Dec. 8, 2019 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| I say in the book, when I walked in that room, I knew 15 of the other 16 Republicans were running for president. | ||
| I mean, I know Marco Rubio. | ||
| I know John Kasich. | ||
| I knew, you know, Jeb Bush. | ||
| I'd met them all. | ||
| The only one I'd never met was Donald Trump, so I was kind of curious. | ||
| And I say in the book, when I walked in that room, I did not like him. | ||
| I did not like his persona. | ||
| I thought he was kind of a blowhard. | ||
| I thought his run for presidency was a publicity stunt, frankly. | ||
| And we spent about an hour and 20 minutes with him, and I walked out with stars in my eyes. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin and this is The Rubin Report. | ||
| Quick reminder to subscribe and make sure that you get notified of our videos. | ||
| Why not, right? | ||
| Okay, joining me today is an author, economist, and former advisor to President Trump, Steve Moore. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Hi Dave, thanks for having me. | ||
| I am glad to have you here. | ||
| We're gonna have to talk somewhat quick because you're in a major time crunch here. | ||
| It's an honor to be on the show. | ||
| I'm thrilled to have you here. | ||
| This is gonna be a little quicker than my average show, so I usually do a little- Rapid fire, right? | ||
| I do a little back story. | ||
| Usually I try to find out where people are from and all sorts of stuff. | ||
| We're gonna do that next time I sit down with you. | ||
| Let's go right into economics. | ||
| As a Wall Street Journal guy and a longtime economist and you studied at George Mason and all of this stuff, how would you say your, what would you say your economic principles are? | ||
| Let's just do 101 more economics. | ||
| Well, I believe in freedom and free markets. | ||
| I believe that, you know, as Thomas Jefferson said, that government which governs least governs best. | ||
| And, you know, get the government, for the most part, out of the way of the economy and it'll do just fine. | ||
| That's not to say we shouldn't have regulation. | ||
| We should certainly have smart regulation. | ||
| We want clean air and clean water and, you know, safe workplaces. | ||
| We want a tax system that raises the revenue the government needs, but in a way that is non-confiscatory. | ||
| Are you listening, Elizabeth Warren? | ||
| And, you know, it doesn't distort the economy. | ||
| So I've been a flat tax guy for all my life. | ||
| You know, I love the idea, you know, let's just have a really low rate. | ||
| Everybody pays it. | ||
| You know, you make 10 times more money than I do. | ||
| I pay, you know, you pay 10 times more tax and not 50 times more tax and get rid of all the loopholes in the tax system. | ||
| So I believe the free enterprise system is the goose that lays the golden eggs. | ||
| All right, so I'm basically with you on all of that, but let's do the flat tax for a second. | ||
| So I would be basically for something like 15% for everybody. | ||
| Would you do something to help the people that are at the lowest, so a certain amount of people would pay nothing? | ||
| Yeah, so like in the standard flat tax plan, you said 15%, I'd love that, but most plans are about 18%. | ||
| And then you basically say, for a family of four, roughly your first, say, $30,000 earned is tax-free. | ||
| And then, you know, above that amount, you pay a tax. | ||
| So, you know, people below the poverty line are not paying any federal income tax. | ||
| And I think most people regard that as fair and equitable and very pro-growth, and we'd love to see it. | ||
| The reason it doesn't happen is not even because, you know, liberals oppose it. | ||
| It's the special interest groups in Washington. | ||
| Do you think they want a flat tax? | ||
| Right. | ||
| The lobbyists make money buying and selling favors in the tax code. | ||
| If you have a flat tax, what do they have to sell? | ||
| No more favors. | ||
| If you really want to drain the swamp, go to a flat tax. | ||
| Would you do anything on the really high side of that? | ||
| So right now, you mentioned Elizabeth Warren. | ||
| Is there something you would do just to kind of, even if it didn't work sort of economically in your mind, just to kind of throw the progressives a bone? | ||
| I get it. | ||
| I get asked that question a lot. | ||
| You know why I don't like that? | ||
| Because, you know, you say, well, why don't we just have 20% for the really rich? | ||
| Then Elizabeth Warren says, well, how about 25? | ||
|
unidentified
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Why not 30? | |
| Why not? | ||
| You know, we had tax rates at one point in this country, 91%. | ||
| So I don't like that idea because I think it perverts the idea. | ||
| I love the idea that everybody pays the same rate. | ||
| No, you know, the idea, oh, but we're just going to have a surcharge on the Bill Gates and the Warren Buffetts of the world. | ||
| They will pay their tax. | ||
| You know, when they earn their money, they will pay it. | ||
| And by the way, those are people who employ, you know, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of workers. | ||
| They pay tax. | ||
| I want to retain the virtue and simplicity of one rate system. | ||
