 This class is You know, I named it I think nine or ten things every millennial should know about socialism and A lot of you are not millennials You're I think we're at the tail end of the millennial generation. I've been reading they're trying to decide what to call you now You're gonna yeah, I think the millennial generation and what is it everybody born after 1983 or something like that and so so you'll have to figure that out but But I wrote this book by the way you you probably have received the email by now that you will not be permitted to leave Auburn, Alabama Unless you purchase a copy of my book Socialism, you know, but I wrote this book in regularly publishing Contacted me after Tom Woods or they contacted Tom, but he's too busy with Tom Woods incorporated to write another book And so he recommended me Then and they said, you know, they read across these Opinion polls one of them's a 2016 Pew Foundation poll found that 69% of voters under the age of 30 expressed a willingness to vote for a socialist president and There are a number of other polls like that. So, you know, the so-called millennial generation that went crazy over a 74-year-old communist who spent his honeymoon in Moscow in the middle of the Cold War Bernie Sanders sort of a sort of a weird development that that there is sort of you know You know after all the world has gone through with socialism in the 20th century here. We have the young the younger generation Infatuated by someone like that and and socialism in general And I would have to assume though that a lot of them didn't know what it was and a lot of these young people Were were Ron Paul followers when Ron was running for the Republican nomination Because he's also anti establishment. So a lot of them. I think just thought of themselves as anti establishment It's just a good thing if you're anti Washington establishment But but they didn't have any really intellectual background to understand. Well, what am I for I'm against that But one of my four, you know, yeah, how could you how could you be more different than being for Ron Paul one day? And Bernie Sanders the old communist the next day that doesn't make any sense at all in Bernie by the way was a high school classmate of Walter blocks and they ran on the same track team And although Walter said Bernie was faster than him And Walter has been challenging Bernie to a debate for about three years now But he just seems to ignore him. He's not not too interested And so that's why I wrote this book the book was written That's Pinocchio on the front cover and the problem with socialism as this as he pointed out should have been problems plural But it comes from a quotation from Margaret Thatcher the late Prime Minister of England who once said the problem with socialism Is that you eventually run out of other people's money and that's sort of where the title of the book comes from And so I thought I'd go down, you know, as many of these nine or ten things as I can get through in the time that I have About what I think young people like you if you talk to your classmates about this if they say geo Oh god, I hope Bernie Sanders runs again for president or something like that. Like that. What would you say to them? Well, first of all, you should buy the book like I said Or else you won't be able to get on the bus back to the airport and and there's I can't cover everything It's in the book, but I'll go through some of these things. Well, first of all, what is socialism? What began in the early 20th century as government ownership of the means of production? And that's that's when all the socialist calculation debate took place in in the great debate over socialism But then it was expanded be far beyond that in in his famous book the road to serfdom in the 1976 edition Friedrich Hayek wrote that Before too long even by the time you got to the 1940s Socialism had been redefined as income redistribution through the welfare state and the progressive income tax And the objective he said was always the same the ostensible object objective was always egalitarianism It was always the an attempt to equalize society But the means just changed the means that they gave up on a lot of socialists gave up on the whole idea of taking over Industry and running it Especially in the United States where the the working class so-called in the United States was never interested in taking over the factories like Marks and Engels insisted. They just wanted to pay raise They didn't they weren't interested in all that so they redefined socialism to mean that so that's the second part of the definition and then also in Ludwig von Miesi's fame famous book socialism, which is for sale out here I assume and it's online and some of the latter chapters he talks about what he calls Destructionism he said it has always been a part of socialism wherever you see it is to first destroy the institutions of capitalism including The institutions of liberalism that mean that meaning the ideas that support economic freedom Okay, peace free enterprise equality under the law and then so forth Those things those ideas have to be destroyed and the and the institutions of capitalism have to be destroyed through taxation regulation inflation whatever means possible propaganda And you know re-education of the public, you know to hate capitalism and to love socialism That has that was always seen as a prerequisite first then you can try to have socialism And so my definition of it is is broader than just government ownership of the means of production It's also the welfare state and the progressive income tax and destructionism Okay, so that's why my book has 16 chapters. It's not just a book about the calculation debate That's actually a tiny tiny part of it the second thing second point is Socialism will destroy your economic future And we have a lot of history that I talked about some of the history in the textbook Here's my hand up and of course in the Soviet Union is the biggest the biggest example of this in world history Our friend Yuri Maltsev who has lectured here. He's a professor at Carthage College in Wisconsin now I just saw him a couple weeks ago in Florida and He he was a an advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev who defected and He ends up being a friend of the Mises Institute in an Austrian school economist And and how he came to be that is that One of his jobs working for Gorbachev Was to read the literature of the capitalist bourgeois Exploitors and criticize it and so he had unique access Yuri once told me that if you got if a Russian citizen got caught with a copy of the road to serfdom There was a seven-year prison sentence just for having that book in your possession And he read it in a mimeograph form and then passed it on right away to somebody else who wanted to read it But so he knew about all this literature and so he was a free market economist when he defected in the late 80s and And he's the guy who convinced Dick Cheney the US defense secretary at the time that the Soviet economy was no more than 5% of the US economy so you had the the the