 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Powell. And I'm Trevor Burrus. Joining us today is Ryan Young. He's a fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He focuses on regulatory and monetary policy and financial regulation. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Ryan. Thanks for having me. Income inequality has been something that's been with humanity for let's just call it quite a long time. It's nothing new, but it does seem to be something new in the public consciousness. The specifics of income inequality and the 1% versus the 99% rhetoric seems to be the hot new topic. So before we get into, I guess, discussing what inequality is, how to think about it, and what, if anything, we should do about it, why do people seem so fixated on it now? One of the reasons might be aesthetics, the 1% versus the 99%. I would prefer people to get along with each other. So instead of saying the 1% versus the 99%, when people talk about ratios instead of actual flesh and blood human beings, why not talk about people instead of ratios? And that's, if anything, the inequality debate just simply needs to be reframed. Talk about people, not ratios. Have we seen inequality go up? It seems like at the very least the returns that the quote unquote 1% get on their investments, such as Steve Jobs, he benefited greatly from a worldwide economy as opposed to millionaires and billionaires of days past who may not have had people in China to sell iPhones to. So have the rich gotten richer, regardless of whether or not the poor have gotten poorer? The answer is yes, the rich have gotten richer. But the more important thing, again, people, not ratios, the poor have also gotten much richer. So Steve Jobs made his fortune and Bill Gates and all the others made their fortunes by making other people better off. And almost all of those people were worse off than themselves. They might not have been billionaires or even millionaires. They still benefited from the iPhone or the PC and all these other products that they used to make themselves better off. It's mutually beneficial. It's not a bad thing. So is that a lot of the anti-income inequality rhetoric and that we need to do something about this? So is this true that it depends, at least in large part, on thinking about the economy as zero-sum? A lot of people do think that way. It's not actually the case in real life, but yes, a lot of people do think that way. I mean, economists call it the zero-sum fallacy and rightfully so. Why is it a fallacy? The reason is that when consenting adults agree to make a deal with each other, well, they consent. The only reason either one agrees to the deal is that because both parties think that they'll both be better off. Otherwise, they wouldn't do it. The person or friends on the left would say, of course, if I go and accept, say, a job that pays a miniscule amount, I had a choice and I thought in the moment that I accepted it that I'm better off than if I didn't accept it because I need that money to put food on the table. But my choice is happening within the context of a larger system, a larger economy, a larger social structure, such that I didn't necessarily have that much of a choice. You as the employer or the capitalist classes could still be exploiting me via the structure of the system without holding a gun to my head and making me accept the individual choices about accepting or rejecting employment or accepting or rejecting buying health insurance or whatever else. Kato just put out a series of videos which I would encourage our listeners to watch. And in the third one towards the end, one of the lawyers asked an excellent question that speaks exactly to the point that you're making. And this is not verbatim. How does preventing a young man from getting his first steady job prevent income inequality? If your goal is to level the level of incomes, how does that help anybody? Well, then those videos which are part of the Libertarian.org project. Freedom on Trial. Freedom on Trial. But Aaron's question is more about the context of the choice. It reminds me of the quote who I believe is from some French person. We can put that in the show notes, but something along the lines of the law and its magisterial equality prohibits both the rich and the poor from sleeping under bridges. But the question of whether or not the poor have choices, that rich have more choices that the poor may not have. And so when they're taking a job that's $3 an hour or $4 an hour or 50 cents an hour, there may only be jobs that are 50 cents an hour. So maybe we should do something to fix that and give them jobs that are $15 an hour. Then the question becomes, does the minimum wage or similar policies, do those actually do anything to fix that? I think the answer is no. Well, we'll get to the minimum wage in a bit. I think we were going to kind of walk through because there are two papers that you've co-authored with your colleague Ian Murray about income inequality. One of them, which you call people not ratios, discusses the difference, the fact that you think that the inequality debate is somewhat askew, which you've already alluded to because it's focusing on