Sen. Rand Paul & Kelley Paul | The Case Against Socialism

good evening I want to welcome everybody to the Strand bookstore my name is nancy bass widen on the owner of the Strand for a little bit of history it was founded by my grandfather in 1927 in an area that was called book row that was famous it ran along 4th Avenue from Astor Place to Union Square there were as many as 48 bookstores they all were used bookstores at the time we moved to block away in 1958 and all the other stores have shuttered since we're doing great thanks to you voracious readers so I want to thank you for that you know we house here used new and of course rare books and we have a vigorous events program you know we have 400 events annually events like tonight and I hope you'll join us for more of them tonight I mean so excited to welcome the husband-and-wife duel Kelly Paul and Senator Rand Paul they have forcefully presented their point of view in the book the case against socialism our role is the leading proprietor of one of the leading proprietors of books is to always be open to a full range of viewpoints and Kelly is a personal friend of mine and ran does privacy and civil liberties work with my husband Senator Ron Wyden who represents Oregon and with that let's get on to having a spirited discussion that's part of the Strand tradition welcome Kelly Paul and Senator Rand Paul to the Strand all right thanks everybody for coming out and thanks to Nancy for hosting us and she mentioned her husband Ron is a senator from Oregon and you wouldn't believe this if you watch the news but we actually are friends we get along it's not like the view we don't yell at each other and the interesting thing is is I think it's one of the things that's really misreported about politics in our country is that there's so much anger in there and then all of its really apparently Donald Trump's fault you know it's there's so much anger and it's like well who influenced those women on the view to be so angry I mean it's like but here's the thing in Washington we don't really yell and scream at each other you see it on the cable news shows you see it online the Internet but as Nancy mentioned Ron and I work together on privacy issues Fourth Amendment issues and we probably have a dozen bills that we co-sponsor together does it mean we agree on everything no but what happens in Washington is people from the other side of the aisle you acknowledge the things you agree with them on and you work together with those and then the things you don't really you kind of leave out because I'm probably not convincing him of anything and each part not convincing me of anything that we have long held beliefs on but on privacy we just happen to be exactly on the same side I would say with the Democrats on issues of war we have a lot of things in common even Bernie Sanders who we go after in this book he and I at least before this book came out were on good terms now we'll see after the book is out for a while whether we're still in good terms but I can give you a couple of examples of things that I've worked with him on one would be in the defense bill that's been put forward recently we have language that says that we should not go to war in Iran and unless Congress votes on it it's like well duh I mean that's in that's like a restatement of the Constitution and yet I can't believe anybody would vote against that but it ends up being there very few Republicans will vote for that Mike Lee and I will vote for that and actually more Democrats will vote for that and we were I work with Bernie on that I've worked with Bernie on trying to end the war in Yemen I don't really want to sell arms to Saudi Arabia because I think the wars a disaster and there's no good coming of that of the war in Yemen but back to the book the book we kind of got the idea to write the book Kelly and I've been talking about this and looking at the numbers that are coming out about the young generation and the young generation being sort of enthralled with this idea of that socialism would be a good thing and we thought well gosh if you know the history of the 20th century it's hard to find any example of socialism that's not associated with genocide and famine and or both and so it's hard to imagine how anybody could be for it so that in the book we talked a little bit about that but we also talked a lot about Scandinavia in the sense that they keep saying well we're not for that kind of socialism although in our country there were American intellectuals who were for Stalin for twenty or thirty years New York Times Walter Durante travelled over there wrote about it got a Pulitzer Prize and really in the end the New York Times eventually apologized for his reporting on the Soviet Union because it wasn't accurate we finally some of some people knew but really the entire world knew when Khrushchev ultimately admitted what Stalin had done and the millions of people have died but today socialists will say well that's not the kind of socialism we want you know we're not for authoritarianism and this is a little bit of the debate I was having with the so-called Republican yesterday is that she's like Oh Maduro is a thug he's a murderer and I'm like well yeah but he's also a socialist and maybe there's a connection between socialism and thuggery but she wouldn't let me get a word out because she was like no no he's just a murderer and a thug it's like well can't you be both and maybe there's a linkage between centralizing power we're just a small group of people have the power that maybe corruption and kleptocracy is more common when you only have a few people running your country instead of having what we like to call democratic capitalism because really the ultimate democracy is with your money you need to shop at Walmart you shop at Target you shop at Kmart you shop at the Strand I hope the thing is but people people make those decisions and the power is more diffuse and if there are corrupt people hopefully the law or whatever catches them but if one person runs everything it's much more likely if that person becomes corrupt that it affects your entire society I taught a course at George Mason about a year ago and that sort of was the beginnings of thinking about the book and the course that I thought was called the dystopian novel so everybody's heard in 1984 everybody's heard a brave new world but what we looked at was sort of the lineage and the connection that 1984 is probably the most famous but coming before that is brave new world coming also before 1984 is Hein rands anthem but really coming before any of these dystopian