The 8 richest men are worth $426 billion, while the world s poorest 3.7 billion people together own $409 billion, $17 billion less. Where exactly is the great sin? Is it that wealth belongs to the rich elite, and we must reallocate it? Or is there some other way to distribute it? Ben Shapiro explains why this is a fool's errand, and why we should focus on free market economics, rather than income inequality. He also explains why the world's poor are doing better than the middle class in most places on Earth, thanks to the glories of free markets and free trade. And he offers his favorite gift for Martin Luther King Day: a recipe for a delicious, home-cooked meal prepared by the crew at Blue Apron. Ben's birthday gift to himself is a recipe from the folks at the Daily Mail's Blue Aproned, a company that makes delicious, pre-portioned ingredients that you can make at home. You can choose a variety of preportioned recipes from a wide array of preported ingredients, so you can cook up a delicious homecooked meal that tastes delicious and tastes good. You can t ask for much more than that, can you? Let's cook up something delicious and share it with the rest of the world. Ben Shapiro's birthday present to himself and his friends! The Ben Shapiro Show is a must-listen to this week's episode of The Daily Mail. Subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast, wherever you get your eardrums are listening to the latest news and your favorite hipster podcast! Subscribe and let me know what you think of it! Tweet me what your favorite gift you're listening to this episode of the most delicious thing you got me on your social media platforms! Timestamps: 3:00 - What s your favorite meal? 4:30 - What's your favorite thing you ve eaten so far this week? 5:15 - Which meal you ve been up to? 6:20 - What kind of meal you dabbled in the past week so far? 7:40 - What do you're most excited about? 8:00 9:00 | What s a good meal you're going to cook for me? 11:30 | What would you like to hear me cook in the next 5 days? 12:15 | How do you d have me cook?
00:00:00.000On Monday, BuzzFeed headlined, These eight men own as much wealth as half the world.
00:00:05.000This vital bit of information came with this supporting fact, courtesy of BuzzFeed special correspondent James Ball and UK editorial developer Chris Applegate, quote, The world's eight richest men are worth $426 billion.
00:00:15.000The world's poorest 3.7 billion people together own $409 billion, $17 billion less.
00:00:24.000These statistics came courtesy of Oxfam.
00:01:03.000He said, quote, while one in nine people on the planet will go to bed hungry tonight, a small handful of billionaires have so much wealth they would need several lifetimes to spend it.
00:01:11.000The fact that a super-rich elite are able to prosper at the expense of the rest of us at home and overseas shows how warped our economy has become.
00:01:19.000Inequality is not only keeping millions of people trapped in poverty, it is fracturing our societies and poisoning our politics.
00:01:25.000First off, there is no indicator anywhere in this report that the wealth of the world's eight wealthiest men was ill-gotten.
00:01:31.000There is no record of them enslaving people or robbing banks or burning down rival businesses.
00:01:36.000The reason these people are rich is because they have founded businesses that created better products and services and engaged in more consensual transactions than any other people on planet Earth.
00:01:45.000Bill Gates' Microsoft created a reputed 12,000 millionaires among his employees.
00:01:49.000Microsoft currently employs more than 100,000 people.
00:01:52.000Microsoft employees have given more than $1 billion to charity.
00:01:57.000Microsoft products have made millions of lives easier and better, and millions of businesses cheaper to run.
00:02:02.000The same is true for Amazon, one of the world's great companies.
00:02:04.000Certainly, as a consumer, I benefit from Amazon every single day.
00:02:13.000Oxfam's implication seems to be that wealth belongs to the collected and we must therefore reallocate it.
00:02:19.000Hence their language about a super rich elite prospering at our expense.
00:02:23.000But these rich people aren't prospering at the expense of others.
00:02:26.000Since 1981, the global extreme poverty rate has been sliced in half.
00:02:31.000Meanwhile, from 1979 to 2014, the upper middle class in America grew from 12% of the population to 30% of the population.
