 The Yaron Brooks Show starts now. All right, Merry Christmas everybody. And I'll say I'm a couple of days early, but it's better to be early than not at all. Merry Christmas. And you know, I love Christmas. I love this season. I love this period of time. It's a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful holiday. And many people look at me kind of weird and say, wait a minute, Yaron. I thought you were kind of an atheist and originally Jewish by background. What's the deal with Christmas? Well, I mean, I think the beauty of Christmas and why Christmas is such a universally loved holiday is because of how secular of a holiday it is. I mean, this is the most secular holiday I can think of. I mean, what do you do during Christmas? You buy gifts for people you love and people you care about. You get in touch with friends and family who you have a, you know, you like and you love and you respect and you hang out with them and you, it's great. I mean, think of all the pleasure that produces. You exchange gift and then you light up your home. You create this wonderful lit up environment. And when you go outside, the trees have lights on them and the malls fill the pretty things that the displays in the windows are wonderful and the lights are wonderful. I mean, New York City during this time of year, particularly if it snowed a little bit is just so beautiful and so pretty. And what are all the lights and the, you know, the malls and the shops and the presence and all this, what does that all represent? What does that all symbolize? Nothing particularly religious. It all symbolizes kind of an embrace of life, of enjoying life, of celebrating life, of celebrating friendship and family and, you know, celebrating our achievements and the fact that we can buy presents and hang out with the people we love and enjoy and respect and so on. So what a wonderful, wonderful time of light, a time of the year. It's exactly a wonderful, wonderful time of the year because of how secular it is because of the fact that it is all about, almost all about, right? Enjoying life, it's about enjoying life. That's the essence of what Christmas is about. So, you know, people complain, literally, oh, Christmas becomes so commercialized. It's terrible. Yeah, that's part of what makes it so wonderful. It's that it's so commercial because what is the commercial aspect of Christmas about? It's about going out and buying stuff. Well, we enjoy doing that when we're buying gifts for people we like or we enjoy that when we're buying ourselves gifts. Why? Because it's a celebration of what I in Rand call the trade principle, the wonderful aspect of life which is trade, giving something and getting something in return, giving something of ultimately less value to you and getting something of greater value to you. That trade, that buying and selling, those are wonderful things in life. They're demonized, they will get to why that is in a minute but just think of the fun. Christmas is fun. It's not about and it's not celebrated in a way that suggests that it's really the season of giving or the season of sacrifice or the season of altruism. No, there's nothing altruistic about giving gifts to people you love. Now, now, if you decided one year not to give gifts to your kids but to send all the gifts to Africa that would be different but how happy would you be about that? How happy would your kids be about that? Would it still be the joy, the season of joy? Would it still be the season of goodwill towards man? Really is the goodwill comes at a cost of somebody else's sacrifice, somebody else's misgivings, hard times. Your kids, for example, who didn't get gifts because you sent them all to Africa. There was a really good article published, well, it's been a few years now, I guess, by Peter Schwartz. You can look him up, Peter Schwartz and it's called Objecting to the Season of Giving. I don't think that's the title he chose. I think this was published in the Washington Post. And Peter Schwartz is also the author of In Defense of Selfishness. So an excellent book that I strongly recommend and Christmas is the season of celebrating, selfishness of celebrating, doing fun stuff that is not just fun in a superficial, immediate sense but fun in the sense of celebrating the relationships you really care about in life, the people you enjoy and you care about, your children and the family that you enjoy and care about. That's what Christmas is about. It's about a celebration of your life and of the life of the people that provide you with the most value. You know, people think of love, unfortunately in the world in which we live, people think of love in terms of sacrifice, in terms of selflessness. Really? Do you love somebody out of a sense of selflessness? Is it a sacrifice to love your wife or to love your girlfriend or to love your spouse? Is it a sacrifice? Or do you love them because of how they make you feel about yourself? Do you love them because? Of the fact that they represent the values that you care most about. Do you love them because love is fundamentally a selfish emotion? It's about you. It's about your responsive values. I think I've used this example before. I think I in Rand, I learned, this is an example I in Rand once used. Imagine going up to your to be soon to be spouse on your wedding, the night before your wedding and saying, look, this is selfless completely, it's completely selfless. I don't really care about what you do to me. I don't care about my own life. I'm marrying you out of a complete sacrifice. You do nothing to me. You are no value to my life. But since I don't care about my own values, I'm marrying you. I mean, the other person would slap you. What is love really about? You make me feel amazing when I'm around you. You project back to me all the things that I love about life and about the world. You represent the values that I cherish the most. All of that's selfish. All of that is about me. Love is the most selfish of all emotions. Now selfish, not in the sense of exploiting other people, not in the sense of being mean, nasty, brutish. No, none of that is selfish. That's just stupid, destructive, irrational, emotionalist. I'm talking about a rational selfishness about thinking about really pursuing your rational values, the values that you care most about, that you understand, that you have chosen and pursuing them and dedicating your life to the pursuit of them so that you live the best life that you can live. That's what selfishness really means. It means making your life the best life that it can possibly be. And that's not about money. It's not about stuff. We'll put it this way. It's not only about money. It's not only about stuff. It's about the kind of life you live. It's kind of the kind of values you pursue. So I love Christmas because it's about the pursuit of rational good values. It's about the pursuit of friendship, the pursuit of family, the family you love. Don't go hang out with family you don't love. About the pursuit of presence and the sharing of gifts with people you love and respect and admire. Now I know that much of what the conventional view of Christmas is about is about charity. It's about sending that money to Africa. It's about sacrifice. That's the story we are told. That's how it's presented to us. But well, I'm gonna take a break here. I'm gonna take a short break. And then when I come back, I wanna talk about charity and whether it is really the fundamental here where they really, when we think about Christmas, what we're really thinking about is charity and sacrifice. All right, you're listening to the Iran Book Show. The only place you're gonna hear this kind of stuff on Christmas, maybe you're regretting listening now. We're on the Blaze radio network and we're gonna be back right after this break. All right, we're talking about Christmas. And if you wanna call in and tell me about your Christmas, what's your Christmas like? What do you enjoy about Christmas? What do you love about Christmas? Maybe for you, Christmas is more of a religious experience. Maybe for you, Christmas is more about sacrifice and giving and so on. I'm here to listen. Maybe not to agree, but here to listen. And there's no accident that Christmas has evolved into really into this celebration of, you know, really of lights and gifts and life, a really celebration of life. Because Christmas as we celebrate it today is a very modern holiday. It really is a holiday that has come out of the Industrial Revolution and really is a holiday that has the spirit of a people discovering wealth for the first time, discovering their ability to buy gifts and give gifts and have vacations and have time off. Christmas is really a holiday of the late 19th century, early 20th century where Macy's gave us Santa Claus and Coca-Cola