novels was a novel by a zombie Otten called wee and a lot of people I see heads nodding I've read it but if you haven't read it it's very much worth reading but then I don't think a lot of people have taught the course with there are different dystopian novel courses then taught it with a linkage back one step further removed and really I think and maybe this is my own bias but mine one step further removed from Sami Otten is once again another Russian writer Dostoyevsky and Dostoevsky writes the notes from underground and in it he doesn't really make a pragmatic argument against socialism in fact the word may not have been around then that were a either called nihilist but there was this idea that we'd base society on reason and rationality and it would be known what in the best interests of people and people would like it and government would be rational and it would be humane and it would be all-encompassing but it would be sort of this idea of trying to achieve perfection well the underground man responds to that and responds to the symbol of the Crystal Palace which was built in England about in the 1840s or 1850s and he says well maybe you might just want to stick your tongue out at you may want to act irrational you may want to bump into somebody you may think that part of being alive is expressing your free will and it may not always be rational in fact may be irrationality is a part of showing that you're alive another thing that Dostoevsky talks about in it is the idea of new if we talk about a perfectible society where government is going to be the perfect instrument of a perfectible society we talk about something that may be the perfect ends are not exactly what we want maybe part of being alive is actually the act of attaining and I was at Columbia that I was talking about the idea that getting your your degree is important but maybe going to college is about going to college you know maybe you know fighting a legal battle or doing something in your career isn't always about the end result it's about the it's about the striving it's about the attaining it's about the whole process of life and it isn't about the results but as we as I taught this course we because I became more and more interested in looking at socialism in general and one of the interesting things about notes from underground is it actually is a response to a novel called what is to be done by a guy named churn at chef Sookie and churn chef Sookie and this book where I this was actually Lenin's favorite book and it's been described as the the least famous but most influential book out there nobody's ever heard of it and I wouldn't bother reading it it's a terrible read actually but he's really only famous and only well-known now because notes from underground was written as a response to it and charnot chefs key building on Plato and building on all these people believed in the perfectibility of man sort of presents this new man which later became the new Soviet man because what what happened is they began talk about perfectibility and they're talking about having these sort of selfless philosopher kings that would be disinterested and and you get this perfectible society is that as they did they discovered guess what man's nature may not be disinterested man's nature actually may be selfish and so they said well I guess we're gonna have to change man's nature and I guess when you start talking much changing the man's nature and molding man's nature to me that song sounds like it may include some violence or some force in order to do that but the other side says that's not what they're for and there weren't for Stalin they weren't for Hitler they weren't for Mao they were initially kind of for Castro in fact Bernie you know was very complimentary of Castro for a long time not so much anymore but each time it was sort of discovered that the socialism trended towards authoritarianism then the Socialists in our country and the intellectuals would back away from it same with Venezuela Chavez was lauded by every everybody Oliver Stone does too biopic stew how great Chavez was Noah Chomsky loves Chavez Michael Moore Sean Penn they all love Chavez until they didn't or actually we say they love job as a Maduro until people lost 20 pounds and began eating their pets in Venezuela and then socialism didn't look so good but this has happened time and time again and so one of the themes of the book is is violence inherent to socialism or is it just an accident so that's what the socialists want you to believe they want you to believe Hitler was an accident well then Stalin was an accident and then Mao accidentally came to power and killed 50 million people or whatever and one after another they think it's sort of an accident of history Hayek and others who have looked at this and they say that basically it may be that when you want complete socialism when you want the government to own the means of production when you want the government to own the land when you want things to be owned collectively it may well be that you can't have a kinder gentler dictator what you really need if you're going to be efficient you want the best socialist leader maybe you have to select for ruthlessness so maybe ruthlessness is not an act but if you really want to take people's property there's a point at which they will resist and you're going to need to use violence you need someone who is unafraid to use violence and so maybe evolutionarily the selection process for leaders in socialism as you centralized power and as you're going to take the land and take the property and redistribute it it has to end up being something that is a ruthless leader one of the I think ironic things about socialism is some people come from the left and they say and like really everyone does now that you want the law to be equally applied we want equal protection of the law regardless of who you are and yet if you want complete socialism where we have equality of outcome the only way to have equality of outcome since we're unequal we have different talents some of us work harder some of us have a great idea some of us have some product that everybody wants and becomes richer but the only way we can make ourselves equal if the government's going to do it is we have to treat people unequally so the irony is those people who are advocating equal protection that the law treat everybody the same if you want people to be the same in the end you know I could give you all thousand dollars and you walk out the door and ten minutes later somebody's got fifteen hundred and somebody's got five hundred cuz you swapped something