| Those guys are also always for raising taxes, and yet they don't voluntarily pay them. | ||
| What do you make of the mind of someone like that? | ||
| There's a group called the patriotic millionaires. | ||
| There's something like a hundred millionaires and billionaires who have signed something saying, You know, we want to pay more tax. | ||
| I call them the hypocritical millionaires because, you know, there's nothing to prevent somebody, you know, at the bottom line of your tax form is if you want to pay more money into the treasury, you know, you can write a check. | ||
| None of them do that. | ||
| So my feeling is that they are, they want other people to pay more tax, but they don't want to pay more themselves. | ||
| And then they say, well, but the tax system isn't voluntary. | ||
| And I'm like, wait a minute, you know, people voluntarily want to serve, you know, people sign up for the military. | ||
| Those are patriotic people. | ||
| They care about our country and they're willing to give potentially their life for our country, but these, quote, patriotic millionaires won't pay more tax themselves, but they want other people to pay more tax. | ||
| Does it become one of those odd things where it's like the CEO of Walmart or something will publicly say that he's for a $15 minimum wage, where he knows actually it won't ultimately hurt him, but it'll hurt all of the small businesses that won't be able to afford it. | ||
| He'll be able to afford it. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| You know, that's why a lot of the regulations in Washington that, you know, liberals want, they are able to team up with the big companies because the big companies can absorb the cost of, you know, requiring a company to pay health care benefits or education benefits or raise their minimum wage. | ||
| So it's a way, actually, of strengthening the big guys and strangling the small guys who are trying to, you know, compete with the big guys. | ||
| So, you know, the small businesses are the ones who get hurt the most by those kinds of regulations. | ||
| It's interesting that you mentioned, in relation to tax, that you sort of, you can, even if you threw somebody a bone, that it's never enough, kind of, which reminds me of the $15 minimum wage thing, where Rashida Tlaib said, well, why not $20? | ||
| And then it's like, well, Bernie or Warren or the rest of them, they have nothing to really stand on to say why it should be 15 and not 20, because once you artificially put these numbers in. | ||
| By the way, I'm for the highest wages Americans can possibly get. | ||
| So how do you ensure that, then, without doing too much government Well, you don't have to have the government. | ||
| First of all, one of the principles, you asked me about principle economics, one good principle is you never want the government setting prices or setting wages. | ||
| That's supposed to be done by the free enterprise system, the law of supply and demand. | ||
| And when you have the government come in and set, you know, I'll give you as an aside, you were living here in Los Angeles, you know, in a lot of cities you have rent control, you know, to try to make, you know, housing more affordable for poor people. | ||
| Look, we want, we all want people Well, they have shelter and a roof over their head, but it turns out, you know, this is a perfect example of the law of unintended consequences. | ||
| It turns out when you actually impose rent control, you actually reduce the amount of affordable housing and you actually have more people homeless, not less. | ||
| New York City found that and yet liberals seem to never, you know, understand that message. | ||
| And it's the same thing, you know, with what were you asking me about? | ||
| Well, the minimum wage. | ||
| It's not hinged to reality, sort of. | ||
| So when someone says it should be $15, well then why not $20 and then why not $25? | ||
| And so what tends to happen when you raise the minimum wage is you actually, the people who tend to get hurt the most are the people with the least guilt because you've essentially priced them out of the market. | ||
| I always tell the story, you know, I have two teenage sons. | ||
| I love them to death, but I'd never pay them $15. | ||
| I mean, they just, you know, they don't have the training and skills to, you know, warrant | ||
| a $15 an hour wage. | ||
| Why not, you know, especially for young people, let them work for $7 or $8 an hour and gain | ||
| the skills. | ||
| You know, I remember very well, by the way, my first job, I think most people listening | ||
| to this, watching this show, remember that. | ||
| Do you remember the first job you ever had? | ||
| I do. | ||
| What was that? | ||
| I was a paperboy. | ||
| Paperboy, okay. | ||
| I was a paperboy. | ||
| I was working in a small warehouse in Northbrook, Illinois. | ||
| But you learn a lot with your first job. | ||
| How to show up on time, how to be nice to your boss, how to learn some skills. | ||
| You learn that whether you're delivering newspapers or whether you're working in a factory. | ||
| So I don't like that about, I like that letting the wages rise, | ||
| and that's happened under Trump, by the way. | ||
| We've gotten a really nice wage gains under Trump through the free enterprise system | ||