00:02:39.000America's poor are doing better than the middle class in most places on Earth, thanks to the glories of free market economics.
00:02:45.000Here's what Pew Research said in 2015, quote, The U.S.
00:02:48.000stands head and shoulders above the rest of the world.
00:02:50.000More than half, 56% of Americans, were high income by the global standard.
00:02:54.000More than 32% were upper middle income.
00:02:57.000In other words, almost 9 in 10 Americans had a standard of living that was above the global middle income standard.
00:03:02.000Only 7% of people in the United States were middle income, 3% were low income, and only 2% were poor.
00:03:09.000The quest for income inequality is a fool's errand.
00:03:11.000That's because the only way to rectify imbalances is to punish successful risk-taking.
00:03:16.000The reason that investors make greater profits than those who do the actual work is because the investor takes the risk necessary in order to create a profit margin with which to pay those people.
00:03:25.000Oxfam neglects to mention where the world's poorest people live.
00:03:28.000According to the World Bank, two-thirds of the world's poorest human beings live in India, China, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Congo.
00:03:34.000The Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedom ranks these countries thusly in terms of their participation in free markets and their governmental dedication to rule of law and private property rights.
00:03:54.000Oxfam's solution is to regulate markets more.
00:03:57.000A richer world relies on freer markets both at home and abroad.
00:04:00.000But the foolish, inconsistent focus on income inequality merely provides cover for policies that actually enhance human suffering rather than mitigating it.
00:04:53.000The good folks at the Daily Wire, Mathis and Jonathan and Austin and the rest of the crew, Bailey and Cynthia, everybody, they got me these wonderful gifts.
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00:05:51.000The recipes are not repeated within a year, so you're never going to get bored, which is great because at our house we have like a weekly rotating menu, and it gets boring really, really fast.
00:05:59.000Blue Apron makes sure that doesn't happen.
00:06:01.000Again, they all have the step-by-step, easy-to-follow recipe, and everything is guaranteed for freshness.
00:06:05.000Check out this week's menu, and you get the first
00:06:07.000Three meals for free with free shipping.
00:06:09.000If you go to blueapron.com slash Shapiro.
00:08:11.000Okay, second, if you look at the faces in the Selma march, pretty diverse group.
00:08:14.000And it was Martin Luther King's recognition, unlike Malcolm X, early Malcolm X, it was Martin Luther King's recognition that you actually needed to work with people across the racial spectrum in order to move forward with individual civil rights that made him successful.
00:08:28.000He was successful not just because he was a fantastic orator and a really profound thinker on racial matters, but because he actually had the foresight to reach out to people who are not black as allies.
00:08:37.000But today's civil rights leaders are not interested in that.
00:08:41.000I think Martin Luther King won the battle and Malcolm X won the war in a lot of ways because now we have racial polarization on all fronts.
00:08:47.000Not even late Malcolm X, like after Malcolm X became an actual Muslim as opposed to a member of the Nation of Islam.
00:09:24.000I mean, I think that Ta-Nehisi Coates' worldview can be summed up by the fact that he wrote in one of his pieces or in his book that during 9-11 he was sitting on the top of his apartment building watching 9-11 happen and he didn't feel anything.
00:09:37.000Ta-Nehisi Coates said, quote, so this is from Oliver Thomas, White society was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land.
00:09:47.000In short, through three centuries of kidnapping, torture, murder, and rape.
00:09:51.000We built an entire society on these bruised and broken backs, that and countless Native Americans driven off their land.
00:09:56.000I have been asked to speak at a Martin Luther King Day event.
00:09:58.000Me, a white preacher, speaking to a predominantly black audience filled with gifted preachers.
00:10:04.000No white person understands the black experience.
00:10:07.000And this is what the left wants you to take away from Martin Luther King Day, is that you should judge people by the color of their skin, not the contents of their character.
00:10:12.000And we can never have a situation in which a little black child and a little white child hold hands and walk into the future together.
