In the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union, many assumed that the end of government redistributionism and centralization had come. Instead, socialism has been on the rise in the United States since the 1970s. In this episode, we re looking at the roots of socialism, and why it s a symptom of a larger problem: the distortion of the terms capitalism, opportunity, and hard work in favor of socialism and coddling from the government. Plus, a look at the best moments from the last two years of the show, with unique perspectives surrounding a topic and some of my own reflections on the collection. This week s episode features: Peter Robinson: The communist threat of socialism The best thing that everybody should buy Life insurance Why you could save $1,500 a year by using a Genius Genius Is it possible to save more than a million a year? And much more. This episode is brought to you by The New Republic and New Republic. New Republic is a website dedicated to modernizing the American political system and understanding of the past, present, past, and future. It s a place where we can learn from our past and learn from the past and understand what s going on in the present. If you like what s gone before us, you ll love what s in store for us in the future, you can help us make it so we can make it better, not just better, better, and more beautiful. We lllllllll. . We hope you lllll be a little bit more like that! more like it and more like us - we ll make it a little more like the real you , not less like that less like it. - Peter Robinson -- Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Republic -- it s better than the good old days, not the bad old days. -- Thank you so much -- Peter Robinson. Peace, Joe of the Good Fight Podcast Thanks to Peter Robinson, Joe Gooding, John Rocha, Sr. and Joe Goodall, Joe Goodell, Joe, , and Joe Pizzi, and ? & , for helping us make this podcast to make it great, and thanks to the late, great Joe Goodll
00:00:17.000In the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a going theory.
00:00:19.000The theory was that we had reached the end of history.
00:00:21.000That from here on in, it was basically going to be liberalism and laissez-faire economics.
00:00:27.000That the fall of the Soviet Union had definitively shown that the end of government redistributionism and centralization had come.
00:00:34.000That obviously was untrue because it turns out that the pitch of Marxism in the end is not really a pitch about efficacy or utilitarianism.
00:00:40.000It's not about making you wealthier or making you happier.
00:00:43.000It's about changing the nature of man.
00:00:45.000The basic idea of Marxism, the basic idea of socialism, is that human beings are inherently good.
00:00:50.000And the only thing that wrecks that inherent goodness is the systems around us.
00:00:53.000So when we see bad things happening, when we see inequality, when we see cruelty, when we see crime, that is all a result of the evil capitalist system in which we are plunged.
00:01:01.000So if we just change that, if we just destroy the entire system and replace it with something quote unquote fairer, if we get all of our rights from government as opposed to God, if we stop worrying so much about individual fate and start worrying a lot more about our community as a whole, then life will be better.
00:01:15.000Now, wherever it's been tried, communism has been a failure.
00:01:17.000And wherever socialism is tried, it has only been a success to the extent that capitalism supports it.
00:01:22.000When you look at democratic socialist countries in Northern Europe, for example, it is perfectly obvious that these are capitalist countries with some social welfare policies.
00:01:28.000However, the rise of Marxist theory, a new, I mean pure, uncut Marxist theory, the idea that income inequality is in essence immoral and exploitation, the idea that free market economics is again exploitation, the basic notion that free exchange is somehow a violation of personal rights, that is on the rise.
00:01:47.000That's why you've seen the rise of the Squad and the Democratic Party.
00:01:49.000It's why you've seen the rise of Bernie Sanders, who doesn't really advocate for a Denmark-style system.
00:01:55.000He more likes the centralized government systems of open communist systems.
00:01:58.000He's been praising those for literally decades.
00:02:01.000Now the fact is that the rights-based system of the United States is a good system.
00:02:05.000Capitalism, free markets, they're not just effective.
00:02:08.000They're based on the principle that you are an individual human being and that your labor belongs to you.
00:02:13.000That you have the right to alienate that labor voluntarily.
00:02:16.000That it requires your consent to remove that which belongs to you from you.
00:02:20.000And that the best thing that can happen for the world is for people to engage in mutual exchanges.
00:02:25.000Because the bottom line when it comes to socialism is, I'm here, I'm breathing, give me stuff.
00:02:29.000The bottom line of capitalism is, I'm not gonna get anything from you unless I give something to you.
00:02:34.000That free exchange makes the world a better place.
00:02:36.000It leads to technological development.
00:02:39.000A part of what's happening here is that so many Americans believe that they hit a triple when in reality they were born on third base, meaning that all of the prosperity they've been experiencing is the result of a system they now decry.
00:02:50.000They tend to pretend that prosperity is the natural state of man.
00:02:53.000That being rich, being powerful, being free, all of these things are just how the world works.
00:02:58.000And so if we chip away at the foundations of our society, everything will be fine.
00:03:11.000Socialism is not only immoral, it is ineffective.
00:03:14.000And yet the slogans of Marxism have become ever more popular.
00:03:17.000Well, this week, we're bringing you the best moments from the last two years of the show, with unique perspectives surrounding a topic and some of my own reflections on the collection.
00:03:25.000This week, we're looking at the distortion of the terms capitalism, opportunity, and hard work in favor of socialism, free money, and a desire for coddling from the government.
00:03:34.000We'll jump right into it with Peter Robinson on the communist threats of yesteryear.
00:03:37.000But first, let's talk about a simple thing that everybody should buy.
00:03:40.000I'm talking, of course, about life insurance.
00:03:42.000I mean, there's a lot of stuff going on in the world that makes you think about life insurance.
00:04:21.000And step three, PolicyGenius handles the rest.
00:04:24.000PolicyGenius works for you, not the insurance company.
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00:04:30.000They even have policies that allow eligible customers to skip that in-person medical exam and do it over the phone, which is super convenient these days.
00:04:36.000So, if you need life insurance, head on over to PolicyGenius.com right now to get started.
00:04:40.000You could save $1,500 or more a year by comparing quotes on their marketplace.
00:04:45.000When it comes to insurance, it's nice to get it right.
00:04:49.000Let's start with a man who literally faced communism head-on.
00:04:52.000Peter Robinson was the chief speechwriter to then-Vice President George H.W.
00:04:56.000Bush from 1982 to 1983, and then special assistant and speechwriter to President Ronald Reagan from 1983 to 1988.