| and creating a very tight labor market. | ||
| I mean, workers have a lot of bargaining power right now. | ||
| So you advised Trump on the tax cuts a couple years ago. | ||
| Talk to me just a little bit about what's that like when you're sitting in a room with this guy? | ||
| What are his guiding principles, sort of economically, what you've kind of laid out there? | ||
| I mean, he's obviously a capitalist. | ||
| Do you know Trump? | ||
| I've never met him personally. | ||
| So he's a really good guy. | ||
| I mean, believe it or not. | ||
| I always say, half-jokingly, that most politicians are wonderful people in public and jerks in private. | ||
| Trump can be a jerk in public, but he is a wonderful person in private. | ||
| I like him a lot. | ||
| He's interesting. | ||
| He's charming. | ||
| He's attentive to what you're saying. | ||
| He looks at you straight in the eye, and he wants to know, and he'll come at you. | ||
|
unidentified
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I like that. | |
| He'll joust with you if he doesn't agree with your position, which He'll have four or five people in the room and they'll argue, and that's what a good CEO should do, not just surround themselves with yes men, but people who will argue out the point. | ||
| So when you guys sat down and he's going, I wanna cut taxes, and this is one of the things I promised, and now help me pull this thing together. | ||
| So I'll give you one example. | ||
| So this tells you a lot about the tax bill, but it also tells you about Donald Trump. | ||
| So I remember we went into Trump, this was Larry Kudlow, and Larry's now the chief economist, and we said, hey, we showed him this chart that had the, U.S. | ||
| tax rate on our businesses was 40% and the rest of the world was like, on average, about 20%. | ||
| And we said, you know, this is a problem for us. | ||
| You know, as Larry called it, it's a 20% head start for all the countries we're competing with because they've got a lower penalty that they've faced. | ||
| And as a result of that, companies were leaving the United States and they were going to Ireland or they're going to Canada or they're going to Mexico. | ||
| This was called inversions, where companies were giving up their American citizenship to move somewhere else. | ||
| So anyway, We said to Trump, we think you should have a 20% rate in your tax plan. | ||
| And I'll never forget, he sat back and he said, no, I'm not going to do that. | ||
| We said, well, why? | ||
| He said, I want 15%. | ||
| And what was so interesting about that was that from that moment until we passed the bill in late December of 2017, he always insisted on 15%. | ||
| You know, it was a meeting with Mitch McConnell or Paul Ryan or I need public declaration. | ||
| 15, 15, 15. | ||
| And I'll never forget, we're waiting for the final vote in the Senate, 'cause we needed to get 50 votes | ||
| in the Senate to pass this. | ||
| We were nervous about whether we could do this. | ||
| Remember on Obamacare, we came up with 49 votes. | ||
| One vote short. | ||
| So we didn't wanna come up with 49 again. | ||
| And so we're very nervous. | ||
| We're waiting for McConnell to come back from his come to Jesus moment, | ||
| when they had their final meeting and the Senate Republican caucus to see if they had 50 | ||
|
unidentified
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votes. | |
| And I remember he walks in, goes right up to the president. | ||
| He said, "Mr. President, I'm so sorry. | ||
| "I failed you. | ||
| "I know you wanted that 15% tax rate. | ||
| "And I made up an argument I possibly could. | ||
| "And I'm just, I failed you, Mr. President. | ||
| "What can I say? | ||
| "I made, I just couldn't convince my colleagues. | ||
| "I said, I couldn't get you that 15%." | ||
| And he said, "Would you take 20%?" | ||
| Twenty percent. | ||
| I'll take that in a minute. | ||
| I really believe this, the really interesting thing about that story is, I always thank God, thank you God, that Donald Trump didn't listen to Larry and I. He does understand the art of the deal. | ||
| I think he wanted twenty percent all along, but you understand, if you want to end up at twenty percent, that's not your opening bid, right? | ||
| So he started at fifteen, and I guarantee you, I guarantee you, If he had started at 20%, like Larry and I had, we would have ended up at about 27 or 28%. | ||
| It's because he started at 15, the negotiated position was 20. | ||
| Well, we ended up actually at 21%. | ||
| Do you think basically that is his secret sauce to everything? | ||
| I mean, we could even take this outside of the world of economics, just that negotiating like that is basically, that is his greatest skill. | ||
| Well, you know the name of his book, right? | ||
| The Art of the Deal. | ||
| The Art of the Deal. | ||
| He's a good negotiator. | ||
| He is. | ||
| I've seen him many times in person and he knows how to negotiate. | ||
| That's what's made him successful in business. | ||
| He's made mistakes as president. | ||
| I'm not an apologist for Trump. | ||
| You know, where we are with the economy. | ||
| But yeah, I think this is one of his assets. | ||
| He's a very good negotiator. | ||
| So where are we exactly right now with the economy? | ||
