 There's always a question of, you know, what topic should we cover? But the beauty, particularly of this administration, really, any administration, particularly this administration, is every, every day, you know, Donald Trump tweets something that makes it really interesting. And every day you can just open up Google News or some news program or some news thing. And there it is, interesting. Every day you can just open up Google News or some news. You get the latest in terms of what he's tweeted and there's tons to talk about. It's really great for a talk show host in terms of topics, in terms of content. There's tons to talk about. It's really great. All right, so let's look at what Donald Trump has been tweeting just over the last few hours. And it's kind of interesting, right? So the big news this morning that seems to make all the top of the news is the fact that Trump says he called Chuck Schumer yesterday to see if the Democrats want to do a great healthcare bill. Obamacare is badly broken, big premiums, who knows. So Donald Trump called the Democrats because he wants to have a great healthcare bill. Now, what kind of great healthcare bill could we expect from Democrats in Congress, from Chuck Schumer? What is even possible if you think about what Democrats stand for, what Democrats represent, what Democrats would actually do? Well, we know this. We know what the Democrats want, what the Democrats are advocating for, what most Democrats now are coming around to. What they want is single-payer healthcare. What they want is single-payer healthcare. What they want is the government to run healthcare. They're not interested in, you know, in giving us freedom in healthcare. They're not interested in private healthcare. What they want, what they've always wanted, but they've hidden, you know, and they didn't get everything they wanted, of course, with Obamacare. But what they've always wanted and what they want now is single-payer. So what's Chuck Schumer going to actually give the president in terms of creating a great healthcare bill? Now, of course, Donald Trump himself is on record suggesting that he might support a, you know, a healthcare bill, a single-payer healthcare bill. He's actually on record saying that he admires many of the single-payer healthcare systems that exist out there in other countries, whether it be in Europe or he complimented the Australian system and other systems. I mean, for those of you who believed that Donald Trump stood for principles of any kind of principles of free markets, of any kind of principles of freedom, of individualism, of Americanism, of what America stands for, it's not playing out that way. It's not playing out that way. I mean, he is eager to cut a deal now with Democrats. Now I understand his frustration. If I believed that he was actually pro-free market in healthcare, then I believe he was really frustrated with the Republicans who can't get their act together, who can't actually repeal Obamacare and can't actually move us towards a healthy free market healthcare system where we as individuals get to make choices. There are plenty of plans out there. We know how to do it. It's not a big mystery, but Republicans don't want to do it. So if the President really believed in free markets, I could understand his frustration with Republicans. But your frustration with Republicans, is that really going to lead you into the hands of Chuck Schumer as a partner for dealing with, you know, a healthcare reform? I don't think so. I don't think so. I mean, Donald Trump in his early days was a big supporter of the Democrats and there's no reason to believe that Donald Trump is still not a big supporter of Democrat agenda, at least in some realms, and certainly in healthcare it seems like Donald Trump's real motivation and real incentives is to ultimately lead us towards where the Democrats want to lead us, which is towards a European style or Australian style, single-payer healthcare bill. And I mean, I don't need to tell you what I think of that. I think you all know that, but that is, you know, it's pretty sad. It's pretty sad. Okay, so that was one of the tweets, right? Donald Trump talking to Chuck Schumer and we don't know the details and we don't know if Chuck Schumer is going to, what kind of response. Chuck Schumer has already said, look, if what he wants is to repeal Obamacare and I told him this, we're not interested, we're interested in fixing Obamacare and if you want to deal with that, then we're open to negotiation. Sue knows what's going to come of that. We'll see. You never know with Trump on what kind of deals he will cut. All I can guarantee almost is the deals he will cut will not move us towards more freedom, but away from more freedom. And this is, here's another example of that, right? So he's complaining about the treatment he's getting by late night hosts. As I think every president complains, I remember in the early days of Saturday Night Live in the 1970s, the fun they would make of Gerald Ford, the Republican president at the time after Nixon. I mean, they would harass him to no end. I mean, it was embarrassing how bad it was. And I'm sure Ford complained. Anyway, this is Donald Trump, two tweets. The first one, late night hosts are dealing with the Democrats for their very unfunny and repetitive material. At some extent, that's true. But, you know, I believe in the market. If it's unfunny, don't watch it. Always anti-Trump. Should we get equal time? And then he follows that up. Notice the should we get equal time. It's important. Then he follows that up with a tweet saying, more and more people are suggesting the Republicans and me should be given equal time on TV when you look at the one-sided coverage. Now, that's interesting. Is Donald Trump be a suggesting of a turn of what used to be called the Fairness Doctrine? The Fairness Doctrine was a doctrine that existed before the mid-1980s, which basically said that radio and television, because they were leasing, this is before cable, so this would have to be broadcast television, broadcast radio, because they were leasing bandwidth from the government. They were therefore compelled, they were therefore compelled to provide equal time on television and radio for the various political views. And this was a doctrine that existed through the 1980s and that supposedly was there to guarantee that you would have equal, equal presence. Of course, the media was still heavily, heavily, heavily biased left-wits. Now, this doctrine disappeared. There was a law passed, eliminated in the 1980s during the Reagan administration, and as a consequence, one could argue, of the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, you got the basically the domination of conservatives on the right on talk radio. So talk radio from Rush Limbault to Glenn Beck to the Blaze is dominated by voices from the right and has been dominated by voices from the right from the mid-1980s and really from the birth of large-scale talk radio. And that is a consequence of getting rid of the Fairness Doctrine. But the Fairness Doctrine was about this equal time. We should have equal time for both political parties, in a sense. Now