00:05:03.000It was Peter who wrote the address from Reagan in Berlin in 1987 that called for General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down this wall, which at the time was incredibly controversial.
00:05:14.000During his six years at the White House, Peter wrote 300 speeches.
00:05:18.000For the last two decades, he has hosted Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson at the Hoover Institution, where he has interviewed an enormous number of political leaders, writers, and thinkers over the years.
00:05:27.000He's authored books including How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life and It's My Party, a Republican's Messy Love Affair with the GOP, and has been published in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and many others.
00:05:38.000When Peter Robinson found out that he was going to be featured on the Sunday Special again, he sent us this letter.
00:05:43.000The United States of America as a miracle.
00:05:45.000Free, democratic, enterprising, and the one country to which millions of the rich and the poor alike on every continent on the planet dream of moving.
00:05:53.000That's the theme to which Ben and I kept returning when we recorded this conversation several months ago.
00:06:17.000The Civil War might have ended in a stalemate instead of a victory for the Union.
00:06:21.000The Cold War might have continued for decade after decade, the Soviet Union steadily expanding its influence in the 1990s and beyond, as it did during the 1970s.
00:06:29.000None of these things happened for one reason.
00:06:31.000In each generation, Americans—not all Americans, but enough—recognized what was at stake, remained true to their principles, stood their ground, and fought.
00:06:49.000His breadth and range of knowledge is incredible.
00:06:51.000And of course, he is himself a part of history, a key cog in the wheel that led to the fall of the Soviet Union, the actual evil empire.
00:06:59.000In episode 75, Peter and I talk about whether Americans can unite without an existential threat like communism facing us and the tension of not having a shared view of American history.
00:07:08.000But first, Peter tells me the story behind writing the tear down this wall line in Reagan's historic speech.
00:07:21.0001987, spring of 1987, Berlin is celebrating its 800th anniversary.
00:07:33.000Gorbachev is going to visit, the Queen of England is going to visit, and the West German government, remember it was West Germany and East Germany in those days, the West German government asked President Reagan to make a visit.
00:07:44.000I got assigned the speech and flew to Berlin before, this would be six weeks or so before the president was to speak there, to do some research.
00:07:52.000I went to the wall, I went to the place where the president was going to be delivering the speech.
00:07:57.000It's all gone now, but the wall was there, the Reichstag, which was still pocked with shell marks from the bombing at the final battle of Berlin, and behind me was West Berlin, modern city, color, life, movement, recent model cars, and then you look over the wall, And there was almost no motion.
00:08:37.000This was the place where the Soviet advance stopped at the end of the Second World War.
00:08:41.000This was the place where the Americans and the British had taken over.
00:08:47.000So, at that moment, I was a young speechwriter in trouble because what could I write that would equal what you felt there, the felt weight of history?
00:08:56.000Several other stops in Berlin, including one to the ranking American diplomat who was full of ideas about what Ronald Reagan should not say.
00:09:03.000West Berlin is surrounded by East Germany.
00:09:06.000The people who live here are very sensitive to the nuance and subtlety necessary for East-West relations.
00:09:12.000Don't have Ronald Reagan sound like an anti-communist cowboy.
00:09:15.000And by the way, don't have him make a big deal about the wall.
00:09:19.000And that evening, I went to a dinner party West Berliners whom I had not met, but we had mutual friends back in Washington.
00:09:27.000And so they put together a sort of a buffet for me, 15 or so people, different walks of life, a professor, a couple of students, and my host and hostess were lovely retired people.
00:09:38.000He had worked at the World Bank in Washington and retired back to West Berlin.
00:09:43.000And I asked the question, I said, I've been told by the American diplomat that you've all gotten used to the wall by now.
00:09:53.000And I thought, I've made just the gaffe that the diplomat doesn't want Ronald Reagan to make.
00:09:58.000But then one man raised his arm and pointed and said, my sister lives just a few kilometers in that direction, but I haven't seen her in more than 20 years.
00:10:07.000How do you think we feel about that wall?
00:10:17.000And each person told... One man talked about walking to work each morning, and each morning he would walk under a guard tower where there was an East German soldier with a rifle over his shoulder who would peer down at him with binoculars.
00:10:32.000And the man said, We share the same history, we speak the same language, but one of us is a zookeeper, and the other is an animal, and I have never been able to decide which was which.
00:10:41.000And then our hostess, a lovely woman called Ingeborg Eltz, who just died a couple of years ago.
00:10:46.000She must have been younger then than I am now.
00:10:48.000She was in her, perhaps in her early fifties.
00:10:53.000She'd been charming throughout the dinner party, but now she became angry.
00:10:57.000And she said, if this man Gorbachev – she smacked her, made a ball of one fist and smacked it into the palm of her other hand – if this man Gorbachev is serious with this glasnost, this perestroika, he can prove it by coming here and getting rid of that wall.
00:11:14.000And that went into my notebook, because the moment she said that, I knew that if Ronald Reagan had been there in my place, he would have responded to that remark.
00:11:24.000The simplicity, the dignity, and the power of that remark.
00:11:28.000So the answer, that's a long way around to get to the answer to your question, but if the question is, where did that phrase come from?
00:11:36.000The answer is, it started with a German woman who lived behind the wall herself.
00:11:43.000As somebody who was five when the Berlin Wall speech was spoken, the impression that was left in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the communist regime in the USSR, is that it was the end of history, that now everybody was friends again.
00:11:58.000I mean, even if you watch Terminator 2, you have characters saying to each other, why did the Russians have missiles pointed at us?
00:12:04.000And there's this great feeling that arises in America that basically it's all over.
00:12:08.000And it seems as though we've sort of turned our guns on each other as opposed to the existential threat that used to exist out there.
00:12:14.000Maybe that was temporarily lifted for a brief moment in time after September 11th, but we're certainly back at it to an excessive degree right now.
00:12:22.000Do you think that Americans have enough in common now to actually hold each other accountable?
00:12:27.000To see each other as non-enemies in the absence of an existential threat like the Soviet Union.
00:12:35.000I also believe we have to work at what we have in common.
00:12:39.000So, I'm trying to say something, I'm trying to put this in a way that gives it some sort of edge or some sort of interest, because this is the kind of thing that you say on the radio every single day, and God bless you for saying it, but I didn't come here just to agree with you.