gave us his red uniform. It's really a celebration of commercialism. It's a celebration of wealth creation. It's a celebration of consumption. It's a celebration of life. There's nothing wrong with these things. We're taught to feel guilty about consumerism. Why? Consumerism is a sign of wealth. It's a sign that we can buy and sell the things that give us pleasure in life. That's great. I love the fact that Christmas is commercial. Christmas was created, the modern Christmas, the Christmas tree, the lights, the malls, the shopping, the parades, all creation of commercial interests. Why? Because they want us to enjoy life. They want us to celebrate life. They want us to be in a good mood because they want us to buy stuff so they can make money. They benefit because we consume the stuff they produce and we benefit because we consume the stuff we want to consume. It's a win-win for everybody. That's the beauty. And that's why I ran called Christmas, not the season of giving, but the season of trading. Produce is produce. Retail is sell. Consumers buy. Everybody has jobs. Everybody is producing and creating and everybody is consuming and enjoying. Who's losing? Everybody's winning. It's great. So Christmas in America, and I think in parts of Europe and maybe not in all of Europe, has become a completely secular holiday. People don't go to church that much. People come and they go shopping and they enjoy the lights and they enjoy their families and they enjoy gift-giving. All secular, secular phenomenon. And all, you know, capitalist, good capitalist phenomenon. It's great. Now, what about charity? What about charity? Is it my against charity? Is Christmas against charity in my book? No, but I don't think Christmas is about charity. I disagree with some who say, what we need to do is stop consuming all the stuff and what you should do is go work in a soup kitchen. Why should I go work in a soup kitchen? You know, Christmas is not about for me going to work in a soup kitchen. For me, Christmas is about celebrating the good life with my friends and family, exchanging gifts and trading and enjoying the season. I'm not against charity. I just think that if you do charity, make sure that it's for cause you really believe in. Do charity to help people that are worthy of help. Not everybody's worthy of help. I don't, and this is the story, I don't love my neighbor necessarily. I love the people I love. I think people are deserving now. My neighbors are nice. I'm happy to celebrate with them. I'm happy to enjoy the season with them. But I don't love my enemies. I don't love just any random person. I don't love the unlovable. I only love the people who are value to me. So, you know, I don't buy into this until you should love everybody. Certainly not, you should love everybody equally. No, you love those people who deserve your love. You care for those people who deserve your caring. You support the people who deserve your support. You provide charity to people who you believe deserve your charity. Not everybody does. Not everybody does. But I'm sure some of you are frantically disagreeing with me and getting really upset. So you can call in 888-900-3393. 888-900-3393. Come on, you know, give me your best argument on why I should love my neighbor automatically. Why I should love my enemy. Why I should love the unlovable. You know, just call in 888-900-3393. All right, we've got Skylar on the line. Hey, Skylar, you there? Merry Christmas, Dr. Brooke. Merry Christmas, Skylar. I would like to know if you have seen the film A Christmas Story yet. I don't know. I'm not sure if I've seen it or not. I don't think so. And you're saying yet because it sounds like you've asked me this before. I have for the past two years. I'm putting on my to-do list this Christmas to watch A Christmas Story. All right, I just wanted to get that out there because to me it's probably the one of the most selfish. It's like anti, it's a wonderful life. It's completely about this one more request for a Christmas gift. Yeah, let me say something about it's a wonderful life. Thank you, Skylar. Thanks for the call. Really appreciate it. You're reminding me, I need to go and watch A Christmas Story. Let me say, a wonderful life has become this Christmas classic. Everybody watches A Wonderful Life on Christmas. I remember when I was a kid it was on every channel in the days before cable. Every channel was showing it's a wonderful life. You couldn't miss it. And I can't stand it's a wonderful life. I can't stand that movie for so many reasons. But primarily because it's about this person who has dreams about living this amazing life, going to Paris, living a glamorous, exciting, fulfilling, wonderful life. And then because of circumstances, giving up all those dreams, sacrificing everything he lived for, everything he dreamed of, everything he wanted and staying to run against a family bank. And then really doing a lousy job doing that so the bank is basically bankrupt. And being miserable, really, really miserable, not enjoying his life, not valuing his life, not to the point of wanting to commit suicide. And the argument about not committing suicide if you remember the story is all the good he's done other people. Oh, don't worry, your life is crap. You're miserable. You are not enjoying what you're doing. You're not good at what you're doing. You have not fulfilled your dreams. You have not followed your passions. You didn't marry the woman you really wanted to marry. You didn't go to see the world like you really wanted to see it. You didn't do all the things you really wanted to do, but you know what, you helped a lot of people so everything's okay. No, your life should not be measured by the value you provide other people. Your life should be measured by the value you provide your own life by how good your life is. And again, I'm not talking about material good. I'm just talking about how good you are. You're doing, you're working at a career you love. And that career could be a career that doesn't produce a lot of money. That's okay. If you love it and you're enjoying it and you're getting a huge amount of value out of it. Life should be about marrying the person you admire, you respect, you love fully. You know, a good life should be about making the most of your life, living your life to the fullest. I love that I think it's the army slogan. Be the best that you can be. I love that, that is great. Because that should be a motto in life. Be the best that you can be. Use all your faculties to be the best human being you can be. Which means think out your life plan on how to make your life the most meaningful it can be. I mean, but think about, and that is what it should be about. Yeah, you wanna help other people, fine. If it's not a sacrifice. Two minutes. If you're not losing through the exchange. Make this a trading holiday, not a sacrifice holiday. You wanna send money to charity again. Make sure it's a charity you believe in. So again, Christmas, great holiday. Particularly in America. Why is it a great holiday, particularly in America? Because America's commercialized at more than any other country in the world. I love Christmas because it's commercialized. I love Christmas because of the lights and the lights by the way are there to draw you into them all, draw you into the stores, draw you into places where you can buy stuff for yourself and the people you love. That's who created the lights. It was the Macy's Parade. It was Santa Claus, right? Where's Santa Claus? Santa Claus is not about, he's the jolly guy. He's happy. He's not about sacrificing. He's about having fun. All the stories we read, it's all about enjoying and celebrating life. Even the tree, the Christmas tree. We bring in a Christmas tree. We bring in an evergreen, a plant that survives the winter when it's freezing cold and it lives in spite of that. We bring it into our home to symbolize life and we decorate it to symbolize happiness and lights and friendship and the wonders of the universe. So go out there Monday, celebrate, have a good time, enjoy your family and friends. I certainly will. And you know, remember, this is a time, this is a holiday about your values. All right, we'll be right back after this break. This is the Yoram Book Show. All right, we're back and we'll be talking about Christmas. And before I move on to another topic, first, if you wanna call and talk about Christmas, try to convince me I'm all wrong about this. 1-888-900-3393 or if you wanna support my position on Christmas, 1-888-900-3393. We've got Jennifer on the line. Merry Christmas, Jennifer. Merry Christmas. I wanted to ask you if you'd ever seen Rudolph the Rental's Render cartoon. I know it's a cartoon, but I think it's a really great story because it's about doing what you believe is right and