of them hearing some of this for the first time.
So right now the left is back on its minimum wage kick.
By the way, while they're trying to distract people from what Obama's incompetence is with Syria, and while everybody's looking at that, Obama is issuing new executive orders on gun control.
You know what I think why doesn't Obama just issue an executive order canceling the Constitution?
He's trying to do that with the Second Amendment.
I mean, he pivoted from the Martin Luther King 50th anniversary event yesterday.
He's gone full bore right into gun control today.
And trying to, via executive orders further limit the second amendment and your right to bear arms.
I've got the details here coming up.
But the minimum wage.
One of the points I was trying to make when I first caller Sean, he said 725 not fair, needs to be at least 15.
I said, okay, why not 20?
Yeah, that's cool.
And I got him all the way up to $50 an hour, at which point, eh, maybe it's too much.
I say, why?
No matter who supports a minimum wage increase, try this with them.
You can always reach a level where even they will say it's too much.
And then you own them.
When, in Sean's case, he said $50.
Well, I don't know.
Why is $50 too much?
And that they know they've been caught, and they don't really want to answer the question at that point.
But the reason that he thought $50 was too much is because it doesn't work isn't worth that.
And then you realize that the whole movement isn't about the value of work.
It's about some emotional feel good factor that has nothing to do with market economics.
There ought not be a minimum wage.
The minimum wage kills jobs.
And every time you say that to people that don't understand it, they think that you are a hateful person that doesn't like the poor.
Because they think the minimum wage is an entitlement program.
They think the minimum wage is a compassion program and it's not the minimum wage has nothing to do with economics the minimum wage is the Democrat Party's attempt and anybody else that signs on to it to make people think they care about them but it's entirely arbitrary $7.25 an hour for what?
There are some jobs that aren't worth that.
The White House interns don't make anything.
Did you know Obama doesn't pay his interns anything?
Why aren't people protesting that?
And there are a lot of them.
There are a lot of White House interns and they're told you do it for the experience.
You do it because of what you're going to learn.
You do it because of the people you're going to meet.
But somehow when it comes to McDonald's there's no such thing as internships.
And there's no such 725 is too low.
But $50 is too much well then you admit that any figure is arbitrary and unrelated to market economics.
Labor, the price or cost of labor is based on what somebody will work for.
Sad to say have you um have you ever heard the term what somebody is worth you need to be paid what you're worth.
Well how's that determined your worth is what somebody else agrees to pay you.
And if you want to get your wealth or your worth up you better make yourself valuable to somebody real world example when I was see I thought that I had failed at at radio as a DJ.
So by hook and crook I got a job in sales ticket sales at the Kansas City Royals it paid $2,000 a year at age 28 that's 1979 $2,000 a year that wasn't very fair.
I mean players are making millions the management there had company cars I couldn't afford my house payment and food in the same two week period I had no business owning a house but that's another story.
And it wasn't even really a house it was a shack.
But nevertheless I had no business owning that if they would have just paid me $5,000 $17,000 would have made such a difference but they didn't and you know why?
Because there were people who would have done what I was doing for $10,000 a year because it's a groupy job professional sports teams you wouldn't believe the people team doctors well not team doctor but doctors will offer to do the job for nothing and so the job was worth to the people paying me $12,000
I might have been mad at them but it was business it's just the way it is there was no requirement that they be fair or nice based on my circumstances.
Now if I ended up there doing work that was really valuable to them that $12,000 would have gotten higher that's how it works and you're always going to run into everybody's going to run into unfair bosses and and and mean you can't avoid these things and there's there's no politician and there's no political party that can eliminate any of that and there's no government that can make it fair life
is life and we all have self-determination and Martin Luther King understood it.
If you whatever you're doing whatever it is if you try to be better at it than anybody else you're not going to be doing that long.
You're going to move up now there's you know young people expect instantaneous success because they see it $12,000 in 1979 is equivalent 38,000 today the old inflation calculator $12,000 it wasn't much but that's what it was worth.
It was a new job they had never had the job before.
They didn't know what it was.
And there was no such thing as commissions selling tickets.
I asked them about it.
They said, well, if if we give you a commission, then don't we have to give the player who hits a home run the night before a commission on additional tickets sold the next night if we win the game, how are we going to do this commission business?
No, here's what it is.
12 grand, take it or leave it.
No commissions.
Okay, I ended up $1,000 raise every year.
So when I left I was making 17.
And it's just the way it is.
And I was mad about it, and I wasn't happy about it.
And it's a why I eventually left.
I don't like using myself because it's the old fody, fuddy duty thing that people can react to.
But economics.
It's one of the most intriguing subjects because when it is properly explained to you, it is just common sense simple.
But it's complicated at the same time.
The common sense simplicity doesn't occur until somebody explains it to you.
Economics, free market economics has to be explained.