00:12:56.000Identity politics, the politics of dividing Americans, that's not only wrong, that approaches, in my mind, that comes close to a kind of wickedness.
00:13:08.000Because, why is it, think about this, immigration is a problem, we have to, blah blah blah, all that is true.
00:13:20.000But why is it that a Mexican who just crosses that border within a few months finds himself in a position to better the lot of his, not just his family, but his village back in Mexico?
00:13:34.000What is it about this country that permits remittances back to Mexico of almost $30 billion a year?
00:13:41.000Why is it that one of the first things that Chinese do, the Chinese who since 1979 when Deng Xiaoping had his opening to markets, and now there are lots of people in China who are rich.
00:13:57.000They try to buy real estate, right here in Southern California.
00:14:01.000They try to invest their money in this country.
00:14:04.000What is going... And the answer, of course, is that the United States of America is a miracle.
00:14:10.000And it needs to be cherished and sustained and nurtured in every way we can.
00:14:16.000People who come here... I'm trying to think... Back... Now, Ronald Reagan didn't live to see the kind of uncontrolled immigration that we have witnessed since he left office.
00:14:28.000And so he was fundamentally pretty relaxed about immigration.
00:14:33.000But what he always understood, what people of that generation always understood, was that people come here to become American.
00:14:43.000So the idea that it is in the interest of certain politicians, you and I, I'm sure, could go off and do a whole show on the problems with California, this spectacular state, so blessed in so many ways, so beautiful, so filled with enterprising and talented people.
00:15:03.000The problem with California is the government of California, in whose interest it now is to colonize certain groups or communities of people when they come here for political purposes and try to trap them in a certain kind of mindset instead of permitting them to enter into the fullness of American life.
00:15:30.000The resources of American history From the Revolutionary War, where you see, it seems providential, the way Washington is able to escape from Brooklyn across to Manhattan.
00:15:45.000The wind blows it the right way at just the right time.
00:15:47.000The courage to stand up to what was then the greatest empire on Earth.
00:15:53.000Lincoln, this martyr, giving his life to hold the Union together and to abolish slavery, the greatest generation in the Second World War, I would argue that the Cold War, which is a bipartisan project, it begins with Harry Truman, it ends with George H.W. Bush, and in between, intellectuals behave, by and large, pretty badly, really, during the Cold War.
00:16:19.000But it's ordinary American people who continue to vote, to sustain the politicians who want to spend the money to do what we need to do, that this country is able to sustain that kind of a project across four and a half years, four and a half decades rather, until communism collapses and the Soviet... By the way, this is a pet peeve of mine.
00:16:39.000It is now, we're not allowed to say, That our side won the Cold War?
00:16:54.000So, the resources of American history, the ideals that we have, the ability, the... This is your book on the right side of history.
00:17:04.000The astonishing thing about the Western civilization is not that it's Western.
00:17:09.000It's that it consists of permanent truths which are open to anyone, from anywhere.
00:17:16.000And the greatest exemplar of that tradition in the world today is the United States.
00:17:20.000Yes, of course we have enough resources if we choose to sustain them.
00:17:27.000Longtime friend of the show, Senator, presidential candidate, and host of the podcast Verdict with Ted Cruz, it's Ted Cruz.
00:17:33.000From 2003 to 2008, Senator Cruz served as the Solicitor General of Texas, essentially hired to handle appeals involving the state from a constitutionalist perspective.
00:17:43.000He argued before the Supreme Court of the United States nine times, winning five of those cases.
00:17:50.000The senator first became widely popular in 2013, when he gave a 21-hour speech on the Senate floor to hold up a federal budget bill in order to defund Obamacare.
00:17:59.000It led to a government shutdown and ruffled a lot of feathers, but it also showed supporters that Senator Cruz was committed to walk the walk of a conservative political leader.
00:18:06.000You can hear him tell this story in the full episode.
00:18:09.000Cruz joined us and gave his perspective on being raised by a father who fled communist Cuba in the 50s.
00:18:14.000In regards to America's size of government and its control, and the ever-growing sentiments with regard to socialism, Senator Cruz's story hits home on the need to fight against tyranny.
00:18:22.000When we let Senator Cruz know that he was going to be in this episode, he sent us this letter.
00:18:27.000This November, the American dream is very much at stake, as the precious rights and freedoms we cherish are under assault by the radical left.
00:18:33.000Months ago, following the horrific death of George Floyd, thousands of Americans across the country exercised their First Amendment right to peacefully protest against police brutality and for equal justice.
00:18:43.000However, these protests were hijacked by violent Antifa members and other anti-American anarchists who would arrive at protests with weapons, rocks, commercial-grade lasers, sledgehammers, and weapons-grade fireworks to use against the men and women of law enforcement, the very people who put their lives on the line every day to protect our lives and rights.
00:18:59.000This violence should be universally condemned, but unfortunately, Democrats have been largely silent.
00:19:03.000They've made a cynical political decision and believe it's politically expedient to stand with the rioters.
00:19:08.000I chaired a hearing just a few weeks ago.
00:19:10.000Not a single Democrat who participated in the hearing would criticize Antifa.
00:19:14.000Instead, many Democrats across the country are actually supporting calls from the violent mob to defund our police departments.
00:19:20.000This is the face of the Democrat Party.
00:19:22.000A Democrat Party that refuses to condemn Antifa violence, refuses to stand with the men and women of law enforcement, and has Bernie Sanders running the show.
00:19:31.000We need to stand for justice, stand with the men and women of law enforcement who by and large engage in proper conduct, and stand for freedom.
00:19:37.000That is how we protect the American Dream.
00:19:41.000Full disclosure, I've been friends with Senator Cruz for a very long time.
00:19:44.000I backed him in his original race against David Dewhurst, then the Lieutenant Governor of the state of Texas.
00:19:49.000I've always found Senator Cruz to be charming and fun.
00:19:52.000I know you don't always see that side of Ted, but he really is quite fantastic.
00:19:56.000In episode 54, here Ted tell me about his family and about how his community, the Hispanic community, is a fundamentally conservative community.
00:20:02.000But conservatives need to communicate the message that connects with them.