what's best for you and not conforming to society. And also it depicts growing up as a positive thing. Yeah, no, absolutely. I have watched it and I think you're right. And I think a lot of American stories are like that. I mean, we Americans are really into doing the right thing and growing up. At least used to be, I think it's changed, but... And we've always been a self-interested society. It's kind of in our DNA in a sense. You know, we all, we're all the founders of this country put in our founding document, the idea that every one of us has an inalienable right. Inalienable right as part of who we are, as part of what we are, in their words endowed by our creator, whether you believe nature is your creator or God is your creator, you have these rights as part of being a human being to your own life, not to sacrifice for other people, not to give charity, not to live for other people, but to live your life free of intervention and to pursue your happiness. The right to pursue happiness is again, the right for you to make choices about your own values and to pursue your own happiness. And they left us that as a legacy in spite of all the attempts by left and right in this country to denounce the idea of the pursuit of happiness, to turn Americans into Europeans who are malevolent and dark and depressed and sorry, Europeans listening to this. I know there are a lot of you, but European culture generally, and who are collectivist, the founding fathers left America with a legacy of individualism and a legacy of pursuit of happiness. And despite the fact that intellectuals in this country hate that fact, we still see it here and then. And I think one of the places you see it is in how Americans so heartedly, so willingly and with so much fun embrace the holiday season and embrace Christmas for all, it's commercialized wonderful value. Yes, I totally agree, thank you. Thanks, Jennifer, thanks for calling. All right, only people agreeing with me calling in today. All right, nobody wants to argue the case for a different, oh, maybe David wants to argue about wonderful life. All right, David, go for it. What's good about a wonderful life? Well, sir, I just wanted to say that you said that the man just about ran the business broke. Well, actually the money was stolen for him and that's the reason he was so depressed. Yeah, but remember, remember he's in big trouble already before that, that is, this is a relatively, I think it's $6,000, it's a lot of money in 1930 something whenever this was done, but he was having, he's the unsuccessful banker throughout the thing. He feels unsuccessful, he is not really achieved and remember that the money is kind of lost, right? His uncle misplaces it and then it's stolen from him but ultimately it's his uncle and him, they're not very good at what they do. They give out loans because they feel sorry for people not based on real and economic values. The successful banker in the story is the bad guy which is of course typical, right? The successful financier is always evil. He's the one who steals it. So the whole movie is teaching you that good bankers, bankers who are successful, bankers who make money, bankers who foreclose on people because they don't pay back their loans, how evil is that? They're bad guys, they're evil. The good guy bankers, the guy who doesn't care about money, who doesn't care about profit, who is just casual and relaxed and is the lousy banker really and who is not really, you know, that's what it teaches, right? I know, what you're saying kind of falls to exactly the reason why we went into a recession here in the first place because President Clinton in 1995 passed a poverty act that told banks to give people no money and no loans alone. Absolutely. That's why we get the recession in the first place. Banko gives you money based on your need. I found very, he was giving people loans that were part of the community that he knew, I don't know. I don't know if anybody didn't pay him back. Oh, they didn't. There's a lot of evidence there that people in the movie, if you watch it again, that people are not paying him back. Why are they not paying him? Because they can't afford it because the kids had surgery. It's all about him feeling sorry for people and making loans based on that. The reason he was wanted to commit suicide is because he was still guilty about losing the money, losing the bank and his family. No, it's much more than that. Those people who didn't have no money who couldn't pay him back all came up with the money to save the bank. Yeah, I know, feel good ending. But no, because if you remember, the way to convince him that he shouldn't commit suicide is not to say, look, the bank could be saved, everything's gonna be okay, your family, you're not disappointing your family. That wasn't what convinced him. What convinced him was, look how bad the town would be if you hadn't been around. Look at all these people's lives, how bad they would be. So the reason he's committing suicide is because he believes his life had no meaning. He didn't do what he really wanted to do, if you remember, which was go to Paris and travel the world. He doesn't really like banking. He doesn't enjoy the profession. He doesn't see any value in what he's done. He's giving up on life. And the way to show him that his life is valuable is not to show him all the good things he did for himself. It's to show him all the good things he did for his community and so on. It's such an un-American. I mean, I'm serious, it's such an un-American movie. America is not about giving loans to people who cannot pay it back. That's exactly you're right. That's what caused the Great Recession. America's about greedy bankers like J.P. Morgan creating whole industries, or like the venture capitalist in the Silicon Valley. Creating whole industries by investing their money in businesses that can pay them back and make them a profit. America's about businessmen going out there and creating jobs and creating industries and creating, it's about building, creating and making. And part of that is about creating wealth and doing business and people trading with one another. It's not about doing favors. Doing favors is nice and there's nothing wrong with that, but that's not the essence of what America's about. I don't know if you're still on there, David. You know, your turn to disagree. But okay, sounds like David's gone. Thanks, David, for the call. But you know, charity and community service. I mean, there's nothing wrong with charity and community service. They're fine, they're fine. But it's not what defines America. It's all defines life. Think about America in 1776. A country that is relatively poor, the British don't care that much about us. That's why they don't really fight. They're too busy with the French and the Spanish who they consider really important. We're not that important. And then, and then, by 1914, we are the mightiest economic power in the world. How do you go? How do you go? From being a third-rate country to being the mightiest economic power in the world in 140 years. Was it because of charity? Was it because of community service? No. It was because of business. It was because of entrepreneurs. It was because of hard-working Americans building something, creating something out of nothing, going into the wilderness and building an economy, pursuing their self-interest, trying to make their life better. Their life substantially better. It's the pursuit of self-interest. It's the pursuit of profit. It's the pursuit of creativity that made America America. And we don't celebrate that. We never celebrate. I mean, a wonderful Christmas movie would be about a successful businessman, right? Who's created jobs. And instead, what do we get? We get Dickens a Christmas Carol, right? Dickens a Christmas Carol. About a scrooge. Now, is he really a scrooge, right? What does he do scrooge? He's made money. How does he made money? By providing values to his customers. And how much does he pay his clerk, the poor clerk that is the hero of the story, supposedly underpaid? Well, if he's underpaid, why doesn't he leave scrooge and go and get employment somewhere else? Because he's probably not that productive. He's probably not that productive. He's making the market wage. If he was more productive, he was worth more than what scrooge was paying him. He would have left and he wouldn't have thought twice about leaving scrooge without an employee. And he would have gone and got a better job somewhere else that paid him more. And yet, so he's getting paid a market wage. He's getting paid what he's worth. Why is scrooge the bad guy? Why is scrooge who's providing an important service to his customers a bad guy? And why is, I forget his name, the clerk, the good guy? Because we're so, we've imported