we're unequal and the distribution of our talents is unequal but if you want to make everybody equal you're gonna have to treat people unequally by the law and I think that's a great irony of the of the the concept of socialism but the thing is is throughout time they say over and over again that's not what we want that's not what we want that what we did want Castro but we don't want him anymore we did want Chavez but we don't want him anymore but they keep saying we want a kind ler gentler form of socialism and they all point to Scandinavia and this is part of the book that Kelly did a lot of work on is talking about Scandinavia and socialism or the lack thereof yes that's right one of the things interesting things in doing research on the book interviewing and reading a lot about what they do is that we found out that in Scandinavia they don't actually do most of the things that Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are advocating or if you listen to to them and talking about democratic socialism and how we could achieve that in the United States I'm sure you've heard the term you know Medicare for all free college education so they they stress those things and that they are going to do this in America up with taxing the rich making the rich pay their fair share but what one of the messages that we go through in the book and we go in exhaustive detail of what they do is that they don't have punitive taxes on the rich they're the dirty little secret there is first of all they are they are not socialist they are purely capitalistic countries stock market private property extremely low corporate tax is much lower than the United States had until they were lowered in the Trump tax cuts so we actually lowered ours during the Trump tax cuts to be more equal to theirs because they've had low corporate taxes really since the 90s they got rid of their wealth taxes in 2007 they have no minimum wage you know we we look at and you can argue this ran was trying to bring this up at the view with what we pay in the United States our income taxes are actually more progressive than theirs it's kind of a math problem in the u.s. our top one percent pays nearly forty percent of the income tax in Sweden for example their top no actually let's do ten percent our top ten percent pays seventy percent of the income tax in the US whereas in Sweden the top ten percent pays about a quarter about twenty five percent of their total income tax which is not the message that you're getting from those that are advocating that we could pay for something like you know nationalize health care and free education what they do do is to every single Scandinavian country has an extremely high value-added tax of that it's twenty five percent on everything you buy pair of jeans a dozen eggs I mean this includes food and beverage so anyone who's ever traveled to Denmark or Sweden will tell you it's insanely expensive because right off the top and that twenty five percent is applied throughout the entire production chain of everything so it's 25% the government is getting that huge swath now as we all know of course the less money you have the poorer you are your consumption takes up a much larger percentage of your income so that ends up being an extremely regressive tax on the poor in those countries the other thing is their tax rates hit very high a huge swath of the middle class so for example in Denmark if you're making about 65 thousand a year 60 65 thousand a year you're being taxed at 60% boom right there it's that's where it starts for them and then it just stays there all the way up so it's a very hard hitting middle-class tax burden and a lower class tax burden I always laugh because when people try to compare us to the Danes which obviously our countries are extremely different it's a very small very homogeneous country very you know similar culturally but the pictures you always see are the Danes riding those bicycles and they're so healthy looking and they're vitter than we are they're thinner they've gotten ready cheeks that's because they have until last year a two hundred percent tax on automobiles two hundred percent people don't even believe it last year they did have somewhat of an uprising and elect quite a few libertarians who had argued that tax down so it's been lowered in the last year to 100 percent but as my friend who I interview quite a bit in the book she's a Danish journalist she said look most yeah buying a car is something that most young people just do not do in our country it's not something that is affordable for anyone until they are you know much older it's bike transportation and again so I just I every time I hear you know Bernie or Elizabeth Warren talking about this I just want them to be honest about what they're talking about if you really want if it is a trade off yes they do have completely nationalized health service and they do have free college education again back to the education though as as I mentioned at Columbia when the state is paying for it they take a much greater interest in what you're studying and who gets to go it is actually much more stringent in terms of requirements for example if you want to study political science which is a very popular major we were at Columbia we're talking a lot of these kids in the libertarian Club and the Free Speech Club and a lot of more Poli Sci majors Poli Sci in Denmark since they don't actually need a lot of political scientists you want to study that you will have to be in the top 10% I mean equivalent to how hard it is like to get into medical school to study a lot of these subjects so again they will as so if you if you're not in the top 10% you will have to choose a major that is in more demand by the state so hey we need more computer science as well I'm bad at math you know well you may be looking at a trade which again they're you know that a lot of people do choose that so it's interesting that even though their college is free in quite a few of the Scandinavian countries their amount of students that are actually going to college is really very similar to the u.s. because they you know either can't get into the major they want or they're choosing more of a trade so those are some of the things I think that the the conversation has been so much on the Left right now in terms of income inequality I mean we're in at a point right now in our country where we do have now the middle are our median income is up to $65,000 a year it's it's gone up four thousand dollars just since you know Donald Trump has been elected and people don't really want to talk about that