relative ratios rather than absolute poverty. Why is it important to make that distinction? Because I think everyone of every political persuasion is concerned about helping the worst off. Everyone has the same goal. The question is, how do you go about it? I think a lot of folks are so focused on inequality. They see a difference between a rich man's income and a poor man's income that that's all they care about. They don't even care about how was the poor man doing? How can you help him out? How can you make people's incomes rise over time? Those are questions that to a large extent are not being asked. I think that is a major flaw in the debate and I think we need to reframe the debate to ask how are people doing as opposed to what is the ratio between a CEO's and a median worker's income? In that paper, you also discuss the writings of someone who recently brought income inequality to the discussion, Thomas Piketty, a French economist. What did Piketty say about income inequality and what's wrong with what he said? Well, that is a very rich topic. I'll try to keep it brief. We can go in depth if you want. So we do in these parts? Yeah, on this side of Kato, we go in depth. So if you want to really hash it out, go for it. Okay. Again, I'll try to keep it brief but also noted. Piketty's general story is that in the battle days back when monarchy was the dominant form of government, you had very high inequality, which means essentially that the nobility held almost all of the wealth and everyone else had nearly nothing. They lived at subsistence level. After the world wars in the 20th century, death and destruction made things more equal. Fortunes were brought down even though very few people were actually made better off. In the post-war years, equality has grown again and it continues to grow today. And actually Piketty argues that as of about 2010 or so, income inequality is roughly where it was right before World War I. So they call that a U-shaped curve because the dominant measure used for income inequality is called the Gini coefficient. It ranges from zero to one. In the Belle Epoche Europe, before say the French Revolution or so, it was very close to one, about 0.85, which meant that the nobles had everything and everyone else had nearly nothing. That's not fair. And then the revolution happened and then of course the 19th century wealth explosion happened. You had the world wars and the flattening, which describes the U-shape that Piketty describes. And then lately, yeah, since about the 1950s or 1960s, you've seen growing income inequality. Now, the trouble is the question that we want to answer, is it inequality or is it how do we make human beings better off? I think the debate is being framed in precisely the wrong way. And that's because people are focused on inequality instead of people. One of the counters to that would be to say, of course the poor today, say the poor in the United States, even if their relative position compared to the wealthy is the same as it was in the early 20th century or the 1500s or however bad we might want to believe it is that of course their lives are quite a lot better than the peasants were or poor people living in Industrial Revolution, England. But the amount of money that you have, the amount of stuff that you can buy is not the only thing that matters for the quality of your life that we should care about when we care about people. And that at some level, basic inequality, which isn't just monetary but often then transfers into power and dignity and respect within a society, that that sort of inequality does degrade a person's quality of life, that it is harmful to see that there are other people who have so much more than you do. And so yes, we don't want to impoverish everybody to flatten the income distribution, but caring about people means caring about them in a holistic sense and not just how much money they can bring in. That is probably the best and the hardest question you could ask about the inequality debate at all because it really ties into how do people feel about it? How do they talk about inequality? Everyone wants to keep up with the Joneses. If your neighbor gets a new car, maybe you want one for yourself. And that kind of sentiment is, well, it's part of what makes us human. That's both a good thing and a bad thing. It incentivizes us to create wealth and to do business with others and create mutual benefits. At the same time, if the fellow next door has something more than you, well, you get a little bit jealous and that often is the case that people make for bad public policies. Are we being too dismissive though in that sense? Because if we're focusing on the well-being of people, are we being too dismissive of inequality? You brought up the Gini coefficient of the Ancien regime in France, for example, as 0.85 and how that was bad. But why was that Gini coefficient bad? What sorts of inequality are bad in the way that we should care about them morally and use policies to try and fix it? The reason isn't so much the measure of the Gini coefficient. Like you said, it was 0.85 in pre-revolutionary France. In most of the U.S., the measure is somewhere around 0.4, 0.5. It varies