 I want to thank all of you for making it to Professor DeLorenzo's lecture. He we're very, very pleased that he's a longtime friend of the Mises Institute, someone who of course personally knew Marie Rothbard, knew James Buchanan, knows all about the public choice school, and of course is a thoroughgoing and deep Austrian. But I think a lot of you probably know him better as an historian, and Tom is just from that era where you could be both. They didn't have this stay-in-your-lane mentality among academia so much. So he's a tremendous scholar not only of Alexander Hamilton, but also of Abe Lincoln, for whom he seems to have a bit of distaste. And he's here today to talk about his great book, which came out a couple of years ago about the problems with socialism. Please welcome Tom DeLorenzo. Thanks, Jeff. This is the book that the Mises Institute won't allow you to leave the building unless you purchase a copy of my book, The Problem with Socialism. And so I thought I'd put together this talk, I've given a few times on 10 things millennials should use, should know about socialism. And because a couple of years ago there, you know, there began taking polls of so-called millennials. I guess what born after 1983 is how they used to define that. And something like some of the polls said 50 to 60% preferred socialism over capitalism. And it's probably the people you see writing out in the streets in the last couple of months, you know, they're a big part of that 50 or 60%. And so we thought my publisher and I, Regnery Publishing, thought, well, we should do something about this. And they asked me to write a book, a short book, and it's almost pocket-sized. They said, well, we'll make it small like this, so it'll fit in a knapsack, a student knapsack. And it's not a big tome like Mises socialism. And so that was the purpose of that book. And so anyway, so I'm going to talk about 10 things. I might not get to all 10 things that you should know about socialism. And the first one is, you know, in Ludwig von Mises' famous book, Socialism, the last couple of chapters, he talks about something called destructionism. OK. And let me quote Mises himself in explaining what he means by destructionism. He says this, socialism is not in the least what it pretends to be. It is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build, it destroys. For destruction is the essence of it. It produces nothing. It only consumes what the social order based on private ownership and the means of production has created. Since a socialist order of society cannot exist unless it is be as a fragment of socialism within an economic order resting otherwise on private property, each step leading towards socialism must exhaust itself in the destruction of what already exists. Now, and he has a section on the sort of methods of destructionism in his day. This was in the early 1920s. And he lists labor legislation like the minimum wage, maximum hour legislation, social security taxes and sort of the nationalization of old age insurance, labor unions, unemployment insurance, taxation in general, and inflation. And those are some of the tools of destructionism, destructing the way he thought we're going to destroy or work at destroying the capitalist economy and what he called social cooperation. And I forget who it was. I don't know if it was Jeff or somebody else. The other night mentioned that the original working title of human action was social cooperation. And it's another word for the international division of labor. And that's what, in fact, in the communist manifesto, Marx and Engels mock the whole idea of the international division of labor and say they want to destroy it. So that's always been the essence of destructionism there. So that was Misi's day and early day, even for him in the 1920s. That has changed quite a bit over the years. There's a new form of destructionism now. You may be familiar with something called the Frankfurt School. It's where political correctness comes from. That's where so-called cultural Marxism comes from. And after the Marxists failed to instigate socialist revolutions in Europe, based on the old Marxian theory of an inherent conflict between the working class and the capitalist class, they decided that the factory workers was not a big enough group of people to be on their side to overthrow the existing institutions of society. They need more than just factory workers. Plus, the factory workers just wanted better wages and working conditions. They didn't want to destroy society and run the factories themselves. They just wanted better pay. And so they invented a new theory, a group of Marxists who came to America from Germany, Italy, and a few other places, and known as the Frankfurt School. And the new class conflict became not the capitalist class and the working class, but the oppressor class and the oppressed. And the oppressor class is essentially white heterosexual males, and the oppressed is everybody else. And so that's where all these categories come from, women, minorities, the transgender, this and that. Everybody is categorized because their scheme or their strategy was that, well, that's a heck of a lot more people than just factory workers. That's just about everybody. And so they've been working for decades and decades in creating conflict between the oppressor class and the oppressed class. There's even a famous essay by Herbert Markusa, the Marxist professor, I think it's called Oppressive Tolerance, where he makes the