they want to talk about the the difference between the richest in our country and the poorest but as we have seen there is pretty wide income inequality in the United States and a widening part of that in terms of money income but there's actually a shrinking of inequality in terms of consumption with traded with trade cheaper goods we actually see the World Bank consumption figures showed that the bottom 20% of income earners in the United States actually consume more goods and services than the median or middle-income earners in affluent countries in Europe and Scandinavia so I think sometimes the more moral question is not does everyone have the same but does everyone have enough so that's one of the arguments we make in the book and again we're just trying to put it out there that if you if you believe that a National Health Service is a great idea then be honest about how it is actually being paid for and in those countries it is absolutely being paid I think most people would say if you're making sixty thousand your middle-class in those countries you are being taxed at 60% and you're paying a 25% VAT on every single thing that you buy so it is much more expensive and again the cars at 100% so when in the book we tell this story and we retell the story about Boris and I Gore and you know the fairy godmother comes down and says to Boris and I go you can have anything you want and so Boris looks a tiger who has one scrawny little goat and he says well I wish I were his goat would die that's what income inequalities about why didn't wish for 20 goats for himself for a thousand goats or he wished that his neighbor's goat would die it's it's sort of income inequality is about envy and really it's ridiculous when you think about it most people look at it say it's not even something that even is measurable or of any value to measure it for your country so for example which country would you rather live in with a average poor person makes thirty thousand dollars a year and the average rich person makes a hundred thousand dollars a year or would you rather live in a society with average poor a person makes sixty thousand and the rich person makes ten million I mean if you're the poor person you'd rather have sixty thousand and thirty thousand and that's what it should be about it's about your standard of living it shouldn't be about the others now some like Thomas Piketty and others have said well economic growth slows down and democracy itself is threatened by income inequality well both of those I think are fallacious for example there are groups now that have looked at the United States and other developed countries over the last 40 or 50 years and find that income inequality if anything is proportional to economic growth not inversely proportional but actually proportional now if you look at developing countries you may get a different you may get a different answer on this but I think that we've gone so far in worrying so much about this that people don't also realize how you make people equal which gets back to how do you make people equal again how do you make outcomes equal and people say well we'll just do a little bit well it becomes very arbitrary what is a little bit and I think that's what a lot of our youth want as they say they want fairness and equality and we try to make the point there is you can have fairness inequality but you have to have a fairness inequality police someone's got enforce it and they've got to do something that is contrary to man's nature and that is that we're going to try to have a perfectible equal outcome society one of the sources that we used that is a great website and I highly recommend is human progress dot org it's it's sort of like you know the bad news of everybody on television saying that controversy is all that happens in Washington it's the same thing as that always in the news they're reporting statistics about how terrible the world is and how it's such a rotten place to live and I've started beginning my speeches particularly the kids saying there's never ever ever ever been a better time to be alive and the statistics are overwhelming when you think about it think about the health statistics in 1900 the average person who lived to be 46 now it's all about 80 think of infant mortality used to be you know a very significant in for mortality and now it's you know less than one in a thousand or less than 1 in 10,000 very small childhood mortality used to be about a third of kids died before age five all of that has plummeted look at poverty and the poverty statistics this is a story that human progress tile work is really telling and people need to learn this and understand this in 1820 90% of the world lived in extreme poverty and this is measured as less than $2 a day it's a World Bank statistic and they do it in constant dollars and they move forward so 90% of the world lived in extreme poverty when I was born in the early 1960s it was about third of the world so we went from 90% extreme poverty to about a third of the world extreme poverty not the United States the entire world India Bangladesh all of Africa all of the developing nations everybody when I was born as about a third today it's actually less than 10% so the statistics don't lie I mean if you look at world GDP it's doubled eight times in the last 200 years if you look at purchasing power of how much food you can buy for the same amount of average hours work it's amazing and from 1919 to 2019 100 years what an average hour Li wage could buy can buy seven times as much food now it used to be a third of your income for a worker was going to food now it's 12% clothes kelly always gets mad at we're not said I bought this shirt at Target for $7 it's amazing how inexpensive clothes are in season I quit telling everybody you shop at Target for your clothes you know but the thing is it is pretty amazing and I think that seeing the positive aspect of progress in the world is important because the people are selling you doomsday the people are selling you that rich people have all the money and what was me and that the economic pie is like this and if you get rich I have to get poor it's absolutely untrue completely there is no truth to that the rich are getting richer the poor are getting richer the middle class is being decimated because they're moving into the upper class these are the statistics and we can't let the other side argue things that are not true the statistics are overwhelming the book does I mean it is it is the case against socialism but it's also the case for capitalism and you know all of the ways that our lives have