from state to state. The measure that I think we need to talk about is how people are doing, and that's what we need to do by having a conversation like we're doing today, but also like everyday people need to have with each other. As in, how are you doing? Are you doing better off than your parents? Are you better off than your grandparents? Are your children going to be better off than you? And the answer to all of those questions for most people is yes. So how do we continue that trajectory? How do we make more people better off? I think people are asking the wrong questions, and I think we need to reframe the debate. I'm curious, as we're talking about this, I'm wondering if – so obviously, if we're having the debate the wrong way and we're putting too much attention on these relative versus absolute measures, it can lead us to bad policies, which can hurt people. The minimum wage being an example of a policy that can be well-meaning but can do a lot of harm. But at the same time, it seems like framing the debate the wrong way could also be hurting people merely by convincing them that they're being hurt. So if we're constantly saying, look at these people who are screwing you over and they're only rich because you are poor and they're getting rich off of your back, you're going to inculcate resentment. You're going to convince people that they're worse off than they really are, and you're going to convince people to judge the quality of their lives by measures that I think we agree are not as important. So whether Bill Gates has more money than I am is not the best way to measure how well my life is going either from an economist standpoint or just subjectively from my standpoint. But if someone's telling me that this guy is the problem, then I'm going to start seeing my life is worse than it really is. That's a common problem. I think the question that all of us are asking is, how can we make folks' lives better? And I think one of the biggest answers to that question is actually occupational licensing. For example, roughly one third of people need the government's permission to get up and go to work in the morning. I don't think that's right. I mean, if I needed brain surgery or something like that, I would not want to go to an uncertified surgeon point well taken. But at the same time, if you want to arrange flowers or decorate a room or you name it, a lot of times folks need to get the government's permission. They need to get a license. And a lot of times the folks who grant the license are the incumbents in business who have a vested interest in keeping out competitors and limiting the competition. And well, if you look at why workforce participation is at a near 50 year low, that's a big reason why. And I think that does a lot to widen not just the ratio of income inequality, but it also does a lot to keep poor people down. A lot of people might hear – I've probably heard about – if they listen to free thoughts, they've heard us talk about occupational licensing. But identifying it as one of the causes of income inequality might seem like a stretch. It's a bad thing. We have too many licensed industries, but I mean, really is it that big of drain on poor people's ability to move ahead in life or is it just sort of a marginal contribution? I think it's rather more than a marginal contribution. If you have an idea and you have a decent work ethic, you should be able to start your own business. That's it. There's not much more to it than that. Why are folks getting in your way? Yeah, but it seems also, especially for poorer people, if you look at – I mean, we're talking about thousands of hours for some of these professions, correct? And a lot of these people don't have – Thousands of hours to get these licenses. They get the license, yeah, in addition to how much money it costs. And so that's pretty daunting to someone making a barista who wants to become a hairdresser, for example. That's a good question. In fact, in one of my papers that you guys mentioned, there's an African hair braider, Bentadio. She emigrated to the Seattle area and started – I mean, she became an American and she became an entrepreneur. That's wonderful. And when she started her own hair braiding business, it turns out that she needed roughly 1,600 hours of cosmetology licensing. And when you look at the content of what the courses and the classes took, she does not do hair braiding – or sorry, she doesn't do hair dyeing, she doesn't do styling, she doesn't do anything else. All she does is braiding. So not only would she have to spend roughly three quarters of a working year – that's nine months of full-time work that she cannot be able to spend – actually making money and providing for a family – that she would have to spend on things that are worse than useless because those are services that she does not provide. And again, the people granting the licenses are her direct competitors. So you can see why that is, shall we say, unfair. It's stacking the deck against poor people. Yeah. Ask anyone to take nine months off to get prepared for something of not working and trying to get a better job. And that's usually supposed to be something like school, but