00:10:19.000We can't have that because the black kid can't understand the white kid, and mostly the white kid really can never understand the black kid.
00:10:24.000First of all, this is just not factually true.
00:10:27.000Obviously we should lament and decry and remember the absolute evils of slavery and the horrors of Jim Crow, but to suggest that American power was built on the back of slavery is economically illiterate and morally obtuse.
00:10:49.000This is one of the reasons why the North was wildly out-competing the South during the Civil War.
00:10:53.000I mean, you would have imagined that the side with all the slaves would have won if slavery were all that great for the economy.
00:10:57.000Slavery is not good for the economy, it turns out.
00:10:59.000It turns out that wages are much better for the economy than slavery is.
00:11:02.000So the idea that we built our economic power on the back of slavery is just not true.
00:11:06.000We actually built our economic power in spite of slavery.
00:11:09.000The Great British Empire really became the Great British Empire after outlawing slavery.
00:11:14.000America got more powerful in spite of slavery.
00:11:16.000We got more powerful in spite of Jim Crow, not because of Jim Crow.
00:11:19.000One of the things that a lot of the kind of revisionist racialists like to say is America only became powerful and wealthy because of Jim Crow.
00:11:40.000You're losing all the marketable skills.
00:11:42.000The Constitution of the United States is great, not because it enshrines slavery permanently, but because it was a step toward abolishing slavery.
00:11:49.000That's what the Constitution was designed to do.
00:11:51.000When you hear people talk about the Three-Fifths Law and how racist the Three-Fifths Law was, the whole purpose of the Three-Fifths Law in the Constitution, the whole purpose of the Three-Fifths provision, is because the North did not want the South to be able to vote for continuing slavery by counting slaves as citizens for purposes of allocation of votes.
00:12:08.000They came up with this compromise so they could actually have a functional country.
00:12:12.000But the purpose of the Three-Fifths Clause was partially to get rid of slavery.
00:12:16.000The Declaration of Independence, as Frederick Douglass made clear, was not because it was particular to white people, but because it was universal.
00:12:23.000Frederick Douglass was very passionate about the Declaration of Independence.
00:12:25.000So all of this is just historically not true, but it's the message of it that's really gross.
00:12:30.000So, Martin Luther King did, and the reason that, you know, you're proud to show videos of Martin Luther King to your kids, my daughter is a little too young to understand it, she's only just turning three next week, but as soon as she's old enough to understand it, I'm going to be proud and honored to show her speeches of Martin Luther King at the March on Washington.
00:12:47.000Because King appealed to our common humanities, individual human beings.
00:14:24.000Thank God for people like John Lewis, who we'll get to in a second.
00:14:27.000But that doesn't mean that it didn't take a coalition of people across racial lines in order to reach success.
00:14:33.000I mean, if you want racial reconciliation, the reason that Martin Luther King is a great figure and Malcolm X is not a great figure is because Malcolm X's perspective on race is counterproductive and leads to polarization.
00:14:44.000Martin Luther King's perspective on race is a deeply American one.
00:16:48.000That's not an open, democratic process.
00:16:52.000Okay, so, you know, whatever you think of the Russian interference in the election, the fact is there was a legitimate vote held based on the information that was available to the public, and Hillary Clinton lost.
00:17:33.000But Trump's not wrong about the fact that if this were reversed, everybody on the left would lose their mind, right?
00:17:38.000If this were somebody saying that Hillary Clinton were not a legitimate president.
00:17:42.000In fact, when Donald Trump said that Barack Obama was not a legitimate president, that he was born outside the United States, everybody rightly went nuts.
00:17:49.000Now, everybody's getting on Trump for this.
00:17:50.000And there are a bunch of people on the left who said that Trump was attacking John Lewis racially.
00:18:55.000It is diverse ethnically and it is diverse economically.
00:18:59.000So my memo to my white elected officials, not just President Elect Trump, but a lot of white elected officials make this mistake in making the African American community a very
00:19:49.000There is much higher unemployment in John Lewis's district.