Donald Trump is suggesting that we should have a return to the Fairness Doctrine. I mean, coming out intervening in what ideas are projected on our televisions and our newspapers and our radio shows and so on. Is that really what we want? Does that really make sense? Right? So we're going to measure how much time they say pro-Trump things, how much time they say anti-Trump thing. Remember, this will also be the case for radio. So maybe not the Blaze because we're online, but broadcast radio. Imagine if Glenn Beck on his broadcast shows has to devote as much time to praising the left as he does to praising the right. Or if he condemns both, I don't know what happens if he condemns everybody like I do. Anyway, a disaster, a real disaster, right? I think a horrible policy. Now it's interesting, particularly today when we have, I mean, you can understand it when there were very, very limited venues, a few broadcast television stations, a few broadcast radio stations. But today, I mean, today you've got a whole network dedicated to supporting Donald Trump. Whether it's Breitbart, well, we're supporting some of Donald Trump stuff. Whether it's Breitbart, whether it's Fox, whether it's, you know, Fox is basically the Donald Trump station these days. So, anyway. All right. So that's just a review. We'll do this once in a while, review of Donald Trump's tweets from this morning. All right. We are, if you want to end on the conversation, if you want to talk about the fairness doctrine or you want to talk about negotiating healthcare with Chuck Schumer, you can call in 888-900-3393-888-900-3393. You're listening to your on Brookshow and we're on the Blaze Radio Network and we're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back. You're clear? Author, media contributor. This is the your on Brookshow, the Blaze Radio Network. You're live? Hey, you're back in the your on Brookshow and, you know, probably the most important thing that happened on Friday this last week in the news was these new, this new guidance from the Justice Department about religious liberty. Now, I know, I know this is going to be a contentious issue because, as you know, I, you know, I am not religious. I am, as many of you know, and those of you don't know are going to find out soon enough. I am not religious. I am an atheist. I am an admitted atheist. I'm a pro-capitalist, pro-freedom, pro-founding fathers, founding fathers, and America loving atheist. And Jeff Sashin's, the administration this last Friday, released new guidance on protecting religious liberty. And as part of that, they have rescinded the mandate on inch as part of that is part of the Obamacare healthcare bill for to cover contraceptions with, I guess, no, what do you call it, you know, no any kind of co-payment. So Obamacare, Obamacare said you can only sell Obamacare policies, policies on Obamacare. You cannot sell, you cannot sell policies on Obamacare exchanges unless you offer contraceptions for free. No down payment, no co-payment, no nothing, right? So they have just rescinded this. So you might say, hey, you want, what do you have a problem with that? Isn't that, that's good. That's taking away some power from Obamacare. It's allowing insurance companies to offer the product that they want to offer. And yeah, that's all true. But why contraceptions? Why is that the issue? Why are you focusing on that, right? Obamacare mandates, they're like, you know, dozens of these mandates, dozens of them. This is what makes insurance so expensive. This is more what makes insurance so one size fit all. Why are you focusing on one mandate? I'm for freedom. I'm for freedom. And I don't want the decision about which mandates go in or which mandates don't go in to be dictated by the religion of the president in power or by the religion, religiosity of the justice department. I want there to be no mandates. I want employers to be able to offer any health insurance policies they want, covering whatever they choose to cover. Without the government intervening at all about what is sold on exchanges or what is sold by employers or what is sold anywhere. But what I find offensive is when the government picks and chooses the kind of mandates based on religion. To me, that's a violation of the separation of church and state. Religion should have no place in government, including deciding, you know, if you're going to violate my rights, then I want it violated. I want it to be agnostic to religion, that violation. Now, I don't want you to violate my rights at all, which means I don't want you to have any mandates. So, you know, I find this offensive, you know, I mandated in California and through the state of California, but also through Obamacare, I don't know, to be covered for acupuncture. And of course, that means my rates go up to acupuncture for psychiatric care for all kinds of things that I don't want for pregnancy. I've got two boys, two sons. We're not going to have any more kids. And yet, you cannot sell an insurance policy in the state of California that does not cover pregnancy. What's up with that? So, it makes it more expensive for me. It's more expensive for everybody because everybody is not covering, you know, everybody else's pregnancy and everything else, because everything goes through our employer. Actually, the young people in my place of work are subsidizing. So, all of this, instead of the government concentrating on protecting individual rights and identifying violations of individual rights and undoing them, which would mean coming out and saying all those mandates that Obamacare imposed on insurance companies, we're not going to enforce them. I don't know if that's legally possible, but that would be the kind of spirit. And why can they pick and choose the mandates that are not covered, right? If they can pick and choose, why not get rid of all of them? And of course, this goes back to the fact that Republicans cannot repeal Obamacare because they bought into the mythology of universal healthcare. They bought into the idea that everybody has to have health insurance for the universal health coverage. So, every time they propose something and somebody says, yeah, but people are going to lose coverage, instead of saying, yeah, some people are not going to have coverage and choose not to have it. They're going to prioritize their lives not to have it. That's their problem. Instead of saying that, Republicans argue, no, no, no, no, no. We're going to have as much coverage as anybody else. It's just not true. When you have a free market, a free market assumes that some people are going to make really, really bad decisions. And therefore, some people are not going to have health insurance and some people should be allowed to suffer the consequences of not having health insurance. The fact that you don't have health insurance, the fact that you are being irresponsible and not bought health insurance, does not give you a claim on me. Does not mean I have to subsidize your health insurance. So, but they can't say that. They can't say that because they live by a moral code where we're all our brothers' keeper and we have to take care of everybody and we have to watch over