been improved by that and so sometimes statistics like the left will use like wage stagnation or something but as I was talking earlier about consumption and what you can actually buy for your money has changed so much so people often look back and say oh the 60s or the 50s you could buy a house and only one person had to have a job and you could pay for all these things but the truth is compared to the 1960s most of workers have about twice the purchasing power there's a statistic from that same group human progress that said that in ninth in the 1960s the average worker I think that's in 1960 the average worker would spend this is an average worker would take about a hundred and fifteen hours of labor to afford to buy a Sears refrigerator that same average worker could buy that same refrigerator today for about 15 hours of labor so it's it's really staggering in terms not from a Sears well this is true and you know the other the other thing back to sort of Scandinavia and the fascination that so many of our politicians have with them it is true that in the 70s they did flirt with pretty serious socialism the Sweden for example was one of the like the fourth richest country in the world going into like by the late 60s but they were extremely capitalist then they had very low similar taxes to the United States low corporate taxes and that's really when all of their industries were formed I think like can't remember the statistic but it's like 25 out of there 30 years largest industries were formed them and then they elected pretty hard left government and started really expanding their social welfare state taxes went through the roof but what happened number one the wealthy fled the founder of Ikea fled Bjorn Borg fled I mean they were all leaving the country and taking their capital with them and they hit a really significant recession in the 90s and that's when they started electing center-right politicians and really enacting the pop you know the politics and the Reagan and Thatcher much more than socialist policies and then they've been moving that way ever since I think it was the early 2000s if they completely dropped their wealth taxes to lure their wealthy industrious industrialists back into the country because they could not support their social welfare system without these folks and again they're still heavily taxing the middle class but when you hear the statistics that are oh well the Swedish Americans they live longer they have lower infant mortality they have less poverty than the United States and I would say to them if you look at the statistics of Swedish Americans and Danish Americans they actually have higher incomes than your average American they actually have better health and lifestyle outcomes than the average American living in America Swedish Americans and danish americans so some of these statistics maybe Jeanette I don't know I mean but before they enacted socialism they lived longer than we did so a lot of those things when the left tries to tell you that they are related to having socialized medicine that's just not true you know Friedman's story where the Swedish economist comes up to Milton Friedman and he says well you know we have no poverty in Sweden and Friedman responds well you know we have no poverty among Swedish Americans and it's this whole thing you know they're they had long they live longer lives well they've been living longer lives since way before they even got socialized medicine in Sweden so it's like it's cause and effect and people need to be a little bit more careful about it we're gonna wrap up we're gonna take a couple questions but but the bottom line is that we want the next generation to learn a little bit about the history of socialism we want them to think about whether or not it's an accident that we got authoritarians it's an accident that we got state violence or whether or not it's inherent to socialism we want them to think also about if the rights of the individual are made secondary to the needs or the desire of the collective does that not make violence possible but also all of the horrible things that have happened in history that we all now know we're wrong and we're getting away from the discrimination and the racism all those things or by treating people as groups and clumps of people that have a characteristic so you're part of this group as opposed to saying we're all unique individuals uniquely either made in our Creator or uniquely precious in in our own individual way that deserves to be defended deserves to be protected from the collective and it's it's a it's an argument that I think's worth having and Jefferson said basically that every generation had renew and sort of re water the the Liberty Tree I think that's true with knowledge that we can't let things be forgotten about historical examples of socialism we also can't let the other side get away with pointing to no this is a socialism I like which really in the end isn't socialism and it isn't working because it's because we tax only the rich the only way they get to their big welfare state is by taxing the heck out of everybody I do think it's a debate worth having and I thank you for coming out today and we'll be happy to take a few questions and if they're hard I'll make Kelly answer hi mr. Paul my name is Michael Bonnie I'm a young college student in New York City and with the rise with socialism on college campuses what advice could you give to young conservatives well I think part of the debate that has to move forward is a lot of the polls will show half or more of college students saying they have a positive perception of socialism but then when you ask college students what do they think socialism is only about 16 percent of them respond you know government ownership of the means of production or government owning private property they kind of respond well we just want things to be fair and you know and there's a lot of ways to approach it but I think there's you have to combat the intellectual arguments I think their biggest argument when you talk to people at college will be we want Scandinavia and the thing is one it's not socialism there's still private property so it's thriving mainly because of capitalism in fact if you look at economic indexes of Scandinavia they're in the top 10 for trading and capitalism their success is really from what capitalism they still have but then they'll say well they're free college and free health care and free paid leave well it's not free they pay for it and they pay for it with massive taxation of the working class in the middle class this is absolutely true