Ten Things Millennials Should Know About Socialism | Thomas J. DiLorenzo

this talk is uh is related to my my new book the problem with socialism and the idea for this book came from you know some of you might be familiar they'd be in opinion polls there was a Pew foundation poll that said 69% of voters under 30 said they could vote for a socialist for president in the United States and there was a you gov calm poll of Millennials that is if people born between 1982 and 2004 43% of them said they preferred socialism over capitalism and so my publisher regularly publishing now they contacted me and and we talked about that but the need for a book that would explain why this is a bad idea yeah so mark marketing a book to the Millennials in particular and my editor there said we want every conservative parent to buy this book and give it to their kids before they go off to college what's in the schools are in one of the blurbs for the book Walter Williams wrote that here's what he wrote it's a worthwhile investment for parents with college-age children to buy two copies in the one for them and one for the kids and then he said he calls universities socialist indoctrination camps and before before you send your child off to socialist indoctrination camp give them some an ammunition intellectual ammunition and so that's that's the purpose of the book and so what I thought I'd do today is another an alternative title for the talk could be how to argue with your Bernie Sanders following roommates back at school something like something like along those lines and so it's 16 short chapters they're short but I tried to make them as concise as possible and there are several hundred footnotes to the book so it's based on all of our literature but written up in a sort of an economics in one lesson type of style so I'm going to go over something you know as many of these as I can get through some of the you know one or two of these this crowd probably doesn't need to hear about too much but I'm going to do it anyway because I we have a diverse crowd here first of all we know what is socialism these the Millennials who say yeah socialism is a good thing for my future I hope to I like to assume they don't really know what it what it is and I think they do learn they'll change their minds but what it is the way I define it is first of all it includes the traditional definition of government ownership of the means of production so any nationalized industries government-run industries and I do have a chapter called islands of socialism it's about government-run enterprises they're not nationalized but it's the state government and a local government you know hospitals schools all the things that governments run but then in the 1976 edition of the road to serfdom Hayek wrote that the meaning of socialism had evolved by that time to include government income redistribution programs through the welfare state and the progressive income tax and he said that the goal was always ostensibly equality the pursuit of material equality egalitarianism was always the goal but the means evolved from nationalization of industry to the welfare state and the progressive income tax and the progressive income tax of course as plank number two in the Communist Manifesto plank number one is abolition of private property and then the second most important goal of Marx and Engels was a progressive income tax in capitalist economies because they thought it would it would help to destroy capitalist economy undermine capitalist economies so plug part number one is nationalized industries part number two is the welfare state and the progressive income tax and then I also include what me see said in his book socialism in one of the latter chapters he said that socialists have always had a dual strategy the parts the first part of the strategy was to nationalize as much as possible to have a government run as much as possible the second part of the strategy is what meeseeks calls destruction ISM to destroy the private property free enterprise system with heavy taxes heavy regulations inflation whatever works you know taking over the educational system and brainwashing the kids in yeah with it the virtues of socialism and the evils of markets whatever works destruction ISM and so with that definition it's not the old early 20th century definition of government ownership of the means of production it's much broader so I have 16 chapters and in the book 16 it covers a lot of ground if you look up the website of democratic socialists of America for example they highlight a super minimum wage as one of their top objectives and so the ads not government ownership of the means of production but it's a government mandated $15 an hour minimum wage and so I take I take it from the horse's mouth in other words by looking up but what the socialist of our day are saying they want just last night Hillary Clinton looked at Bernie Sanders and said your cause is our cause to Bernie and so I guess you could look at the Democratic party platform and a lot of the Republican platform is being socialized socialism or socialistic as far as that goes so that's what it is point number two I wrote down here I probably probably don't need to explain this to this group that's socialism will destroy your economic future and so I write a little bit about the history of the Soviet Union for example our friend Yuri Maltsev who has taught at Mises University in the past was an advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev it would affected from the Soviet Union and when he defected he ends up it's very interesting story I don't have time here to tell Yuri story but he ends up in the office of Dick Cheney who was the defense secretary at the time and