The Ben Shapiro Show - Does The Free Market Work? | Ep. 497

00:00:00.000 Hello there.

00:00:00.000 American Split.

00:00:01.000 I'm the gun control walkout, the right splits on free trade, and we'll check the mailbag and do many other fun and amusing things.

00:00:07.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:08.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:13.000 So if you hadn't noticed, I'm just in one of those moods because I watched the Avengers Infinity Trailer.

00:00:18.000 And all I can say is, does every character from every movie have to appear in one movie?

00:00:22.000 Should we just make, like, isn't that called life?

00:00:24.000 Where we're all in the same movie together?

00:00:26.000 But I guess that's the way we're gonna do movies now.

00:00:29.000 So I'm doing movie mashups.

00:00:30.000 I think Sleepless in Seattle and Contagion should be in the same universe.

00:00:33.000 Chief and Meg Ryan finally find stomachs.

00:00:36.000 And then they both die of a horrible disease.

00:00:39.000 Okay, we'll get to actual news in just a second.

00:00:41.000 But first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Skillshare.

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00:02:00.000 Alrighty, so.

00:02:02.000 The fallout from yesterday's gun control walkout continues, and I'm getting tons of emails from kids who feel like they were essentially discriminated against at these walkouts.

00:02:11.000 I just got one from a kid who wrote to me and said that he wanted to—that he wasn't intending on being political at this walkout.

00:02:19.000 He waited until people brought out the gun control signs, then he brought out a Gadsden flag, and he was immediately shut down by his school.

00:02:24.000 He was immediately told he had to put it away.

00:02:26.000 I don't know.

00:02:45.000 In fact, there are many teachers who are not in favor of this.

00:02:46.000 And there are lots of states like California where you have to be a member of a teacher's union in order to teach.

00:02:50.000 And if you are a member of a teacher's union, you are expected to toe the party line.

00:02:53.000 One of the close family friends of ours growing up was a guy who was a member of the teacher's unions because he had to be.

00:03:00.000 And he would constantly get the updates from the teacher's unions, and they were all left-wing updates.

00:03:04.000 This is a coordinated effort from the top.

00:03:07.000 And it really is quite awful.

00:03:10.000 One teacher has actually been suspended for questioning the gun control walkout.

00:03:14.000 Her name is Julianne Benzel, and she says that she opened up the discussion in her classroom about the politics of the protest, and she was subsequently told to stay home on Wednesday because the administration didn't like it.

00:03:24.000 Here's what she had to say on CBS 13 Local.

00:03:26.000 This is in Northern California.

00:03:28.000 Julianne Benzel says she never discouraged her students from participating in National School Walkout, but she did question whether it's appropriate for a school to support a protest against gun violence if it's not willing to support all protests.

00:03:42.000 It's the best example I thought of at the time.

00:03:44.000 If a group of students nationwide or even locally decided, I want to walk out of school for 17 minutes and go in the quad area and protest abortion. 0.59

00:03:55.000 OK, and she's, of course, exactly right.

00:03:56.000 If the students decided to walk out and protest abortion, they would have no capacity to—none of the teachers would sponsor it, right?

00:04:01.000 But because this is a national gun, anti-gun walkout, all the students were expected to walk out.

00:04:06.000 I've gotten notes from students who say that they wanted to stay in class because they didn't feel like creating a hubbub.

00:04:11.000 They were just going to stay inside the school.

00:04:13.000 And they've actually been getting notes from teachers, you know, threats of suspension for staying in the school during the walkout.

00:04:18.000 So it's really astonishing stuff.

00:04:20.000 And it demonstrates once and for all that something really nefarious has happened at a lot of our public schools.

00:04:25.000 I don't know.

00:04:39.000 I've been taken over by the left.

00:04:41.000 And this is why so many parents are pulling their kids out of public school and putting their kids in private school.

00:04:44.000 They're saying, you're not even doing a good job of ensuring that my kids are getting an education, but you can certainly ensure that my kids get to walk out of class and miss class in order to make a political statement that has nothing to do with their education.

00:04:55.000 Because of course, these kids can't vote.

00:04:57.000 Their parents can.

00:04:58.000 If their parents want to do something, they are free to lobby.

00:05:00.000 Why these kids should be leaving school in order to do what they're doing is beyond me.

00:05:04.000 It doesn't seem like it makes any sense at all.

00:05:07.000 These teachers are political actors, and teachers unions are political activist schools of thought.

00:05:11.000 That's what they do.

00:05:13.000 If you look at just how teachers unions work, the way they bargain with the state is they are basically democratic tools.

00:05:17.000 And that was predicted long ago by Ludwig von Mises in his book, Bureaucracy, talking about how any employee of the state ends up being a propaganda outlet.

00:05:26.000 Thank you.

00:05:44.000 We're good to go.

00:06:07.000 With all of the union dues that the teachers pay in, and the state mandates that you pay your union dues in order to work.

00:06:13.000 So you have this guild, and this guild is mandated by the state.

00:06:16.000 You have to work for the guild in order to work for the schools.

00:06:18.000 And then the guild takes some of your money and pays those politicians to keep that system going, keep that rigged system going.

00:06:24.000 And those politicians get to push legislation, and all they ask in return is that the teachers' unions push all of their ancillary causes.

00:06:30.000 And that's what a lot of these teachers' unions are doing. 1.00

00:06:32.000 It's really shocking and appalling.

00:06:34.000 And again,

00:06:35.000 Most of these students who are walking out have no political bent one way or another.

00:06:37.000 It's not like most of these students who are walking out are passionate about gun control.

00:06:40.000 The vast majority of students who walked out probably have no idea anything about gun control.

00:06:44.000 They probably don't know any facts about gun control. 0.99

00:06:46.000 In fact, there are some students who are walking out just because they want to walk out and go do stupid things. 0.99

00:06:50.000 Like this is film from Chicago. 0.99

00:06:52.000 Students walked out and they proceeded to trash a Walmart for no reason.

00:06:56.000 Oh my God, look how they tore up our store.

00:07:01.000 Insulanti's.

00:07:03.000 Kids!

00:07:04.000 She ran to the bathroom and said, I'm taking off my vest. 0.98

00:07:06.000 Oh my God, look at this s***. 0.99

00:07:09.000 Oh my God. 0.99

00:07:10.000 They got the noodle palette.

00:07:12.000 They didn't get, they gon' make us work today.

00:07:18.000 Oh my God.

00:07:21.000 So these students charged into a Walmart and they upturned all the stalls.

00:07:24.000 I like the security guards laughing about it.

00:07:25.000 Well done, security guards. 1.00

00:07:27.000 But it's just demonstrative of the fact that young people sometimes are stupid. 0.99

00:07:31.000 This does not mean that all young people who walked out don't have any political knowledge. 1.00

00:07:34.000 Some of them do.

00:07:34.000 Some of them are politically active.

00:07:35.000 Some who oppose my position.

00:07:37.000 Some who support my position.

00:07:38.000 Some who are in favor of Second Amendment rights.

00:07:39.000 Some who are in favor of gun control.

00:07:41.000 But to pretend that all of these students are the wisest and fairest of all beings, they're the elves in our little morality play of Middle Earth, 1.00

00:07:49.000 It's just it's foolish and it's not true at all, especially when you look at what actually happened in Broward County.

00:07:55.000 So this video came out yesterday and it really is shocking. 0.93

00:07:58.000 It's video from Broward County of the sheriff's deputy.

00:08:01.000 This is the on school site deputy.

00:08:04.000 He obviously, first of all, does not look like he should be on school site security.

00:08:09.000 One of the big problems that you see when you talk about in-school security is very often these are rented cops.

00:08:14.000 Very often these are people who could not pass a physical.

00:08:17.000 These are people who could not run a block without losing their breath.

00:08:20.000 It's not everybody who's a school deputy, obviously, but it is true for a certain number of them.

00:08:24.000 And it is important that you have some people who actually are in good shape, know what they're doing.