and cannot be controverted the massive welfare state of Scandinavia is paid for by large sales taxes that the working class pay and in income taxes that start in the middle a era and we had the we had the debate yesterday in the view and they wouldn't let me finish but the interesting thing about it is most people and most families at 50,000 and under in our country don't pay much income tax we actually have taken most people off of the rolls towards the bottom and we have become more and more progressive over time it's not the same over there our tax code is actually more progressive than theirs when Bernie says he wants to raise you know he if you listen to his talks he rails against the evil corporations and all these terrible corporations he wants to raise the corporate income tax - back where we had it it was 35% we had the highest in the world one of the reasons jobs and companies were you know reincorporating overseas was to escape our taxes Bernie wants to raise back those taxes to 35% and you have to ask your your friends that are gonna graduate from college do you think you'll get more you have a better or worse chance of getting a job if we raise the corporate income sector 35% most of its so much based on emotionalism and hatred of whoever this big guy is you know the corporate guy and they don't realize that corporations are there aren't that many really rich people that own the corporation well there are some Jeff Bezos and people like that but really most of us here own like this much of these major corporations by having a 401k or something and so really it's it's it's kind of simplistic to make it out that corporations are all owned by some these evil ogres that are cackling and running their hands through their gold coins you know well I would say you might want to mention to some of the books that you have your interns read like eyepencil and different so we do a couple of things you know I'm trying to get message out intellectually through a book the interns we accept a lot of interns and so sometimes I'll have ten interns that's not gonna change the world but I try to have as many as I can we give them books from the foundation for economics and education which is a great group I give them eye pencil by Leonard read which talks about making something so simple as a pencil but actually how complicated it is and how it's all orchestrated by profit it's a great little book it's very short and I like it because more likely to get a younger person to read it maybe the other book I give is economics in one lesson by Henry Hazlitt who is also a buddy of Leonard reads all this is right after war too and then we give them Basquiat to the law and then we also have a big intern program where I bring in speakers and then we'll have 400 interns and Republican and Democrat we invite them all in and we bring in our speakers to try to help you know win these battles and then you have to be part of it if you you know believe that socialism is a bad idea for us you have to become the next generations leaders to influence your people your age I mean a lot of it is just understanding how capitalism has made us the freest the most prosperous and has reduced human suffering in power in our country and around the world and so not only those books that Rand had mentioned but there are some great groups out there that you can follow like human progress org the Atlas society the Freedom Works they've got you know a lot of information that can you know kind of help you understand the political environment I'll often say we have this slogan you may have heard it make America great again I always say but we really need to take a step back before that and say what made America great really and what made America great and America still is great is individual Liberty individual rights that we treat the individual not the collective that we largely leave you alone I mean for the most part people are left alone even with government as big as it is now we still are largely left alone in our country it's it's not as good as it could be but it's amazing what capitalism does when we leave people alone to create things and some people don't get it but the people who have created this vast amount of wealth it comes from capitalism X that's always my pet peeve is I meet some billionaire who now is preaching socialism it's like really you major wealth from capitalism capitalism's what made you rich appreciate it thanks for taking my question okay do you think that the Federal Reserve is to blame for creating some of these measures of inequality that the left likes to point to I think so and in some ways when you manipulate the interest rates to make it harder for traditional average people to put money in a bank and gain interest the money is made more in the stock market the people can invest in the stock market are more sophisticated or more likely to do it far more wealthy so you can get some more disparity by control of interest rates and things like that there also you can argue that you know bailing out the banks and not letting it's sort of we we have capitalism for their profits but then we socialize their losses when they make mistakes and they go bankrupt we all ask you to bail them out and then they go they move right along without suffering so it's part of it and the Federal Reserve becomes part of it I always tell people it's sort of which comes first Federal Reserve or debt you know we can't have this massive debt and not have a Federal Reserve so really we got to get rid of the debt as well you have to have a country that actually balances his budget or you actually need this fiction that is is the Fed which isn't a good thing and ultimately does redistribute money and away from those who are savers to those who are spenders senator I noticed that Chapter three of your book is entitled interfering with free markets causes shortages so if indeed interviewing with three markets on causes shortages yes so if indeed interfering with free markets causes shortages as you say how do you feel about president Trump's trade policy visa vie China I'm not a fan I think tariffs are basically just tax on people and I don't want more taxes their taxes on Americans and they're disruptive so I've been critical of them in my state in particular we have a significant farming population we've been hurt by the the trade barriers with China and even when it's attempted to help people selling items you know that may be made out of steel or aluminum it's actually backfired on us too so really no I don't see a lot of good to trade wars done Boudreaux was a chairman of