| Because depending on who you listen to, it seems like we're all over the place. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, first of all, let me say this. | |
| I mean, if I had told you three years ago that, you know, after, say, three years of Trump, not quite three, but we're good, we would have the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years, the lowest inflation rate in 50 years, the lowest interest rates in 50 years, and the biggest wage gains in 30 years, That's a pretty darn good economy, and that's what we have right now. | ||
| We have 7.1 million surplus jobs in the United States. | ||
| Think about this. | ||
| That's never happened before in the history of our country. | ||
| 7.1 million unfilled jobs, that's larger than the entire population of the state of Indiana. | ||
| That's how many surplus jobs. | ||
| You know, what that means is workers have bargaining power. | ||
| It goes back to what we were saying before. | ||
| So you know, you don't like your job working for Joe's, you can go down the street and | ||
| work for Susan and she's going to give you a higher offer. | ||
| We just had negotiations between the UAW and GM. | ||
| The UAW, it looks like they've gotten pretty much what they wanted in these negotiations. | ||
|
unidentified
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Why? | |
| Because it's not like UAW can go find other workers. | ||
| There's a shortage of them. | ||
| So I think it's been a positive thing for workers. | ||
| Let me summarize. | ||
| If you are an American worker and you are looking for a job and you have some kind of useful skill, this is the best labor market in any of our lifetimes. | ||
| It's really good. | ||
| So can it continue? | ||
| I think it can. | ||
| So you mentioned regulation before. | ||
| How do you figure out where the moments are that you have to use the touch of government? | ||
| Because as you said, you are for some level of regulation. | ||
| So let me put it, the way I like to put it is, look, we all believe in, not all of us, but most of us believe in sound regulation that makes the economy run and stops cheaters and things like that. | ||
| I have a lot of libertarians that watch your show, they'll be just by saying the word regulation. | ||
| I have friends who don't even believe you should have to drive on the right side of the road. | ||
| My point is that I believe regulations should be guardrails right on the road, so to keep you on the road. | ||
| The left believes that a lot of the regulations should be roadblocks to prevent people from, you know, we want our businesses to succeed but we want them to stay on the straight and narrow. | ||
| Too many times, I saw this in the Obama administration, too many times the regulations were just meant to bring these companies to an abrupt stop. | ||
| And I think that's the difference. | ||
| We want regulation that makes sense, that's cost effective, and that achieves its mission without disrupting our economy in a way that will destroy jobs. | ||
| Can you give me an example of a regulation that Trump has cut? | ||
| You know, there was the original, wasn't there that idea at one point that for every new regulation he was going to pass he was going to cut something like 70 regulations? | ||
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unidentified
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Two. | |
| He said why every new one we'd get rid of two and actually so far every new one we've gotten rid of 20. | ||
| So he's been a big deregulator. | ||
| So can you give an example of where something like that, that he's cut, has actually helped the economy? | ||
| The best example is in the energy area. | ||
| Barack Obama and his team hated the fossil fuel industry. | ||
| They hated shale oil and gas. | ||
| They hated the coal producers. | ||
| So they passed regulations that were, by the way, the law says that regulations | ||
| should be passed in a way that where they're achievable for an industry. | ||
| In other words, that they shouldn't be designed to bankrupt a company. | ||
| To take out our industry. | ||
| But in the area of coal, the intention was precisely to just put | ||
| the coal producers out of business. | ||
| And it hurt our own guests. | ||
| Now we've got a situation where we're producing more oil and gas and coal than ever before. | ||
| We're producing more nuclear power and that's created, you know, | ||
| for the first time in our. | ||
| Again, in your and my lifetime, we're actually producing more oil and gas than we're consuming. | ||
| I mean, that's a pretty cool thing to think about. | ||
| We're no longer susceptible to oil embargoes or the Russian influence. | ||
| We saw what happened when the Iranians bombed the oil fields in Saudi Arabia. | ||
| That was, what, about three or four weeks ago. | ||
| If that had happened before the shale revolution that we have going on, the price of gasoline, What are you paying here in California? | ||
| You pay a lot for gas. | ||
| I don't even know what it is. | ||
| I have an electric car. | ||
| It's like $4 or $5 a gallon. | ||
| But on the East Coast where I live, you know, you pay maybe $3 a gallon. | ||
| The price of gas probably would have gone to about $6 a gallon if it hadn't been for the fact that the United States is actually now producing a lot of oil and gas ourselves. | ||