00:08:28.000 This guy I don't feel bad ripping on because you'll see in the video that they hear the gunshots, he takes off on his little golf cart to go over to the area where the shooting is happening, and then you'll see in the video he stands around and does nothing for 20 minutes.

00:08:40.000 Here's what it looked like when the Broward County Sheriff's Office released the tape.

00:08:45.000 So you can see him.

00:08:46.000 It's a silent video, so I'll narrate it.

00:08:48.000 You can see him, Scott Peterson, the BSO, school resource officer, who looks like he's maybe in his 50s, and he drives over to the area where the shooting is happening, and then he proceeds to legitimately just stand outside the building.

00:09:00.000 He's just standing around outside the building doing nothing.

00:09:03.000 I mean, it's an amazing thing, right?

00:09:06.000 And there's part of this video that we cut out where you can actually see students fleeing the building through another one of these doors.

00:09:11.000 Does he charge in?

00:09:11.000 Does he do anything?

00:09:12.000 No.

00:09:12.000 And according to the Broward County Sheriff's Office, the orders that are given to their officers are that if there is an active school shooting, you are supposed to engage.

00:09:19.000 You are not supposed to stand outside.

00:09:21.000 So the talk about how these guys were told that they were supposed to stand outside, how that was the policy of the department, that was not true.

00:09:27.000 So there's one problem with the department with regard to policy, and that is this policy that says we're not going to arrest anyone because we don't want to increase the arrest statistics on students.

00:09:36.000 We want to show that our students are doing really well, and so we'll just pretend that no crime is going on.

00:09:40.000 But this one looks like it was on Scott Peterson and not on the Broward County Sheriff's Office, per se.

00:09:44.000 Nonetheless, this is not stopping the agenda from rolling forward.

00:09:47.000 Mika Brzezinski over on MSNBC, she says the NRA should be sued.

00:09:51.000 Some things have changed, at least in the state of Florida.

00:09:53.000 The NRA, with their inflammatory ads and threatening ads, should be sued.

00:09:58.000 Okay, on what grounds should the NRA be sued?

00:10:00.000 In order for you to sue somebody, you actually have to have legal grounds.

00:10:03.000 There actually has to be a legal purpose for the suit.

00:10:05.000 Otherwise, it'll be thrown out.

00:10:07.000 But according to so many people on the left, lawsuits happen when you're angry at something.

00:10:10.000 So you don't like the NRA's ads, you get to throw it out.

00:10:12.000 Okay, the NRA was not responsible for this shooting.

00:10:14.000 One of the most astonishing things I saw yesterday was Code Pink calling for an end to funding for JROTC on campus.

00:10:19.000 They were saying, well, we don't want campuses militarized.

00:10:22.000 We need to stop funding JROTC.

00:10:24.000 There were three kids who were killed who were members of JROTC, and one of those kids actually threw himself in front of bullets to save other kids. 0.99

00:10:30.000 While this idiot cop was standing around outside doing nothing, 0.98

00:10:33.000 One of these students, a 15-year-old, he ran out there and he tried to stop the shooter. 1.00

00:10:38.000 He got in the way of the bullets.

00:10:39.000 He saved his students.

00:10:40.000 He died in the process.

00:10:41.000 And Code Pink is saying we should get rid of JROTC?

00:10:44.000 Again, the big problem with evil is that evil cannot be prevented simply by legal mechanisms, usually.

00:10:50.000 Evil can only be prevented by good people.

00:10:52.000 It can only be prevented by good people doing the right things.

00:10:55.000 And unfortunately, the left does not want to recognize the real possibility of human evil.

00:11:00.000 They're just not interested in recognizing that possibility.

00:11:03.000 It's pretty, it's pretty horrible.

00:11:05.000 So meanwhile, President Trump is embracing this new bill, the school safety bill.

00:11:11.000 And the school safety bill really does not have much gun control attached.

00:11:14.000 So everybody on the left is, of course, very upset about that.

00:11:16.000 They thought that President Trump was going to break the impasse.

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00:12:47.000 I don't know.

00:13:09.000 Here's what's in the school safety bill.

00:13:11.000 So it passed the House.

00:13:12.000 It has the support of a wide variety of senators, and it doesn't do anything about gun control per se, but it does do some things about school security.

00:13:19.000 So there is no parallel measure pending in the Senate.

00:13:22.000 Right now, they're trying to push gun control in the Senate, of course, but that's not going to happen.

00:13:26.000 This bill is instead a bill that doesn't allow, that is seeking to increase security at schools.

00:13:35.000 So it does not,

00:13:38.000 Let me bring up the actual provisions of the bill right here.

00:13:41.000 So the school safety bill

00:14:04.000 Let's see, it passed by an overwhelming margin, by the way, in the House of Representatives.

00:14:08.000 It has not yet been brought up, as I say, before the Senate.

00:14:13.000 Again, all the people on the left are very upset because they think the only measure that can be taken here is going to be gun control.

00:14:18.000 But it steers clear of the demands of gun control advocates.

00:14:22.000 It is the Stop School Violence Act.

00:14:24.000 It provides $50 million a year for a new federal grant program to train students, teachers, and law enforcement on how to spot and report

00:14:30.000 Okay, so this is a good start.

00:14:31.000 But they say this doesn't do enough.

00:14:31.000 Republicans say this is only the beginning.

00:14:33.000 This is the first step.

00:14:55.000 And OK, these should be the first steps.

00:14:57.000 Obviously, I think that the states should actually take precedence here.

00:15:00.000 I'm not sure that the federal government should be leading the way on any of this stuff in the first place.

00:15:04.000 But I think that it is it is pretty clear that these that the school, the school safety bill should pass with flying colors through the Senate.

00:15:12.000 OK, meanwhile.

00:15:14.000 This is another story that I think is worth talking about.

00:15:18.000 Huffington Post has done something pretty amazing.

00:15:20.000 So, Huffington Post is obviously a very left-wing outlet.

00:15:25.000 And the deputy opinion editor of the Huffington Post is a person named Chloe Angle.

00:15:28.000 Okay, Chloe Angle triumphantly tweeted out the demographics of people they have published this year.

00:15:33.000 It just shows how crazy the left has become with regard to their politics of intersectionality.

00:15:37.000 Here's what they say.

00:15:56.000 And then, say, we also wanted to raise Latink's representation to match or exceed the U.S.

00:16:00.000 population.

00:16:00.000 We didn't achieve that goal, but we're moving firmly in the right direction.

00:16:03.000 Making the improvements we made took work, no doubt about it.

00:16:06.000 We all tapped our networks and made moves to expand our collective Rolodex.

00:16:09.000 I check our numbers at the end of the week because it's easy to lose track or imagine you're doing better than you really are, and the numbers don't lie.

00:16:14.000 The numbers also don't tell the whole story about disability, geography, socioeconomics, and more.

00:16:18.000 But the work is not onerous, and it's definitely not impossible.

00:16:21.000 If we can do it, every other opinion page can do it, too.

00:16:23.000 And if you have an op-ed to pitch, here's how you can do that.

00:16:25.000 So what I love about this is that the deputy opinion page editor over at the Huffington Post doesn't make any case with regard to the quality of the submissions over at Huffington Post.

00:16:34.000 There's nothing to be said here about how great Huffington Post's quality is.

00:16:37.000 Instead, all they care about is the racial breakdown of the people writing, which used to be called racial quotas and were obviously Latinx.

00:16:43.000 Sorry, not Latinx.

00:16:44.000 OK, this is all supposed to be a guarantor not of quality on the page, but instead a guarantor of

00:16:54.000 Of demographic equality.

00:17:23.000 Interesting stuff.

00:17:24.000 Okay.

00:17:25.000 Meanwhile, President Trump continues to forge forth on his anti-free trade program.

00:17:31.000 And this is obviously not good policy.

00:17:34.000 Tucker Carlson made the best case on this last night.

00:17:37.000 There are a bunch of folks who are on the Trump side of the aisle who are trying to make the case for tariffs, who are trying to make the case for protectionism.

00:17:44.000 My problem with tariffs and protectionism, obviously, is that they believe in the power of centralized government.