as you said, the requirements didn't even relate. But only rich people would really be able to afford or be able to take nine months off to prepare themselves for a new career. That's right. It's stacking the deck. That's what occupational licensing is. So when people on the – it typically is the very far left, like the same people who protest in Seattle against WTO meetings and those sorts of folks – You're showing your age. People don't remember that as much. Was that 99 the big protests? That was pretty old. That was a pretty long time ago. So whatever those – So whatever those – The Matrix came out here and X-Men won. So that's how old it is. College-age kids who all have dogs and live together in houses that they rent, like the hippie sorts. But when they protest, those kinds of people, when they are protesting, I'll use the now horribly cliched libertarian go-to example for basically everything, which is Uber. And when they're protesting Uber, which – and typically their protests are at least the issue that they're objecting to is that Uber is operating without some sort of license or regulatory permission or something else that the taxi companies operate under, their objection is that this will hurt working-class people to allow it. Because it's not just that there's a cost associated with the licensing, but the licensing – if you allow someone to come in without the license, then that person's going to be cheaper or they're going to flood the market with labor or products, and that in turn is going to hurt the established people, which we tend to portray as these politically connected corporations but are often, say, relatively low-income taxi drivers who have came to this country and have been driving for 30 years and are now going to be put out of work by this upstart Uber that's not following the laws. And so is there – the occupational licensing, getting rid of it would also come with costs. And in a lot of cases, these licensing schemes are in place in relatively low-income professions like hair braiders. And so should we be concerned about the people who would be harmed by getting rid of licensing and various sorts? Well, that hardly sounds like a horrible fate for consumers, which again are the ultimate point of production. People don't live to produce, they live to consume. But almost every Uber driver I've talked to has said, and a lot of them have also and still do work as taxi drivers with the licenses and the medallions and the other occupational license requirements that every city has, they prefer the Uber and the Lyft model. And I think that's not just good for consumers, it's good for the drivers. They can set their own hours. They don't have to answer the awful bosses or corrupt bureaucrats. They can do what they want. And I think that is something that everybody likes or nearly everybody likes. Let's go back to the minimum wage which we brought up earlier in the episode, get sort of into the nitty-gritty of it. It's a very popular topic. It's brought up consistently by particularly the Lyft saying that we need to raise the minimum wage. Hillary has said it many times. Bernie Sanders had said it. It's sort of part of the catechism of the Lyft. You kind of have to believe it in order to be a liberal in America, modern America. That's why it was a mini scandal when her leaked email showed that she or at least her senior people were not fans of raising the minimum wage. Well, they thought $15 was too high. I think they thought $10 or so. So this might show that it's merely rhetoric that they might understand that we can't solve this quote-unquote problem by just mandating that people get paid more. But people seem to think so. So why is the minimum wage so attractive to people and what's wrong with thinking that we can solve problems with it? I think it's because a lot of people think that it's a free lunch. You look at a proposed minimum wage increase. The federal rate is currently 725. There are lots of proposals to put it to 1010. There's the fight for 15. You name the level and someone's proposed it. Usually about two-thirds of people will support it. It's very, very popular. And like I said, the reasons that people think it's a free lunch. So what I've been doing along with trying to reframe the inequality debate is also trying to reframe the minimum wage debate. There are trade-offs. I'm actually agnostic on whether or not to raise the minimum wage or whether to do away with it altogether. I just want people to acknowledge that it has trade-offs. For example, a lot of your jobs will have on-the-job perks. Maybe you get a free lunch if you work at a restaurant. Maybe you'll get free parking if you work at a shopping mall where other people have to pay. And on and on and on down the line annual bonuses, you name it. When you raise the minimum wage, especially at a place that has a lower prevailing wage, some of those on-the-job perks are going to go away because they're trade-offs. The minimum wage increases not free. It comes at a cost. And another point that I think a lot of people should... I think they would do well to understand is that, well, suppose those free perks under the table stuff, well, they're not