case that free speech should only be allowed to the oppressed class. The oppressor class does not deserve free speech. So when you see all these attacks on free speech in universities, the people who are instigating the attacks believe they're taking the moral high ground by abolishing free speech and academic freedom because they think that they say anyway that they're attacking speech of the oppressor class. And that's a virtuous thing. And so when you see today the attacks on Christianity last weekend, there were church burnings and taking down statues of the Virgin Mary and things like that, the institutions that they want to destroy now are the traditional family, the nuclear family, religion, especially Christianity, in addition to capitalism itself. So when you see all these attacks, that's modern day destructionism. And we've seen it on television here in the United States over the past couple of months, day in and day out, night out with the taking down of the statues. Not that I'm a big fan of statues. I once told people that I don't think anybody should be on Mount Rushmore, let alone Abe Lincoln, but I don't want to say that anymore because I don't want to encourage the lunatics to go out there and dynamite the place and kill somebody while they're doing it. So that's point number one about socialism. As Misi said, destructionism was always a key element of it and the type of destructionism has evolved over the years. Point number two is that socialism will destroy your economic future. This is the really odd thing about the young people who are the Bernie Sanders followers who happily march behind like the Pied Piper. This picture, by the way, that's supposed to be Pinocchio on the cover of my book. We had a debate, should it be the Pied Piper or Pinocchio, the artist who works for the publisher, had a, I preferred Pied Piper. He had the Pied Piper and a whole bunch of college kids behind them, they were headed toward a cliff. They were walking toward a cliff, and I kind of like that one better, but they chose Pinocchio instead. It'll destroy your economic future, but we'll study a little bit of history. Of course, the Soviet Union, when you think of socialism, you think of the Soviet Union in the 20th century, and even as late as 1988, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, Paul Samuelson, was predicting in his textbook that by the year 2000, the Soviet economy would be bigger than the U.S. economy. That's what you got by the distinguished MIT Nobel Prize winner, Paul Samuelson, whose book was the biggest selling economics book for 40 years. And of course, the CIA was saying at the time that the Soviet economy was about 65% of the U.S. economy, but then after the collapse, the worldwide collapse of socialism, our friend Yuri Maltsev, who was an economic advisor to Gorbachev, apparently convinced our government that it was a more like 5%. And Yuri once told me that after he defected, he defected, he ends up in Dick Cheney's office. Dick Cheney was the defense secretary at the time, and they brought Yuri into debrief Dick Cheney on the Soviet economy. And he said, he told me that Cheney said, well, the RCIA says it's 65%, and Yuri said, no, 5%. And Cheney went back and said, well, surely, it's probably somewhere between five and 65, and Yuri said, no, no, five. And Yuri told me that Cheney said, sweet. That's what he said. Sorry. So it is possible that our friend Yuri is the guy who convinced our government the Cold War is over. The Soviets can't finance any kind of military aggression. It seems out of the question because of their economy. So everybody knows that. I have in my second chapter, I have some, or first chapter, I have some brief statistics on some countries around the world that have destroyed their economies with socialism. Chile in this 1970s nationalized almost all their industries and adopted socialism. And they ruined their economy as they always do. And then as also as they always do, they tried to print their way out of it by printing money, and they created 746% inflation. After World War II, the British adopted their version of socialism known as Fabian socialism. They kicked out Winston Churchill and brought in Clement Attlee and adopted socialism. And by the 1970s, the whole world was talking about the British disease, meaning British industry. They nationalized all the commanding heights of British industry, and they all operated like nationalized industries do with all the compassion of the IRS and all the efficiency of the Department of Motor Vehicles, and as they say. And so that led to Margaret Thatcher's revolution in which she privatized a lot of these industries. And that's really the only reason why Britain today is reasonably prosperous compared to what they were. It was the British disease back in those days. Argentina adopted its version of socialism in the 1950s and then tinkered with it with different varieties for decades, and they ended up trying to bail themselves out too with printing money. And they created 12,000% inflation by the 1980s in Argentina. India after independence adopted Soviet style central planning. There was a man named Helinobus who was their guru, their economic guru, and he claimed to be able to centrally plan the Indian economy with a single equation, a single mathematical equation. He was a brilliant mathematician. And of course, it didn't work. India became synonymous with poverty for decades after that. No longer today, today India is much more