00:17:49.000 Here's Tucker trying to make his strongest case.

00:17:51.000 For technology and trade being the downfall of American civilization.

00:17:57.000 It's not a horrible case, but I don't think it's a convincing one either.

00:18:00.000 Lawmakers in both parties, for example, have heartily embraced self-driving vehicles and drone delivery of packages.

00:18:07.000 It's all impressive technology, but what would be the effect on employment?

00:18:11.000 Has anyone asked that?

00:18:13.000 There are more than 3 million professional truck drivers in this country.

00:18:16.000 It is the most common job in the majority of American states.

00:18:20.000 More than 90% of drivers are men.

00:18:23.000 Thanks to technology, many of these men are about to lose their jobs.

00:18:26.000 That's a lot of unemployed Americans.

00:18:28.000 That's a lot of broken families.

00:18:31.000 Washington is not worried at all about this.

00:18:33.000 Lawmakers and business leaders assure us that those truck drivers will be just fine.

00:18:37.000 They'll find something else to do.

00:18:39.000 Something better, in fact, with higher pay!

00:18:42.000 And maybe they will.

00:18:43.000 But keep in mind, our leaders said the very same thing about manufacturing jobs 30 years ago.

00:18:48.000 Okay, so this is, what Tucker points out here is, I think, a generalized argument that can always be made in favor of centralized government.

00:18:58.000 What he's saying is there's a group of people in the United States, they are lower educated white men, basically.

00:19:04.000 These are people who are living in the middle of the country and people who are working in non-technology jobs.

00:19:10.000 These are people who are working on lines.

00:19:12.000 These are people who are truck drivers.

00:19:13.000 And these people are going to be hurt by technology and trade and we have to do something for these people.

00:19:18.000 But the implication is...

00:19:20.000 I think so.

00:19:35.000 I think so.

00:19:50.000 There are lots of people who make a lot of money in their jobs, and there are lots of people who make very little money, and all of them go to the same church.

00:19:56.000 So, when Tucker suggests that people who are earning a lower wage are suddenly going to not stick around for their kids, I'm not sure I see the correlation there, or at least I'm going to resist the correlation.

00:20:07.000 The other thing is that this is not really a case for tariffs.

00:20:10.000 It's not really a case for shutting down trade or shutting down technology, so I'm not sure what Tucker is actually arguing for here.

00:20:15.000 I agree that a lot of this stuff is a problem.

00:20:17.000 I agree that we have a problem with people who are not lawyers or doctors, people who don't have higher education degrees.

00:20:24.000 And what do we do with them?

00:20:25.000 As the technology develops and they lose their jobs, what do we do with those folks?

00:20:29.000 But the answer is not to stifle the technology.

00:20:31.000 Tucker seems to be making the case against self-driving trucks.

00:20:34.000 Okay, but you could have made that exact same case against cars back in 1910.

00:20:38.000 You could have said there are a bunch of wheelwrights who are going to lose their jobs.

00:20:41.000 This is true with every technological change.

00:20:43.000 Every single one.

00:20:43.000 There are a bunch of people who lost their jobs over at AT&T when people stopped using landlines.

00:20:47.000 There are a bunch of folks who lost their jobs when dial-up internet went away.

00:20:52.000 There are a bunch of people who lose their jobs when any new technology is developed.

00:20:56.000 There are a bunch of people who lose their jobs.

00:20:57.000 The question is, are a consummate number of jobs created on the other end?

00:21:01.000 Are there more jobs that are created on the other end, or just as many jobs created?

00:21:04.000 And, by the way, that isn't even really the question.

00:21:06.000 The question is, does quality of life go up for the vast majority of Americans every time there's a technological change?

00:21:11.000 Because the goal of an economy is not to create jobs.

00:21:13.000 The goal of jobs is to create an economy.

00:21:15.000 Meaning, the purpose of a job is to create a product or service someone else wants to buy.

00:21:19.000 It is not the job of the economy, per se, or the government, per se, to ensure that anyone has a job.

00:21:23.000 If you get that polarity backwards, you end up with communism, where everybody has a job, but they're not producing anything anybody wants.

00:21:29.000 Centralized government is not the answer here.

00:21:30.000 Now, there is a piece that I referenced a little bit yesterday I want to go through in a little more detail here.

00:21:35.000 Regarding tariffs, there's a piece over at the Journal of American Greatness.

00:21:38.000 The Journal of American Greatness was an outlet devoted to President Trump's purported philosophy.

00:21:43.000 And it's kind of lost some of its luster because President Trump doesn't have really a coherent philosophy.

00:21:47.000 But there's a piece there that was taking on something I said on the show about free trade.

00:21:52.000 And this piece is by a guy named Spencer Morrison, who's a law student and editor-in-chief of the National Economics Editorial, which I've never heard of.

00:21:58.000 And here's what he says.

00:22:00.000 He says, the piece is titled, Why Ben Shapiro is Wrong on Free Trade.

00:22:05.000 Let's just make something clear.

00:22:06.000 My perspective on free trade is backed by essentially 100% of economists.

00:22:10.000 There are very few economists who believe in tariffs.

00:22:12.000 When I say very few, I mean that if you polled actual economists, the number of economists who would dismiss free trade in favor of tariffs, that number is very close to zero.

00:22:22.000 Here is what this article says.

00:22:24.000 I think it's worth discussing in detail.

00:22:25.000 So, Morrison argues in favor of tariffs.

00:22:27.000 And he begins with an analysis of a three-minute segment of video from this podcast in which I talked about the flaws in tariff-based economics.

00:22:33.000 I specifically talked in that segment about the fact that trade deficits don't matter.

00:22:37.000 I don't know.

00:22:56.000 Now, obviously, I've done a lot of work on tariffs on the show, but there's a new argument that Morrison presents that I think that you should know about just so that you know what you're talking about when you talk about free trade.

00:23:04.000 So, first, Morrison sort of misrepresents my argument.

00:23:07.000 He suggests that I think trade deficits are an act of good.

00:23:09.000 I've never said trade deficits are an act of good.

00:23:11.000 They're not an act of good.

00:23:11.000 They're not an act of bad.

00:23:12.000 They're just a thing.

00:23:13.000 You sometimes have a trade deficit with your grocery store, sometimes you're a contractor to your grocery store and you have a trade surplus.

00:23:19.000 None of that means that anything inherently bad or good is going on.

00:23:23.000 As I've quoted before, Thomas Sowell says this, In general, international deficits and surpluses have had virtually no correlation with the performance of most nations' economies.

00:23:31.000 Germany and France have had international trade surpluses while their unemployment rates were in double digits.

00:23:35.000 Japan's post-war rise to economic prominence on the world stage included years when it ran deficits as well as years when it ran surpluses.

00:23:42.000 The U.S.

00:23:42.000 was the biggest debtor nation in the world during its rise to industrial supremacy, became a creditor as a result of lending money to its European allies during the First World War, and has been both a debtor and a creditor at various times since.

00:23:52.000 Through it all, the American standard of living has remained the highest in the world, unaffected by whether it was a creditor or a debtor nation.

00:23:58.000 Now, Morrison, this author, claims that I have called Trump a flip-flopper on free trade, which I never have.

00:24:03.000 He's been very clear that he's anti-free trade.

00:24:05.000 But here's the central argument that's made, and this is the one that I think we should spend some time talking about, just so that you know the arguments that are being made against free trade and why they are wrong.

00:24:12.000 So here's what Morrison says.

00:24:14.000 He talks about comparative advantage.

00:24:15.000 Comparative advantage is this idea.

00:24:17.000 Let's say that I, Ben Shapiro, I am great at making this podcast, but I also happen to be very good at growing oranges.

00:24:24.000 And I'm pretty good at it.

00:24:25.000 Not like the best, but pretty good, right?

00:24:27.000 And let's see that I can even make, I can even grow oranges better than my local grocery store.

00:24:32.000 But I am the very best at making this podcast.

00:24:34.000 So every minute that I spend not growing oranges is a minute that I spend on the podcast.

00:24:38.000 And every minute that I spend on the podcast is a minute I spend not growing oranges.