economics at George Mason for a while he's written that over looking at tariff wars over the last couple in her years you almost never see them go the ratchet down you see them ratchet up until there's sort of an economic calamity and then then there's a resetting down many people look at the Great Depression say what made it worse and extended it really was the hot smelly tariff which was a widespread Sarah so whenever I talked to the Trump administration or talk publicly I'm opposed to the tariff war but I try to convince them let's try to get some kind of arrangement let's try to get a deal as soon as we can and get back to free or trade with China the problem is is that people see from a nationalistic perspective they see well China cheats and they do I mean they steal intellectual property they cheat but if you look at it in economic terms trades better than not trade and we actually are some estimate from the average consumers about a thousand dollars richer you know and that means you have extra money you spend on something else you actually are significantly richer through trade many who argue against capitalism will point to a company like Amazon making 11 billion dollars and not paying any tax so what reforms would you make to the current tax code to prevent that well I wouldn't say they don't pay any tax everybody works there pays taxes right so I mean some would argue don'tyou shouldn't really have a corporate tax anyway everybody else still pay a tax so if I own a corporation I got it and I take a salary I've got to pay the corporate tax and then pay my own tax as well I guess I don't when I hear somebody makes a lot of money and doesn't pay taxes that means well that means the money is going into the efficient sector the economy instead of government the inefficient sector of the economy it's like the more money that's left in the private marketplace the better because Amazon doesn't like put it under a mattress that 11 billion will go in a bank and you might borrow it to buy a house or their employees spend it or they give it into salaries and stay by you know people buy stuff and so I guess I don't look at it as a bad thing should we have taxes and try to make them as fair as possible we have to have some but I guess I always argued that we should have as little as possible so I think if you're taxed at a hundred percent I think you have no Liberty if you're taxed at zero percent you'd be a hundred percent free and we were probably going to be a hundred percent free but I'd much rather be closer to zero than 100 and we're sort of right in the middle now if you live in New York and you are in the either upper middle class or into the upper class most of them pay well over fifty percent of their income now and it's interesting when you ask college students you ask them this question what do you think's fair those rich people aren't paying up what do you think they ought to pay a lot of times students if they're not given a number will say they ought to pay at least twenty five or thirty percent in cycling well that would be actually a lot less than they pay now okay thank you Senator Paul and Kelly for for coming here and I'm just like looking around if only these walls could talk look at the history and with what they have and if we look back at the history of New York City after World War 2 you know the ruins of Europe and you had lots of people my parents actually emigrated from Europe after the war okay after a year after ruins from from Ukraine okay my father made it his brother was shot by Stalin's troops outside the village but we got here we had a successful life and everything but you look at today you have the Ukrainians this the Russians that and they're all complaining but you look at the oligarchs controlling those countries it's a mafia state it's when we when we look at it's a mafia State these oligarchs and I have a colleague that I work with and he was saying well he's left of the aisle I'm right up the aisle but we still talk we have good discussions but he's saying that the oligarchs are coming here but it's not the oligarchs coming here they're taking the bad habits of the oligarchs and they're employing it here they're taking the fake news of the oligarchs employing it here we think fake news was invented in the United States no it was invented by you know it was like the early communist woman pretty much I would say we're the first ones to take advantage of it so thank you again yet I think you bring up a good point it's sort of the difference between capitalism from the bottom-up and capitalism that when you try to go from state-owned enterprise back and I think it was one of the great difficulties of the breakup of the Soviet Union or the grey cup of any of these centralized government where the government owns everything is getting it back to the people and I think England did a little bit better job of trying to turn over state industry back into private hands be right in Russia and Ukraine and throughout a lot of the former Soviet republics you ended up getting this kleptocracy where the you know if you were a friend of the leader basically you got the got the industry maybe one or two more thank you both for coming appreciate it question I I think that I think a reason why a lot of people are looking towards socialism is two of the topics you brought up the cost of health care cost of higher education just very you know just keep increasing and they haven't seen a clear answer from the right from conservatives so can you speak to that a bit on either topic you know I think that's a good point and we were on with Trevor Noah the other night and he made that point he said yeah food is cheaper and there's all this progress of being able to buy so much more stuff but you can't you know it's made up for with the loss of rising drug prices healthcare and education and the point I made with him is yeah and there is something consistent about healthcare and education the government I mean over 50% of those markets are controlled by the government and so really we don't ever address any of this now give quickly on education the only people I hear from our students who want more grants and I say well we don't have any money but you know we'll see what we can do we're a trillion dollars short but if you give more money to stimulate the demand and you keep the supply of schools the same what happens the price goes up so we've been feeding the demand of schools for last 30 or 40 years you really want to make schools more affordable and they can be if schools if there was a capitalist world for higher education