00:19:54.000Okay, when you look at the poverty rate, the poverty rate is 17.3% in Georgia's 5th district, it's 17% state average, 13.5% nationally, a little bit higher than the state average, a lot higher than the national average.
00:20:05.000Now there's some major businesses that are located in John Lewis' district, but the crime rates are also
00:20:13.000They are higher in John Lewis's district.
00:20:15.000Okay, so Atlanta is located inside Lewis's district.
00:20:18.000It had the 14th highest violent crime rate in the United States in 2015 with 1,120 violent crimes per 100,000 residents, which is triple the national average.
00:20:44.000But to claim that Trump is a big racist because he's pointing out that Lewis's district isn't in the greatest shape ever, that is a stretch.
00:20:50.000By the way, he would say the same thing about some white person's district, right?
00:20:53.000If a white person had insulted him, he would have said exactly the same thing, and you know he would if you're on the left.
00:23:57.000Every time a Republican is elected, it's illegitimate, right?
00:24:00.000Everything is illegitimate that the right does.
00:24:01.000And it's now coming from both sides, right?
00:24:04.000Donald Trump said that Barack Obama was basically illegitimate.
00:24:07.000Paul Krugman, who just a week ago was saying that Republicans are alienating too many people and polarizing the political discourse, wrote a column today in which he said, let's not talk about Mr. Trump's ravings.
00:24:17.000Instead, let's ask whether Mr. Lewis was right to say what he said.
00:24:33.000It's just amazing how the positions switch as soon as the shoe is on the other foot.
00:24:37.000As soon as Trump gets elected, then it's fine to say that the president is illegitimate.
00:24:41.000If the results had been exactly the same and Republicans had said Hillary is illegitimate, she shouldn't have been running, she's a criminal, the left would have said, how dare you?
00:25:16.000I think this is just part of the new political discourse, and we're all going to have to get used to it, is calling the other side illegitimate no matter what the actual results.
00:25:23.000The only time I haven't seen that is with Obama 2012.
00:25:25.000To Obama 2012, I didn't see a lot of Obama is an illegitimate president from the right, even though he'd obviously lied about what happened in Benghazi in order to prop himself up at the end of the election cycle, even though the media were obviously propping him up.
00:26:19.000It's a combination of a couple of things.
00:26:23.000I think that and I think the FBI in the October surprise, I call it an October surprise, of announcing a subsequent investigation did have an impact.
00:26:38.000Wow, she invented the term October Surprise, who knew?
00:26:40.000But yes, the Democrats are just going to keep saying this.
00:26:43.000The Democratic chair candidate is saying the same thing, that Trump was allegedly elected.
00:26:55.000Anyone with a smidgen of common sense can remember Donald Trump looking in the camera, encouraging Russia to hack into our electoral process.
00:27:06.000Cheerleading them on, and the idea that whatever information these members of Congress are getting out of this classified briefing had them storm out of that room makes it very clear that the decisions that the FBI made that were unprecedented to get involved in the election against Hillary Clinton, pick a winner, pick a loser, when they had so much information that was so damaging, what have we been talking about since this man was allegedly elected?
00:27:34.000All allegedly elected are now coming out of Russia.
00:27:37.000You acknowledge that he achieved the necessary electoral votes and is a legitimately elected President of the United States, would you not?
00:27:44.000Well, I haven't seen the classified briefing that the members of Congress did.
00:27:49.000Okay, so one of the questions that we're going to be asking as we continue here on the Ben Shapiro Show is whether this is good strategy or not, because there's a bit of a split opening up in the Democratic Party.
00:27:57.000We've also got to talk about Trump going after SNL.
00:28:00.000We've got to talk about Trump on Obamacare.
00:28:01.000We've got to talk about Trump on NATO, EU, the intelligence community.
00:28:06.000We have tons coming up, like a lot, and these guys worked really hard to cut all of this audio, so you're going to want to be around.