00:24:41.000 Should I spend my time doing the podcast or should I spend my time growing oranges?

00:24:44.000 The answer, of course, is that I should take all the money I'm earning from the podcast and go buy some oranges at a cheaper price.

00:24:50.000 The time value, the monetary value of my time is higher doing the thing that I am best at, even if it means that I'm buying from somebody else who's specializing in an area where I'm still the best, but it's just not the best thing I do.

00:25:02.000 I'm better at the podcast than I am at growing oranges, therefore I should spend more of my time doing the podcast than growing oranges, even if the second best guy at growing oranges

00:25:09.000 Is not as good as I am at it, right?

00:25:11.000 He should specialize in growing oranges.

00:25:12.000 I should specialize in podcasting and then we should trade services for one another.

00:25:15.000 I should give him a subscription for $9.99 a month and he should give me a bag of oranges, right?

00:25:19.000 This is the idea of comparative advantage.

00:25:22.000 So here's what Morrison says.

00:25:23.000 His comparative advantage is an elegant theory, but too often is domain specific.

00:25:26.000 It only works when certain preconditions are met.

00:25:28.000 For example, capital must be immobile for the theory to apply, meaning that I can't just take my capital and go buy a

00:25:38.000 Um, an orange farm in Brazil.

00:25:41.000 Shapiro ignores this crucial limiting factor and applies comparative advantage to just about everything.

00:25:45.000 This is his root error.

00:25:46.000 For example, comparative advantage suggests the key to getting rich is to specialize production regardless of what you produce.

00:25:51.000 That is, a country with comparative advantage in growing soybeans should focus on growing more soybeans, while a country with comparative advantage in manufacturing semiconductors should focus on manufacturing more semiconductors.

00:26:01.000 In either case, this supposes their relative wealth will correlate with the degree of specialization as opposed to the complexity of their production.

00:26:07.000 This is objectively wrong.

00:26:09.000 So what he says is that if you're a country that produces semiconductors, you're going to be richer than a country that produces soybeans.

00:26:14.000 There are a bunch of problems with this.

00:26:15.000 So first of all, it is important to note that countries don't just make soybeans or semiconductors.

00:26:22.000 They make lots of products.

00:26:23.000 Countries are not individuals.

00:26:25.000 Countries are broad amalgams of individuals, all of whom are in different industries.

00:26:30.000 So this guy says, well, this guy makes the obvious point that if you grow bananas, you're going to make less money than if you make computers.

00:26:35.000 This is obviously true.

00:26:37.000 OK, but of course countries that develop higher profit sectors are going to have higher growth rates.

00:26:42.000 And of course, the decisions that you make now are going to have impact on the future development of industry.

00:26:45.000 So this is his second argument.

00:26:46.000 He says, OK, so granted that a country that grows bananas makes less money than a country that makes semiconductors.

00:26:52.000 So if you are a banana growing country, comparative advantage would suggest you keep growing bananas.

00:26:56.000 But that means that you're never going to become a semiconductor making country.

00:26:59.000 Therefore, what you should really do is you should tariff semiconductors.

00:27:02.000 You should put a tariff on foreign semiconductors, and then you should grow your business in semiconductors from the inside.

00:27:07.000 Okay, this neglects a few points.

00:27:09.000 This neglects a few points.

00:27:10.000 First of all, you cannot tell which sectors of an economy are likely to be the most profitable.

00:27:16.000 This is something called, what he's talking about here is a term called path dependency.

00:27:20.000 Path dependency is, you made a mistake, you decided to grow bananas, and now you're stuck growing bananas forever, even if it would be more profitable for you to move into making semiconductors.

00:27:28.000 But this assumes that you can't just stop making bananas and start making semiconductors.

00:27:32.000 It assumes there's no bank that will lend you money if you get a computer education degree to go make semiconductors.

00:27:38.000 This assumes there's no mobility in the economy, which of course is not true.

00:27:42.000 And if the government were to say, listen, we're going to tariff semiconductors, we're going to tax all the banana growers and take all their money, and we're going to use it to subsidize semiconductors, who's to say the government knows which industry is going to grow fastest?

00:27:53.000 When government introduces subsidies into an industry, it usually makes that industry more profitable, but it doesn't end up picking the industry that always works.

00:28:02.000 This is a very important point.

00:28:04.000 Let's take Trump's steel tariffs.

00:28:05.000 Trump thinks the steel industry is very, very important.

00:28:08.000 So he's going to tax all of us, that's what a tariff is, and then he's going to take that money and he's going to give it to the steel industry.

00:28:13.000 It's the same thing as a tax and a subsidy.

00:28:14.000 That's all a tariff is.

00:28:15.000 A tariff is, I'm going to pay more for my car so that my money will go to the steel industry.

00:28:19.000 That's Trump saying he thinks the steel industry is particularly important.

00:28:22.000 But how does Trump know the steel industry is particularly important?

00:28:25.000 How does he know the future of what technological development is going to look like?

00:28:29.000 Now, there's a notion that you have to protect the steel industry from foreign predation. 0.98

00:28:32.000 But why?

00:28:34.000 Why?

00:28:35.000 I mean, for security reasons, you could.

00:28:37.000 But there's no indication that security is the problem here.

00:28:40.000 What's happening here is that Trump likes steel in a way he doesn't like other industries, so he thinks steel ought to be protected.

00:28:44.000 But what does Trump know that the economy doesn't?

00:28:46.000 This is the whole reason centralized government fails.

00:28:48.000 One guy at the top does not know as much about how products and services should move as the entire economy, as this diffused hands of the market, you and I choosing on our own what we want to buy and what we want to sell.

00:29:00.000 You can't tell which sectors are going to be the most profitable, and the government is actually far more likely to lock in particular path dependency.

00:29:06.000 Right now you're path dependent on steel in the United States, or path dependent on semiconductors, than to spur future economic growth.

00:29:13.000 And also, most market lock-in is self-correcting.

00:29:16.000 We develop new products on a routine basis that are different in kind from the products that preceded them.

00:29:21.000 So the argument for path dependency, that you pick a winner and now you're stuck,

00:29:25.000 Or you pick an industry and now you're stuck?

00:29:27.000 It doesn't really hold.

00:29:28.000 The sort of example that people use when they talk about path dependency and trade is the example of your QWERTY keyboard, right?

00:29:34.000 There's this myth that there are two types of keyboard.

00:29:37.000 There's the QWERTY keyboard that everybody has on their laptop, and then there is the Dvorak keyboard that was invented at the same time and supposedly is faster.

00:29:44.000 Number one, there's no evidence that it's faster.

00:29:46.000 Number two, the cost of moving away from the QWERTY keyboard and towards something else have to be taken into account when we say, why don't we switch to a more efficient keyboard?

00:29:54.000 In other words, there are costs.

00:29:56.000 You could say, we should have picked the Dvořák keyboard, that would have been better.

00:30:00.000 But now there are costs attached to switching.

00:30:02.000 So the argument is, well, then maybe government should have subsidized the Dvořák keyboard, for example.

00:30:07.000 But that doesn't make sense, because the government didn't know that Dvořák keyboard was better.

00:30:10.000 And if the market had known that Dvořák keyboard was better, then it would have picked the Dvořák keyboard.

00:30:14.000 But that's not what happened, right?

00:30:16.000 So if we could see the future, the bottom line is that people who are in favor of tariffs think that certain industries are more important than others and that government can see the future and has to protect those industries.

00:30:25.000 But that makes no sense.

00:30:26.000 In 1947, the smart money in the United States would have been on subsidizing

00:30:30.000 Would have been on subsidizing manufacturing, taxing all other industries in the United States to subsidize manufacturing.

00:30:35.000 And that would have been totally wrong.

00:30:36.000 In 1947, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, manufacturing represented a quarter of all GDP production in the United States, finance represented 10.3%, agriculture represented 8%.