he told Cheney that the Soviet economy was no more than 5% of the US economy and Yuri's story is that while Cheney says well our CIA says it was it's more like 50% and Yuri was insistent no 5% and he was right and so the country with the largest natural resource base on the planet I really had no economy he's five percent of our economy at most and I'd never produced a single product marketable on international markets with the exception of possibly of caviar but that comes from a fish and not a factory and so and so it'll certainly ruin your your economic future and I also talk about you know when India gained its independence they adopted a sort of a soviet-style five-year economic plans and India became synonymous with third-world poverty but India was one of the ones one of the wealthiest countries on earth you know a long long time ago but when they had more economic freedom they've made improvements since those days but it was a terrible disaster that they went in that direction Africa did the same thing after the after colonization ended all these African countries Deva adopted socialism of one form or another and central planning and if you're interested in that particular topic the author one of the authors that I cite is George iateiy who's written many books on this he lasts I was in touch with George he was teaching at American University in Washington DC and he's he's from Ghana but he's been in the US for many years so if you're interesting that you read George in uh and he you know he's written books on how Africans had you know they had a culture of entrepreneurship and individualism yet before colonialism and instead of going back to that culture their governments embraced socialism and central planning and you know the rest is history and so if you want to destroy your economic future there's no shortage of examples Argentina did the same thing that the latest example would be Venezuela which I'll talk about in a minute point number three is you cannot fix socialism you know I've been at this quite a while and whenever if I write op-eds criticizing some government program or some government regulation or legislation or something like that I will inevitably get email from somebody who says but we can fix this we can get smarter people in charge we can do it like they did it over there in that country or something like that but the thing about socialism of course is there are inherent reasons why it inevitably fails as an economic system regardless of who's in charge and I lay it out in my book to to a lay audience and you know the three basic reasons are the the incentive problem the old incentive problem and I don't know maybe some of you have heard this story before but if we used if we use socialism to to grade the exams at Macy's University you know we have these written exams and then tomorrow we start the oral exams what we would do with that we would tell the faculty when we do the oral exams tomorrow give each student a puss on the number of points maybe from one to ten if you're at a plus student you get ten during our interview with you okay and then we'll add up all the points divided by the number of students and give all give every student a marginal fail or saw me the same grader or marginal path some sort of mediocre same grade that's that would be social than using socialism that's the incentive system you know it causes the free-rider problem if there's no link between effort and reward you get less effort reason number two is high X knowledge problem the idea that it's the information of time and place decentralized knowledge that makes an economy work and so the pretense is that a small group of politicians or government planners that possibly possess all the knowledge that's in the minds of millions of people are consumers and workers and investors and managers and that's why I call that the pretense of knowledge and the third reason of course is the calculation problem without without private property and free market prices you don't have the guidance of free market prices it comes to becomes impossible to organize production without without prices determined by supply and demand it all becomes chaos it's kind of like trying to make your way through a foreign city without street signs and without prices based on supply and demand and so and so these are the reasons it doesn't matter who's in charge socialism is economic poison for all of these these three reasons and that's why it has destroyed every economy where it's ever been in tried point number four is the myth of democratic socialism and we hear a lot about this that and I can remember maybe some of you saw Larry David on Saturday Night Live portraying Bernie Sanders have you have you seen him you you know he has these white-haired old guy and it kind of looks like Bernie Sanders you know if you look at look at I kind of like the crazy chemistry professor look with a hair everywhere and you know the beady eyes and a bulging vein in his forehead you know that's Bernie Sanders anyway it kind of reminds me of a pea thinner and Nikita Khrushchev you want to give speeches it leans forward he screams into the microphone and he's pounding his fists in in the in the he did by the way Bernie spent very charmingly spent his honeymoon in Moscow when he was a young man in the in the darkest days of the Soviet Union he chose Moscow of all places for for his honeymoon his wife must be a real sweetie to two of them go along with stuck with him for all these years no after he took her to Moscow in the 1960s and but but but democratic socialism look at Venezuela today they adopted democratic socialist well my story about Sarah alive is a Sanders one day saying there's a huge difference between socialism