00:20:14.000I mean, look, all of us are products of our family story.
00:20:17.000And my dad, as you know, my dad fought in the Cuban Revolution.
00:20:21.000I mean, when he was a kid, when he was a teenager, he was fighting alongside Fidel Castro, fighting against Batista, who was a corrupt dictator, and was thrown in prison and he was tortured.
00:20:32.000And my dad came to Texas when he was just 18.
00:20:36.000And I grew up as a kid hearing stories, hearing stories about being a freedom fighter, and it actually works out.
00:20:44.000My father fought with Castro, didn't know Castro was a communist.
00:20:47.000Anytime I really want to yank my father's chain, I'll call him a communist guerrilla, and it drives him nuts.
00:20:54.000What he knew was that Batista was corrupt, he was in bed with the mob, you know, Godfather II, you know, that whole... I mean, that was what it was.
00:21:01.000It was a completely corrupt dictatorship.
00:21:04.000And the revolution, as my dad describes it, were a bunch of 14- and 15-year-old kids who didn't know any better.
00:21:11.000My dad left in 57, and he fled Cuba because Batista's army was going to kill him.
00:21:36.000She ended up being imprisoned and tortured by Castro's goons.
00:21:40.000And then she ultimately fled Cuba too, came to Texas.
00:21:44.000And so my cousin Bebe and I, Bebe is Sonia's daughter, the two of us as kids, we literally grew up sitting at the feet of my dad and my aunt and listening to them tell stories of fighting for freedom.
00:21:56.000And that's what I've wanted to do my whole life for as long as I can remember, since I was a little kid, is in our house, you know, it wasn't that politics was something you just kind of read the paper and, oh, that's interesting.
00:23:39.000But I'll tell you, I had the exact same message in the Rio Grande Valley and overwhelmingly Hispanic communities that I had in Deep East Texas.
00:23:50.000And the message of jobs and freedom and security, that's a message that resonates.
00:23:56.000Look, I think the Hispanic community is a conservative community, but we've got to respond to the needs and interests and values in the Hispanic community.
00:24:05.000If you look right now, today we have the lowest Hispanic unemployment ever recorded.
00:24:10.000We've also got the lowest African-American unemployment ever recorded.
00:24:14.000The clown show that is the Democratic 2020 primary?
00:24:18.000They're going to go to Hispanics and African-Americans that are seeing the lowest unemployment ever recorded, and they're going to say, these policies are terrible for you.
00:24:25.000You should go back to the Obama era policies where you had much higher unemployment, much higher poverty.
00:24:44.000And look, as Republicans, we've got to be able to articulate that and explain it in a way that that's not just a number on a pie chart.
00:24:54.000Those are five million real human beings.
00:24:56.000Those are moms and dads who two and a half years ago, they were dependent on the federal government for their basic food needs, who now presumably they've gotten a job.
00:25:48.000Back in episode 13, we were joined by one of the most influential writers of the last half century, David Mamet.
00:25:54.000Author of a variety of books, plays, and films, including Glengarry Glen Ross, Heist, The Untouchables, and the Academy Award nominated The Verdict and Wag the Dog.
00:26:02.000A rare outspoken conservative among the mainstream culture, and a critic of communism and fascism, David grew up in Chicago.
00:26:08.000His parents were first generation Americans.
00:26:11.000He began writing while in high school and college, and then after graduating, worked any and every job in the city.
00:26:16.000This introduced him to what the actual working middle class of Chicago was like in the 60s, which refined his style and even drew him towards projects like The Untouchables and one of his more recent books, Chicago.
00:26:26.000Sitting down with David Mamet was truly incredible.
00:26:40.000But for starters, listen to David debunk the phrases economic justice and social justice and discuss with me the dangers of democratic socialism in American government.
00:27:04.000But it sounds like, you know, your basic view of human beings, that all human beings are basically at each other, and that's why we have to come to these basic agreements to leave each other alone.
00:27:13.000Well, yeah, I was watching yesterday that the great Tucker Carlson, I'm crazy about him, he had some cockamamie, I think Democrat something or other, you know, congressman or something like that.
00:27:25.000And he says to the guy, the Democrat, he says, wait a second, he says, you guys got nothing left in a golf bag.
00:27:30.000So what in the world are you going to run on in the midterms?
00:27:34.000And the guy says, economic justice and social justice.
00:27:37.000So I said, well, OK, you know, let's let's break it down to the English language, right?
00:27:42.000What does economic justice mean at the end?
00:27:48.000What it means is somewhat it's statism.
00:27:50.000It means that someone is going to Stand above whatever rules we have for commerce and decide what's just to whom, right?
00:28:01.000So as Tom Sowell said, whenever anybody says it's going to help A, you say, well, who's going to hurt, right?
00:28:08.000So economic justice is At the end of the day, it's communism.
00:28:13.000And communism is someone's going to be in charge of saying what you have to give to me, and I'll keep what I think I want and give it back to you.
00:28:24.000Which brings me back to when I realized that the whole Marxian idea, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need, really begs the question.
00:28:37.000Because the term which is missing is, the state shall take.
00:28:41.000from each according to his ability, which means the state's going to determine what your ability is.
00:28:45.000The state shall give to each according to his needs. I'm the state, I'm going to determine what you need. You don't determine it anymore. You don't determine what your ability is, the state does. So, so much for economic justice. I thought social justice, how's that different than decaf justice, right?
00:29:02.000Regular common garden decaf justice, right?
00:30:23.000And the first thing they do is they're an anesthetic.
00:30:26.000Are you optimistic for the future of the country, or do you think that... Yeah, I feel incredibly... You know, somebody said a long time ago, they said, no democracy survives more than 300 years.
00:30:36.000So I think that this new shift to a constitutional republic, back toward a constitutional republic, is going to lengthen the viability of the American experiment by 50 to 100 years.
00:30:51.000I mean, I'm a little more pessimistic than you, just because I feel like the pendulum swings pretty far in this country.
00:30:55.000And it's swung from Barack Obama to Donald Trump, which means that it's going to swing back even further to the left the next time around, just because the Democratic Party by default has made itself into a Democratic Socialist Party.
00:31:06.000I don't think that there are a lot of substantive conversations being had because people are so angry at each other.