everybody and we have to sacrifice for everybody. And it's okay to sacrifice my interest for theirs. The whole Obamacare thing, they can't repeal it because of the morality of altruism, because of the morality of sacrifice, because of the morality of selflessness that they are all living under. And until they're willing to challenge that morality, you know, they can't really, can't go anywhere. So, now we've got them tinkering by taking off some mandates, but not all mandates. The mandates, they find offensive. And the mandates, they find offensive are driven by their religion. I find that offensive. I want all the mandates gone. Now, we'll talk when we get back about the broader question of religious liberty. All right, now listening to your Unbrook show on the Blaze Radio Network, and we're going to be back after these messages. The Iran Book Show. All right, so, periodically, if you follow the show, we run, I guess, competitions, little raffles, and we give away stuff. And to get engaged with that or to have the opportunity to win some of this stuff, I think the best way is to follow me right now, to follow me on Twitter. We're going to be launching a new website for the Iran Book Show soon, very soon, I hope. But in the meantime, just follow me on Facebook. Ybrook, Y-B-R-O-K. So, go to facebook.com slash Ybrook and just press follow or like or whatever it is you do on Facebook. I keep forgetting. Don't friend me because I maxed out on friends, and this is my public figure page where you don't friend, you like or follow or whatever. All right, so this week, this week's prize included signed copies of all my books, including my brand new book. It came out two weeks ago, and I hope you've all gone already to Amazon and bought it, and if you haven't, you should. And once you buy it, you should also write a review or after you read it. You should probably first read the book and then write the review. But I'd really appreciate reviews on Amazon. It helps a lot. Even if you just give it a star rating and just say one word, the more reviews, the better. Of course, more extensive reviews are better than short reviews. So the book is called In Pursuit of Wealth, the Moral Case for Finance. In Pursuit of Wealth, the Moral Case for Finance. So if you won the prize this week, and I'll tell you who won in a minute, you get that book signed, you get Equal is Unfair, my other book signed, and then you get Free Market Revolution. My first book signed all, by the way, co-authored with Don Watkins. So you can get all three books signed as part of winning this prize. And this will be a feature of all our competitions, all our raffles in the future. So to be in on the raffle, you have to go to Facebook.com slash Y Book and just follow me, and then you'll get information about it. And then once my website goes live, you'll be able to sign up there and get emails from there. All right, the winner is not only going to get these books, but he's also going to enjoy the classic American Griller from our friends at Chicago State Company. Chicago is the best stakes anywhere. Chicago State Company, well, I just upset people in Kansas City, I'm sure, but Chicago Stakes, you know, fantastic, bests. Anyway, you know, you're going to get stakes, right? So if you win this raffle, or the person who won this raffle in the Iran Book Show, get stakes from our friends at Chicago State Company. The package is a sampling of 10 to premium choice ribeyes, flavorful boneless strips, and meaty top sirloins, and includes two 10-ounce premium angus beef ribeyes, two 10-ounce premium angus beef boneless strips, and two 6-ounce premium angus top sirloins, and a case of 12 superb wines for our friends at Direct Wines. Oh, my God. The case includes a 99-point super Tuscan, held as, quote, one of the best red wines ever produced by Italy's top critic, a gold medal bordeaux from the superb 2015 vintage and a rich barrel-aged Cabernet from one of the iconic wineries of Napa. This is by Robert Parker. Well, according to Robert Parker, the great wine critic. All right. So that's what you get. You get all the books. You get all the stake, and you get 12 wines. I'm like, I should have entered. I want to win this. I could skip the books. I've got those, but the stakes and the wine, that's pretty good. All right. The winner this week is Greg Hayes. Greg Hayes zip code is 61704. I don't even know what that is. I should Google 6161704. Where is that? That is in Bloomington, Illinois. All right. Bloomington, Illinois. All right. So you won. Greg Hayes. Cool. I'm sure you've already got all the information via email with the price package and everything. So very cool. And again, follow me on Facebook. And you will get information about future raffles like this. And you will have the opportunity to win stakes, wine, and books. What a combination. Just read my books before you drink the wine. Oh, at least not under the influence of the wine. How about that? All right. So let's go back to this contraception rule. It was a rule passed by the Obama administration in 2011 when they had a list of all these preventive benefits because the central planters, and they know what's good for us. They know what needs to be covered by insurance so that we all stay healthy. So they have all these preventive benefits as part of an insurance policy if you want to be able to sell it on one of these exchanges. And without that employers have to provide. So this is not just on the exchanges. This is employers. So all employers have to provide this. I forgot this, right? So it's not just on the exchanges. This is that all employers, this goes beyond just the exchanges for individual policies. This is a mandate for all employers to cover without out-of-pocket costs. Now, they added contraception to this list. And of course, this created a whole habit. Now, I don't know why contraceptions are that controversial. I mean, who doesn't use contraceptions? I assume everybody does. I mean, unless you're a fundamentalist, I don't know, ultra-orthodox Jew or ultra-orthodox Catholic or ultra-orthodox Muslim probably, pretty much everybody uses contraceptions. I don't know why this is so controversial. Contraception, the only people who get upset at this are Catholics who make a big deal out of this. But what's so controversial about it? I mean, doesn't it make sense to use contraception? Don't we want to control whether we're going to have a child or not? Don't we want that to be part of our own decision-making? Isn't sex something that we want to be able to enjoy and cherish without it being for the purpose of having kids? I mean, imagine if all sex was just for the purpose of having kids. How boring and dull would that be? I can see some of you just going nuts. All right. Now, I agree that the government should be mandating this. The government shouldn't be subsidizing my contraception. The government shouldn't be forcing insurance companies to subsidize contraception. But contraception should be over-the-counter. It should be easily available. And you don't want, you know, your teenagers are going to have sex. You don't want them getting pregnant. You don't want your son, you know, impregnating