| So do you think that the primary role of the government basically is to make sure that the economy is running right? | ||
| Is that really the first thing that the government has to do? | ||
| It's to protect our life and our liberty. | ||
| And the reason we have laws is to make sure that I don't violate your rights and you don't violate my rights. | ||
| I'm kind of old-fashioned. | ||
| I believe if I'm doing something that doesn't You know, interfere with your rights to life and liberty, then you should be able to do it. | ||
| I don't like laws that are intended to, for example, protect me from myself. | ||
| I think adults should be able to do pretty much... I don't like drugs. | ||
| I don't like tobacco. | ||
| I don't smoke. | ||
| I don't do drugs. | ||
| But if you want to do drugs, I think you're stupid to do it. | ||
| No comment, no comment. | ||
| But, you know, I don't think the government should be involved in those kind of decisions. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What else should we know about Trump as someone that has spent some time with him? | ||
| Not even the negotiating part. | ||
| I mean, he gave us a little insight into just the human part, but it's a little hard to just figure it out through the media. | ||
| One of the things that impressed me the most when I wrote the book Trumponomics with my friend Art Laffer, the first few chapters that I'd recommend people read are just, if they're interested in how Trump operates, is to read those because we really talk about how Trump Just as a person, what's he like? | ||
| One of the things that first impressed me when we went, we were called by Corey Lewandowski, who was running the campaign back then, and we'll go down the history books for getting Trump through that Republican nomination. | ||
| Trump called us in January of 2016 and said, Mr. Trump would like to meet you and Larry Kudlow at Trump Tower. | ||
| And so I was curious about what the Trump movement was just sort of getting going at that point. | ||
| But you could sense something was going on, and I wanted to see what it was all about. | ||
| And I say in the book, when I walked in that room, I knew 15 of the other 16 Republicans were running for president. | ||
| I mean, I know Marco Rubio. | ||
| I know John Kasich. | ||
| I knew, you know, Jeb Bush. | ||
| I had met them all. | ||
| The only one I'd never met was Donald Trump. | ||
| So I was kind of curious. | ||
| And I say in the book, when I walked in that room, I did not like him. | ||
| I did not like his persona. | ||
| I thought he was kind of a blowhard. | ||
| I thought his run for presidency was a publicity stunt, frankly. | ||
| And we spent about an hour and 20 minutes with him, and I walked out with stars in my eyes. | ||
| He's an incredibly charming, charismatic person. | ||
| And he's always personally been very good to me. | ||
| He doesn't throw people under the bus that are loyal to him. | ||
| You know, be loyal to him and he goes both ways. | ||
| When I went through the Fed Reserve nomination and just got pulverized by, you know, all these accusations against me, you know, I remember I would call Trump up, call the president and say, Mr. President, you know, if this is a problem for you, you know, that, you know, I hate black people and I hate midgets and I hate Jews and I, you know, all these allegations. | ||
| I said, look, if you, if you, you know, there's a problem, I'm happy to, You do realize that that's the clip that people are going to put online, don't you? | ||
| Let me be very clear. | ||
| I don't hate Jews. | ||
| I don't outlast them. | ||
| I'm saying that's the kind of thing they were saying about me. | ||
| Anyway, I said, Mr. President, that's a problem for you and I don't want to embarrass you. | ||
|
unidentified
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get back there, keep fighting. | |
| Wow. | ||
| And one thing I do respect about Trump, and look, Trump has, a lot of things he does and says | ||
| I don't like at all. | ||
| I wish he would stop tweeting, for example. | ||
| But what I went through was for about three or four weeks, of just getting pulverized in the media. | ||
| And finally my wife said, if you stay in this, I'm gonna divorce you. | ||
| Wow, wow. | ||
| And so I just said, okay, I can't take this anymore. | ||
| Trump has taken a thousand times, you know, what I took, and day after day after day after day, and yet he never lets, you know, it just wore me down. | ||
| How do you think he does that? | ||
| I don't, he's like a superhero quality or something in the sense, you know, it's like he's got a coat of armor or something that, you know, protects him from, you know, from these insults and stuff. | ||
| You know, he's always called a racist and that's the other thing I found, you know, I couldn't believe, you know, how many, you know, blacks and minorities he had working for him and they loved him. | ||
| And so, you know, he's not a perfect person by any means. | ||
| He's got a lot of faults, but I think he's a, The one thing you always ask me, what drives him? | ||
| And it really is, how do we make America great again? | ||
| And how do we make sure that the economy is working for middle-class, blue-collar workers? | ||