and democratic socialism and look in in the comedian said no huge spelled with the why is it yes Aug with use like that but there is no difference you know socialism is socialism Obamacare is a form of socialized medicine doesn't matter if it was imposed on Americans by a dictator or by democracy it's still the same thing and it still is still going to be just as chaotic and disruptive doesn't matter how its imposed socialism is basically a forceful imposition of a government plan or set of plans on society that replaces individual plans for their own lives and for their own career and so you can do that for your majority role vote or you can do it through a dictator but you still get the same thing Friedrich Basquiat wrote that and made that very point in the law published in 1850 so this is this is nothing original with me but Venezuela today they adopted socialism and democratic socialism in 1999 and today their economy is is a shambles middle-class people who had very good jobs Venezuela has more oil in Saudi Arabia around rooting through garbage in the streets looking for food to eat they got hyperinflation of 1,600 percent a year at least a hamburger and Caracas will cost you the equivalent of a hundred and seventy dollars today and animals are starving people are abandoning their pets and it is just anybody who can leave is leaving and so they've destroyed what was once the wealthiest country in Latin America in about 15 years with with socialism democratic socialism same with Argentina did the same thing Brazil Bolivia same thing sweetness this country that has often talked about by Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton as a model for Americans we should be more like the Scandinavian countries but the truth about Sweden is that Sweden was very prosperous from the late 19th century till about the nineteen to about 1950 because it had a limited very limited government low taxes high degree of economic freedom that produced all these great inventors like Alfred Nobel who invented dynamite the people who created Volvo and Saab automobiles refrigeration technology and a lot of other businesses and products and then they adopted first they sort of experimented with fascism and then they moved to socialism and by nationalizing a number of industries creating a big welfare state heavily progressive income tax and lots of regulation of what was left of private businesses and as a result Sweden had zero job growth from 1950 until 2005 to the Swedish economic Association they did not have one single net new job created for 55 years which means they were basically eating up the capital that was created by the earlier generations of entrepreneurs and capitalists and taxing it away and it created a bit of a crisis for them as you would imagine and so they did what government socialist governments always do is I try to print their way out of trouble and bail themselves out by printing money and they printed so much that they had five hundred percent interest rates in Sweden that way at one point and that that cause of a bit of a reaction sort of a Margaret Thatcher style revolt where they they privatized some industries they deregulated banking and a number of other industries cut marginal tax rates and made a bit of a comeback but Sweden today still has a per capita income less than Mississippi which is the poorest state in the United States and so and when people make the case that wow it's successful in Scandinavia it was before they adopted socialism yes Scandinavia was a Sweden was successful economically they had the highest per capita income growth from 1870 until about 1940 in the whole world and then they abandoned that it threw it all away and in Denmark I quote a danish economist is saying that you know they have such heavy taxation in addition to the income tax which is quite heavy and quite progressive there's there are things like a hundred and eighty percent sales tax on cars when you buy a car national sales tax I think is 25 percent and he said the total tax take that is danish economist i quote is about 70 percent and so you know the government takes seventy percent of your income and so in following my friend Walter Williams I would point out that that a good definition of slavery is forcing a person to work for the benefit of another person that's a pretty good definition of slavery now the real slaves were slaves for 12 months out of the year but the Danes are slaves for just 70 percent of the years so they're not quite as office real slaves they're their only slaves to other people for 70% of the year instead of instead of 2030 percent here and of course they get something back from it from from this I guess and so in Hayek address this this whole issue of democratic socialism to explain that it's like oil and water socialism eats away at and destroys democracy eventually and I'll read you one little passage from I act to give you a one on some idea of the type of thing that he says about this is that the Democratic statesman who sets out to plan economic life socialism will soon be confronted with the alternative of either assuming dictatorial powers or abandoning his plans and admitting failure he would soon have to choose between disregard of ordinary morals and failure it is for this reason that the unscrupulous and inhibited are likely to be more successful in a socialist society this is from the road to serfdom by Hyatt and so you know for the reasons I gave earlier as socialism always fails and then the politicians never admit failure and they never give up they grab more power and a lot of the public will want a strongman that probably will come out in favor yeah we need a strong man or a strong woman to be in charge and become more dictatorial