00:31:21.000And I do think that has to do with the lack of a common base of values.
00:31:24.000It sounds like when you were growing up, you were growing up with the feeling that, despite all the corruption in Chicago, if you worked hard, you could get ahead.
00:31:30.000And it was actually your obligation as a decent human being to work hard and make something of yourself.
00:31:35.000I feel like there are entire generations of people in this country who have been raised on the premise that America is actually a terrible place that is seeking to put its boot on your throat, and that anyone who proclaims that America is good is a perpetuator of this evil system.
00:31:48.000That's true, but all these generations who were raised in the bubble, I don't think Starbucks can open outlets sufficiently enough to keep pace with that growing population.
00:32:00.000So what are they going to do for a living after their parents die and they're sitting on the couch and working as a barista?
00:32:41.000When they talk about things in their life that they want to get over, it's work.
00:32:44.000You know, for me, my goal is to work until I die, because that's usually how it works.
00:32:48.000The minute you retire, you're gone, right?
00:32:50.000So my belief is sort of the belief from the book of Genesis, which is that you are put on the earth to cultivate it, and the minute you stop cultivating it, there's no reason for you to be here anymore.
00:32:58.000But I think that there are a lot of people who actually believe that they are put here on earth for leisure time and enjoyment, and the more that we require of you, the harder you have to work.
00:33:07.000That's an inherent flaw in the country.
00:33:11.000According to Bernie Sanders' logic, we're so rich, why should anybody have to work?
00:33:14.000Well, Bernie, I think I met him in the old days because I spent a lot of time about the same age overlapping in north central Vermont.
00:33:20.000I don't think he's ever worked a day in his life.
00:33:42.000Well, all the government can do is either tax you or steal it from you, or waste it, or spend money on either things that everybody needs but nobody wants to pay for, or things that nobody wants.
00:33:52.000Those are the only two things the government can spend the money on.
00:33:54.000So the young person doesn't say, where does the money come from?
00:33:57.000I mean, what I worry about, I'm not sure that we have a problem of economics so much as, you know, a lot of folks on the left think it's a problem of redistributionism and the economic system and all this.
00:34:06.000I really don't think that's the problem.
00:34:07.000I think we do have a problem of virtue and heart.
00:34:10.000I think there's a giant hole in the middle of the American soul that has been carved there by 40, 50 years of dependence on government and a belief that there is no higher calling for you.
00:34:21.000That your job on this earth is basically to experience the most pleasure possible and then die.
00:34:27.000I don't know what replaces that other than a return to some sort of centralizing values.
00:34:31.000Well, I don't know either, except that I have a difficult time controlling myself.
00:34:36.000I mean, I don't want to even attempt to try to control somebody else.
00:34:39.000It's going to be what it's going to be.
00:34:41.000I mean, I'm not talking about compelling people, but I do think that the appeal of a moral lifestyle has always been a hard sell.
00:34:46.000And it's a particularly hard sell when there are no consequences to immorality.
00:34:50.000Well, there's a very good book on the subject, you know, which is called a Torah.
00:34:54.000You know, what's the consequences for morality?
00:34:56.000It's a it's a plague or 40 years in the desert or not a think twice about.
00:35:02.000Let's talk a little bit more about hard work and skill sets with Mike Rowe.
00:35:05.000Mike was host of the widely popular reality series Dirty Jobs, which, as his website puts it, transformed cable television into a landscape of swamps, sewers, ice roads, coal mines, oil derricks, crab boats, hillbillies and lumberjack camps.
00:35:18.000Today, Mike Rowe hosts the podcast The Way I Heard It and the Emmy-winning Facebook Watch web series, Returning the Favor, in which he travels the country searching for remarkable people.
00:35:26.000He also runs the Mike Rowe Works Foundation, which awards scholarships to students pursuing a career in the skilled trades.
00:35:32.000Mike has made a business out of showing us that hard work truly matters.
00:35:38.000His personal experiences differ so much from my own, but his transformation from sort of a news guy into a voice for the working classes is really an incredible story and a reminder that so many Americans are doing the kind of hard work and jobs that many of us don't hear about in our daily lives.
00:35:52.000In episode 12, Mike tells me about his foundation's sweat pledge, skills and work ethic aren't taboo, and why some critics seem to hate it so much.
00:35:59.000And we discuss the politicization of the skills gap and the large opportunity in America's workforce, the truth of which cuts against the narrative pushed in politics and in the media.
00:36:07.000Every job eventually becomes a job, no matter how passionate you are about your initial belief in a job.
00:36:18.000And I love my job and I'm sure you love your job.
00:36:20.000Eventually it gets to the point where, yeah, I got to get up this morning, got to go to work.
00:36:23.000And still you're getting up and going to work.
00:36:24.000Happiness is a, it's a, it's a terrific symptom.
00:36:56.000It started, like most everything I do, as an attempt to amuse myself.
00:37:01.000But after a bottle of wine one night, My foundation awards work ethic scholarships, so we need to have some mechanism by which we can Try to account for work.
00:39:00.000So that's what we try and do. And forgive me, I'm trying to bring this back to the answer to the question you posed, but I forgot what it is again. So have I. I mean, you took me on the journey and now we're left adrift here. I'm going to send you a sweat pledge. I'm going to send you a sweat pledge.
00:39:13.000Okay, sounds good. Well, let's hone in on that for a second, the first principle that you mentioned, which is that you won the lottery because you live here, which is something with which I totally agree.
00:39:23.000But that's a pretty controversial proposition these days.
00:39:25.000And it's become almost partially a left-right proposition, unfortunately, where you see there's a poll that came out just within the last month that suggested that Republicans, particularly, were very proud to be members of the United States, very proud to be American, and they were very proud to be American when Obama was president.
00:39:42.000This was not dependent on who was president.
00:39:44.000It was 73% of Americans who were Republicans were proud when Obama was president, and 77% now.
00:39:49.000And for Democrats, it was like 54% were positive when it was Obama, and now it's like 38% because of President Trump.
00:39:54.000Why do you think there are so many people in the country who look at the situation that they've been handed, which is the freest, most prosperous country in the history of humanity, and think to themselves, I'm a victim in this scenario?