| Because those are the people who elected Trump. | ||
| Those were the people in Erie, Pennsylvania, and Lansing, Michigan, and Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and Charleston, West Virginia, who, frankly, were pissed off at both parties. | ||
| The Democrats and Republicans. | ||
| They didn't like the Bush years, they didn't like the Obama years, and Trump knows the people who brought him to this stance. | ||
| Do you think there's any risk in having a sort of pure businessman as the chief executive? | ||
| I think it's a breath of fresh air. | ||
| I think that's the reason he won. | ||
| I think people were sick of politicians. | ||
| Remember, what was his closing argument in the election? | ||
| Do you remember the campaign? | ||
| Well, there were a couple things. | ||
| One of them was, what do you have to lose? | ||
| Yeah, the other one was, drain the swamp. | ||
| And I got to tell you, that really appealed to people around the country. | ||
| Because Washington, this is one of my little pet peeves, and Trump tapped into this. | ||
| Washington is getting rich at the expense of the rest of us. | ||
| Three of the five wealthiest counties in the United States are in or around Washington. | ||
| Did you know that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Three of the five. | ||
| How did we do that? | ||
| I've lived in Washington for 30 years. | ||
| We don't produce anything. | ||
| All we produce is laws, lawyers, politicians, rules, regulations, and we're getting rich at the expense of the rest of the country. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| The American people finally caught on. | ||
| It's like, wait a minute. | ||
| We're sending all our money to Washington. | ||
| So some of the principles you laid out here strike me as a lot of common sense stuff and I definitely fall in line with that. | ||
| of the money and I think that's something that I really admire about | ||
| Trump. He is trying to drain the swamp but it's boy is that tough to do. | ||
| Yeah, so okay so some of the principles you laid out here strike me as a lot of | ||
| common-sense stuff and I definitely fall in line with that. | ||
| When you now hear the ideas of socialism being thrown around as if this is the | ||
| right set of ideas or Or when you listen to, say, Bernie or Elizabeth Warren and the amount of government involvement they want to use to create their perfect utopian society. | ||
| Are you shocked that these ideas gain traction? | ||
| I am. | ||
| I don't think shock would be the term I'd use. | ||
| I'm distressed. | ||
| I'm lucky enough to have been friends with Milton Friedman, who was maybe the greatest economist of the last 200 years, at least since Adam Smith. | ||
| He was just a wise man in so many things. | ||
| I was on the front page of the New York Times in a compilation with him as some of the leaders of the far right. | ||
| That's how bananas the media is. | ||
| So I'm sympathetic to your wife's situation. | ||
| I remember towards the end of his life, which was around the turn of the century, he died in the early 2000s, he said to me, and it was kind of in despair, he said, Steve, what is the most enduring lesson of the 20th century? | ||
| And I think we both agreed, I think most people agree, the enduring lesson of the 20th century is that Communism, socialism, Nazism, Maoism, Bernie Sandersism, whatever you want to call these things, these government controls of the economy, they're a failure. | ||
| And free enterprise system is a success. | ||
| That's what everybody should have learned over the last 100 years. | ||
| It's how the United States of America became the most economically powerful nation in the world. | ||
| And then he said, But yet the lesson everyone seems to have learned is we need more socialism. | ||
| So it is disturbing. | ||
| Do you think that's just lazy thinking? | ||
| What do you think that is? | ||
| Is it a branding of capitalism? | ||
| Have we grown fat on all of the excesses? | ||
|
unidentified
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Because it's so freaking great. | |
| I think both of those things. | ||
| You make two great points. | ||
| Number one, capitalism, I don't really use the term capitalism anymore because it's seen as greed and the rich getting richer. | ||
| So I think we've lost that term. | ||
| I talk about free enterprise system and let people start businesses, let people do what they want to do, let the economy work itself out. | ||
| The other point you make is I do think we've become fat and happy. | ||
| And especially the millennials who, you know, you've seen these polls, 52% of college graduates now think that socialism is superior to free market capitalism. | ||
| I mean, you know, how stupid is that to believe that? | ||
| And yet that's, you know, part of that is the schools. | ||
| We've done a horrible job of allowing, you know, the left to take over our government school system and now we're paying a high price for that. | ||
| Turning out kids who don't know anything about anything. | ||
| It's a big task we have at hand. | ||
| One other thing. | ||
| I don't even think we should call them socialists. | ||
| People like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are authoritarians. | ||