Dickens as British, not Americans. Americans didn't write that way in the 19th century. Americans celebrated success, celebrated worth creation, celebrated rags, the richest stories. Those were the stories we loved in the 19th century. We had to import Dickens. And we had to import this idea that we should hate the successful and we should, you know, the real value is in the worker, the underpaid worker. We should raise his minimum wage as if raising the minimum wage artificially has no consequences. All right, let's take a break here again if you want in the conversation about Christmas, 888-900 or if you want in on the conversation about scrooge, about Christmas Carol, 888-900-3393 or about It's a Wonderful Life. 888-900-3393, you're listening to your Unbrook Show on the Blaze Radio Network and we'll be right back. The Unbrook Show. All right, Merry Christmas everybody. And we'll be spending the first hour talking about Christmas here. And I do wanna say something about a Christmas Carol. I mean, the sense in which a Christmas Carol, the sense in which scrooge is wrong, is in a sense a bad guy. And it's not in the way he treats his employees. I think he treats his employees very fairly. I think it's in the fact that he doesn't treat himself well. What's wrong about scrooge is he's not selfish, not properly selfish, self-interested. The problem is that scrooge does not, does not actually pursue his own values, not in his romantic relationship. He doesn't go after the girl. He doesn't pursue his own values. He doesn't buy himself gifts. He's too miserly. He's too invested in investing his money rather than enjoying his money. He should be enjoying the money. So this is a scrooge's problem is that he's depressed, that he's not focused on how to make his life better, that he doesn't have friends, that he doesn't have a close family, that he doesn't pursue life, that he isn't trying to make life the best that it can be. The best that it can be. Now, I know that people out there would disagree with me about Christmas. Please call 888-9-0-0-3-3-9-3. Joe Scoff, just call. It's easier for me to answer a question than to read it off of a chat. So call in. I understand that what I'm saying goes completely against kind of the tradition of what Christmas is about. So scrooge is miserable. Because he's not self-interested enough. Because he's not focused on his own well-being. All right, let me try to read this question because he's not calling. So he's saying he doesn't get the logic here and completely disagree with my view on Christmas. If you love that people are spending so much, then why don't we make every day of the year celebration so we can massively inflate the production and consumption? It's just arbitrary celebration that's inherently not problematic. But if people feel forced to and don't enjoy it, then how is that in their self-interest? Now I don't think people are forced to do it. I think people, this is a time not to consume for the sake of consumption. But in a celebration of life, this is the lights that, and you can't celebrate life, you can't celebrate all the time. Celebration, it's nice to have a period of time where you celebrate a period of time where the lights come out and you give gifts and you spend time and effort thinking about the kind of gifts that people you love would like. You think about their values and you think about your values. It's a nice way to take a portion of the year, to take a couple of weeks and focus our attention on a certain aspect of life. I'm not against holidays. I think holidays, just like I like the 4th of July. I love the 4th of July because it's a time to reflect on the founding of America on this amazing value and the time we reflect on the value of the founding fathers and what they left us, the time we reflect on the founding principles of the country. So I'm all for holidays. I am all for these moments during the year where we focus our attention in a particular direction and it's not forced. You don't have to do it. You can say, you know, I'm too busy this year to celebrate Christmas and the truth is I'm too busy to celebrate Christmas this year. I'll tell you that. I'll tell you more about that later in January sometime. But I'm gonna celebrate Christmas but not our full all-out celebration partially because I had back surgery a few weeks ago. I'm still recovering from that partially because there's a lot going on right now that is keeping me really busy all good stuff but keeping me really, really busy. So I'm not in full celebration mode. So this year, Christmas has taken a side is not that important for me, right? You're not forced into it. There's no duty to do it but it's because other people are celebrating it because it's the lights out and their stores out. I can still enjoy it. And when I do choose to fully celebrate it, it's right there. I can have a good time with it. So no, I'm all for holidays. I'm all for, it's just like birthday parties. I think birthday parties are cool. I think birthday parties are cool and because it's a time to reflect on your life. I think these moments, holidays are good things. So anyway, Joe's saying he's trying to call in there's no, nobody's answering. So 888-900-3393 and we'll take Joe's call as soon as he manages to call in. All right, I wanna shift a little bit. I wanna shift a little bit to a different topic. And that is, well, but it's related to Scrooge because the Scrooge is all coming out now to destroy part of the reason to celebrate. Well, the reason to celebrate is taxes are going down, which is, you know, I don't think in the big picture, long-term, that big of a deal because as I've said many times, as long as spending is high, it doesn't really matter. But taxes are down. This is generally has potentially, particularly corporate tax decrease, potentially good economic, potential to have positive economic music, although again, long-term it doesn't matter as long as we do not reduce spending. But you're already seeing all these stories come out from the left about trickle down doesn't work. Trickle down is a myth. This tax policy is all about trickle down and don't believe any of it. There's no, not gonna be any benefits and if the benefits are there, they're gonna go all to the rich people and nobody else benefits from it. So I wanna talk about, and I'll probably, I'll do this after the break because we're coming up on the news break in a couple of minutes. I wanna talk about trickle down economics. Is trickle down economics real? What is trickle down economics? And is there, is it a myth? And this relates to the Scrooge thing. I mean, we tend to view businessmen as somehow bad. We tend to view wealth creation as somehow bad. The idea that we cut rates for the rich is bad. Even Republicans, they barely cut the tax rate for the rich. I think that's the biggest flaw of this tax cut. Is it didn't really cut taxes for the wealthy. Where the people who most deserve a tax cut, most deserve a tax cut, and the tax cut for whom the economic benefit is the greatest because let me say this in advance and I'll elaborate after the break. There is no such thing as trickle down economics. It's not trickle down. It's a flood. It's waterfall down. And all the jobs that we have, all the wealth that the middle class has, whatever jobs and whatever money the poor have is a result of the investment of the thinking, of the hard work, of the production of businessmen, of those who have made a lot of money. The wealthy. The wealthy are the ones that drive this economy. The wealthy are the ones that create all the jobs. They're the ones who make this country what it is. Now the wealthy, not the wealthy who inherited it. The wealthy who produce it. The wealthy who make it. 30. So it's not a trickle down. It's a flood of jobs. It's a flood of great products that enhance our lives that we go out and happily shop for and consume. All right, we're about to wrap it up here. We've got a hard break. When we come back, we've got a call from the UK, which we're going to take. You're listening to your own book show on the blaze radio network and we'll be back right after this. The Iran Brook show starts now. Hey everybody, we're back and we're talking. We've been talking Christmas for the first hour and I started to switch over to talking about, talking about trickle down economics and whether there really is a trickle down and we'll get into that. But first, I've got a call from Joe who wants to challenge me on this idea that I have of self-interest. Joe is calling actually from the UK. It's great to have a listener in the UK. Hey Joe. Hey. She cut off there, go ahead. Oh, can you hear me? I can, you're a little choppy. Yes. Sorry, you can hear me. Yes, I can. Go ahead. Brilliant. I don't disagree with your idea of self-interest generally