00:30:46.000 Those would have been the three industries to dump money into. 0.96

00:30:50.000 But if we had taxed agriculture and finance to finance manufacturing, that would have been stupid. 0.59

00:30:56.000 By 2016, manufacturing had fallen to 11.7% of GDP, and finance represented 21%, agriculture represented 1%.

00:31:04.000 So if we had had the government picking and choosing winners and losers, we would have put our money in the wrong place.

00:31:09.000 This is why central planning usually fails.

00:31:12.000 Paul David of Stanford University writes,

00:31:28.000 Namely, the government should try to pick winners rather than let markets make mistakes.

00:31:31.000 Quite the contrary.

00:31:32.000 Public policy could try to delay the market from committing to the future inextricably before enough information has been obtained about the likely technical or organizational legal implications of an early precedent-setting decision.

00:31:42.000 In other words, government picking and choosing winners actually ensures path dependency.

00:31:46.000 It ensures market lock-in.

00:31:48.000 Impoverishing profit sectors through tariffs in order to dump money into non-competitive industries actually impoverishes your country as a whole.

00:31:55.000 Economic flexibility requires that the government should not impede the free flow of capital within industries.

00:32:02.000 What about the idea that if you're a banana and producing economy, you'll never become a software-producing economy?

00:32:05.000 There's no proof of that.

00:32:07.000 Private lenders will pay the freight for new industries.

00:32:10.000 The United States, again, used to be a manufacturing economy, and then it became a service economy.

00:32:15.000 This happens.

00:32:16.000 It happens all the time.

00:32:18.000 So the central argument here just doesn't work in favor of tariffs, and I think that that is worth noting.

00:32:23.000 Okay, so.

00:32:23.000 I have a lot more to talk about, including an insane retraction that was pushed out by ProPublica about a Trump nominee in just a second.

00:32:31.000 First, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.

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00:33:01.000 We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.

00:33:09.000 So moving on from trade policy, the Trump administration is still having high turnover.

00:33:12.000 There was a tweet earlier today from a reporter talking about somebody inside the Trump administration who said they were expecting large moves inside the administration.

00:33:21.000 Something is coming and we don't know what it is.

00:33:23.000 Which is?

00:33:24.000 Not a helpful report from the reporters, but the turnover is very high.

00:33:28.000 Well, one of the people who has been elevated by the turnover is the new CIA nominee, the new CIA director nominee, whose name is Gina Haspel.

00:33:35.000 And we talked about this yesterday about how Senator Rand Paul tore into Haspel, suggesting that she had overseen torture in foreign lands.

00:33:42.000 And it turns out that is not true.

00:33:44.000 He was basing that off of a ProPublica

00:33:47.000 I don't know.

00:34:14.000 So this is obviously a pretty egregious error, but it shows that people on the left are really invested in trying to suggest that Trump's nominees are awful, awful people.

00:34:23.000 Also, they're very invested in the narrative that there's a lot of chaos at the White House.

00:34:25.000 Now, there is some chaos at the White House.

00:34:27.000 There's no question.

00:34:27.000 There are a lot of people in the White House who are wondering what in the world is going on.

00:34:30.000 There were a series of competing rumors yesterday that were pretty amazing.

00:34:33.000 There was one that Chief of Staff John Kelly was going to be leaving.

00:34:36.000 There was one that the NSA General McMaster was going to be leaving.

00:34:41.000 There was one that the

00:34:42.000 We're good to go.

00:34:56.000 Like that guy from Godzilla.

00:34:57.000 Let them fight.

00:34:58.000 He likes to watch his cabinet officers jockey for a position.

00:35:01.000 There's a rumor that Scott Prude over at the EPA was on the hot seat.

00:35:04.000 There's a rumor that Ben Carson is on the hot seat.

00:35:06.000 There's a rumor that Ryan Zinke is on the hot seat.

00:35:12.000 There are a bunch of rumors that half his cabinet is going to be gone.

00:35:14.000 But Sarah Huckabee Sanders yesterday was saying, don't worry, McMaster's not going anywhere.

00:35:17.000 Of course, they were saying the same thing about Gary Cohn five seconds ago.

00:35:20.000 Here is Sarah Sanders, what she tweeted out.

00:35:22.000 She said, just spoke to POTUS and General H.R.

00:35:24.000 McMaster.

00:35:25.000 Contrary to reports, they have a good working relationship and there are no changes at the NSC.

00:35:29.000 OK, well, that's not convincing, considering, again, that they've said this about every person who has ever left the administration.

00:35:34.000 Kellyanne Conway came out.

00:35:36.000 She said they keep recycling rumors, but the rumors have no verity to them.

00:35:39.000 Here's what she had to say.

00:35:40.000 They won't cover policy.

00:35:42.000 They cover personnel.

00:35:43.000 They won't cover principle.

00:35:44.000 They cover palace intrigue.

00:35:46.000 And they keep on recycling rumors and stories constantly that have no basis in fact.

00:35:53.000 I think they figure, hey, if a stop clock is at least right twice a day, eventually I'll get this right.

00:35:57.000 So if I predict a whole year in advance,

00:36:00.000 So-and-so's on Thin Ice, so-and-so's gonna go, and they do a year later.

00:36:03.000 I could just recycle those clips where people said, the president has full confidence in X, and six months, a year later, it changes.

00:36:10.000 This president has every right to put the team around him that he thinks aligns with his vision, his values, but he is the one who controls the timing, the tone, and content of all substantive and personnel decisions.

00:36:24.000 So, obviously, the president has the right to do whatever he wants on personnel.

00:36:27.000 That's really not the question.

00:36:27.000 The question is, is it good that there's this much turnover?

00:36:30.000 Well, some of the turnover is good.

00:36:31.000 Like, Rex Tillerson leaving the secretary of state is good.

00:36:34.000 There's so much turmoil at the administration, though, that that was like the sixth biggest story of the week, that the secretary of state was booted out of office by the president.

00:36:41.000 Normally, that'd be a pretty big story.

00:36:43.000 Instead, that is downgraded to the lower end of the spectrum.

00:36:46.000 Listen, if Trump wants to make some moves, he should rip off the mandate, he should make his moves, he should be done.

00:36:51.000 The prolonged feeling of chaos is not good for the administration.

00:36:53.000 They have some things to do, and it's not worthwhile to have them dragging this process out over long periods of time.

00:36:59.000 I recommend to the administration that they just get done what they need to get done, because otherwise it's putting too much pressure on the American public to go along with the daily reality show that's happening at the White House.

00:37:11.000 I know a lot of President Trump supporters don't seem to care.

00:37:13.000 That's fine, but the American people do care.

00:37:15.000 Not because they're sitting around waiting for the next tweet to fire somebody, but because they do want a feeling of steady leadership at the White House.

00:37:22.000 Now, Obama was not a steady leader, but the media ensured that he felt like a steady leader, even though he was not.

00:37:27.000 They would continue to put out this vision of Obama as a cool-as-a-cucumber guy, which I don't think the evidence is quite there for, but they're not there for Trump, right?

00:37:35.000 They're going to up the amount of cash.

00:37:36.000 So Trump has to be twice as cool as anybody else who's been in the office, and I don't know that that's actually going to happen.

00:37:43.000 Okay, so, you know what?

00:37:44.000 Let's take some actual time with the mailbag today.

00:37:46.000 We'll go back to things I like and things I hate at the very end of the show, but let's go straight to the mailbag today.

00:37:51.000 So get in your questions right now.

00:37:52.000 We'll just jump right in.

00:37:54.000 All right, we begin today.

00:37:55.000 With Hendrik.

00:37:56.000 So Hendrik says, if you detest rock music, why does your show start with an electric guitar?

00:38:01.000 So I don't detest all rock music, Hendrik, number one.

00:38:03.000 Number two, my show starts with an electric guitar because that electric guitar is being played by the brother of the founder of the company, one of the founders of the company.

00:38:13.000 And we didn't want to pay right to actually buy musical cuts to use here.

00:38:19.000 So instead, we just had a guy play two notes.

00:38:21.000 Pretty awesome, right?

00:38:22.000 Okay, so James says, Hi Ben, I don't know if you've ever been asked about these particular questions, but I'm sure it's highly likely.