prosperous because they've moved away from this for decades now, but that's what they did after independence from the British Empire. Africa after independence and colonialism began to disappear. The theme was this, quote, only socialism will save Africa. So they tried that and the rest is history too. I cite, there's an economist named George Ayete from Ghana, he's in America. He's been taught at American University for many years, but he's written some very good books. Many of you are interested in a free market economist who critiques what the socialists in Africa did to his confidence. I recommend George Ayete's books on the subject. Sweden, we have, I think there's a pair, and the pair is back there. So if you wanna know anything about Sweden, just ask Pear, he'll tell you. Well, Sweden was one of the most prosperous countries in the world in the late 19th, early 20th century. Had these great entrepreneurs that created Volvo and all sorts of electronic industries in the early days. And for a while it had the most rapid growth in GDP of any country in the world. And then they adopted their version of socialism beginning in the 1950s. And according to the Swedish Academy of Economics, I think that's the name of it. I'll have to look it up in my book, the exact name. They claimed that there was no net new job creation in Sweden from 1950 to 2005. 55 years of net no new job creation as a result. And I read across one article that said, but they did what all other countries do who destroy their economies with socialism and try to print themselves, print money to bail themselves out, bail the government out anyway. And they created 500% interest rates by the 1980s as far as that goes. And so, that's one of the things you need to learn about. Most students, the millennials, they don't know anything about this. So it seems to me. So that's point number two, socialism will destroy your economic future. Point number three is you cannot fix socialism. I'll tell you a little anecdote. I was teaching at the university, I was teaching at during the collapse, the worldwide collapse of socialism in the late 80s and early 90s. One day I left work and I was out in the parking lot and then I ran across one of the two Marxists in economics department. And it was a very sort of nasty person, hated him. He was always insulting. And he wasn't even interested in an honest debate or anything, he was just insulting in name calling and stuff like. So I ran into him and his name is John. I said, John, what are you going to do now? Brick lair, carpenter, you know, social. And he said, oh, no, no, this is all good for us. You know, we're no longer associated with these monsters like Stalin and Chuchescu and all these tyrants there. So now we can fix socialism once and for all. And that was his attitude. And so they never gave up. But of course, if you're here at Misa University this week, you know, that socialism doesn't have the market feedback mechanism that competition in the marketplace does. And you know that without a price system, trying to have an economy without a price system determined by private property and prices determined by supply and demand, by reality, in other words, it's kind of like trying to find your way through New York City after they take away all the street signs. And that's what it's like to try to have an economy without the signals of prices, OK? And so you cannot fix a reform socialism any more than you can, the analogy I used to give, since we're in Alabama, you might have noticed on the road down from the airport, there are all these gigantic vines that creep up over the tall pine trees and even pull them down to the ground and crack them in half sometimes. It's called kudzu. It's called kudzu. And you cannot reform kudzu. You can't get a pair of scissors out and clip them around. And it keeps growing and growing and growing and growing. You have to pull it out by the roots and then burn the roots. And so you can't reform kudzu any more than you can reform socialism. Or you can't reform socialism any more than you can reform kudzu is the way I would put it. You know, people around the world have tried and tried and tried. They've tried hundreds of different types of socialism of all kinds. And you should be a little suspicious that no matter what variety or what they call it, it doesn't work. Not only does it not work, but it's very destructive of everything. And so that's another thing about socialism. Point number four, democratic socialism can be just as disastrous as any kind. There's one little book that everyone in the room should read if you haven't already. It's The Law by Friedrich Bastiat. It's online for free or you can buy it for five bucks from the Mises Institute. The benefit of buying it for the five bucks is I wrote the introduction to it. So it's worth at least five bucks. But anyway, democratic socialism. Well, Argentina, Venezuela, and Brazil have all destroyed their economies with democratic socialism. And in The Law, this is published in 1850 by Friedrich Bastiat, The Law. There's one little passage in there where he's criticizing socialism and he says, of course, it doesn't really matter whether you have socialism with a dictator or socialism with a democracy. If you vote in one central plan to be imposed by coercive force of government on the whole population, what does it matter if it's voted into place or a dictator puts it into place? You're still gonna have socialist central planning. For example, if we