and in fact, I am a proponent of objectivism but the issue that I have with this is the fact that Christmas is something that people feel obliged to take part in. For example, I have to have Christmas Day off and actually if I felt that I could maximize the productivity of the company which would benefit my self-interest, perhaps because I'm not religious, it'd be better for me to work that day. I'm not religious so I don't place value on that time. I have no problem with people being on holiday but I want them to have the freedom to have holiday when they want to and maximize their self-interest to have holiday when it suits them and when it fits them. And I feel that Christmas is something people feel like they have to do, like me. And actually it's something that perhaps people would prefer to celebrate another time which is more significant to them. Well, I mean, I agree with you if Christmas was and I don't know, maybe there are laws in the books that say companies have to give Christmas after the employees. I'm against laws like that so I don't believe in laws like that but certainly owners of companies have a right to decide that they want to take a day off and they want to give their employees a day off and you get a holiday that day whether you as an employee like it or not if you don't like it, start your own business. So yeah, if there are laws that force you to do that but if you feel pressured and forced culturally then I'd say, you know, not to you specifically but generally I'd say grow a spine, right? This year I'm not really celebrating Christmas and I kind of explained why before because I don't have time and I'm busy and things are happening. We're gonna do a Christmas dinner because I want to see friends and family and we're gonna do that. There's no religious aspect to my Christmas. I have, you know, except for my neighbor who likes to put a cross up facing my house every season but it's on his property, he has a right to do that. I don't see how it's being foisted on me in any kind of way or any kind of aspect except on my employer and my employer has a right to do that so I don't have any gripes against my employer. I think as a cultural phenomena these things are actually good. I think it's good for cultures, for peoples to stop and celebrate certain things in life and having holidays unofficially, not government holidays but unofficially is a good thing and some businesses will stay open but most businesses would probably celebrate it and I gave the foot of July as an example, I gave her birthdays as an example. I think they're dates that are worth commemorating and in this case, the 25th of December has nothing to do with the birth of Jesus. He wasn't born on the 25th of December. He was probably born sometime in the spring based on the stories and the 25th of December is actually the day when the solstice was always celebrated and the way the Christians got people to adopt Christianity was to steal their holidays and to embrace their traditions and the whole way in which we celebrate Christmas is far more pagan than Christian and the dates in which we celebrate Christmas has much more to do with the pagan holidays celebrated during Roman times than it has anything to do with Jesus' birth. So I don't attribute any religious importance to Christmas, to the time of year, to any of that and everything about how I celebrate it and how the people I surround myself celebrate it is secular and has nothing to do with the birth of Jesus and that's why I think so many people around the world love Christmas it's because it's not a religious holiday. All right, I don't know if I convinced Joe. Yeah, go ahead Joe. No, no, I just have one final thing to say to that which is that, yeah, I agree with everything you said and obviously it has merits to it in celebrating the beauty of winter and like you said, it has the pagan significance as well. I just think that the issue is that I want people to have freedom to be able to enjoy holidays when they want to. Yeah, but it's hard to do that. I get what you're trying to say, but it's hard to do that because part of what the holiday is is that it is a community thing that it is something that everybody's celebrating at the same time. You don't have to, you can stay home or you can work on your project on your computer that day. You don't have to go to your family. You don't have to hang out with friends but it is a community thing and I think there's value to that. That is the malls are lit up during the season. They're not lit up all year round. If they will live out all year round it would take away a little bit from what's special about lighting it up. The streets are lit up. So I do think there's a value in celebrating together. This is from a selfish individualist. There is a value in all of us agreeing to dedicate this day or this week to a celebration and if you don't wanna participate, you don't have to. You can go off and do your thing. You can go hiking. You can work on your computer that day. You just can't go to work because your employer has chosen to participate in this joint venture. But that's his choice. It should be his choice. I don't know if the laws allow it. No, that's true. Whoops, I guess you got cut off there. Okay, Joe, thanks. I wanna move away from Christmas and I'm certainly gonna do some work on Christmas because there's stuff that has to get done by the end of the year that I have no option about and this is gonna be a very, very busy Christmas season for me. I still love it. I still enjoy it when I go outside but this year we don't ever be Christmas tree we usually get one of these nine-footers and my wife spends hours and hours decorating it. She loves it and it's just a lot of fun but this year because of stuff, it's just not gonna happen. All right, no Christmas tree even, which is a big deal. Trickle down economics. Ah, how did we get from that to that? You know what, let's take a break here. We can take a break, we're flexible. Let's take a break here and then come back with the whole trickle down economics. I wanna talk about the stock market. I wanna talk about Bitcoin. I wanna talk about stock buybacks. There's a cool topic. I'm sure you're all really, really motivated to hear me talk about stock buybacks but that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna talk about that but first I wanna complete my thoughts on trickle down economics. They're gonna relate to stock buybacks. You're listening to your Unbrook show on the Blaze Radio Network and we're gonna be right back after these messages. You're Unbrook. So one of the things I love about Christmas is the fact that December 25th is Isaac Newton's birthday. Now that's something worth really celebrating. Isaac Newton, the great physicist. Now think about, I wanna talk about this in the context of trickle down. Think about this in the context of trickle down economics. Isaac Newton was born, December 25th, I can't remember the year, but a long time ago. And what he has done, his discoveries have changed the world. They have trickle down or more accurately flooded down to all the rest of us who are not geniuses, who are not anywhere near as creative and as productive and as smart as Isaac Newton was. But Isaac Newton has made all of our lives better. They could not have been an industrial revolution without Isaac Newton. They could not have been a technological revolution today without Isaac Newton. Very few of the bridges that you see out there could have been built without Isaac Newton. We certainly wouldn't have gone to the moon without Isaac Newton. We wouldn't have any, any, any, any of the material goods that we have today without having an Isaac Newton. Talk about trickle down. Isaac Newton made all of our lives hundreds of years later much, much better off than they would have been because of his discoveries, because of what he did. That is the essence of trickle down. I don't like the term trickle down. I like the idea that we all stand on the shoulders of giants. We all stand on the shoulders of atlases to refer you back to Atlas Shrugged. There are people out there who are incredibly productive. There are people out there who are incredibly smart. There are people out there who are incredibly knowledgeable. And they make life better for us by orders of magnitude. They make life better for the poor, for the middle class, for everybody. Much better. And without them, they would be no jobs for the poor, no jobs for the middle class, without entrepreneurs, without inventors, without engineers, without the so-called rich, without those people in the top, I don't know, 1%, 10%, what do you think jobs are gonna come from? Who's gonna invent the next great thing? No, Bill Gates and all these rich entrepreneurs out there, they've got all this money, and we