These people that uh protesting for doubling the minimum wage in McDonald's, like I said, do you think they walk in there and ask for the price of their big Mac to be doubled so that the employees can get a higher raise?
No.
They don't they just think jobs are no more, just another government thing handing out benefits.
The purpose of a business is to provide jobs in the community and health care.
And it isn't.
Thank you.
And so Americans today are down in the dumps thinking that the best days are behind us, thinking the American dream is over.
And if there's no American dream, there's no America.
That's that's a uniquely American thing, the American dream.
We never heard about the Soviet Union dream, and we don't hear about the ChICOM dream, and we don't hear about the Cuman dream, but there's always been an American dream.
And if there is no American dream, there isn't any America.
But there's still an America, and there's still an American dream.
A lot of people are out there doing it.
But a lot of people have been talked out of trying.
A lot of people have been depressed, made to believe that it's not possible.
And so they've lost faith.
And they're depressed, and they're ticked off, and all of it's understandable.
But they need not have lost faith in the country.
Country's still there, country still capable, country is still free, country still filled with opportunity, but we're led by a bunch of people who don't believe that.
Who have never believed that this country was just and moral.
They have never believed that this country was legitimate.
It was an accident.
It was a coincidence.
And only now are people finding out what the real America is like.
And only now are Americans finding out what it's really like for everybody else in the world.
The American dream, American greatness, American prosperity, that only happened in Obama's view, because we stole and pilfered from the other peoples and nations of the world.
We didn't really build anything here.
We stole it after going to war and defeating people.
It's a perverted corrupt near criminal opinion that they have.
And it's a disservice to every American that they attempt to govern and lead with the set of beliefs that they hold.
And the sooner these policies are erased, the sooner these policies are replaced, the better off everybody is going to be.
A brief timeout next.
I got to tell you about this NFL settlement because they're misreading something there.
And your phone calls are coming up.
Oh, oh.
You gotta play this soundbite.
I meant to do this earlier.
Then we'll now I gotta take the break.
Gotta be disciplined.
And then we'll play the Obama soundbite where he says, well, I'll tell you what he says when we get back.
And we're back.
El Rush Motor Cutting Edge, having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have meeting and surpassing all audience expectations.
Now, an employee's worth to somebody is different from employer to employer.
Um certain people, some employers don't want turnover.
Don't want to deal with it, don't want the distraction.
Find people they like may pay them above market, may pay them more than is necessary, may pay them higher than what the standard is for that business.
But there's a reason that's happening, and that is the value of not having the person leave.
There's all kinds of reasons that people get paid what they get paid.
There are all kinds of employers.
There are all kinds of businesses.
There's all kinds of opportunity.
It's not a zero sum game, and there's not only one way to earn a living, there's not only one way that employers pay what they pay.
Employers value their employees, and maybe every employee has a different value.
It all is different.
I'll tell you it's cutthroat, too.
Capitalism is a cutthroat competitive thing.
There's no two ways about it.
It's it is what it is, and that's not bad.
I don't mean that that's bad or not.
I want you to list Obama.
That's how out of touch this man is.
This this is this is this is irresponsible what he said last night.
He was on the PBS News Hour, used to be with Jim Millara, and now it's with Judy Woodruff and Gwen I. Phil.
And Judy Woodruff says, You have a reputation, Mr. President, for being pretty cool, detached.
But standing there at the Lincoln Memorial at the place where Dr. King stood, looking out over that big crowd, that had to be emotional.
What were you thinking?
And I want you to listen to this.
Here is the president of the United States at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on the 50th anniversary of one of the greatest speeches ever at that place, and he's been asked what he was thinking about as he stood there on that moment, at that moment, on that occasion, looking out over that crowd.
Listen, listen to this.
Most of all, what I was thinking about was just uh what I talked about in the speech.
All these uh ordinary folks who did extraordinary things.
There aren't that many examples in American history, maybe even world history, where you see maids and uh seamstresses and porters and laborers who uh are able to fundamentally transform the most powerful country on earth.
You know, I I I folks, this is just so insulting to me.
Those jobs that he described, maids, seamstresses, porters, and laborers, you know he's thinking about African Americans, and what he's saying here is that all this exceptionalism out there, it hasn't come from these people because they're discriminated against.
I feel sorry for them.
They've never been able to fundamentally transform the most powerful country on earth, maids and porters.
This is so damned insulting.
It's so unrealistic, it's so blind.
Where does he think the great seamstresses of the day came from?
For crying out loud.
This is what I meant earlier.
These people seem to think that the fry cook at McDonald's has reached the glass ceiling.
The porter, the maids, and the glass ceiling.
Ordinary people doing extraordinary things defines this country.
It happens multiple times every day.
And the president of the United States, who ought to be trying to inspire that, sits there on the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's speech and basically tells people it isn't possible.
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