and of course that's the opposite of what we think of as democracy and so that's that's what was one of the reasons a Hayek gave quite a few others but I don't have the time to go into a review of the Road to Serfdom here and in this lecture but but that's just one part of his logic of how socialism is actually destructive of democracy it's not it compatible point number five I would make is it's false as false that socialism produces equality and I deny that it's even a moral objective it's an immoral objective okay I have a chapter entitled a Galit arianism versus human nature and of course we're all different we're all made different we all have different interests and in degrees of intelligence and strength and biological characteristics and so forth so when a government devotes itself to the pursuit of forceful equality it becomes more and more totalitarian because that's the only way you can get it and what it really has become the push for equality is sort of a war on the division of labor a war on the international division of labor which is what makes the economic world go around we all specialize in something in our work lives we make money doing that and then we trade with other people who specialize in other things if we didn't do this well it's what keeps human civilization together as Mises wrote and human action the international division of labor so the socialists like Marx and Engels knew what they were doing when they attacked the division of labor in the name of equality which always sounds so nice you know equality they knew they were destroying the heart of the capitalist system that keeps human civilization together the international division of labor okay and so that's why they went after him and I quote I die quick more than just economist in this chapter for example I quote HL Mencken on the in one page and since I have an opportunity to quote HL Mencken and not all of you are familiar with HL Mencken so I'll introduce you to to something a story has it that Murray Rothbard on his wedding night with his wife Joey spent the whole night laying in bed reading HL Mencken quotes to each other and laughing their heads off and I believe it's a true story I think it was Joey that told us that years ago I'm probably out of Mises University I always wonder if that's why they never had children you know myself but but who knows I you know no I didn't know them that well but but anyway so so makin was Marie's favorite writer as far as you know the people who really had a touch for bashing the state and here's one of the things he said at the great Menken about this topic of equality and egalitarianism said all government in its essence is a conspiracy against the superior man it's one permanent object is to oppress him and him if it be aristocratic and organization then it seeks to protect the man who is superior only in law against the man who is superior in fact if it be democratic then it seeks to protect the man who is inferior in every way against both one of the primary functions is to regiment men by force to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible to search out and combat originality among men all it can see in an original idea is potential change and hence an invasion of its prerogatives that is invasion of government's prerogatives the most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos end quote that's what political correctness is all about isn't it to censor all these criticisms of the superstitions and taboos that were all supposed to believe in at the hands of the state and that reminds me of another thing Hayek said in a row dystocia a road to serfdom is that under under any kind of collectivism way they call it socialism or fascism or anything there's sort of the end of truth one of the chapters is called the end of truth because truth becomes something that is handed down by the state it is enforced by its enforcers in the media and academia and elsewhere it's not something that is discovered through a discussion and conversation research and learning it's something that is told to us by the state and then anybody who questions that is dealt with that's under socialism one way or the other and that really is what political correctness is all about isn't it I also cite Kurt Vonnegut is a non economist here and in his famous essay Harrison Bergeron who sort of spoofs the whole idea of equality forced equality at the hand of the state not equality under the law but the state's attempts to make everybody equal in some way and here's what Vonnegut says of the year was 2081 and everyone was finally equal they weren't only equal before God and the law they were equal in every which way nobody was smarter than anybody else nobody was better-looking than anyone else nobody was stronger quicker than anybody else all this equality was due to the 211th 212 and 213 amendments to the Constitution and to the unceasing vigilance of the agents of the United States handicapper general and so so the handicapper general worked as follows hazel had a perfectly average intelligence which meant she couldn't think about anything except in short bursts but George George while his intelligence was way above normal he had a little mental handicap radio in his ear put there by the government he was required by law to wear it at all times it was tuned to a government transmitter every 20 seconds or so the transmitter was sent out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains and quote and then I finally quote very rothbard after this it's saying the reason why writers like this sort of spoof egalitarianism and forced equality and make it sound like a nightmarish thing is because it is a nightmarish thing and rothbard wrote when the implications