somebody else. That's not good. You want to have control over these things. And contraception is a wonderful, beautiful, amazing thing that now we can prevent pregnancy. And that's great. So we should celebrate contraception. And it's so nutty to me that this is the issue. This is the thing. This is the one problem with Obamacare that we can all rally around and get excited about. Really? This is an onerous mandate. All right, here it is. You know, Donald Trump called the rule an onerous mandate reflecting hostility to religious liberty. Religious liberty, contraception. Now, again, this shouldn't be any mandate because I believe in liberty. Not religious liberty, liberty. Religious liberty is part of liberty. But liberty. I believe that individuals should be able to decide what insurance policies to buy. And I believe insurance companies should have the liberty to offer whatever insurance policies they believe the market wants. Or that they believe is good. Or that, you know, you could have a Catholic insurance company that doesn't offer contraception coverage. And I can decide not to buy it from the Catholic insurance company. I can buy it from some other insurance company. The beauty, the beauty, the beauty of freedom is that we get to decide. You don't want contraception coverage. You have every right not to get contraceptive coverage. And the free market would provide you with policies that don't have that. All right, if you ticked off at me, which I'm sure some of you are, give us a call 888-900-3390. What do you think about this whole contraception issue? 888-900-3393. And when we get back, I'll take whatever calls we have and, you know, free for you to call in. The call screen and everything is working today. So don't worry. 888-900-3393. And when we get back, I want to expand the discussion to this whole religious liberty issue because the Justice Department put out a whole memo, 25-page memo, 20 principles about this on Friday and it scares the bejesus out of me. I'm for liberty, freedom, individual freedom. All right, you'll listen to your own book show and we'll be right back after this break. You're clear? Your own book show. The Blaze Radio Network. All right, so we're talking today about this Trump administration's repeal of this contraception mandate that was imposed by the Obama administration on all healthcare policies that employers provide. And what's one of the interesting things is that the administration has issued two separate rules. One for religiously-affiliated institutions like churches and maybe nonprofits and others for non-religious employees. Oh, I guess, I guess no, but this includes like hobby lobby. This includes like owners of for-profit businesses that are religious. And then there's a whole other rule for non-religious employers. So we're now defining employers in America by their religiosity and having different rules or different arguments about the rules for different employers. This is exactly what the founders didn't want. This is exactly what the separation of church and state is supposed to protect us from. There shouldn't be different rules for different employers or different individuals based on whether they're religious or not. There should be one rule and that rule is the protection of individual rights. And the fact is the mandate, any kind of mandate, a contraception mandate or any mandate is a violation of the principle of individual rights. It's a violation of the principle of individual freedom. It's a violation of individual liberty. You have, the whole idea of religious liberty is you have every right to be whatever religion you want to be as long as you don't violate other people's rights. She can, for example, be a Muslim and take your daughter and have her genitals mutilated. That's a violation of her individual rights. So the state can ban that practice and should ban that practice because it is used to force to mutilate a person in spite of your religious beliefs because what supersedes everything is individual rights. You have a right to follow whatever religion you believe or not to follow any religion you believe to believe, to think whatever you want and the government has no role in telling you you can, you cannot you can follow whatever practices you want to follow as a religion as long as you don't violate the rights of other people. The government has no right, has no power, should have no power to benefit some at the expense of others to discriminate based on whether a business is religion or not religious. There should be one rule. No mandates. No mandates. Not one rule for religious institutions and one rule for secular institutions. But this is what the Trump administration is doing and this has been a problem in the American judiciary forever. People don't understand. See, once the government gets in the business of violating our rights, gets in the business of discriminating, gets in the business of determining what insurance policy we can and cannot have, who we can discriminate against and who we can discriminate against, the other part of this of course is going to be the insurance religious institutions are going to be allowed to discriminate, let's say, in hiring. Two minutes. With regard to, let's say, gays or transgenders. But secular institutions will not be allowed to do it. If you're secular, you can discriminate. But if you're religious, if your discrimination is on religious grounds, that's okay. But if it's on secular, reason-based, logic-based grounds, then it's okay. Then you can do it. So that is, this whole religious liberty push by the sessions, Justice Department, is clearly a push to discriminate in favor of religious institutions, in favor of companies run by religious people, in favor of religious arguments at the expense of the secular, the rational, the scientific. You can't make a scientific argument. But if it's religious, then you can do whatever the hell you want. You cannot offer contraceptions, you can only hire the people you want to hire. All right, when we come back, maybe I should start my own religion and then I can get my secular ideas, the protection that the religious ideas seem to have. It's absurd and it's ridiculous. All right, if you want in on the conversation, 888-900-3393. And when we come back, we're going to continue this discussion of religious liberty and also want to talk about taxes when we come back. So taxes are big in the news with tax reform and everything else. All right, you're listening to your own book show on the Blaze Radio Network and we'll be back after this break. Clear? Welcome to a discussion of radical fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, laissez-faire capitalism, and individual rights. The Huron Brook Show starts now. All right, we're back. And we've been talking about this whole religious liberty initiative that Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced yesterday and they put out a 25-page memo outlining 20 principles, not three, not five, not 10, 20 principles of religious liberty for federal departments and agencies to observe. Now, I skimmed it, I read most of it, and it's a combination of stuff that's pretty good and stuff that's