00:40:07.000And not to discount anybody's actual hardships or past, but why do you think that that's become such a prominent thing in what clearly is a land of opportunity?
00:40:18.000Of all the divides, the one that worries me the most is the divide between people who are genuinely, genuinely convinced that opportunity is dead and those who are not.
00:41:30.000So then you have economic experts with whom I really can't engage because I'm not an economist, but they will tell you why the skills gap is a myth.
00:41:40.000If I point to six million available jobs, My friends on the right will tell me that those jobs are available because human beings are fundamentally lazy.
00:41:50.000My friends on the left will tell me that those jobs are available because employers are fundamentally greedy.
00:43:16.000I mean, no, honestly, look, you're as biased as I am.
00:43:19.000You're as biased as the next person, but you can point these cameras at anything you want, and you're pointing them at honest, thoughtful conversation.
00:43:30.000Longtime television personality, commentator, and Emmy Award-winning journalist John Stossel has spent his career espousing the virtues of individual freedom and exposing the evil of big government.
00:43:40.000John has hosted and anchored for ABC News, including Good Morning America and 2020, as well as Fox Business.
00:43:46.000He wanted to bring his message to younger audiences, so he left that show to now produce for his own YouTube channel, where he releases a video every week presenting the case that good things happen in free markets and under a smaller government.
00:44:01.000And honestly, his view on libertarianism has really affected my own and shaped how I think about the size and role of government.
00:44:08.000In episode 27, John walks through how his media and journalism career made him hyper aware of the shortcomings of government, particularly in making life better for Americans.
00:44:16.000We also discuss the countries that the left points to in regard to democratic socialism functioning well, and how the biggest capitalists in the country sometimes become capitalism's biggest enemies.
00:44:25.000I just wanted to cover something that other people weren't covering.
00:44:35.000So, at the time, all people did was politics, the weather, crime, disasters.
00:46:15.000I didn't love the conservative press because it looked like your people wanted to police the bedroom and police the rest of the world, and I didn't like that.
00:46:25.000And I discovered Reason Magazine, and that was an epiphany.
00:46:33.000Coming out of Princeton, I was going, oh yes, we know how to solve poverty.
00:46:36.000My professor said, it's an outrage in this rich country that some people are poor.
00:46:41.000But then I watched these programs fail.
00:46:43.000They just teach people to be dependent.
00:46:47.000And if you look at the graph, I have used this in my videos, of the war on poverty and the poverty line.
00:46:53.000The war on poverty began and the poverty rate dropped for seven years.
00:46:57.000And after that, it's gone up and down.
00:47:00.000Improvement stopped because the government teaches people to be dependent.
00:47:04.000If you've got a man in the house, your check goes down.
00:47:08.000And then, most interesting, look at the chart from before the war on poverty.
00:47:12.000The slope of the line was about the same.
00:47:15.000Americans were lifting themselves out of poverty.
00:47:18.000The war on poverty, trillions of dollars, continued progress for five years and then stopped it.
00:47:24.000So what do you make of the new kind of left argument with regard to the countries they admire?
00:47:29.000So for a long time, for decades, the Soviet Union was a place where they were kind of interested in the experiment and then for a little while they were interested in Hugo Chavez.
00:47:36.000And they were interested in Cuba for a while, but now the modern iteration of the socialist movement is in favor of social democracy.
00:47:43.000So they like Norway, they like Sweden, they like the Nordic countries.
00:47:46.000This is the one that Bernie Sanders likes to trot out all the time.
00:47:49.000What do you make of the argument that those countries are cohesive, that they are functioning well, that they have high standards of living, and they also have massive governmental burdens that are driven by enormous regulations and tax rates?
00:48:02.000Well, first of all, they're not really socialist.
00:48:05.000And the Denmark Prime Minister went on TV to say, look, we're a market economy.
00:48:15.000Scandinavian countries don't even have a government minimum wage.
00:48:19.000They do have a big welfare state and they can afford that because they have a homogeneous culture and they have a fairly free private market to pay for it.
00:48:30.000And the economic freedom indexes, they come out ahead of the United States.
00:48:43.000Is it an accident that Facebook, Google, and all these exciting wealth-creating companies, or podcasts, have come out of Silicon Valley and California, places far away from Washington, D.C.? ?
00:48:58.000Yeah, and that I think is always the big distinction that folks fail to make, that socialism freezes things in place and redistributes them, and capitalism generates new and innovative methods.
00:49:09.000But when it comes to things like healthcare, where the left really is putting its heavy focus these days, what they say is, okay, well, fine, so we sacrificed a little bit of innovation, but there's an entire group of people who have pre-existing conditions, and they don't have a capacity to pay for the healthcare that they need.
00:49:23.000So what's the best system for providing health care if we're not going to have some sort of baseline government provided health care?
00:49:32.000It would be presumptuous for me to say what the best system is, but what I've learned is that the more market there is, the better.
00:49:39.000And poor people with a pre-existing condition are not going to have a market solution.
00:49:44.000But we have in America Medicaid for poor people, Medicare for us old people, and no hospital emergency room turns away any poor person.
00:49:56.000We don't really have a free market system because the rest of it is paid for not by individuals but by insurance companies or governments.
00:50:03.000So what really works is when you go to the doctor and you say, cheat doc, does it really have to cost 200 bucks?
00:50:55.000England, Canada, Australia, and it's true, you don't pay, but the National Health Service in England was created the year I was born, and in some cases they still use that kind of technology, because innovation stops in government.
00:51:12.000You don't get in trouble if you do what you did before.
00:51:16.000You know, most young people won't read books.
00:51:21.000I just released a video on Amazon, Jeff Bezos, and it was...
00:51:28.000I started it with a video defending Bezos against Bernie, saying, how dare Bernie attack this man, who, yes, he's the richest man in the world, but he's made us all richer by lowering prices so much.
00:51:42.000The Fed even lowered its inflation rate.
00:51:44.000And they pay vast amounts in taxes, and their investors pay lots of money in taxes.
00:51:49.000He's good for America, and he's being trashed.
00:51:52.000But I'm midway through writing this piece, and Bezos caves in to the Progressives.
00:51:57.000And says, yeah, I'm going to raise all my workers to 15 bucks an hour.