of such a world are fully spelled out we recognize that such a world and such attempts are profoundly anti human being anti human in the deepest sense the egalitarian goal is therefore evil and any attempts in a direction of such a goal must be considered as evil as well and so the government's always fail to do anything but make everybody equally miserable under socialism but the political elites and their supporters in the so-called private sector always do very well for example you can read the New York Times in a Wall Street Journal today that the wealthiest person in Venezuela where upper-middle class people are rooting through garbage in the streets looking for food the wealthiest person in the country is the 35 year old daughter of the late Hugo Chavez who is worth reportedly 4.2 billion dollars even though she never ran a business or had a job as far as I know the former Treasury Minister of Venezuela is reportedly worth eleven billion dollars even though he was in the same situation I'm sure he didn't create 11 billion dollars of value for anybody or any value at all they just stole the money and so in the latest big long New York Times article about Venezuela that I read there were about 10 pages of pictures of all these awful pictures of the poor people scrounging for food and things like that but at the same time there were pictures of Hugo Chavez is political pals all joining country clubs the Caracas Country Club where it cost like vyas the equivalent of $70,000 to join and and they're just having a good old time because that's what socialism does there's it's always been like it was the chew in Russia chew in Africa India wherever it is it has been you've got a grotesque inequality look at all the Latin American countries you've got this elite at the top it lives high on the hog and then everybody else there's no middle class everybody else in the lower class that's the model ok you know your classmates and your roommates when you go back to college should know that your your professors who always take the moral high road bite outta socialism and criticizing markets or associating themselves with an ideology that is responsible for the worst crimes in all of human history that there's a book called the black book of communism that you can read about these crimes in there's another read a book called death by government by RJ Rummel write that one dad's not easy to spell RJ Rummel he also has a website you can just google death by government what a depressing career that must have been he spent his whole career calculating how many people were murdered by their own governments in that and throughout the world and and he has this huge website several books about it and just to give you some idea of the magnitude of this the next time one of your professors takes the moral high road and goes on and promoting socialism the right the Russians murdered twenty million of their own people these are not war deaths these are this is these are murders of dissenters to socialism China 60 million Vietnam 1 million North Korea 2 million Cambodia 2 million Eastern Europe a million that they were pretty good in Eastern Europe Latin America a mere 150 thousand Africa 1.7 million and he robocalls this demo side yes a death by government and in so uh and I also had one big long paragraph that I quoted from one of these studies of sort of the methods of torture they were also used to against dissenters and so that's something that nobody knows that is I I gave so my students this I teach a course called capitalism in its critics and I have them read some of the bad guys stuff I haven't read the communist manifesto and then then parts of socialism by me cease and go back and forth like that and I gave them a table from RJ rummells book to let them know about this and then a couple of these guys were in the College Republicans and they had one of these days where all the all the clubs on campus have a little booth on the quad and they hand out literature or something or sell cupcakes or whatever they do and and of all the things they were giving out my hand out of the you know death by government handout so all the students are walking by instead of handing out selling cookies or something like that and they told me that nobody knew anything about this another classmates do anything about this you know they thought they thought it was communists were all like Bernie Sanders you know you know you know a cute little grandfather types you know I grant that you see it Christmas that's a such big sweetie pies and so I don't know how much progress they made there but that's what they did my suggest amount point number seven is a fascism is a form of socialism you know one of the most evil words in the English language fascism Hayek called it a violent anti-capitalistic attack fascism after all the Nazis were were the National Socialist German Workers Party that's what that national socialism is what Nazi stood for and so Hitler called himself a socialist although fascism was just a version of socialism as national socialism the Russians call themselves International Socialists and by the way they didn't call their government communists they called it the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics they didn't call it the Union of Soviet communist republics communism was the utopian ideal of Marx Karl Marx that they they hope to reach some day when their van I would be attained but in the meantime they're all socialists and when when the Soviet Union finally imploded Gorbachev was going Mikhail Gorbachev was going to Lithuania and in Estonia and all these they own the possessions of the Soviet Union and he was telling them go ahead and do whatever you want as long as it's consistent