| You were saying that you have libertarian tendencies and I do too. | ||
| I don't want the government to tell me what to do. | ||
| They do want the government to tell you what kind of straw you can use, what kind of lightbulb you can use in your room, what kind of car you can drive, what kind of school you can go to. | ||
| I mean, they want control of everything. | ||
| And when I talk to young people, I mean, this is my plea. | ||
| I'm so glad to do the show because I know you've got a great audience. | ||
| For young people watching the show, freedom and liberty are precious commodities. | ||
| Most people in the world don't have the freedoms and liberties that you and I have, or the people watching the show. | ||
| Guard those. | ||
| Millions of Americans have given up their lives to safeguard those freedoms and liberties. | ||
| And now we've got a whole generation of kids who's willing to just throw those liberties and freedoms away. | ||
| I mean, it distresses me. | ||
| Well, one of the things that I always find so confusing about it is that the arguments run so thin. | ||
| So just in the last couple of weeks, AOC was giving a speech on how she didn't want Mark Zuckerberg to be in charge of her health care. | ||
| Now, I get it, I don't really want Mark Zuckerberg to be in charge of my healthcare, I don't know exactly why she's saying that, but it's like, well, what she wants is Bernie to be in charge of your healthcare, and it's like, I don't know, who's worse out of those two? | ||
| You know who should be in charge of your healthcare? | ||
| You! | ||
| You, exactly! | ||
| And we should all be, you know, this is the danger, I mean, think about this, the two industries, I talk about this in every speech I give, what two industries in America are most dominated by government? | ||
| Health care and education. | ||
| These are the two industries we've basically turned over to the government. | ||
| I mean, look, our health care system is 50% private, 50% government. | ||
| And now the progressives don't want school choice either, which is completely insane. | ||
| So think about this, though. | ||
| So you've got the two industries that are most run by government. | ||
| Guess which two industries have had the biggest increase in costs over the last 50 years? | ||
| Education and health care. | ||
| I think I'm with you here. | ||
| You don't have to be a genius here. | ||
| So wait a minute, then I ask my liberal friends, why do we have the government play such a big role in education and health care? | ||
| You know what they say? | ||
| To make it more affordable. | ||
| Gee, they're doing a wonderful job of it, aren't they? | ||
| So why not let every kid, you know, you and I have to start a movement. | ||
| Every child in America, whether they're black, brown, you know, whatever color, whatever income range, wherever they live, it is a disgrace that we're sending millions of kids to failing schools. | ||
| Why not allow every single American to have the right that Barack Obama had when he moved to Washington, D.C. | ||
| and moved into public housing, right, in the White House? | ||
| What did he do? | ||
| He didn't send his kids to the public schools. | ||
| He sent them to elite private schools. | ||
| Why can't we let every single American have that same right and have the schools compete for kids? | ||
| And, you know, competition is a wonderful thing. | ||
| Well, just, I mean, literally just this morning, we're going to hold this video for a couple of days, but I just saw Elizabeth Warren tweet this morning about how she basically wants to take out charter schools. | ||
| And it's like, she did? | ||
| Oh my God, that is so distressing. | ||
| I just retweeted it this morning. | ||
| I mean, it's like, they wanna force people, this gets to the whole idea you and I were just talking about. | ||
| Who can make a better decision about what schools their kids should go to? | ||
| Elizabeth Warren or the parents of those kids? | ||
| Who do you think cares more about those kids? | ||
| You know? | ||
| What do you think, to give the devil his due here, what do you think the root of what these people think is? | ||
| Like, so okay, we can sit here and agree that their ideas are bad, let's say. | ||
| But they obviously don't believe that. | ||
| I think they have a trust in government. | ||
| They just have a fundamental trust in something else. | ||
| Well look, I think there's a... | ||
| There's a sinister answer to that, you know, and then there's, I do think some just believe government is good, and all we need is just to spend more money on the public schools. | ||
| That's all we've been doing for the last 50 years, and they're getting worse, not better. | ||
| You know, so my attitude is just from, I don't care what your political philosophy is, if you keep doing something over and over, it doesn't work, you stop doing it, right? | ||
| But the other thing is, let's be honest about this. | ||
| Who runs the government schools? | ||
| The teachers' unions do. | ||
| What is the most powerful? | ||
| 35% of the delegates in the Democratic Convention are teachers' union members. | ||
| They run the Democratic Party. | ||
| And unfortunately, too many Democrats put the interests of the teachers' unions ahead of the kids, though we have the schools that are supposed to be served. | ||