00:38:27.000 Your background in debate and evidence-based arguments is well established.

00:38:30.000 When it comes to the evidence concerning the existence of God, is the citation of an accepted religious tome of authority enough, or is it considered conjecture, and or not substantial enough?

00:38:37.000 Could a rational argument based on biblical evidence hold up in a rational legal court of law if the idea of God were put on trial?

00:38:43.000 Could, or rather would, ardent atheists like Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins find any substantive reason to find your arguments compelling enough

00:38:49.000 Okay, so, Jim, I will say that I think that logical proofs of God tend to lack.

00:39:15.000 Yeah, I think that you can make a logical argument for God, but that's not the same as a logical proof of God.

00:39:20.000 Because God hides himself in the universe, right?

00:39:22.000 This is the basic religious tenet.

00:39:23.000 God is incorporeal.

00:39:24.000 He doesn't manifest himself, at least in Judaism, right? 0.98

00:39:27.000 There's no idea of God actually taking corporeal form in the form of Jesus, for example.

00:39:31.000 So in Judaism, and this is true in Islam as well, and even in Christianity, where God has not taken human form for the last 2,000 years, 0.65

00:39:40.000 There's a feeling that God hides himself in the universe, that God is something you have to discover.

00:39:45.000 Making an argument for the existence of God is possible.

00:39:47.000 In fact, I've recommended a book by Edward Fazer, a philosophy professor over at Grove City College in Pasadena, who has written a very good... I think it's at Grove.

00:39:56.000 He may be at Pasadena City College.

00:39:57.000 In any case, he's written a very good book called Five Proofs of the Existence of God, and he has an Aquinas proof, and he has a

00:40:05.000 He has a proof from Pascal, and he has a bunch of different proofs.

00:40:08.000 And some of them I find pretty compelling.

00:40:10.000 But at best, you can make a probabilistic case for God.

00:40:12.000 It's very difficult to make an evidentiary case for God, because any piece of evidence in favor of God can also be interpreted against God.

00:40:19.000 So if you say, look at the beauty of the universe, the atheist will say, right, that beauty of the universe was created through sheer accident.

00:40:25.000 Or there are multiple universes.

00:40:27.000 If you say, God made this universe in a particular way, and the chances of the universe being made in this particular way to sustain human life are really, really, really unlikely,

00:40:35.000 Then folks on the other side, atheists, will say, well, what if there are multiple universes?

00:40:39.000 What if there are parallel universes?

00:40:40.000 Or what if time is endless and the dice have been rolled a bajillion times?

00:40:46.000 In other words, these arguments come to a standstill.

00:40:49.000 The best argument for God that I believe exists, there are two arguments for God that I think are compelling.

00:40:54.000 Again, I don't think they are provable, but I think they are compelling.

00:40:57.000 One is that there is a system of logic that undergirds the universe that is the basis for all human thought and science.

00:41:02.000 Science is the idea that you are discovering consistent rules in the universe that pre-exist your being, and there is an objective truth that would exist regardless of your presence on Earth.

00:41:11.000 And so, the religious person says that's proof of a designer.

00:41:14.000 That these rules exist.

00:41:16.000 And the more you study the rules of the universe, the more you are shocked by the genius that created them.

00:41:22.000 Now, atheists will say there was no genius that created them, right? 1.00

00:41:24.000 This is all accident. 0.88

00:41:25.000 You're just a speck of dust moving through the universe on a meaningless rock. 0.99

00:41:28.000 You're a ball of meat moving without sentience through life, right?

00:41:31.000 You have a basic idea that you're here, but you don't really have control.

00:41:34.000 Which brings us to the second argument in favor.

00:41:37.000 And that is the argument of free will, the argument that you have something that allows you to supersede your own biological necessity and make choices every single day, and that all of civilization is based on this premise.

00:41:48.000 And in fact, all of atheistic thought, too, is based on this premise, because until very recently, most atheists believed in the concept of free will.

00:41:54.000 If you go back to the French Revolution and Enlightenment thinkers, even people like Laplace, there are a bunch of folks who are Enlightenment thinkers, who are atheists, who believed in at least a very contained notion

00:42:06.000 Of free will.

00:42:06.000 Now, folks like Sam Harris, I think, are really consistent on this, right?

00:42:09.000 Sam says there is no such thing as free will, and he doesn't try to make the compatibilist argument that is made by some advocates of non-free will, where they say, well, you know, everything is biologically determined, but at the same time, there is a sense of free will because there is chaos built into the system.

00:42:21.000 That's not free will.

00:42:22.000 It's just chaos built into the system.

00:42:23.000 I actually agree with Sam on this.

00:42:25.000 I agree there are only two real positions on free will.

00:42:27.000 There's the hard free will position.

00:42:28.000 There's an ability to choose otherwise.

00:42:31.000 And then there is the deterministic position, which is that you, in this situation right now, have no choice but to behave as you are behaving, if you believe in free will, which is an experiential thing.

00:42:40.000 If you believe like Samuel Johnson, right, that it's tautological, that let's not argue about free will, it's here.

00:42:45.000 If you believe that, it's very difficult not to believe that there is at least some force in the universe that you just do not understand and that cannot be explained away by physical laws.

00:42:55.000 That at least gets you to a place where there's a supernatural element to life that we just don't connect with or understand.

00:43:01.000 And then you can move beyond there to, is there a logic to that supernatural presence that unites creation?

00:43:06.000 So those are the arguments in favor of God.

00:43:08.000 Again, they're arguments.

00:43:09.000 I don't think that they are completely provable, and I'm not going to pretend that I can prove to Sam Harris or Matt Delahunty or anybody else on the atheist left

00:43:17.000 That God exists.

00:43:18.000 I just don't think that it's possible to prove God exists, and I think that that's one of God's points, right?

00:43:22.000 As a believer in God, I think God does not want you to be able to prove God exists.

00:43:25.000 If I could provide you proof right now, here and now, that God existed, then obeying God's law would be the easiest thing in the world, because you wouldn't have a choice.

00:43:33.000 The argument would be, God exists, and then if I could prove to you, just through sheer evidence, that the Bible was given by God, it's the unadulterated Word of God, then you would not have a choice.

00:43:42.000 The Creator of the universe has ordered you to do things, you must do these things, or the punishments that God provides in the Bible will come true.

00:43:50.000 But I don't think God wants us to behave that way.

00:43:51.000 I think God's whole purpose in creating the world was to create beings in his image, meaning they have free will and the capacity to create and choose.

00:43:57.000 People who believe, by the way, they have free will and the capacity to create and choose.

00:44:01.000 As my friend Jordan Peterson likes to say, people who are trying to generate order from chaos, these are people who find fulfillment and purpose in life.

00:44:06.000 It's very difficult to build either an individual or collective system of meaning on the basis of your meatball floating through space.

00:44:12.000 Kyle says, what do you think the world would be like if there was a second species on Earth as intelligent as humans?

00:44:18.000 Well, you know, I think that we'd have conversations with them, and I think we'd have to take into account common interests.

00:44:24.000 Frankly, I do think that there are such differences between people that we are not separate species, but there's enough for us to talk about to get past our differences.

00:44:31.000 Men and women are different enough that having conversations that way is hard enough as it is.

00:44:35.000 Adding a second species would make things even more difficult.

00:44:39.000 Joel says, how can we innovate in music if only one genre is correct?

00:44:42.000 In your case, classical.

00:44:43.000 Um, you can innovate within classical music, right?

00:44:45.000 Stravinsky is very different from Beethoven.

00:44:48.000 Bartok is incredibly different from Brahms.

00:44:50.000 There are certain rules that you can imagine abiding by and still work within those rules.

00:44:54.000 In fact, I think most great art is created within the confines of particular rules.

00:44:58.000 I think most great novels are written in complete sentences.

00:45:00.000 I think most great novels are written using typical rules of human English.

00:45:04.000 In fact, I think that there are a few that break the rules, but most of the novels that break those rules at least

00:45:09.000 No, we're not.