with socialism he didn't say consistent with communism he's at socialism so they always consider themselves socialists not communists we call them communists in this country and the fascists all came from communism for example I quote Mussolini here and so my critics will probably say don't read his book he quotes Mussolini you know as a you know the implication being I quote him favorably what's done which I done I also quote Hitler in this book - here's something with just one short quote from Mussolini and uh his book fascism doctrine and institutions I read his autobiography by the way and Mussolini was once a PhD in philosophy political philosophy and he wrote an autobiography and it's kind of like if you gave a class of third graders the assignment write an autobiography and put a title on it his the title HR chose is my autobiography but fine by Benito Mussolini yes how imaginative you know PhD in political philosophy at my autobot yes so but this book of fascism a fascist knew who the enemy was the enemy was classical liberalism that was the enemy it was Adam Smith John Locke you know all the all the all the early 20th century libertarians and put in political philosophy and economics here's what he said the fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the state and accepts the individual only insofar as his interests coincide with the state it is opposed to classical liberalism he literally said that which denied the state in the name of the individual okay so the opposed in particular I have another long quote in there from one of Mussolini's theorists fascist theorists who goes on and on denigrating what he called English liberalism English liberalism what is that Adam Smith John Locke you know the whole philosophy of young Levias Scottish enlightenment that is a big part of liberalism and if you read meeseeks book liberalism you'll find that the fashion is like Mussolini and I quote here and his other theorists fascist theorists they very harshly criticize every element of what how meeseeks defines liberalism classical liberalism and in in his book liberal liberalism which is online by the way you could probably buy it out here in the bookstore but it's also online on meeseeks or you can find it and so and so fascism always was a form of socialism if you look at what the German fascists did they nationalize about half of all German industry and the other half was so heavily regulated and controlled so that it operated for the state that not the individual that Hayek wrote and the road to serfdom that they sort of de facto nationalized the whole inish of Industry all of German industry even though they had ostensibly private ownership of some of it it was so heavily controlled you had to produce what what the Nazis told you to produce and how to produce it and who to sell it to and so on and so it was de facto nationalization and so how that ever came to be construed as capitalism you know it's not really a wonder they lie you know they lied about it was nothing he's nothing nothing capitalistic at all about his violent attack on a violent handful anti-capitalistic attack as Hayek said point number eight by making the book is a socialist welfare harms the poor and you're probably all familiar with the incentive effect of welfare payments I'll give you one anecdote the Cato Institute did this study where they picked out seven popular welfare Pro welfare programs out of 126 just seven 126 and ask the question well how much money is that state-by-state and in the highest state Hawaii it's forty-nine thousand dollars and the put in the lowest welfare state Mississippi it's eighteen thousand dollars so in Hawaii that means if you're on welfare and you get forty nine thousand dollars in money and in-kind benefits from the government for not for not working if you want to get off welfare you need a job that would pay you what about sixty-five seventy thousand dollars before taxes to make to get just to break even and so that's a pretty big incentive not to get off of welfare and in Mississippi which has a much lower cost of living if you can make eighteen thousand by doing nothing well it has to make you know maybe thirty twenty-five thirty thousand and if you have if you're a high school dropout or you you have little skill that's going to be darn tough to get someone to pay that kind of money so why would you ever do that especially you have to have children well why would you ever do that and try it and so a lot of people don't so there's the work incentive effect there's a family breakup effect of welfare that has eliminated the stigma that once existed that men had when they abandoned their children and so as long as they get a government check that can let the mother and the children at least survive and get along it eliminated as eliminated the stigma of that and so there's been a 400% increase in out of wedlock births since 1960 in the United States and I cite literature research that shows you know some of the effects of that or the children you know we all know single mothers that have done a great job of raising black children but in general the research says that that such children are the girls are twice as likely to have out of wedlock children themselves which could you know since they're in poverty to begin with a lot of them can make it very tough for them ever to get out of poverty and the boys are three times more likely to be involved in crime and in families like this and those are just two of these two statistics that I throw out in the book and I also talked about the crowding out effect of the welfare state that displaces private charitable efforts that are usually much more effective in helping people who need help then government bureaucracies