don't see any of it. What about, there's no trickle down, of course there's trickle down. You've got an iPhone, you've got an iPad, you've got all the technology, you've got an internet. Internet is a huge trickle down to you. To you who didn't invent the internet, I didn't invent the internet. A bunch of entrepreneurs did most of the work to commercialize it, to make it possible for me to use it. They made a lot of money at it, and who benefits from that? Me, I get to use the internet. What did I pay for it? Zero, nothing, nada. Of course economics is about trickle down. Again, not trickle down, flood down, water fall down. It is the great entrepreneurs, the great producers who make our economy run. Not the workers, sorry, I mean workers are important, there's nothing against work, work is good, work is moral, work is virtuous. But you don't change the world. The people who change the world, the people who make your work possible, the people who create the jobs, the people who have thoughts about how to take money and invent something completely new, and invest in something completely outrageous that nobody would have thought possible. And thereby creating jobs in some field that we can't even imagine today. It's that bioengineer that has an idea about how to cure cancer. He is going to change the world and impact everybody else. Talk, call it trickle down, call it flood down. He's gonna make the lives of everybody who didn't invent this cure for cancer. Everybody's lives are better. And hopefully he becomes super rich as a consequence. And then the left, and some people on the right will say, oh, he's got so much money. That's not right. We're not benefiting from all the money he has. We need more trickle down. You already got the trickle down. You got the drugs. You got the cure for cancer. That was the trickle down. And oh, by the way, not only did he get the drugs, the cure for cancer. You also got, you also got employment. He hired people to produce the drug. We've got people selling the drug. We've got massive quantities of employment. And on top of that, he's taken all his money that he's made and he's investing it. That's providing capital for other businessmen to create more jobs and more products and more benefits for your life and for my life. I mean, every way you slice this, every way you slice it, it is the successful, rich businessman who create the goods and the jobs that we enjoy, all of them. At the end of the day, you have to be realistic about this. If you're a single employee at a single job, doing a single task, you're creating very little. But if you're Jeff Bezos, think of what he's created. He's created Amazon, changed all of our lives, changed the entire landscape, created hundreds of thousands of jobs. Some of them at Amazon, some of them at UPS and FedEx. Yeah, some jobs went away. At retailers, they were less efficient. We are benefit because we get convenience and price. And yet Jeff Bezos, then he takes all that money and he invests it. One of his investment is in a space exploration company. He wants to go to Mars. The highest people, people work for him. One day we might go to Mars and who knows what that will open up in terms of benefits to mankind. Other parts of his money, I'm sure, invested in all kinds of other companies. Basically, their money is going to do what? To create jobs and to create goods and products that we consume. It's not that businessmen exploit us. It's not that businessmen do nothing. We do all the hard work and they benefit from our hard work and they take it away from us. No, no, it's the opposite. They do the really hard work and the really hard work is not physical labor, it turns out. It never has been. The really hard work is the thinking necessary to invent Amazon. The thinking necessary to discover the laws of physics. The thinking necessary to improve the light bulb as Thomas Edison did or to create a whole electricity industry as Thomas Edison did. Never made, you know. That's the real work and that's the work that benefits humanity. That's the work that we all benefit from. That's the work that trickles down but even in the more mundane perspective, the purely money materialistic sense, it's not trickle down, it's a flood. Think about, think about cutting taxes for the rich. They have more money. What are they gonna do with that money? What are they gonna do with that money? Now, if you had money, if I had money, we're likely to go out and spend it. Indeed, I just read a report, where is it? Yeah, that yours consumer spending rose in November. It's, I think it's rising in December again. It's really, really high and at our saving rate, the amount of money we save is at a 10-year low. Now think about that. How do, where does the money to build new factories come from? Where does the money to build new warehouses, the stores that are buying new trucks come from? Where does the money to invest in new technologies come from? It comes from our saving. It comes from, you can't, the money to invest is money that somebody saved and we're not saving. Saving rate is at a 10-year low. And indeed, if you dig into the numbers you discover, that most Americans don't save at all. A lot of us are in debt. We have negative saving. We consume money we don't even have. Who does save? Who does most of the saving in the American economy? Most of the saving in the American economy was done, is done by wealthy people because after you reach a certain level, there's only so much you can consume. There's only so much you wanna consume. And then you invest. You save. And by doing so, you create jobs. You create new products. You create a growing economy. The responsibility for the growing economy in the United States is the fact that wealthy people are saving and investing. Now when you cut their taxes, what do rich people do? Now poor people or low-minute class people, they go on and they buy more stuff. Now that's okay. I have nothing against that and I'm all for cutting everybody's taxes. But the fact is from a purely economic perspective, saving is much more important than consumption. Investment is far more important than consumption because it creates future jobs, future consumption, future goods and products to be consumed. What do rich people do with the money they don't pay in taxes? They save it, they invest it, they create jobs. So yeah, it's trickle down. Yeah, it's flood down. That's where we get our jobs. So if you want the U.S. economy to do well, if you wanna have more job opportunities, more job prospects, you want wealthy individuals, you want businesses to make more money, not less. To be able to keep more of their own money, not less because they're the ones who create the jobs. Now somebody is asking a question. By the way, if you wanna ask a question, I know a lot of this is challenging, a lot of economic myths out there. 888-900-3393, I'd prefer that you call up and ask the question than if you write it in a chat. 888-900-3393. But one of the questions is this trickle down, flood down work if we are importing the goods which we are buying and investing capital in foreign growth markets. Absolutely, absolutely because it's not true that we're investing capital in foreign growth markets. If you look at the capital flows in the world, capital on a massive scale flows into the United States. Think about what's happened. Every time you buy a good from a foreign country, let's say from China, the manufacturer of that good gets dollar bills, they get dollars because you paid in dollars. And what do they do with those dollars? They can't buy anything in China with dollar bills. So what do they do with those dollars? They invest them in America. They give them to the bank, maybe in the bank invest them in America, but those dollars come back to the United States. It's part of the mythology about importing being bad. The dollars come back to the United States in what form? In the form of buying our bonds, which lowers our interest rates, which we are benefiting from. In the form of investment in real estate, in the form of investment in production, buying our companies and investing in them and expanding them. The money has to flow back to the United States and it does, and it does. Watch capital flows, watch capital flows. Now, and to assume that capital flowing into stocks and bonds is not productive is ignorant. It's ignorant. One minute. Read my book. If you don't think buying stocks and bonds is productive, then buy my book. The wealth creators, the mall case for finance, explain why buying stocks is incredibly productive. Why being in the stock market is incredibly productive. And we're gonna talk about stock buybacks in a minute after the break and I'll explain why it is so productive. And we're also gonna take a call from Dan, who's worried about switching