get the Green New Deal, what does it matter that it's imposed on us by the coercive powers of the American democracy or the coercive powers of a dictator? We're still gonna have, they want to abolish the automobile, abolish airplanes and they abolish windows and buildings and all these things, so-called Green New Deal. And so it doesn't really matter. It can be just as disastrous as anything else. So democratic socialism can be just as bad and we have plenty of evidence of that. Speaking of that, I'll have a little graphic here. But Bernie Sanders, he's kind of like the Wizard of Oz now, isn't he? If you, Joe Biden is making speeches on economics in the last couple of days and he's saying everything that the Sanderites are in favor of. So I suspect Bernie's been writing the speeches. He's no longer the front man, but there's a lot of the crazy things that they're talking about. But when Bernie was running, and that's how the millennials really cut onto socialism, you know, just Bernie. And an exam question, I thought a course, by the way, called Capitalism and its Critics. And one of the exam questions, I asked him at the end, the final exam question, was sort of, well, as I said, many of your peers, the students, think that their economic future will be better off if the economy is placed in the hands of a 77-year-old lifelong communist. You know, what do you think of that? It was the question. And so, but anyway, you know, Bernie was touting democratic socialism. And I remember seeing him on, I think it was The Tonight Show, and Larry David was opposite him. It was Larry David, the actor, played Bernie Sanders on, I mean, Saturday Night Live, I think it was. And so they had Bernie and Larry David's side. But Larry David was kind of skeptical of his democratic socialism. And he asked him, so socialism's a bad thing. You know, Larry David knew about Russia and what happened in Russia and the Soviet Union, but you think democratic place is better. And Bernie says, oh, yeah, huge difference. And then Larry Sanders made a big deal of huge. He like repeated the word huge several times and wave his arms around like that. And so Bernie is, you know, he's pointing to Denmark, Finland, the Scandinavian countries, democratic socialism as his model. And but what he's really thinking of, he's thinking of, say, Sweden in 1950, where the Scandinavian countries when they started experimenting with socialism, but even Sweden, like I say, you can ask Pear, they've taken a big step or two back from this in the last couple of decades. And so Bernie's not talking about today's Sweden. Now, some of you might be familiar with something called the Index of Economic Freedom. There's something published by the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal have been involved in this. The Fraser Institute in Canada. Walter Block was one of the founding fathers of this whole thing, the Index of Economic Freedom. I was at one of the first conferences to work this up in 1990 with Walter and Milton Friedman and Charles Murray and a bunch of other economists to work up the whole idea of an Index of Economic Freedom. And it's not perfect, of course, but here's the latest, some of the latest statistics. They work up an index based on how much free trade, how oppressive or not so oppressive taxes are, how oppressive or not so oppressive regulation is, and so forth. And I think of it as sort of a scale of socialism on the left side with a zero and capitalism on the right side, free market capitalism, you get a hundred. And so every country in the world has given a score on the Index of Economic Freedom. And on this issue of democratic socialism, Denmark in the latest index had a score they're given 78.3, which is higher than the United States, Finland 75.7, Sweden 74.9. So they're all in the same ballpark. So when you hear people like Bernie Sanders saying, we should be more like Denmark or Sweden, well, if we were more like Denmark, it would be more capitalistic, according to this anyway. They have a better ranking today than as far as that goes. And a lot goes into this, you might have business taxes that are lower in one country, but income taxes are higher. And so it's kind of complicated. But the point I'm making here is that when you hear people say these things, they're talking about the Scandinavia of 30 and 40 years ago. They're not talking about today. They learn that, some of them anyway, learn their lesson from this. So don't fall for that is what I'm saying. Okay. The next point is socialism does not produce equality. That's always been the point. And of course, you know, the definition of socialism started out as government ownership of the means of production, or government ownership and control of the means of production. And so at the beginning, it meant basically nationalization of industry by the government. But in the road to serfdom, Hayek, the 1976 edition, Hayek made the argument that the definition has been expanded because a lot of the early socialist countries gave up on the whole idea of running the factories because they realized, you know, what the heck do we know about running factories? And they produced mass poverty and starvation. And so they switched it to be to that, you know, some nationalization, but also the institutions of income redistribution through the welfare state and the progressive income tax. You know, the second plank of the communist manifesto says a heavy progressive income tax. The first plank is abolition of private