education would be approaching zero for a price because what happens on the internet once I get to my one millionth thing that I'm making and producing the price gets almost a zero education is even better than that because if I'm broadcasting like let's say I'm the best explainer of calculus in the world and you put me on the Internet I can teach literally millions and millions and millions of people we have not really allowed education to utilize the mode of the internet we have online courses but look at this all of the colleges in America every state-run college in America charges the same maybe not everyone the vast majority that I'm aware of charge the same for an online course as others but if you expanded that and all of a sudden had competition the price of education would plummet so that was one way you could look at education and try to fix it with healthcare it's been broken I'm a physician and hadn't been perfect but the thing is we have to look at the problems we have and say do we need more capitalism or more socialism and then you have to ask what economic system works better socialism or capitalism for the distribution of goods the best the the most production of the largest production of goods at the cheapest price it's capitalism socialism doesn't work because it can't figure out where to distribute the goods once we don't know what the prices are that should be attached to it but our healthcare is sort of a an in-between model hell you know the government's involved with so much of it the biggest problem we have in health care and this is one of the reasons we got Obamacare and could be fixed by the market the biggest reason we got Obamacare was the individual market if you work for Toyota or General Motors and you have corporate health insurance for the most part it kind of works it's not perfect but most people are fairly happy with big corporate insurance but we made insurance deductible with your employment people get it through employment so inevitably they somebody should have thought this through if you're an accountant with two employees or your General Motors who gets the better price individuals get a crappy price and it's worse than that you get a crummy price because you have no leverage and if you get sick they attribute all the risk to you and the insurance companies love it they've taken the individual market forever and attributed risk to man and wife or you know small business with three employees we could fix that in a heartbeat and the way you would do it is simply let people bargain collectively and let you join a group you should be allowed to join Costco Sam's Club Amazon eBay Chamber of Commerce and buy your insurance it's illegal to do that across state lines and we mandate that it your insurance has to have certain things in it which makes it more expensive so big corporations are actually exempt from most Obamacare mandates and they usually have self insurance as part of it and they try to work with their employees to keep costs down by having some skin in the game of what they do you could fix the individual market simply by letting people buy their insurance collectively and then you but you do have to change the law and say well what about pre-existing conditions while the group insurance already has pre-existing conditions in it and even if it didn't if I were in charge of Costco and I had 44 million people you think I can't get pre-existing conditions covered from our 44 million people you know be such a large group and I'd have such large ability to leverage it but right now we have a lot of stuff in our country and this gets back to sort of the anger with big corporations look we get mad at Big Pharma we get bad at our health insurance company like everybody does you know I was just in the hospital I had a $50,000 bill they send me a bill two days later saying we're denying your coverage and I know they will eventually pay but because there's a doctor they'll file and file and file you can see how people are worried and alarmed when they get a $50,000 bill and that's why everybody's so mad but it could be fixed there are ways to fix it and the question is whether we go towards more socialism or more capitalism and because I believe and that's why most the health care economics isn't about health care it needs to be about economics we need to just say which economic system is better and you know an example of the worst kind of crony capitalism is under Obamacare Big Pharma's you know their profits increased what doubled they almost double health insurance health insurance companies went from 6 billion to 15 billion and so what we did is the same thing as education so the price curve on the individual markets doing this and it's in it's difficult so say you're all in the individual market you can't afford your insurance Obamacare gives you money to buy your insurance what does that do the price curve it goes even higher we're stimulating the demand and doing nothing to the price curve so what I would do is give you no money but I'd let you all band together and buy your insurance with one person negotiating for you so instead of the prices doing this you would actually get better prices than Toyota or General Motors because you'd be bigger you have joined consortium like the National Restaurant Association so all the waiters and waitresses all the young people could join all those restaurants it's millions of people and what we also should do is let young people buy inexpensive policies when Rand and I were when we met in our 20s and we always had these like very inexpensive policies because you're young and healthy yes they did not got mean you know we pretty much had to pay out of pocket if we ever went to the doctor but if there was anything catastrophic I mean if over like a thousand dollars or something then it would kick in and so those problem a lot of those policies were made illegal under Obamacare because they said you have to have birth control you have to have pregnancy and you have to have all of these different things and again that's treating people all you know people are have different needs not everyone is gonna want pregnancy coverage so making those inexpensive policies for young people illegal has contributed to the problem I'm told we have to start start signing books so we won't finish but thanks everybody for coming [Applause]

Channel: Strand Book Store

Views: 3,713

Keywords: Strand events, Strand authors, Strand books, Strand Bookstore, author talks, author events

Id: OnhI3w9aN80

Length: 53min 12sec (3192 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 15 2019