from manufacturing to retail after the upcoming break. And if you can call in, 800-888-900-3393. And we'll talk about flood down economics. And you're listening to your Unbrook show on the Blaze radio network, we'll be right back. You're listening to the Unbrook show. All right, we're back and we're dispelling some economic myths. The idea that there's anything but flood down economics. There is no such thing. Socialism, which has bottom-up economics. Yeah, it results in everybody starving. Go visit Venezuela these days. No, capitalism is flood down. The entrepreneurs create real benefit. And that's why I never resent, never resent the wealth that accumulates in the hands of entrepreneurs. In the hands of entrepreneurs. I wanted to mention, if you're interested in the ideas you hear in this show, I encourage you to go to my website, yourunbrookshow.com, Y-A-R-O-N-B-R-O-K-Show.com. Yourunbrookshow.com, you can find a gazillion content that reflects this particular point of view, the iron-rand, objectivist point of view about the world. You know, so, again, Matthew's writing here that he thinks that productive capital, that is capital that's invested in plants and pieces of equipment, is more valuable than financial capital. That's just not true. That's just not true. Financial capital always translates into productive capital. And how it translates, you should read my book. The Mall case for finance. All right, there is no such thing as pure finance that does not translate into production. And, you know, again, the trickle down works from the stock market as well. All right, we're gonna talk about the stock market in a minute, but let's take the call from Dan. Dan wants to talk about switching from manufacturing to retail. Dan, how's it going? Merry Christmas. Hey, Merry Christmas. Thank you. I love your show. I love listening to your perspective and how you really dive deep and really get into the nuts and bolts of things. And I love the topic you were just talking about. I wish there were more people like you, Dan. We need more listeners like you. Go ahead. So the thing, it was really interesting when you were talking about the savings versus kind of like the spending, I guess. And like you said, it's okay to go enjoy some things and do a little spending retail sales, I guess. But I'd love to hear your perspective on how we've changed as a country where we'll use from a big picture to even the smallest picture as in downed towns and communities where we used to be the lenders to the rest of the world. And now we have to borrow from them and that's kind of come down to whether we wanna say manufacturing's gonna come back and not advocating that as a real actual thing. But we used to manufacture export. Now we have to import more than we export. And where I live in Syracuse, our own county, 40% of the county government's revenue depended on retail sales. Which I found this out a few years ago and I think it's really, in my opinion, I think that's a way off balance for how much and that they really encourage us to spend from a retail environment. They just built a $82 million Ample Theater on our lake to get us to go to concerts. And I'm like, is that really the role of government and is it good to go retail versus why don't they encourage more real economics, state power like you're talking about? But you see government is all about focusing us on consumption and not on production. Think about our tax system. Our primary taxes are on producers. We have an income tax. So we tax, right? We tax work, we tax production. And we know that when you tax something more what do you get of it? Less. So with taxing production, we tax corporations, we tax business, that's our main source of revenue. You could alternatively tax consumption and then you'll get less consumption and more work. So as a government, we have chosen as a society, if you will, our government has chosen to tax production and work and not tax as much consumption. And as a consequence, you get some of the things that you're talking about. Then our city governments, they prefer retailers. So they will rezone areas for malls or for stadiums or they'll steal people's property. They'll call it eminent domain and they'll steal people's property to build those stadiums and malls. Why? Because they like, their tax base, they like from these big projects and because they think it'll get them votes. So we have a perverted, a whole perverted system now, but let's be clear about something. In the United States today, we manufacture more stuff than we ever did at any point in our entire history. We manufacture more stuff today than we did 10 years ago, more than we did 20 years ago, more than we did 50 years ago. Now we do it with half the number of people because we become so efficient at it and because we use technology effectively. So we don't have to employ people in order to produce a lot, but we actually manufacture more than ever before. Let me also say this. Retail consumption is a sign of wealth. If you don't have money, you can't consume. Societies that consume a lot are societies that have a lot of extra wealth. And the fact that we have so much consumption is a sign of wealth. Now, unfortunately, a lot of that consumption in America today is driven by debt. And I wonder whether we can afford that debt, particularly the government. The government is the biggest consumer in the world, the U.S. government. And most of its consumption is debt-driven. And I don't think the government can repay that debt. So that is very worrisome economically. So I agree with you. There's some very negative trends in the world in which we live. We're using debt to consume rather than our own wealth, our own production. But the fact that there are lots of stores everywhere, that I don't see as a negative. That I view as a sign that we're wealthy. Now, I wish we were really wealthy and not living on debt. That's the problem. Now, let me just address the import-export issue. We're importing a lot of stuff. I think that's great because we import it at a cheaper price. You don't have to import. America doesn't import anything. It's individuals who import. We buy foreign stuff because it's good and it's cheap. And we make that choice as individuals. The Chinese choose to export to us because they want, at the end of the day, to invest in America. They want those dollars. And those dollars make it possible for them to invest in America. And they're investing in America and they're part of what keeps our economy going. Not only that, but Asian cultures over the last 50, 60 years have saved much more than we have. And they want to deploy those savings. And they don't have enough investment opportunities to deploy those savings at home. So they basically convert those savings into dollars and make those investments in the United States. So I still think that on a global basis, we have one of the healthiest economies in the world, if not the healthiest, most productive economies. The problem with our economy is the ever-growing role of the government in it and the ever-growing role of the government in consumption in it. But export input is not a problem. Switching from manufacturing to retail is not a problem. Debt is a problem, particularly when it's government debt. Does that kind of explain stuff, Dan? Yeah, that's what I was trying to say. It's like you said, when I was a kid, I had a savings account and I had a job and I got interest on my savings. We don't get the savings and people don't, like you said, they don't save, I think, as much as they could for how much we spend or government gets us into spending or they're doing their own spending and that creates that pilot debt that eventually has to- I think that's right. I think we've gone from a saving economy to a consumption economy and what allows us to get away with it, what has allowed us to get away with it, is China. And this is why I think we have benefited far, far more from China than they have benefited from us because what has allowed the US economy to not save, we're at the lowest saving rate in 10 years and it was never very high, is the fact that the Chinese save and that the Chinese are investing those savings in America. That's what's add to that, the fact that we import cheap goods, which has raised our standard of living because we're spending less money on those goods. If you combine that, China has been a massive boon to America. I think without the Chinese revolution, economic revolution over the last 30 years, the standard of living in America would be way, way lower than it is today. Way lower than it is today. So China, I mean, this is one of the things that really upsets me about Trump is the demonization of China is so unjust to them and to us. It just gets economics upside down. It's completely utterly