property. Second plank is a heavy progressive income tax. And so Hayek said the goal has always been coerced equality. But the method has changed somewhat. Yes, it's also nationalization as much as they can get away with, but also primarily the institutions of the welfare state and the progressive income tax. And my old professor and colleague for a while, James Buchanan once said, if you understand public choice economics, you cannot be a socialist. In other words, if you understand how politics works, you cannot be a socialist. And I would combine that with another slogan that Hayek has known for. He said, under socialism, the only power worth having is political power. And so in all the socialist countries of the world, it's the politically connected who do very well. And they're not equal to you, I guarantee you that. They're not at all equal. In Venezuela, when the daughter of the former dictator, Chavez, was revealed in the Wall Street Journal to have a net worth of $4 billion. And she was a young woman in her 30s. And I don't believe she was one of the founders of Microsoft or Apple Computer or anything like that to have a net worth of $4 billion of the B. They also said the former finance minister of Venezuela in Chavez's time left the country, went to Europe somewhere, maybe probably Switzerland would be my guess. And the Wall Street Journal says his net worth is about $11 billion. And so what did he do to produce goods and services that earned him $11 billion? Nothing, he stole the money. And so I did a little research on Venezuela a few years ago when their economy first started becoming totally destroyed with socialism. And a lot of articles on the web about how all the cronies, they still have their country clubs and they still eat well. And you can see pictures alongside of that of the ordinary people who used to have good paying jobs in the oil industry. For example, rooting through garbage, looking for something to eat for dinner. And that's always been the case with socialism. Bernie Sanders owns three houses. I don't own three houses. How many of you own three houses? So it's a myth that socialism produces equality. Who was a George Orwell that said all people are created equal but some are more equal than others. I can't remember if that was an animal farm or one of the other books. Another point is I've always been sort of amused or maybe disgusted after a long academic career that the socialists on campus always strut around pretending to take the moral high ground. Especially where I worked. I worked at a Catholic institution. So you had these hardened communists with priest callers walking around everywhere pretending to take the moral high ground when the ideology that they espouse is associated with the worst crimes in human history. The worst crimes in human history. Take a look at the black book of communism as just one. Authored by seven French scholars. There's also a book called Demoside by a sociologist named Rudy Rummel retired from the University of Hawaii who takes what Demoside was was governments who murdered their own citizens for being dissenters. Not war. Not governments who invaded another country how many people died in World War II or anything like that. It was murder of your own citizens because they refused to buckle under and knuckle under to your dictates and your commands your socialist commands. And just this one book the black book of communism and I've seen much higher estimates of this how many people did the Russians kill? 20 million. China 60 million. Vietnam 1 million. North Korea 2 million. Cambodia 2 million. Eastern Europe 1 million. Africa 1.7 million. And Latin America 150,000. And so these are not war related deaths these millions of people. That's the 20th century. That's what socialism did. That's what I mean when I say it kind of sickens me to have these academics strutting around always taking the moral high ground when they're associated with this ideology. Now in his famous book The Road to Serfdom probably the most famous chapter in Hayek's book The Road to Serfdom is one called The Worst Rise to the Top. And what he's talking about he says under any kind of collectivist system what do you call it socialism or anything else typically what happens the socialist will impose central planning, price controls all the usual things that will cause economic catastrophe and so they have a choice back off and admit you were wrong or double down and they always double down more coercion, more planning, more controls and so forth. And of course that takes more coercion more orders, more dictates more police, more guns more jails to do that. And so Hayek argues that in a system like that it evolves to a extent where the worst kind of people will rise to the top in a political system like that the people with the fewest qualms about brutalizing their fellow man and there might be a scale kind of like my capitalism socialism scale okay you might think of it as a tyrannometer, you know the meter different measures of tyranny you know left and right but that's why he said the worst rise to the top and so again you're not going to reform this socialism depends on this it depends on the use of coercion and it doesn't work economically for all the reasons you're learning this week and so they will always be confronted with a choice. Now some countries have backed off England did away with Fabian socialism Sweden moved away from their version of 1950s era 1960s era socialism somewhat they