just horrible. Now, you know, a future show I'll have to do where we actually go over this in greater detail. But this is the thing. This is what I want, I want to emphasize. So this is one of the things that Sessions wrote in it. Except in narrow circumstances, no one should be forced to choose between living out his or her faith and complying with the law. Let me repeat that. No one should be forced to choose between living out his or her faith and complying with the law. Why? What's so special about faith? What about no one should be forced to choose between living out his or her ideas and complying with the law? What about my ideas? What about the fact I don't have any faith, but I have ideas about how I want to live. I don't want, for example, any of my money to go to subsidizing Tesla. I find that offensive. I find that upsetting. So what do I need to start a religion now about non-subsidizing Tesla so that they don't steal my money and give it to Tesla? But no, but if you find it offensive that some of your money is going to pay for contraceptions, then they're not going to do it, right? Or really? Really? Why is that okay and mine not wanting to subsidize Tesla not okay? I don't want, I don't believe in the welfare state. I have a strong, rational position that is anti-the welfare state. I think the welfare state is immoral, immoral. Why doesn't my morality count? And let's say you had a religion where the welfare state was declared immoral. Let's say there was some religion out there that says welfare is immoral, right? Some Christian cult or something, some Christian sect. This finds welfare is immoral. Does this mean now that those people who adhere to that sect are not going to have their money taken from them in order to provide welfare for other people? I mean, what is the standard? The standard is anything you have faith about. What about Scientology? They have all kinds of weird beliefs. Are we going to respect their faith over my rational beliefs, over my rational ideas? Liberty is about protecting thought. Liberty is about protecting ideas. Liberty, the right to liberty. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It's in our Declaration of Independence. It's not about religion. It's about freedom to think and act on your thoughts. It's about ideas. It's about your beliefs. And as long as your beliefs don't lead you to act in ways that violate other people's rights, you should be free to have those beliefs and act on them. This is why the redistribution state is so wrong. This is why government intervention in everything in our lives is so wrong. Because what if I don't want to subsidize Tesla? I don't know why I'm picking up Tesla today. What if I don't want my money to go to pay for your grandmother's Medicare or for your Medicare if you're listening? I don't want to pay for your Medicare. Oh, but I paid Medicare in with my taxes. Yeah, but you're going to spend four times more than what you paid in. And the fact is, my money is paying for your Medicare. Once the government starts redistributing wealth, once the government starts telling us, for example, I want to use the latest experimental drug, the cures. I don't know. I want to use stem cells on my back. I've got a lot of back problems, right? I want to use stem cells on my back. I want to inject with it with the discus. I want to inject stem cells in there and maybe even under some of the facet joints. And I'm right. And I want to inject stem cells in this. And my doctor says we can do that, but we have to use inferior stem cells because the government won't allow us to use the really good ones. And we're not really even talking about the really, really, really good ones, which are embryotic stem cells. We're talking about the fact that the government won't allow him to inject my own fat stem cells. Stem cells that derive from my own fat. They won't let him do that. And he has to use bone marrow stem cells. So he has to take some bone from me and spin it so he gets the stem cells and then inject those. Really? The government gets to decide what I do with cells from my body injected into my body? It shouldn't. Now, what if I had a religion that said commandment number one in my religion is that God has said you have to use fat stem cells? Then is it okay? Then is it okay? Why is faith elevated to being superior to science, to being superior to rational argument, to being superior to any other form of ideas? Why is faith now more important than reason? That's not what the funny fathers wanted. Jefferson Memorial has a quote from him I'm paraphrasing. Bring everything before reason. Everything has to be argued from the case of reason. Even the existence of God must be argued from the position of reason. And yet now we're elevating faith which is the negation of reason above reason. If you have faith in something, the government is going to treat you one way. If you're just arguing from a moral, secular reason perspective, the government is going to treat you differently. Now that is a violation of rights. That is one step, small step on the road to theocracy. This is wrong. This is wrong. I believe everybody should be treated the same before the law. If the law sucks, everybody should be treated the same by the awful law. And what we should fight for is getting rid of laws that are bad. What we should fight for is getting rid of laws that violate individual rights. Whether in the name, whether you're religious or secular. All right. We're going to take a quick break here and then when we come back, we're going to switch topics because Gavin has called in and he wants to talk about something completely different. And we're going to do that. And you can call in 888-900-3393. But we're going to take a quick break now. You're listening to your own book show on the Blaze Radio Network. Best Selling Author. You're clear? Contributor. PhD in Finance. This is the Your Own Book Show. The Blaze Radio Network. So we're back now. Okay. And we've been talking about religious liberty and why it really isn't such a thing. Liberty is liberty. It's liberty for all ideas. It's liberty for all points of view. And the government is violating its responsibility to treat us equally before the law if it treats some religions or religions differently than it treats the secular, the non-religious. And as you know, I am not religious. I am completely secular. I am not a believer. And I expect the government to treat me just like it treats you guys. And I expect the right to be able to determine what's going to be in my insurance policy, just like you do. And I don't think that the issue of whether you're religious or not, you know, should play any role in what kind of insurance you can get or not. Or what is mandated on you to get or not. I am just as offended when people impose their ideas on me as religious people offended by having to, having to, I don't know, fund contraceptions. I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous. What makes them special? What makes you special? All right. I mean, I really, you know, and I know I'm the only, my guess is I'm the only host on the Belize Radio Network who has these ideas, who believes in real