taxed. Wages are taxed. So it's a de facto tax increase on poor people. I don't think that's fair. Does the minimum wage just redistribute money from within a business though? That seems to be maybe the acknowledged point of it that the CEO or the profit... The person who's holding the profits of a McDonald's is going home with $180,000 a year and they're paying their employees $725 an hour. So we're going to have them pay them $1025 an hour. And then the person at the CEO is going to go home with $160,000 a year. And that's a good thing. We've lowered inequality. We've made people better off. And what's $20,000 to the person making that much compared to the wage increase that the lower wage workers would get? It's a good thing for the lower wage workers who do in fact find jobs and get hired. It's a bad thing for the workers who never get hired in the first place, who can't find their jobs, who never get work experience, who don't learn basic skills such as showing up on time or whether it's specialized trade skills that you learn in whatever your first job is. It's not fair to the poor. Minimum wages are... The tradeoffs are severe. Can we measure that sort of stuff? I mean, obviously we can measure like within given businesses, you know, a city or a state and acts an increase in the minimum wage and we can see whether businesses let workers go. And we can track overall unemployment and overall unemployment among low skilled or low education workers. But these longer term trends about, you know, they're not getting the experience that they would have otherwise gotten at entry level jobs and then that hurts them long term. Is there a way that we can demonstrate whether that's actually happening empirically versus saying, you know, as free marketers, well, these are the things we expect to have happen? Yes, there is, but not with much precision, which is unfortunate, but that's the way it goes. The predominant pro minimum wage study is by David Card and I forget the other fellow's name, but they looked at fast food restaurants in New Jersey and found that rather than raising prices or cutting jobs, they simply cut into their margins, made the workers work harder instead of cutting wages, which kind of is the same thing as a pay cut, but they don't go into that. But roughly 79% of PhD economists believe that the minimum wage has a trade off, which involves throwing people out of work. Again, it's up to you to decide whether that's a good thing or not, but it has trade offs and to quantify them, I think roughly 3% of workers currently make minimum wage, but the opportunity costs that I've been talking about, the workers who never get hired, the workers who never gain experience, you cannot quantify that. That's interesting. You mentioned that only about 3% of workers make minimum wage, which itself, I don't think anyone really, I mean, no one disputes this basic fact. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders don't dispute this fact. With that very small section of the American worker, it seems like a weird thing to have as much discussion as we have on it as a way of fixing the world when it's only going to, if it does anything, affect 3% of workers. We can move on to, there's some other things you discuss. I mean, minimum wage gets a lot of attention, but other things that could be fixed to help people get ahead, more people maybe than just the 3% who make minimum wage. You write, for example, that affordable energy can help the poor. How is energy being made unaffordable and how would that help the poor? Usually through regulation and that's the trouble. How many folks want to regulate energy production? Well, they're going to, that's why we have an EPA and an energy department and I'm not a fan of either, but... Do you have a clue me quantify how much money they add, these regulations add to the price of energy? Well, let's take one step back and then a step forward. The step back is thinking about people who live in absolute poverty. You're talking about people who live in mud huts and who have to burn dung indoors for their heat and for their cooking. This is not a healthy way to live. It reduces life expectancy. In fact, this kind of energy poverty kills people. So when you can transition to fossil fuels or this or that kind of clean energy, who knows what the future will bring? I'm eager to see it myself. It's rather better than the mud hut option. So I would love to see more people be able to embrace that, which brings us, well, another step back to our people's not ratios concept when it comes to inequality. Make people better off. Don't worry so much about the ratio between the rich and the poor. One that often is discussed is this is sort of almost as much of a quote-unquote cliché on the right as the minimum wage is on the left and that is regulations. When the right says regulations, they usually say it with some sort of foreboding. Too many regulations, so much regulation. I think a lot of people don't really understand what that means. It just means there's rules on things. How big a problem is regulatory impact on the economy and in particular the poor, the well-being of the poor? It's a very big problem. Anyone who