still have a huge welfare state like we do in the United States but some people learn their lesson but not everybody okay so that's that's that point also under equality you know if the government wants to pursue equality it can only do so by treating people unequally you know and that's another point that Hayek makes actually you know what does it mean to pursue equality material equality it means you have to take money out of the pockets of one group of people and give it to another group of people to try to make it equal well then so you have to by definition you have to treat people unequally in the pursuit of your goal of equality and so just a silly contradiction that under socialism you can do that Hayek says that in his chapter on the rule of law he argues that collectivism in general is inherently incompatible with the rule of law which means equal under the law because it inevitably leads to this big bundle of policies that treats different groups unequally that's in pursuit of equality okay next point fascism is a form of socialism okay don't get confused by antifa in other words and I have a couple of quotes on this from the book Socialism I just wrote these down this morning I didn't have a printer in my room I just wrote these down this is from Misi's book Socialism Nobody could surpass Mussolini and Marxian zeal he's talking about the early days of Benito Mussolini in Italy and then another quote that's on page 574 of the book Socialism another quote is the slogan into which the Nazis condensed their economic philosophy which is the common new deal ranks above private profit is likewise the idea underlying the American new deal and the Soviet management of affairs so that's what von Misi's was saying so it's all the same gang the new deal, Mussolini, Hitler and in terms of economics anyway he's not talking about the holocaust and all these things okay so fascism is a form of socialism and it always was it's out as does Misi's that all of these so-called fascists all started out as Marxists like Mussolini did he was a hardcore Marxist so let me read you a couple of things from the horse's mouth Mussolini himself he wrote a book he was a PhD in political philosophy he wrote a book called Fascism, Doctrine and Institutions he said this the fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the state and accepts the individual only insofar as his interests coincide with the state it is opposed to classical liberalism classical liberalism the free market, libertarianism John Locke James Madison and all the ideas the judge talks about in constitutionalism and Mussolini they knew who the enemy was the enemy is a free society classical liberalism the ideas of a free society classical liberalism classical liberalism denied the state in the name of individual you can't do that the state comes first that's what Misi was talking about when he said collectivism is collectivism no matter what you call it and of course the Nazis national socialism the Nazis and the Soviets where the Soviets called themselves international socialists and the Nazis called themselves nationalist socialists nationalism but they were all socialists it's right in there in a word and I don't distinguish I agree with Misi's one of his writings he says communism socialism same thing when I went on I did 65 radio interviews this book came out my publisher had me running doing radio interviews all in about a month I would always be asked well communism was bad but it's not the same thing as socialism well I would usually tell them that the name of the Soviet Union the country union of Soviet socialist republics it wasn't called the union of Soviet communist republics they call themselves socialist because communism was this utopian ideal that would be achieved in 500 years but in the meantime we're all socialists that was the whole basis of the Soviet Union that's what it was a union of a union of socialist countries so Misi's said that that there's no difference in this I don't distinguish between it either it's all the same gang so fascism socialism Hayek said and wrote a serfdom that said all the leading men of German and Italian fascism began as socialists and ended as fascists or Nazis so it's just a matter of degree the next point I'll make is the progressive income tax you know the second plank of the communist manifesto economists all know that one of the things about the income tax it penalizes work it's a tax on work and so it can deter the work effort and it really does fuel what the catholic church would say is the deadly sin of envy the seven deadly sins envy is one of the worst in my book because that's really what has been behind the Soviet Union and communism everywhere is envy and resentment I used to have in my office door a short quote look up on the web Henry Haslett socialism in one minute and he says it's basically you can explain socialism by a sort of envy and hatred of the man who was better than you and that's not an exact quote but it's the essence of what the great Henry Haslett said was the essence of socialism okay now the progressive income tax it sort of stokes the fires of envy and I also quote Frank Charterov there's a great book downstairs I think it's still for sale downstairs it might be online also on Mises.org the income tax root of all evil I like that title it's kind of a title I would I would pick this is my latest Lincoln book by the way I wanted to call it that stinkin Lincoln but they chose no problem with Lincoln anyway