00:45:29.000 All of that can be broken, but that's not what rock does.

00:45:32.000 Rock is not people who learned the rules and then decided in ordered fashion to bend or break them.

00:45:36.000 It's a bunch of people who don't know the rules, who hit the drum on two and four and who play three chords.

00:45:43.000 And that's not breaking the rules.

00:45:44.000 That is not only not breaking the rules, it's not even...

00:45:47.000 It doesn't even acknowledge that the rules exist.

00:45:49.000 And so you actually end up with a much more primitive form of music than anything that was developed in the classical era.

00:45:57.000 No, but I think that you should be able to apply, if people have dementia, to have those guns removed from people's homes.

00:46:04.000 I'm not sure that age is a good argument.

00:46:06.000 There are 80-year-olds capable of having a weapon.

00:46:08.000 If you're a law-abiding citizen and you need to defend yourself, I don't see the problem with you owning a shotgun.

00:46:12.000 Yeah, that said, if you are senile, then I do see the problem with you owning a shotgun.

00:46:15.000 Thanks, love the show.

00:46:16.000 Well, James, I can't believe that they put you in the mailbag, but I will say that just because the original saying was, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, does not mean that the proof is in the pudding is not the modern saying, or at least the bastardization of that saying.

00:46:25.000 So it's less a correction than I think an addendum by Michael Knowles.

00:46:42.000 Yeah, Michael has corrected me on occasion about things like writing words in books.

00:46:45.000 That apparently was a complete waste of time.

00:46:46.000 But it does not feel good to be corrected by Michael Knowles.

00:46:49.000 Listen, I've had to pay him more money than I thought humanly possible, right?

00:46:52.000 He works for me.

00:46:53.000 It means I pay him a salary.

00:46:54.000 I lost a bet to him.

00:46:55.000 Our relationship is not going well.

00:46:59.000 I had an idea for a YouTube series where I talk about struggling with depression and anxiety.

00:47:02.000 I hope to use my experiences to help others realize they can reach out to their families and communities with their struggles and get the help they need.

00:47:08.000 My only worry is that if I admit to some of the darker problems I faced, I could lose my Second Amendment rights.

00:47:12.000 I haven't ever attempted suicide and it has been years since the worst of my depression, but I live in New Jersey and gun laws are tough to begin with.

00:47:17.000 My fiancé also worries that this may affect his ownership rights when we live together.

00:47:20.000 Am I worrying over nothing or am I right to be hesitating?

00:47:22.000 Well, I don't know what the current status in law is in New Jersey, but typically you have to prove that someone is a current danger to themselves or others, not that they once had issues with depression ten years ago, five years ago, two years ago.

00:47:33.000 You actually have to have hard proof that somebody is a threat to themselves or others.

00:47:35.000 You don't sound like that's the threat.

00:47:37.000 I think that your series sounds like a wonderful thing.

00:47:39.000 I think there are a lot of people out there who are suffering with depression and anxiety who don't even know what it is they are suffering with, and a little solidarity along those lines would be a perfectly wonderful thing.

00:47:47.000 Jordan says,

00:47:48.000 The Libertarian Party today posted on Twitter that they support the students and their political works from the walkout yesterday.

00:47:53.000 Why would the Libertarian Party support gun control?

00:47:55.000 So I haven't seen the post, so I'm gonna hesitate to attribute to, I'll take you out your word. 0.94

00:47:59.000 Okay, if what you are saying is correct, assuming what you're saying is correct, that's because the Libertarian Party is ridiculous.

00:48:04.000 And they ran Gary Johnson for President of the United States twice. 0.69

00:48:07.000 This party's in disarray.

00:48:09.000 It's really frustrating because as a conservative slash libertarian, I would love to see a vital and working libertarian party, but this is the party that trots out John McAfee at their events, and then also trots out a naked guy wearing an iron cross tattoo. 0.97

00:48:26.000 So I'm gonna go with they're crazy.

00:48:27.000 At least the party.

00:48:28.000 Pete says, Hi Ben, I'm with you on the immigration question.

00:48:30.000 Let's keep those that are behaving in accordance with American values and customs.

00:48:33.000 Playing the tape forward concerns me, however.

00:48:35.000 Say the wall does get built.

00:48:36.000 What happens then?

00:48:37.000 Does the black labor market disappear?

00:48:38.000 How are labor laws going to change?

00:48:39.000 What benefits are guest workers going to be entitled to?

00:48:42.000 Is it unreasonable for me to have doubts as to the ability of the U.S.

00:48:44.000 government to administer such a program effectively?

00:48:47.000 Well, you're never wrong in doubting the ability of the U.S.

00:48:50.000 government to administer any program effectively.

00:48:52.000 But the idea here would be that there probably be guest worker programs, there are H-1B visas.

00:48:56.000 But this is why I don't think the wall is the be-all end-all.

00:48:59.000 I mean, the whole point here is that half illegal immigrants in the United States are people who overstayed their legal visas.

00:49:04.000 So that means that we really should be focusing on ensuring that we are enforcing the laws that are already on the books.

00:49:09.000 I'm fine with a wall.

00:49:10.000 I'm in favor of a wall.

00:49:11.000 But I don't think the wall is going to solve the problem.

00:49:15.000 I've been following your show for the last few years, but just recently subscribed.

00:49:18.000 I use part of my tax refund because what's more American than that?

00:49:20.000 My question is regarding taxes and the latest tax reform.

00:49:23.000 My sister and brother-in-law are big liberals, and at that last family get-together we're saying that without the inheritance tax, the rich could and would put all their money in a trust fund and then claim a lower tax bracket.

00:49:31.000 I wasn't sure of the logistics, so I had to debate them using all of their premises.

00:49:34.000 Is this true?

00:49:35.000 Are there loopholes that are now possible without the inheritance tax?

00:49:38.000 Thanks for all you do.

00:49:38.000 Okay, so, the inheritance tax is ridiculous.

00:49:42.000 The inheritance tax is disgusting. 0.73

00:49:45.000 I already paid tax on that money.

00:49:46.000 So when you get income, you pay tax on your income.

00:49:48.000 Then the money goes into your estate.

00:49:51.000 If the estate accrues money, if it accrues capital gains, then you pay capital gains tax.

00:49:56.000 You don't pay income tax.

00:49:56.000 The rate on capital gains and income is not the same.

00:49:59.000 Now, there's a case to be made that you should pay the same tax on capital gains as you pay on income.

00:50:02.000 That's actually not a terrible case.

00:50:04.000 But the solution to this is not to claw back half the money that you already paid taxes on.

00:50:09.000 I mean, every year I'm paying an enormous sum of taxes and then I'm taking the leftover and I'm putting it into savings for my kids.

00:50:14.000 And by the way, when I put that money into a trust fund for my kids, the bank is taking that money and borrowing against that money.

00:50:20.000 The bank doesn't just leave the money sitting in a lockbox somewhere.

00:50:22.000 The bank actually takes that money and lends it out at interest to other people who are starting businesses.

00:50:26.000 So all of this is economic ignorance on the part of these folks.

00:50:31.000 The whole point of working hard, one of the reasons that you work to make a profit, is that you can take that money and pass it on to your children.

00:50:37.000 I would be supremely pissed if I did not have the ability to dispose of my money as I saw fit at the end of my life.

00:50:42.000 So, I think that the National Archive is fantastic.

00:50:48.000 You can actually go see the actual original Constitution of the United States and Declaration of Independence, which is super cool.

00:50:58.000 I think that the Supreme Court is really fun to visit.

00:51:01.000 The Smithsonian Museums are, of course, really neat.

00:51:04.000 You should walk through the Capitol and check that out because

00:51:08.000 We're good.

00:51:24.000 You know, the White House is a really neat place to visit.

00:51:25.000 All the typical sites that you see are really neat.

00:51:28.000 The Washington Monument is great.

00:51:29.000 The Jefferson Memorial is great.

00:51:30.000 The Lincoln Memorial is great.

00:51:31.000 There are so many sites in D.C.

00:51:32.000 It's really a tremendous place to visit.