00:52:07.000He'll find very good workers for that.
00:52:10.000But then he goes on and says, I'm going to lobby like another craven opportunist rather than a capitalist.
00:52:17.000I'm going to lobby government to force every company to pay $15 to get rid of the competitive advantage my competitors would have.
00:52:24.000And since I got lots of robots replacing workers, I'm going to really crush these guys if they have to pay $15 an hour.
00:52:32.000Capitalism's biggest enemies are often capitalists.
00:52:35.000Yeah, and this is, I think, a great point that libertarians I wish would make more often, because the kind of pie-in-the-sky, rosy view of free markets is always that people are going to act morally within free markets.
00:52:46.000But the truth is there are a bunch of people, as long as there's a big government capacity out there, who are going to take advantage of that.
00:52:51.000This is why when folks say, well, big business is capitalist, like, have you been watching big business?
00:52:57.000Human beings are willing to take advantage of each other, which is why you do need, and I keep coming back to this, and I think that this is the, not to promote my own ideology, but I'm going to because it's my show, that you do need a tremendous focus on bringing up virtuous people in a free system if the free system is going to last, because otherwise people are just going to try and pervert The system for their own ends, which is exactly what you're talking about with Bezos.
00:53:21.000And when people say crony capitalism, that's not crony capitalism, that's economic fascism.
00:53:25.000It's exactly the same sort of state-sponsored monopolism that you were seeing in early, you know, post-Weimar Germany.
00:53:32.000So it's really, I think it's necessary for libertarians, and I include myself in this number, to spend an awful lot of time teaching people that virtue is necessary.
00:53:43.000And that's why, you know, the markets are great.
00:53:45.000But this is where I think Adam Smith differs from the Lord Mandeville bees metaphor.
00:53:53.000Adam Smith recognizes... I don't know the Lord.
00:53:55.000There's a very famous... There's a tract that was written right before Adam Smith all about... I forget the name of the tract.
00:54:03.000It was written by Mandeville and it was basically the... It's a piece of poetry.
00:54:07.000It's like 500 lines about the economy of the bees.
00:54:10.000And his basic idea is that economies develop because people have vices.
00:54:17.000In other words, you want to buy a nice piece of jewelry, and therefore, this creates economic growth because you want something that you didn't have before, and maybe it's coming from selfishness or greed, right?
00:54:26.000It's sort of an objective disposition.
00:54:28.000So my wanting it would be the vice in this particular scenario.
00:54:32.000But what Adam Smith says, and he's correct, is that while that's true with regard to vices that are not inherently damaging to the system, there are vices that are inherently damaging to the system.
00:54:42.000And so we have to teach people that freedom can only be preserved by people who actually spend an awful lot of time thinking about virtue.
00:54:53.000Or put into one of my five-minute videos.
00:54:55.000Yeah, well, let's talk about, for a second, the changes... It's hard for a Bezos to resist.
00:55:00.000He's almost not doing duty to his shareholders when there's this monster government over here doling out... Put your headquarters here, I'll give you a tax break.
00:55:11.000In some ways, he'd be a fool not to ask for it.
00:55:13.000The only solution is to shrink the state.
00:55:17.000And why did Japan and Germany do so well after World War II?
00:55:21.000Because we bombed them to smithereens and they had to start over.
00:55:24.000And they got rid of all the guilds and the special interests that were holding progress back.
00:55:50.000There's perhaps no one who proclaims the glory of capitalism more than radio host and financial guru, Dave Ramsey.
00:55:55.000As a best-selling author of multiple books, including the widely popular book, The Total Money Makeover, the host of a nationally syndicated radio show and podcast, The Dave Ramsey Show, and the creator of classes and training, like Financial Peace University, Dave Ramsey is a figure of eliminating debt and reaching financial prosperity.
00:56:11.000Having had great successes, not without hardship in the business world, Dave now spends his time passing on the knowledge he has acquired as a proponent of personal responsibility to achieve personal success.
00:56:22.000I know so many people who have turned their lives around because they followed Dave's steps to success.
00:56:27.000His realistic view of human nature and his reality-based view that you have to take personal, responsible decisions rather than blaming the system is a refreshing one in this particularly system-based thinking time.
00:56:39.000In episode 36 of the show, Dave and I discussed the myth of cheating your way to the top in business and other victim mentalities, the data on life choices that lead to success, and how wealth equality is actually not fair.
00:56:51.000When it comes to kind of personal character, how much do you think that financial decisions are about education of people to make the right decisions, and how much is it about actually being able to put off what you want for what you need.
00:58:17.000You know, one of the things that I think is so fascinating about your approach is that it is an approach that is driven by personal responsibility.
00:58:22.000So much of what's going on in the country, in politics generally, is driven by precisely the opposite attitude.
00:58:30.000I'm in politics full-time, and it seems like politicians make bank off of basically telling people that nothing they do is their own responsibility, and that everything that is wrong in their life can be blamed on outside forces.
00:58:41.000In America, how much of what's bad in people's lives do you think can generally be blamed on the decisions they make, and how much can be blamed on outside forces, if you had to balance that out?
00:58:52.000Well, I think you can be born into a situation where you don't, you know, I grew up in a neighborhood where people said stuff like, the little man can't get ahead.
00:59:11.000I sure hope we can elect a, you know, a president or a congressman will take care of us, because the little man just can't get ahead on his own.
01:00:08.000I'll do it for you. And there's a different message there in that ideology.
01:00:11.000But you know the problem is if you start to believe someone else is going to fix your life, whoever it is, your employer, your mommy, the president, the Congress, you're screwed. Yeah well this is one of the things I really fear because I am seeing it rise on both the left and the right. There's a sort of new right-wing populist movement that suggests okay well you know all the problems that you're having life you didn't get married because you couldn't afford it.
01:00:31.000And it's like, well, maybe you should have made some different decisions.
01:00:34.000And single motherhood is not a financial decision.
01:00:36.000It's not that you got pregnant out of wedlock because you couldn't afford it.
01:00:40.000The classic studies are that 97% of the 30-year-olds that graduated from school, high school, Before they got married, and got married before they had a kid.