but maybe that'll work out better but on the income tax let me get the right page here Charterov I can find him this might take about 15 minutes here we go here's one statement he made about the income tax here's what when we thought the income tax in 1913 in the United States and the country that has an income tax Charterov said here's what the state is saying to you he's saying quote your earnings are not exclusively exclusively your own we have a claim on them and our claim precedes yours we the state we will allow you to keep some of it because we recognize your need but not your right but whatever we grant you for yourself is for us to decide that's the meaning of the adoption of an income tax it's basically the nationalization of your income and what is the difference between that and slavery by the way what do you call a system where people are forced to work for the benefit of others for four or five months out of the year the National Taxpayers Union computes Tax Freedom Day every year and it's the end of April they just divide total tax revenues taken in by the government divided by national income and they usually come up with April 27 or something like that and I used to ask my students that what would you call a system where one person is forced with threats of violence and imprisonment to work for the benefit of other people it takes about two seconds for somebody to say slavery and then I asked them how's that different from the welfare state they get very uncomfortable because they've been taught their whole lives that the welfare state is a good and virtuous thing they never thought I got that from Walter Williams that's one of his techniques and speech making techniques another thing the income tax does is to create a tremendous centralization of power let's see if I can get shot off again but anyway I'll skip over that I don't want to give you another long quote one way to look at it is during the Civil War since I've written about Lincoln there was one of the things I've written about over the years is there was a huge desertion crisis on the Lincoln's army you could read stories of how on the eve of a big battle there would be 80,000 soldiers in camp the battle of Manassas or something like that and then the sun would come up and there would be 20,000 where everybody would disappear into the woods and this happened over and over again and the US government did not have the revenue with which to pay people to run down the deserters but they do today once they adopted the income tax you're not going to evade the conscription law they'll find you anywhere and they'll root you out because they got all the money in the world and of course the Fed came in at the same time and so that's not going to happen okay and so that's the progressive income tax I guess the last thing I'll mention I want to leave time for a few questions or comments about any of this as one of the things I've written about over the years is when the socialism collapsed in the late 80s in the early 90s one of the things we learn is that the socialist countries of the world were by far the most polluted the worst environmental nightmares in the world were in the socialist countries there are even books published with titles like Ecoside and the USSR and I wrote several articles about this there were stories all of a sudden people could go into these closed societies and look around and see what things are like scientists journalists and there are stories like a man in Poland would pull up his car alongside a river to have a picnic and use the river water to wash his car he had to eat lunch and go back and the paint had come off his car because of all the chemicals that were in the river there were signs on steam boats in the Volga River in Russia that said do not throw cigarettes overboard the river may catch on fire because there's so many the soil in former Czechoslovakia was toxic down to a foot deep from decades of overuse of chemical fertilizers and things like that I had a friend who was from Zagreb former Yugoslavia who came to America and he worked as a lawyer for the government and he told me he lived on the 30th floor of a high rise that had no elevator and I asked him if he was a mountain climber or a physical fitness fanatic or something like that he said no the pollution was so bad that you can't open your windows unless you're at least on the 30th floor and I didn't want to live without being able to open my windows and in Poland there were stories of fire trucks going through the streets with water cannons to knock the lead and zinc and cadmium dust out of the air that was their version of pollution control I guess back under communism and so we've had our problems here in this country but nothing like happened there because everything was one big commons no private property and with private property comes responsibility you're responsible for how you use your property and so to the extent that you enforce this enforce the harm that you impose on other people and the use of your property pollution can be reasonably controlled but if you have a system where everything is a commons you don't have that and the Russians had a great sounding constitution said many wonderful things about the environment but then they destroyed their environment and anyway they almost there was so much overfishing that the sturgeon population was almost destroyed they almost ran out of caviar thank God communism ended so we could save caviar but they almost ran out