00:51:34.000 I just wish that they would decentralize it and destroy it.

00:51:36.000 One of my big problems with D.C.

00:51:38.000 is that I think that you can tell whether a country is run well or not by whether the buildings that are government buildings are nicer than the private buildings.

00:51:45.000 In D.C.

00:51:45.000 they are, and that's a problem.

00:51:47.000 I like countries where, I like areas, like state buildings are usually worse than the private buildings in the same city.

00:51:53.000 I think that's the way it should be.

00:51:54.000 I think we should decentralize Washington D.C.

00:51:56.000 and make people live in their home districts and then vote from their home districts.

00:51:58.000 This is what the internet was created for.

00:52:02.000 Trump has nominated Gina Haspel to replace Mike Pompeo.

00:52:05.000 The biggest criticism of her is her work in a secret prison in Thailand where at least one terrorist was waterboarded, and then she subsequently ordered evidence of the waterboarding destroyed.

00:52:11.000 So again, this was retracted today by ProPublica.

00:52:14.000 So, the justification for using torture on terrorist suspects is twofold.

00:52:21.000 Terror suspects are not accorded protection under the Geneva Convention.

00:52:24.000 As I explained yesterday, the Geneva Convention was designed to ensure that soldiers stayed in uniform.

00:52:35.000 If they got out of uniform, they're no longer protected by the Geneva Conventions.

00:52:38.000 Go back and watch The Great Escape, and you'll see this is a major issue.

00:52:41.000 As soon as people try to escape the prison and dress up as civilians to escape, they're no longer protected by the Geneva Conventions, and this is a major risk for them.

00:52:48.000 This is for a reason.

00:52:50.000 You don't want people dressing up as civilians, going into civilian areas and using those civilians for cover. 0.52

00:52:54.000 It gets more civilians killed.

00:52:55.000 One of the purposes of the Geneva Conventions is to prevent that from happening.

00:52:58.000 So, terrorists should not be treated as members of an enemy army.

00:53:02.000 They should be treated as terrorists.

00:53:04.000 Second of all, is torture useful?

00:53:06.000 Well, it was for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. 0.84

00:53:08.000 We waterboarded him a bajillion times and we got some good information from him about Al-Qaeda and its leadership structure and all the rest.

00:53:15.000 So there's a really strong open debate going on about whether torture works or whether it does not.

00:53:22.000 I'm not going to pretend that I think that waterboarding isn't a form of torture.

00:53:25.000 It's not the form of torture that does permanent damage, but it's certainly torturing the person psychologically.

00:53:30.000 Do I think that it's called for in certain circumstances?

00:53:33.000 I think probably.

00:53:34.000 But I think there's a good argument to be made on the other side.

00:53:35.000 I mean, there's some people who say that torture doesn't work at all.

00:53:38.000 I find that dubious.

00:53:40.000 That's the argument.

00:53:40.000 Anyway, Jade says, do you use an e-reader like a Kindle or do you prefer physical books?

00:53:43.000 So I tried a Kindle.

00:53:45.000 I tried it.

00:53:46.000 I prefer physical books.

00:53:47.000 I strongly prefer physical books.

00:53:48.000 One of the reasons for that is, number one, I just like the feel of a book in my hand.

00:53:52.000 I like to be able to turn the pages.

00:53:53.000 I feel like I'm making progress in a book.

00:53:55.000 One of the things that drives me nuts about Kindle is that it tells you percentage of the book that you've completed, not page numbers, which is annoying to me.

00:54:01.000 And then beyond that, I have another problem, which is I can't use a Kindle on Sabbath, and I get a lot of reading done on Shabbat.

00:54:06.000 So if I'm in the middle of reading a book on Kindle, I can't read it on Sabbath, so I have to buy the physical copy anyway.

00:54:11.000 Well, number one, just research the facts all the way up and down and make sure that, you know, Trevor Noah

00:54:25.000 May try to suggest that you care less than your liberal friend, and if he does, then what you should say to him is, listen, Trevor, I'm one of the people who was at the school.

00:54:31.000 You don't get to call into question my sincerity on these issues.

00:54:37.000 We need to have an open debate about these things, and that has to start with people stopping questioning other people's sincerity.

00:54:41.000 And it's not just me, right?

00:54:43.000 I think you should say to Trevor, no, you've been here ripping on the NRA, ripping on Dana Lash, suggesting that she doesn't care about dead kids and all the rest of it.

00:54:49.000 I am one of the kids who's victimized.

00:54:50.000 I believe a lot of the same things that Dana Lash believes, and I don't think that makes her uncaring.

00:54:54.000 And I think that you need to stop that if you want to have a valuable conversation.

00:54:57.000 Like, this is a good, valuable conversation we're having.

00:54:59.000 Conservative, liberal, Trevor Noah, right?

00:55:01.000 We're all having a conversation together, not doubting each other's motives.

00:55:04.000 If you can't grant that same capacity to so many other people in the political sphere, we're never going to get anywhere.

00:55:08.000 I would start with that point.

00:55:09.000 First of all, you should do it.

00:55:10.000 Second of all, it would go totally viral, so you should totally do that if you're on Trevor Noah's show.

00:55:13.000 Carl says, Hey Ben, if you had, Carl, if you had an opportunity to overhaul the public education system, what would you do?

00:55:19.000 What curriculum changes would you make?

00:55:20.000 And would you remove or include any courses of study?

00:55:23.000 Do you believe there should be an early separation of students into different tracks, like for students that plan to go to college versus to trade schools straight to the workforce?

00:55:28.000 Big fan of yours.

00:55:29.000 So yes, I do think tracking should start earlier.

00:55:32.000 I don't think it should start, you know, once you're, now you don't even start until you're in grad school.

00:55:35.000 So certainly by the time you're in college, you should be tracked.

00:55:37.000 And the way it works in Israel is that you start getting tracked at age 17, which makes some sense to me.

00:55:42.000 We're good to go.

00:56:05.000 OK, time for a quick thing I like and a quick thing I hate, and then we will break for the weekend.

00:56:10.000 So, a thing that I like today, we've been doing books on socialism.

00:56:14.000 There's a book called The God That Failed, which is really a compilation.

00:56:17.000 We're good to go.

00:56:49.000 All right, so the quick thing that I hate today is Vanessa and Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., are divorcing.

00:56:55.000 And the media are making a huge deal out of this, right?

00:56:57.000 This is a big deal because, of course, he is a public figure.

00:57:00.000 They've released a joint statement.

00:57:02.000 Apparently Vanessa didn't like being in the public eye. 1.00

00:57:04.000 They have five children, so it really is tragic.

00:57:06.000 Here's what they said.

00:57:07.000 After 12 years of marriage, we have decided to go our separate ways.

00:57:09.000 We will always have tremendous respect for each other and our families.

00:57:12.000 We have five beautiful children together.

00:57:13.000 They remain our top priority.

00:57:14.000 We ask for your privacy during this time.

00:57:16.000 That's the way you should handle this.

00:57:17.000 Although, you know, obviously I wish that they would work to put it back together.

00:57:20.000 I'm not in their situation, but it's just, you know, obviously divorce is a terrible, terrible thing.

00:57:26.000 What's really gross is there's so many people on the left who are celebrating this.

00:57:29.000 Oh, Don Jr.

00:57:29.000 getting what he deserves.

00:57:30.000 Okay, this is a family.

00:57:32.000 I wouldn't be excited if the Obamas divorced, right?

00:57:34.000 That would be terrible.

00:57:35.000 They have children.

00:57:36.000 I don't like it when people divorce.

00:57:37.000 When bad things happen,

00:57:39.000 I don't know.

00:57:59.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Mathis Glover.

00:58:01.000 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.

00:58:03.000 Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.

00:58:05.000 Our technical producer is Austin Stevens.

00:58:07.000 Edited by Alex Zingaro.

00:58:08.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.

00:58:10.000 Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.

00:58:11.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.

00:58:14.000 Copyright Forward Publishing 2018.

The Ben Shapiro Show - March 16, 2018

Does The Free Market Work? | Ep. 497

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