Richest country in the world in terms of natural resources including human beings in a huge population Producing basically nothing. I once asked an MBA class of mine. Well, what what product could you name that the Soviets? Produced it was a worldwide You know competitive on world markets and I had some military people in the class because there's a military base near where I was Teaching and they said a k-47s. Yeah a k-47, but no consumer good That's that's one thing they can think of it and maybe caviar, but that comes from a fish and not a factory So that's the worst biggest example all over the world Socialism is a disease, you know, and you know students need to study this and know this Argentina developed their brand of socialism in the 40s under Juan Perón and then that that imploded and The Argentines Tried to bail themselves out with massive government spending and printing of money for decades after that ending up with 12,000% inflation by the 1980s and but that all got started with the implosion of Juan Perón's socialist Project India was once one of the wealthiest countries on earth With a lot of brilliant engineers and people of all of all kinds of all trades and the very wealthy and but then after colonialism They adopted Soviet style central planning as their model and they and the rest is history It became one of the poorest countries in the world until Rajiv Gandhi helped them started turning things around Was that 20 or 25 years ago in in India? Africa the same thing after colonialism ended in Africa They all also moved into socialism as a possible answer and and so country after country also became You know among the poorest countries of the world the latest one of the latest examples of course is Venezuela of the wonders of socialism where in Where Hugo Chavez Nationalized all the major industries and a lot of not so major industries impose price controls regulation socialism It's only you know, not even 20 years ago. They did that in Venezuela has is reportedly Has more oil than Saudi Arabia and so it was a very affluent country a Latin American country and they've totally destroyed the place Here's one article from the London Telegraph Describing today's Venezuela It says explosive government spending combined with declining oil prices made Venezuela a dead hell as Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro refused to admit the folly of their ways today a hamburger cost the equivalent of a hundred and seventy dollars Because of hyperinflation a night in a hotel is six thousand nine hundred dollars a Middle-class monthly salaries savaged by inflation are worth about thirty five dollars in purchasing power Food prices more than tripled just in the past month and the annual inflation rate is four thousand five hundred and five percent One Venezuelan interviewed by the Telegraph Said that he had to spend more than half of his monthly income just on toilet tissue and You know that you can read articles on the web about people in Venezuela rummaging through garbage in the street competing with dogs for looking for something to eat out of garbage piles and Hundreds of thousands of people leaving the country and that only took about 15 years to do that to what was once a Fairly prosperous country And so there's no and there's no shortage of examples of that if you want to destroy your Economic future well, then socialism is the ticket for you. It's moved to Venezuela You can you can you can see your economic future quicker than if you just vote for Bernie Sanders and be a Bernie Sanders supporter Okay The third lesson is that you cannot fix Socialism any more than you can reform kudzu Those of you who have never been here down south in Alabama Don't know what kudzu is it's that weird vine if you on the highway from the air from the Atlanta Airport to Auburn You might have noticed that there's these vines that just completely come over all the big pine trees It's called kudzu and it's just like grows like crazy You can't kill it you can't can't trim it or anything like that You have to pull it out the mother roots and then burn the roots and and that's the only way to get to do Anything about socialism can and of course the reasons why you can't reform socialism Or the inherent reasons that you've learned a lot about that this week. I assume there's the Calculate the calculation problem that you've all been You know, you know, they are knowledgeable about now there's also the Hayekian knowledge problem the idea that That the kind of knowledge that makes an economy work is the knowledge of time and place that it's in the minds of the millions of people the Consumers the producers the workers the entrepreneurs the financiers and everybody and that no one mind or no one group of people could possibly Possess and utilize in an efficient way all that information And Hayek called that the pretense of knowledge in his in his last book before he died And so that's the knowledge problem. That's different from the calculation problem There's more to do with the absence of market prices and being able to calculate profit and loss and those sorts of things And then there's the famous incentive problem, you know, how do you how do you give people an incentive to work if everyone gets paid the same? if I'm a professor in a college class and I tell the students that Okay, we're gonna have six exams during the semester at the end of the semester I'm gonna add up all the scores and divide by the number of students and give everybody a C You know, what what incentive would you have to study if you know? You're gonna get a C if you study a hundred hours. You get a C if you study one hour. You get a C You know, what's and that's that socialism? basically Okay, so these are the inherent reasons why you can't fix socialism And it's remarkable how some economists don't know this I remember reading an interview in the New York Times with years ago with Joseph Stiglitz who was Bill Clinton's chairman of his president of the council of economic advisors He was he was the head of the World Bank for a while. I believe a famous Princeton economist And so a real establishment kingpin Nobel Prize and the whole gist of the interview in the New York Times was that He thought and this was this was after he left the Clinton administration and after the worldwide collapse of socialism The gist of the interview was that he thought he could people like himself could make socialism work that they just didn't do it the Right way And so so he learned nothing through history or economics and this is somebody who's supposed to be a big shot economist He doesn't understand a darn thing about it to say something like that. It seems to me okay point number four is Democratic socialism can be just as disastrous as any other kind My Venezuela example is an illustration of that. That was a democracy As far as that goes so you can in his famous pamphlet the law Friedrich Bastiat commented this was published in 1850 Bastiat said that Democracy can be just as as bad as communism If what democracy means is you pass a law that imposes one system on the