of sturgeon who produced the caviar and so that's the last point and that's true of some of the democratic countries too Brazil the beach Rio de Janeiro is one of the most polluted waterways in the planet for example Mexico we had this awful oil spill on the Gulf of Mexico it was too far from here several years ago an oil platform blew up people died there was an oil slick for a while in the Gulf in the American environmental the watermelons what I call them green on the outside, red on the inside went nuts over this but Mexico does this all the time British petroleum set aside 20 billion dollars to compensate victims and to suffer lawsuits and everything of this Mexico does the same thing and they just thumb their nose at the world they just say go you know where we're not going to pay anything and they don't and they have democratic socialism isn't it basically they have a nationalized oil industry and so this is not just the Soviet Union and the communist countries it's a lot of these other countries as well and so maybe I'll stop it there those are some of the things that everyone should know about and follow up on study and learn more about and I think we have a few minutes if you have a question just shout it out you know we don't want to have to pass a microphone around and spread the plague to anybody if you don't want to but if you're all so convinced of everything yes sir what is your response when in an argument someone says well that wasn't real socialism well it depends on what that is you know we know what socialism is government ownership of the means of production and then you have Hayek's sort of footnote that it also includes the institutions of the welfare state and a progressive income tax so you can identify what socialism is they always say that and they always will say that but it's a big cop-out isn't it it's because we've tried hundreds of different types of socialism and they've all had the uniform result of economic destruction and you need to rely on economic theory too that's why you're here this week you know what works and what doesn't work in terms of economics and so if it quacks like a duck and it walks like a duck it's a duck you know and that's basically what you're learning this week when you learn about the importance of the price system socialist calculation and so forth how to identify a duck when you see it you know and so that's that's what you need to rely on I think so yes sir so I don't know if I'm romancing the past but since you've seen that socialism is passing the universal system doesn't see what socialist are getting more mediocre or less ambitious at the point of course in the old days we kind of had like radical union bosses who expected that when the revolution came to be you know in charge party bosses controlling these networks but then nowadays we just have people who just want to be social workers and replacing all the cops so there's like so much low to the original yeah we don't have as many lennons as we use to I guess is what you're saying people like that although that guy who's the head of the democratic national committee is a spittin' image of Vladimir Lenin is he I don't know what his name is but he looks just like him and it creeped me out when I saw him this guy's in charge of the democratic party Vladimir Lenin come back to life they look like they trotted out his corpse and stood in front of a camera you know but you know that's a good point you know you got the dopey college kids who are out there setting fires and raising hell your classmates who have been indoctrinated in this since grade school apparently but like you said maybe their highest aspiration is to be a bureaucrat at the department of motor vehicles and get a government job for life so they don't have to work and get paid every day and so but you do have the Bernie Brigade and you do have people like Pelosi and the people who run Chuck Schumer I had a student once that I brought to Mises University he was a straight A student before he went to college and he was very smart and he had that Marine Corps discipline and high intelligence and our friend the late Ralph Raco who used to teach at Mises the great historian asked this student of mine let's say his name was Jim I don't want anyone to be able to guess who it was he said Jim could you pick out Senator Schumer in a crowd because he was a sniper in the Marine Corps and so he was a sniper instructor anyway I just thought I'd end with kind of a silly joke like that but yeah that's a good point we don't have, thank God we don't have quite as many Lenins but you do have Schumer's and Pelosi's and the young woman from Brooklyn who got 14,000 votes and became a congressperson what's her name AOC you have people like that if they succeed whoever created the Green New Deal is a Lenin that's an atrocious the Soviets were never there so ambitious in central planning they were much more piecemeal the Soviets were never so idiotic saying let's abolish all the cars and airplanes let's do that that's just plain stupid we have that I told my old friend Don Marmontano we had a little debate over the impact of Bernie Sanders and what he's up to a while back and I told Don that I think he's probably sick of being a senator and would like the job say of EPA director to enforce the Green New Deal on us if Joe Biden wins the election and so we might have another Lenin come along sometime but hopefully not I think my time is just about up and so thank you for your attention