liberty, who is not religious, who doesn't hold a religion to be a primate. I don't. I'm with the founding fathers. I hold, I hold man's rights as the primate, individual right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. There's no qualifier there that if you're religious, you have more. All right. We got some callers. That's good. We're going to take Gavin. Hey, Gavin. How's it going? Hello, how are you? I'm good. I'm good. Thanks for calling. Thanks for taking my call. I've been trying to do this for weeks. My question was regarding Japan. Should I just sort of say it? Sure. Ask the question. Yeah. All our listeners want to hear what the question is. It seems that Japan used a lot of government to promote industrial buildup and copy a lot of what the United States was doing technically and ended up, you know, getting to a point where they're almost equal to us. How does that square sort of with, you know, the alternate idea that you deregulate and let the market take care of things? If you had such great success doing that. Yeah. Well, I would argue that the history of Japan is a little bit more complex than that. So, post-World War II, what happened is is that they got a constitution thanks to General MacArthur, an American, the American general who wrote it for the Japanese that basically freed up the Japanese economy to entrepreneurial ability and made it much, much easier for entrepreneurs to start companies and create and build and make stuff. And as a consequence, you got a lot of amazing Japanese entrepreneurs and you got a lot of amazing Japanese companies being created to the extent that the Japanese government tried to manage the process. To that extent, they ultimately got into trouble and they wasted huge amounts of wealth. But the fact is that much of the wealth that Japanese economy created was created due to the innovations of individuals who allowed to freely innovate and not be managed in control. Something very similar has been happening in China over the last 30, 35 years. That is, most of the wealth created in China has been created in those areas of China where they have left people alone, where the government is not trying to micromanage, where the government is not centrally planning. So if you leave people even with relatively a little bit of freedom, if you leave spaces geographically unregulated, things explode in terms of wealth creation. Now, what happened in Japan? Now, because Japan partially was structured badly, that is, the banking system was very controlled and very heavily regulated. And the Japanese government had this mentality that no companies could go bankrupt and you couldn't fire anybody so that this economic growth all was okay as long as there wasn't a financial crisis. But once there was a financial crisis, the system did not have any flexibility to adjust and adapt and recover. So what you got was that the Japanese Central Bank made some big mistakes in the 1980s by flooding the market with money and then raised interest rates and shrunk the money supply and the market and everything, all of these gaps in Japan. And instead of having the freedom through bankruptcy and through laying people off and through restructuring and through moving and through encouraging new entrepreneurs, the Japanese economy just froze. And it basically hasn't changed that much since 1991. And you've had relatively little entrepreneurship. Think about innovative Sony used to be and how un-innovative Sony is today. Think about the fact that most of the innovative companies are like even in Korea rather than in Japan like Samsung. So what you saw post-war was the extent to which freedom could generate real economic growth and in Japan the economy was freed up by in the post-war environment. There was still some central planning. There was still some industrial planning to the extent that that was applied to that extent Japanese growth was retarded to the extent freedom was allowed to that extent Japanese growth was successful. Does that answer your question Gavin? Absolutely, thank you very much. Sure, anytime. So basically the idea is freedom works guys Liberty works going back to my initial conversation. Get the government out of our lives and amazing things happen. Good things happen. Now we have to you know be supportive of Liberty we have to be willing to go out there and work hard, we have to be willing to be entrepreneurial we have to be willing to do all these things but step one or step whatever maybe not step one, step one is education but ultimately get a government out of our backs even if you're Chinese even in China, even in Japan even after decades of communism get a government out of people's backs and boom massive quantities of wealth are being produced pretty amazing All right, we got a call from Neil who wants to talk about morality I'm always up for talking about morality go ahead Neil Hey I'm Nicole who called last time about the guy who had the communist friend and I just want to say this one thing first I did take that answer back to my communist friend that's what he said They weren't real communists Yes Well, I mean he's evading and you should take that into account be very very careful of people who are evade they are very very dangerous Yeah, but this is one question I actually want to ask you Go ahead This is something that came up in my history class I'm in college basically my history teacher was saying some people's happiness happiness is detrimental to other people's happiness I said well, not really he said, okay, what about a killer a killer's happiness killing another person and then I said, well, it's bad because it's initiation of force and it's basically it's inflicting on the rights of the other person to pursue his own happiness and his right to exist and basically the teacher was like you didn't really answer the question The teacher's right, you didn't answer the question because Wade did force come in she was just talking about happiness and the answer to that is what's the definition of happiness and how do we define happiness and how do we measure happiness and how do we know when somebody's happy and I think it's really important people throw around the word happiness saying what it is, happiness is not joy or even the sense of pleasure now there are killers who get pleasure out of killing now there are abnormal sick deformed human beings and that's important to note when we talk about morality when we talk about happiness we're assuming a healthy human being we're assuming human beings that are fundamentally psychologically healthy if you're a defected human being if you're a psychopath if you're a person who gets pleasure out of killing you cannot be happy happy is not some chemical response to stimuli happiness is a state of being that is a consequence of ideas of values and achieving those values it is living inconsistently with your nature which means living consistently with man as a rational being using your mind it's Einwand called it the state of non-contradictory joy so you have no contradictions of your life if you've read Atlas Shrugged remember the description of John Galt, right a man who felt no guilt and no one