are and so so that's point number eight about how the social well via the welfare state actually harms the poor but it puts them right where the politicians won them as dependent on them to do and the more the better the more the better yes you have time for okay I'm gonna give you a couple of these point number nine is a the progressive income tax is social poison I would call it and again you've all heard a vib probably the incentive effects of the progressive income tax that imposes progressively higher tax rates on the more productive people so the idea is to tax the more productive people in society who who therefore were in higher income at a higher rate and then use the money and to subsidize less productive or unproductive people and we're not talking about disabled people here we're talking about able-bodied less productive people and that's called tax fairness that's that's called tax fairness you take robbing robbing people who work hard and so forth so we have we have the phenomenon of the entrepreneur who goes broke three or four times trying to become a successful business person it finally hits upon a good product it succeeds and he makes a lot of money and so we what do we want to do with them we want to tax his pants off we want to put him in the thing of the 70 percent marginal tax bracket if we could someday and so or the or the novelist who writes three four or five novels and makes no money and finally hits writes a Tom Clancy novel okay let's tax the daylights out of that person and I can lux I will never forget years ago when I was at George George Mason we had a guest lecturer from Sweden I'm and I'll never forget this left female novelist from Sweden who was we were told was one of the most better known novelists in Sweden at the time and she had just moved the United States and one of the faculty members there knew her somehow had brought her to to the Economics Department to get a talk and her talk was that they're the main reason she was moving the United States is that she finally succeeded you know she struggled for years and didn't sell many and finally she had a couple novels there were big sellers and her tax rate was a hundred and ten percent so she made a hundred grand than a novel she owed one hundred and ten thousand dollars in tax and that's why she was living in Fairfax Virginia at that time we don't have anything like that in this country but that's you know that's sort of the end game of what we're progressive incomes Taxation takes you but the most insidious part of the income tax in general I quote Frank charter off who wrote they had this great book the income tax root of all evil which is for sale out here it's also online charter of that when we thought the income tax the government basically said we now own all of your income they nationalize income and we will tell you how much of your income you can keep by setting the tax rate so the income was nationalized in the federal government got a gigantic new source of income you know there was no income tax in the original Constitution and so what did that do that led to a tremendous centralization of power because now the government had all this income a charter off rights for example during the Civil War there was a lot of there's a lot of a lot of soldiers in the in the US Army went AWOL or or you know you know just was left left the army but Lincoln did not have the resources to hunt them down but the Charter off rights but after the income tax the US government does have the resources to hunt down there are people who leave the army and things like that they also have the resources to bribe a lot of people giving them government grants and threatening the withdrawal of the grants if they don't behave in the way the government wants them to behave and that includes the state and local governments and so charter off sees the income tax is something that was sort of the final nail in the coffin of American federalism or states rights and that it is creative is this tremendous centralization of power in the central government and centralized power is always the enemy of freedom and so unless so I look at the income tax the progressive income tax much more broadly and just sort of the minor economic work instead of a fit at the income tax okay I had one more thing here but I think I'm going to quit at that point because I'm going to I'm going to raffle off a couple of books too by asking whoever is the first asked to answer the question I will give a free book it's kind of like on Jeopardy you know you have to have your hand ready to go up real fast and answer the first question you may earn up know these I don't know what I'll ask you see uh what year was the road to serfdom published I think you had your hand up right you get a book okay okay okay who was Ludvig Lachman nobody knows that that's not good enough okay you got a baby good luck okay where did Charles Barkley play college basketball I think you had your hand up first Auburn University okay yeah well that's it for now that's my last book I'm gonna give away you have to buy em if you want one

Channel: misesmedia

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Keywords: Top 10, DiLorenzo, Socialism, Millennial, Mises, Rothbard, Criticism, Economics, Austrian School, Politics, History, Critique

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Length: 44min 40sec (2680 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 17 2016

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[u/lingben]

this is such a poorly argued proposition that even when it was shared 2 years ago at /r/libertarian it was shredded to ribbons:

https://np.reddit.com/r/Libertarian/comments/53ahpq/ten_things_millennials_should_know_about/