01:01:23.000I think that the supposed crisis that we're having in terms of happiness, the rise in the opioid epidemic, although some of that is due to bad diagnoses and people being given medical opioids and all of that, the rise in suicide, the rise in single motherhood, that in the end, these are mostly personal problems.
01:01:38.000These are people making bad decisions, and they're making bad decisions because they've been taught by society, by the government, by the culture, that if you make a bad decision, it's not really your fault.
01:01:47.000And at the beginning of wisdom is recognizing that it's probably your fault.
01:01:51.000Where do you think things start to fall apart, or do you think things are really not that falling apart?
01:01:58.000There's pockets that are falling apart, and there's sometimes a malaise or a fog over some things, but then there's entire segments of the population that are booming like never before.
01:02:08.000They're having the best years of their life right now, and maybe did even under Obama, you know?
01:02:13.000They had the best years of their life.
01:02:15.000But, I mean, we share a book in our faiths, in my Christian faith through Jewish faith, the Book of Proverbs, the Book of Wisdom.
01:02:22.000And all throughout the Book of Wisdom, the fool is juxtaposed with the wise.
01:02:27.000The wise does this, the fool does this.
01:02:29.000Wisdom is this, and wisdom is, in the Hebrew, you know this probably, is the art of living life well, is really what it means.
01:03:00.000And then when I quit doing that, I actually saved money.
01:03:02.000I had some money in the house of the wise.
01:03:05.000I mean, it was just, it's remarkable, isn't it?
01:03:07.000And so the art of living life well, and when you start to believe that if I plant corn, I'm going to get corn, if I'm going to reap what I sow, if I'm going to live in a cause and effect world where I actually can impact my own destiny, there's variables around me.
01:03:40.000There's always, you know, I've got a southern drawl, and for years in the radio business, now we've got 600 stations, but for years people in Boston thought we broadcast from a double-wide because we were in Tennessee, you know, with no shoes, you know?
01:03:50.000I mean, there's all these isms, right?
01:03:52.000Everybody's got an ism they've got to bust through.
01:03:54.000I don't care who you are, but if you truly believe because of your ism, whatever it is, that you can't win, you're not going to get corn if you plant corn, then why would you ever plant corn?
01:04:08.000Yeah, the way that I've put it on my own show is that I root for reality because there's nothing else to root for.
01:04:14.000There's a lot of folks out there who are rooting against reality.
01:04:16.000And you see this not only in politics, but you see it in culture, just the general thing where people look at their life and they go, X or Y isn't fair.
01:04:22.000Here's a person who's really rich, and I'm not really rich, and that's unfair.
01:04:25.000And you see politicians say this without any solution.
01:05:07.000But, you know, I was arguing with this lady, liberal lady, and she was mad at me because I had made a lot of money selling books to people, helping them with money.
01:05:16.000And she's like, well, you're taking advantage of all these people that are broke.
01:05:18.000And I said, You know, when I sold 5 books for $10, nobody was mad.
01:05:24.000But all you people got pissed off when I sold 10 million of them.
01:05:45.000Which means they did something in the marketplace.
01:05:49.000So the American dream is alive and well.
01:05:50.000And one of the things that I love about your show is that you actually do defend the morality of the free market.
01:05:54.000And that's something that very few people are willing to do in this day and age.
01:05:58.000It's all about the shortcomings of the free market, income inequality, the idea that people are being exploited.
01:06:02.000And it seems like they're coming from this perspective that even basic elements of life, in the intelligent gaps, this should be somehow rectified.
01:06:11.000And you see this with, they'll use Bill Gates as an example.
01:06:13.000How is there a Bill Gates in this country who's worth this much money, and then you'll see somebody who's worth no money?
01:06:17.000And you know, you say, well, he's contributed more.
01:06:20.000He's, he's, and they say, well, but that wasn't his choice.
01:07:01.000And she said, my parents told me my whole life, it doesn't matter where I'm coming from, what matters is where you're going.
01:07:07.000And you just decide that's what we're going to do.
01:07:10.000But that has all this all the way back to the do with this thing called hope and this belief that if I plant corn, I shouldn't be shocked if I get corn.
01:07:17.000If I plant nothing, I can't gripe about the farmer who planted corn and was out there toiling to kill the weeds and in the hot sun.
01:07:25.000Meanwhile, I'm standing over here watching the guy.
01:07:27.000And then I go, well, it's not fair that he's got some corn.
01:07:30.000I mean, I wonder if some of the complaints that are cropping up, particularly among young people, and I speak a lot on college campuses where there are a lot of young people who make exactly these complaints, that this is coming as the result of a breakdown in religious community.
01:07:40.000Because, you know, I'm a religious person, you're a religious person, there are a lot of rich people, people who have been, you know, I've been a lot poorer, I've been, you know, I've done well.
01:07:49.000That's changed, but I've watched the same thing happen to people in my community who I grew up with, and so I know all of them.
01:07:54.000And so it's a lot harder to be jealous of the guy that you've known and grown up with and he can go to for help than some random guy on the street who you have no association with.
01:08:02.000And as we fragment as a community, there's more of a feeling of, well, maybe that guy owes me money, as opposed to, well, I've known my next-door neighbor my entire life.
01:08:10.000We go to the same church or the same synagogue.
01:08:12.000The one area of equality that matters more than any, we are equal, which is we are all equal before God, right?
01:08:18.000With that breakdown, I'm wondering if maybe that's what's caused a lot of the feeling of dispossession.
01:08:23.000Well, and it also contributes to racism.
01:08:26.000Also contributes to arguments between religion.
01:08:30.000I mean, if you sit down and spend time with people and actually develop a relationship with people that have different situations than you've got, you're going to learn there's good people and there's bad people in almost every one of those things.
01:08:41.000I know wealthy people all over the world that are worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
01:08:44.000They're some of the best people on the planet.
01:08:46.000And I know some of them that will cut your throat.
01:09:02.000If you've enjoyed hearing from our past guests in this collection, be sure to check out their full episodes and hear more of The Conversation.
01:09:07.000Links to those are in our description.
01:09:09.000This is the last collection of great moments from the Sunday Special we're bringing you.
01:09:12.000We will see you here again in two weeks with brand new episodes of the Sunday Special.
01:09:16.000We're super excited for our upcoming guests.