owned guilt and no shame and no none of this contradictions he didn't accept the existence of contradictions so that is what happiness really means it's again not this pleasure that some sick people get out of killing people now that's hard because people don't accept that so people say oh but Hitler was happy no he wasn't Hitler was a miserable pathetic and then he was literally neurotic and miserable and horrible and so are serial killers and yes they get this momentary high so are drug addicts they get momentary highs doesn't make them happy so you have to be able to define what happiness is and not to accept the modern interpretations of what it is certain things firing off at the brain it's much deeper and broader it looks like we're going to have to take a break here 10 so if you want to follow up with something you can stay on the line but otherwise thanks Neil thanks for your call important question and it's really important to define happiness and to understand happiness and not to define alright so we we are talking about happiness and we got to happiness and what about people who seem to get their kicks like this I don't know like the shooter on Las Vegas can you believe it I mean the shooter who just went up with and just fired off intercontinental 22,000 people with some automatic weapons that were rigged to fire like automatic weapons and just sprayed bullets and just killed and wounded as many people as he could now he then committed suicide and I think it's important to note that he then committed suicide because even a psychopath and I don't know what caused him to do it so it's going to be interesting to find out if they ever figure out a motive clearly this guy is a nihilistic you know life hating more than life hating reality hating hatred for being self hate of everything you can tell that the guy is not happy because he put a bullet in his head and that's the state of all these of people who get their kicks kicks are not happiness alright neo you wanted to follow up from that you're still on yeah I'm still on the line okay basically yeah that was one question I wanted to ask about more the other one was I was speaking to one of my my friends who's also an atheist but he's not really an objectivist like me and basically he's we were talking about morality and he's a moral relativist and he he said this to me like morality doesn't exist because morality is based on feeling and honestly I just thought that was insane yeah and that's wrong and this is where I think it's so important to read the objectivist ethics in Inran's The Virtue of Selfishness which I recommend to all listeners to read that one essay it's actually available online if you go to the Inran Institute website you can get it online just look the objectivist ethics Inran and you'll find it online for free but there Inran makes a reason based reality based argument for a particular morality so I'm not going to I'm not going to replicate that right now we'll do that another time but there is a source of a rational morality you can refer your friend to the idea that morality is based on feeling is what religion ultimately advocates for because if morality is based on what God said well how do we know what God said because we feel it because we have faith faith is an emotion it's not it's not reason based you can't reason into the Ten Commandments you accept the Ten Commandments because because that's the dogma that's the faith that's what's being imposed by religious authority and that's emotion unfortunately religion has perpetrated this idea that morality is in the heart I believe morality is an issue of reason to be moral requires to think indeed the most important thing you can do if you want to be a moral person is think think think use your mind to figure out how to live well that's the bottom line of morality use your mind and how to live well but really use your mind take everything into account really think it's hard work morality is not easy this is why we are philosophers who can help us with it but the idea that morality is about emotions is destructive and it's what causes I think some of these horrific things because if it's emotions it could be anything anybody could do anything but that's I think that's ultimately what the dominance of religion over morality ultimately leads to is the perception that morality is about emotions and it's not because the opposite of emotion is reason it's not about reason alright Neil thank you thanks for the call good questions I'll try to make sure that we don't we take your call in the future really appreciate it thanks alright I want to talk a little bit about another issue of liberty and freedom I just want to talk about taxes a little bit I'm not going to get into the nitty-gritty of the particular tax proposal Republicans are putting together I'll talk a little bit about that but I want to talk about how to think about taxes and and I think the two important issues here one is to understand the taxes ultimately the taxes are coercive the taxes are taking your money at gunpoint because the majority has decided through its political representative to use it in a particular way that taxes are force the taxes are taking your money against your will right I think that's point one now you don't accept anybody else taking your money from you if your neighbor takes your money from you if somebody on the street pulls a gun and takes your money from you we call that robbery theft the fact that the government does it the fact that we all get together and vote to take your money for things you don't want the money taken for redistribution subsidizing Tesla doesn't make it anything else you can't take something that's immoral wrong for an individual to do and somehow by vote turn it into something positive so ultimately taxation in particular taxation for things that are clearly not part of what government is responsible for is theft so that's point number one and as a consequence my only standard for taxes is the lower the better the lower the better second taxes are not the problem fundamentally because the fact is that whatever the government spends it has to somehow get that money so the problem is the problem is spending if the government spending a trillion dollars it has to get a trillion dollars for somebody if you want to protect rights if you want to shrink government if you want to limit government if you want to get government out of our lives don't focus on taxes focus on spending focus on what the government is doing focus on the things that government shouldn't do focus on shutting down departments shutting down programs shutting down initiatives shutting down whole government efforts focus on shrinking the role the scope of government what I believe in and I believe in government as a necessary good but I believe in a limited government so let's limit government if we start getting rid of all the things that government shouldn't do if we start getting rid of all the business subsidies the government provides if we start getting rid of all the regulatory agencies that try to control our lives if we start getting rid of the education department which federal government has