wrong. Dan, thank you for calling. Have a great Christmas and hope you keep listening and please go to my website because there's a lot more there in terms of me speaking. You're on brookshow.com, you're on brookshow.com and if you wanna support You're on Brookshow, broadly you can support us on Patreon. I'd really appreciate that. It's the Christmas season. It's the trading season, value for value. You can go on Patreon and make a small or large trade in providing some funds to allow me to continue to do this. And that way we continue trading. All right, we're gonna take a quick break here and we'll come back for the final segment. I wanna just say something about stock buybacks and don't hang up on me. I know it sounds boring. I'll try to make it interesting but it's really, really important because it's one of the ways the left is demonizing the cuts in corporate income tax. We'll be right back after this break. The You're on Brookshow. All right, we're back, Merry Christmas everybody. Next week we're back on Saturday, same time, same place and we'll be doing our year in review show. So we'll listen in next year to chime in on what you thought the good and the bad of this last year, the year that's about to end. I have mostly bad stuff so you guys can, you guys are gonna have to fill in the good stuff. We'll be talking about that. I wanna talk quickly and it's a topic that's hard to talk quickly about because it's technical but it's important about stock buybacks. I mean, we hear about this all the time in the news. The Democrats are using this now to demonize the corporate tax cut. They're saying, oh, corporations are gonna use the corporate taxes, the increased profits that they have to buy back their stocks, which means that their shareholder is gonna benefit enormously from this and it means that the stock market is gonna go up because indeed the stock market has gone up over the last few years because corporations have been buying back their stock. Now that's complete and utterly ignorant of the facts of economic fact and economic theory. There is no economic theory that shows that stock buybacks for corporations would drive up stocks unless you believe markets are completely inefficient driven completely by whim and then who knows what drives them up. But think about this. When a company has a billion dollars in cash available to it and it decides to use that billion dollars to buy back its stocks. What has happened? There are fewer stocks now and that's why people say but the stock price goes up. But there's also fewer cash. There's a billion dollars less of cash which wipes out whatever advantage there is of the greater, of the smaller number of stocks. Stock buybacks from a purely, perspective of price, independent of information, independent of what actually stock buybacks actually signal is a neutral event. It's a non-event. It's a non-event. They've taken this billion dollars that they could have invested in stuff and given it back to me. What does that do to the stock? Nothing. I mean, what you see is generally for other reasons which we'll talk about in a minute. Stock prices go up between one and 2% when stock repurchase is announced and they go up on one, 2% but that doesn't explain the 15% average returns that the stock market has earned since 2009 or 2010 or whatever or 2003, 2003, even counting the decline. It doesn't explain the returns. It can't, one or 2%, maybe, maybe. And that doesn't explain the whole stock market where a lot of stocks didn't have stock buybacks. Now, what does this stock buyback actually represent? Now, again, I'm skipping over a lot of technicalities and I'm skipping over a lot of financial literature and a lot of stuff, but what is it, what do most finance professionals, academics, believe stock buybacks represent? A company has a billion dollars and they take that billion dollars and they go and buy stock. It says that, so what that says is they don't have good investment opportunities. They don't have any good investment opportunities that would actually raise the rate of profit of the corporation. So they'd rather give you the shareholder the money so you can then find good investment opportunities somewhere else. It's a great way to take cash that the corporation does not have good investment opportunities to deploy and give it to you so you can deploy it to better investment opportunities. It's a massive way to redistribute capital to where it's less needed into where it's more needed in a sense of where it can gain a higher return. So it actually creates the stock buybacks, actually create jobs. They actually spur economic growth because they're a way to move capital to where it's needed which means move capital to where it will be invested which means move capital to where it will create new products, new jobs, new stuff, new goods. So yeah, again, it's trickle down. Now that's not only reason why stock buybacks are happening. The other reason the stock buybacks are happening is because interest rates are so damn low that businesses have discovered that debt is cheaper than equity. Having bonds is cheaper than having stock. So what most of the buybacks look like is companies increasing their leverage taking on more debt and paying off the equity, buying back who cares? That's just taking money from the people who issued the debt, sold the debt. Well, the company sells the debt, who bought the debt and transferring it to shareholders. Nothing happened here from an economic perspective. Maybe the only thing that's happened is we've increased risk because leverage is risk. And because we've increased risk, maybe we increase return on capital, the expected return on capital and the stockholders are more likely to invest in risky projects versus bondholders. So we've increased the risk in the economy but that's probably a good thing, not a bad thing unless it's out of control and there's no indication that leverage at the corporate level is out of control. We've improved risk taking. Now, I actually think having a company, having billions of dollars on its books is bad. Why? And this is called the agency cost issue in finance. It's bad because there's a temptation for managers to use that money to grow for the sake of growth, not for the sake of return on capital, of actual profitability, but just for the sake of growth, it's more fun, it's more prestigious. You get invited to better parties if you're running a big company than if you're running a small company. But big is not always good. What matters is not how big you are but how profitable you are over the long run. That is what the return on investment is. And I don't want managers to be investing their cash in bad investments. In investment that grow but actually reduce the rate of return. That actually reduce profitability. I actually want them only to invest in good deals. Now, one way to make sure that they only invest in good deals is that every time they get cash, they return it to shareholders. And when they have a good investment opportunities, they have to go to shareholders and ask for more money by issuing more stock in order to make the investment. And that way shareholders can look at the investment and say, okay, yeah, that makes sense. That's a good investment. That's gonna increase the rate of profitability. I'm good with that. So one of the phenomenons that has been recognized in finance is empire building. Managers who want to grow companies not for the sake of shareholders, but for their own sake. And therefore you want to take money out of the company. Now, Apple, for example, sitting on huge amounts of cash. And the question is the shareholders trust Apple to invest that not in a way that builds empire but in a way that maximizes return or don't they? And if they didn't trust Apple, they would demand that Apple do a stock buyback or pay it out as a dividend. As I think Carl Icahn did a few months back. And I think that's great. I think shareholders should demand that because even Apple, as much as I love Apple, I don't completely trust them with all that money. I want that money in shareholders' hands. I want them to be a little bit more constrained in terms of the money that they have. So that they have to go to the market if they want more money. All right. I think we're close to the end of the show. I want to wish you all again a very merry Christmas. I want to encourage you all to go to youronbrookshow.com. And to go to my page on Patreon and join this wonderful season. Trade, support the creation of these shows. And I'll be back next week. Same time, same place. To do 2017 in review, we'll look back at the good and bad stuff that happened. All right. Thank you for listening to your onbrookshow on the Blaze radio network. Bye. You're clear. Thanks. See you next week. We'll be here.