follows politics knows that the federal government spends, I don't know, three and a half trillion dollars in change, the budget deficit, a little less than half a trillion national debt, about 18 trillion at this point. Nobody knows what the numbers are for regulation and I think that is a huge hole in the news coverage that's going on right now, whether it's the presidential campaigner or anything else. Very few people know that the total burden of just federal regulations are about 1.9 trillion dollars per year. State and local rules are extra. So even if you're just talking about the federal government, a lot of folks on the left and the right do like to complain about the size of government. Most of them don't know that it's half again as big as they think it is. If you actually go through the Code of Federal Regulations, which is where they store all these things, and by the way if you want, you can order one from the government printing office, they will email you, or sorry, they will mail you 237 volumes, which total roughly 178,000 pages. I assume these are big print pages for people who need eyeglasses. So when you're typing up a manuscript for a book, usually you consider 250 words to be a page. The average federal register page is roughly 1,000 words, in small font, multi-column type. Tolstoy year, hard out kind of thing. This is a lot of words and a lot of pages. Yeah, and every day you get about 300 pages more of them. In fact, this year's federal register, which is where new regulations get published, among other things. It's on pace to be almost 90,000 pages, and that's just for this year. Now, people, again, might think, okay, a lot of people don't encounter these regulations directly in their lives. They don't run a business, or they don't try and buy and sell land or other ways that you might get to interact with the regulations. So they might be wondering, okay, so there's a bunch of pages, but what's an example? How does one of these regulations, you just pick one if you want, cost poor people jobs and opportunity? For example, this year, I'm actually looking up the exact number right now, upwards of 500 regulations affect small businesses. And again, if you really care, I can get you the exact number, but the number's in that ballpark. And just, if you want to start a business, you want to create jobs, you want to create value for other people. It gets harder and harder every year. There are regulations for everything from, say, the size of holes in Swiss cheese to preventing collisions at sea. I mean, you name it. This sounds like a good thing, no, preventing collisions at sea. I'm just trying to figure out how someone is losing a job or money because of this. A lot of it's opportunity costs, and a lot of that is what makes free market folks it makes it difficult to make the case because a lot of what we have to say is about opportunity costs. I mean, if you really want to, I would encourage you to try to stand at a podium in front of a factory that was never built that builds a product that was never invented in front of workers who were never hired. It's less concrete. There's a few other things you discussed in the paper, which are the second one about possibilities for reform. You discussed a little bit about central banks. What can central banks helping the inequality problem, or I guess more specifically, are they hurting the poor? There's not a lot that they can do to actively help. What they can do is prevent harm. So if you're a central banker, what you want to do is have an honest price system. You don't want to have radical inflation. You don't want to have radical deflation. What you want is a stable, honest currency that people can rely on. So all of us know that, for example, say the price of computers goes down year after year. If you want a certain amount of computing power, it's going to get cheaper. Moore's Law and all that. A lot of other commodities also go down in price over time. That's fine. What you don't want is monetary inflation or deflation. What you want is a stable amount of money chasing, a stable amount of wealth, or actually you want growing wealth. So I misspoke. But you want the amount of dollars to approximately match the amount of wealth. So there are a lot of ways to do that. And the way to do that is to bind the central bank to a set rule. And there are a lot of good candidates out there. I don't really care myself which one they choose. So long as they do, in fact, bind themselves to a rule instead of the completely ad hoc policy that the Fed has been following, not just under Chairman Yellen, but also under Ben Bernanke, and also under Mr. Greenspan for about the second half of his tenure. The point isn't so much what the rule is. It's that a central bank needs to follow a rule. And that way we can have honest prices, which every entrepreneur and every investor who wants to think about the long term, not just about themselves, but about their children and their grandchildren, they need that. And at least the Fed is not giving that to them right now. One of the other policies that, at least in the minds of a lot of voters, they think will help the working class get more of a leg