| All right, we literally only have five minutes left. | ||
|
unidentified
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No, no, no! | |
| We're just getting going here! | ||
| We only have five minutes left. | ||
| You've got to get to Fox. | ||
| Next time I'm in L.A., can I come back on the show? | ||
| Absolutely come back and we'll do it with no time limit. | ||
| But in five minutes, this is gonna be almost impossible. | ||
| Can you give me a sort of basic breakdown of where we're at with China? | ||
| I think this is pretty much the most confusing thing right now. | ||
| People have no idea what is being ramped up right now. | ||
| So it's not just confusing, this is the issue of our time. | ||
| You know, this is, I've called this the- Well, congratulations, I've given you five minutes on it. | ||
| Yeah, I know, it's the epic battle of our time. | ||
| Just as, you know, from the 1950s through, you know, the late 80s, you know, it was this, the Cold War with the Soviet Union. | ||
| Now we have an epic battle between, I think this is the new Cold War, I really do. | ||
| And I think that this is World War IV, you know, that we've got. | ||
| I mean, China is- Wait, why'd you skip three there? | ||
| Pardon me? | ||
| Why'd you skip World War III? | ||
| Well, I think you could say the Cold War was sort of... Oh, okay. | ||
| You know, but in any case, I mean, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but my point I'm making is China is becoming increasingly a menace on the world scene. | ||
| They had marched towards freedom. | ||
| Look, Mao was the single greatest villain maybe whoever walked on the planet Earth. | ||
| I mean, he killed, you know, tens and tens of millions of his own people. | ||
| And then finally they moved away from communism, which we were talking about before, and they started to embrace privatization and free enterprise. | ||
| Not fully, but they moved in that direction. | ||
| And they had a boom! | ||
| I mean, one of the great booms ever in history, what happened in China over the last 30 years. | ||
| The problem has been they've moved more in a Stalinistic direction now. | ||
| And so they're building up their military, they're cheating on trade deals, they've never opened up their markets to us. | ||
| The way I describe it to Donald Trump, not that he needed any urging on this, | ||
| 'cause he got this. | ||
| We are in an abusive trade relationship with China. | ||
| We've opened up our markets to them, they have not opened up their markets to us. | ||
| They're stealing our intellectual property. | ||
| I applaud Trump for finally calling them out on this. | ||
| It's about time. | ||
| Where this is right now, the ball's in their court. | ||
| We have a mini deal right now, but look, China could, you can't trust these people | ||
| as far as you could spit. | ||
| I mean, the problem is they also don't keep their word. | ||
| So it's a tricky situation, but this is a battle that's not gonna be resolved | ||
| in the next three months or six months or a year or two. | ||
| It's probably gonna go on for a decade or two. | ||
| And the big issue is, will the United States or China be the world economic superpower over the next 25, 30 years? | ||
| You know who I'm gonna put my money on? | ||
| I think you're putting it on the U.S. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm putting it on us. | |
| You know why? | ||
| Because we still do have a free enterprise system. | ||
| They are command and control. | ||
| They have the, you know, they have the Elizabeth Warren type of economy. | ||
| And it doesn't work! | ||
| So you think ultimately that sort of thing might work at some level for some period of time, but ultimately... It fails! | ||
| Show me any time, I would say... | ||
| Show me any time, any place, anywhere where that model has worked. | ||
| It didn't work for the Soviet Union. | ||
| It hasn't worked for North Korea. | ||
| It didn't work for Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. | ||
| It didn't work for Castro. | ||
| I mean, it's never worked anywhere because the genius of the free enterprise system is the millions of actors who make decisions. | ||
| The idea that you can have a few politicians in a central politburo that can make the decisions about an economy with You know millions and millions of decisions. | ||
| I mean, it's it's ludicrous. | ||
| It will break down I'm putting my money on Silicon Valley You know and they've got their own set of problems though because of how lefty they've gone But that that's a whole other topic that we'll have to discuss next time. | ||
| I think you proved to me you're a big advantage over China Yeah, I always say this in my speeches our Chinese are smarter than their Chinese I think you proved to me you're an economist here, because we probably got the most amount of ideas packed into the shortest show I've ever done. | ||
| That's called efficiency, my friend. | ||
| That is efficiency. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| You guys can follow Steve at Stephen Moore on Twitter, and we will have him back for a full episode soon enough. | ||
| All right, thanks. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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