no business in education and the energy department who the hell needs an energy department let markets determine energy supply and demand I mean the government doesn't own the oil doesn't discover oil energy companies do they need an energy company a department for what do we need a commerce department for companies are very good at cutting trade deals better than the government so let's get of the commerce department let's get rid of all these activities of the government that are violating rights that are not necessary for the proper functioning of government and then cutting taxes will be easy easy because we'll be spending less maybe we'll actually run some silt pluses so we can pay off the government debt or maybe we'll just default on the debt I don't mind defaulting on debt you buy government bonds you're taking the risk you know you own bonds of Puerto Rico and how it can destroys the capacity of Puerto Rico to pay back your debts forget it you should that's gone you're taking a risk you can't buy government debt and assume it's risk less you can't buy municipal debt and assume it's risk less they're all risky and if bad things happen you as a bond holder should suffer the consequences so the whole focus of republicans always is on taxes that is the wrong place to focus I'll get back to talk about specifics a little bit about the plan we don't have a lot of time but you're listening to your own book show and we'll be right back after this Israeli military and radical for capitalism it's the Iran brook show on the blaze radio network it's the Iran brook show you're live I'm listening to Iran and we're talking taxes we're talking taxes and I was just making the case that taxes don't matter that much I mean Milton Friedman the great economist Milton Friedman used to have this idea if you cut taxes and cut taxes then the deficit would grow and grow and grow and it would get so big that it would shame politicians into cutting spending and that has proven completely false politicians have no shame they have no earned guilt they only have unearned guilt and instead when you cut taxes and you don't touch spending because it's grow and they grow and they grow and national debt grows and it grows and it grows and nobody cares nobody cares so if you want to cut taxes and I want to cut taxes I'd like them as close to zero as possible then what you need to do is cut cut cut spending and I don't see anything coming from republicans where they're cutting spending nothing if anything spending is increasing the house and the senate and the house is a little better than the senate spending bill the house cuts future growth more than the senate does the senate is like growth and spending is exploding right? I mean let's face it people the republicans are statists big government statists the democrats are bigger government statists but they're all statists and some of them are indeed statists big government small government there is no small government status out there there's no such thing right? so what you get is a continued growth in government spending for both house and senate the house slows the rate of growth a little bit more than the senate does but deficits are going to explode into the future and all they can talk about is cutting taxes and then what they want to cut taxes they don't want to actually really cut taxes they want it to be revenue neutral no I want the government to get less money because I want the government to spend less money and I want the government to borrow less money I don't want the government to borrow at all I don't want it to be revenue neutral I want it to be revenue negative and then what about treating everybody equally everybody equally before the law. Why does some people get tax deductions and other people don't get tax deductions? Why are some people don't pay taxes and some people pay a huge amount of taxes? Why are there three tax rates and not one tax rate? Why are some people paying zero? And why? Why do you get a tax deduction for charitable contributions? Why do you get a tax deduction for your mortgage? What's so holy about a mortgage? I mean, I could have some respect for them if they were really doing tax reform. Eliminate all deductions, all exclusions. Just a straight, very low tax on whatever you earn. Simple, postcard size. You know, it would be nice if it was one rate, maybe 10%, but everybody, poor rich middle class, everybody paying the same rate on what you earn. 10% off the top finished. That's it. All right, then you would also solve some of the healthcare problems because you would get the same good corporations. Get rid of all of the exclusions, deductions, loopholes, benefits, subsidies, all of it. Get rid of it all of it. Make it flat, simple. I mean, the ideal corporate tax rate is zero. No deductions, including for healthcare. And then you make, you make it less beneficial for employers to offer healthcare, and then you get the development of an insurance market for individuals, a real insurance market for individuals because employers are not providing healthcare. I mean, so, so many problems. But the idea that we want to replace one complex system with another complex system, it's not just complexity. It's the fact that the taxes are used for social programming. Taxes are used to try to manipulate us, for example, to buy a house, not to rent a house. Two minutes to give charitable donations. But when we invest our money, we don't get a deduction. Why? Why is charitable donations more virtuous than investing? Investing creates jobs. Investing probably helps the poor much more. If that's what you care about, if that's your standard, it's not mine. So I want, if you're going to have tax reform, simplicity, equality before the law, getting the government out of using the tax system to manipulate our behavior. That's what I want. And that's not what we're getting. Not from Republicans, not from Democrats, not from anybody. And it's, you know, Republicans are the same as Democrats were 20, 30 years ago in terms of economic policy, tax policy, all these things. And they obsess about cutting taxes instead of obsessing about shrinking the role of government. One minute. And if you want to get economic growth going, the best thing you could do is deregulate, deregulate, deregulate, stop subsidizing, get out of trying to run businesses for them, let the market flourish. And then when you stop, when you're cutting them and spending, then you can cut taxes. All right. This gets me so angry because there's no voice for liberty. There's no voice for freedom out there today. And I include unfortunately much of talk radio. There just isn't a voice for real freedom and real liberty. Everybody is so conventional. That's not what you're going to get here on the Iran book show. Here you get the unconventional. Here you get the principle defense of freedom, the principle defense of individual liberty, a principle, secular, rational defense of individual right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. All right. Five. We'll be seeing you next week. This is your one book show. You're listening to the year and you're clear. Oh, on the blaze radio. Thanks for it.