up, but that you argue hurts the poor is collective bargaining. How does collective bargaining make people on the bottom worse off? The arguments to that are actually pretty similar to the minimum wage. The crux of it is trade-offs. So some workers actually do benefit. That is not in dispute. The trouble is that other people are hurt, and that's what I care about. For example, some workers might get a higher wage, better benefits, but other workers are, again, opportunity costs. You can't quantify those things, but some workers never get hired. Some workers, maybe they have to settle for lower paying jobs. Those people are hurt. What about them? What does the state of unionization look like in the country? Have we seen a drop-off in how many people are unionized that maybe parallels some of the lowering status of the poor? Unionization has dropped off quite a bit in the private sector. It's now below 7%. In the public sector, because, remember, governments can't move away. They can't escape from anybody. They're captive. They're closer to somewhere between a quarter and a third of all of their workers being unionized. That's state, local, and federal, although the level is lower at the federal level. Is that important? Is there a difference between... You mentioned that government can't move away. Is there a reason you might sort of think that private sector unionization has gone down? I mean, some people might say it's because of, say, NAFTA and foreign competition from trade, and so we've kind of destroyed our auto manufacturing, and our unions can't keep up because they're competing against people in other countries. Is that disparity, and is there something worse about public sector unions versus private unions? Well, seeing as since the passage of NAFTA in 1994, net employment has gone up by 21 million people. I think the job destruction argument falls flat. The reason for declining percentage of private sector unionized workers I think has to do with escapeability. If workers and companies can get away from it, they will. And that's why I think we have increased public sector unionization. They can't get away. And if we reformed this, would you be in favor of prohibiting unionization or would you say this would have the same kind of effect as minimum wage abolishing or getting rid of a lowering minimum wage? Would this ultimately would help the poor because some wages would go down but the amount of people who would get jobs would offset it, is that the theory? I don't think unionization helps the poor. That said, I am neutral on the issue. I think I take the Mansar Olson line, the old University of Maryland economist who I think was a friend of Cato when he was alive. He said that unions couldn't really exist without some form of government coercion on their behalf. So if unions can survive on their own, I'm all for it. Workers should be able to bargain collectively if they want to. There should not be laws hindering that. Nor should there be laws specifically favoring that either. It should be neutral, not opposed, not for neutral. So we as advocates of free markets have, I mean, it's important to have these discussions and we have these discussions a lot and watch these discussions happen around us in a much more one-sided way. But what can we as libertarians, as fans of capitalism and markets, how can we get better at talking about these issues? What are the ways that we have approached them or rhetorically in the past or they're pretty common that you think are less helpful, ways that might be more fruitful, ways that might change hearts and minds more effectively? I think the best way is to tell stories about people, put names and faces and stories together. My background's in economics and I can talk to you all day about this or that statistic or this graph or that. But really, if you're talking to folks, the best way to do it is to tell stories. It's hard to do and I think the main reason why is because of the opportunity costs that I've been talking about. You know, the factory that was never built, workers never hired that we talked about earlier. It's hard to do. It's hard to find those people who have been left so. Would you think that that is one of the inherent problems with trying to win this debate with someone who had a raise, but it's hard to find the person who didn't get a job? I think that's precisely it. I think one of the few examples that I've seen actually happened in, well, you guys know how Seattle recently raised their minimum wage to $15 an hour. Before the city of Seattle did that, the city of SeaTac, which has the Seattle Tacoma Airport in a small population, of course, did that $15 an hour. Yeah, there were trade-offs. People got fired. People lost their free parking, no more free meals, people stopped tipping them. And those kinds of stories need to be told and very few people are telling them. I think that is one of our biggest failures as a free market movement. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed today's show, please take a moment to rate us on iTunes. Free Thoughts is produced by Evan Banks and Mark McDaniel. To learn more, find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.