whole population And then uses the coercive force of government to keep that one system Imposed on the population. Well, that's what communism does and so you can have the same results of communism or socialism As far as that goes but with democracy and by the way, I don't I don't really distinguish between the two It's all the same gang to me communism socialism because after all the Soviets called their government The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. They didn't call it the Union of Soviet Communist Republics They they consider themselves to be socialists because communism was the utopian ideal that they hoped to reach someday Maybe in a hundred years, but even the Soviets never called themselves communists It was they called their government Soviet Soviet Socialist Republics okay, so that's sort of a Red herring argument to me because some people will say well you're criticizing socialism but communism is he has bad Yeah, but socialism is different. Well, no, it's not It's just the same same beast as far as that goes Yeah, a little Hayek made the point in Well, I'll leave I'll leave Hayek later. That's Hayek made the point about about this You know the road to serfdom there are there are several chapters in his famous book the road to serfdom about this point about democratic socialism and and he talks about how democracy inevitably is incompatible With with socialism because what happens what tends to happen among other things is that okay? The you'll impose some sort of central plan on society and then the plan will fail and then the government will face a choice It can either abandon the plan or it can adopt Dictatorial powers to keep keep the system going to sort of force more and more on the population in Venezuela For example democratic country they they're talking about Forcing all the adults in the country to spend two months on a farm somewhere working Because they're out they're running out of food And and so you know so it started with price controls and a nationalization of industry and now 15 20 years later They're talking about literally enslaving a large part of the population Like chattel slavery and forcing them to work backbreaking farm labor to feed the population And so so it's either that sort of thing or just abandon and admit that you failed And politicians are rarely inclined to do that aren't they and so so that's a high ex argument of how One of the reasons he gives several others of why Democracy is essentially destroyed by socialism even if it's adopted by a by a democratic country Okay See the next point I would make is uh Socialism does not produce equality it produces Just as much inequality as as any other system. Maybe even more than any other system. For example Uh, I read not too long ago in the wall street journal that the wealthiest person in venezuela Socialist venezuela today is the daughter of the late hugo chavez Who's reportedly worth four billion dollars with a b even though she never had a job and never ran a business And and also the chavez former finance minister who now lives in europe according to this article Is reportedly worth 11 billion dollars And there and the same article had a big uh long discussion Of the political cronies of hugo chavez who were still At their country clubs living high in the hog having you know Eating well having pig roast at the country club tonight and that that's sort of being driving mursadis But the people are living like animals and in as far as the animals go They're starving in the zoos too and people are eating dogs and and cats in venezuela But the politically the politically connected are doing very well. It's always been that way Joseph stallin was the richest man in the world during his time He essentially owned the entire soviet union You know people will say no i might have been john d rockefeller Or you know in his heirs or somebody like that knows stallin No, but nobody owned more property than than he did in his time and of course in the soviet union all the all the uh, the top politicians had Resort homes and secret bank accounts and all the rest and lived very well And everyone else is equally miserable And a couple of interesting quotations that i that i put in the book about this about equality and egalitarianism A couple of my favorites actually Like i said the book's written for a popular audience. It's not written Because i want to win the Nobel prize in economics okay H. L. Makin, this is one of my favorite H. L. Makin quotes about the whole subject of egalitarianism He said all government in its essence is a conspiracy against the superior man Its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him If it'd be aristocratic in organization, then it seeks to protect the man who is superior Only in law against the man who is superior in fact If it'd be democratic then it seeks to protect the man who is inferior in every way against both One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force Meaning not just men men and women to make them as much alike as possible And as dependent upon one another as possible to search out and combat originality among men All that can see is in an original idea is potential change and hence an invasion of its prerogatives That is the government's prerogatives The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself Without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos And that's any You know egalitarianism Anywhere no matter where where you're talking about And then another quote that i stuck in here on this top of the chapter That my chapter is entitled egalitarianism versus human reality And I recommend if you're interested in this read Murray Rothbard's essay Egalitarianism as a revolt against nature It's a very informative a lot of good economics in it. It's on the web You don't have to find a book or anything like that And and Murray Rothbard quoted Kurt Vonnegut in this essay the the the american Literary figure Kurt Vonnegut in his essay called Harrison Bergeron About equality and here here's what vonnegut said It's a novel, you know novel, but it's fiction work of fiction The year was 2081 and everyone was finally equal There weren't only equal before god and the law they were equal in every which way Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else No one was stronger or quicker than anybody else All this equality was due to the 211th 212th and 213th amendments to the constitution and to the unceasing vigilance of the agents of the united states handicapper general And so so what did the handicapper general do? Here's an example Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence Which meant she could think about anything Except that she couldn't think about anything except in short bursts And george while his intelligence was way above normal had a little mental handicap radio in his ear He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter Every 20 seconds or so the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like george from taking unfair advantage of their brains and that's That's a good that's a good lesson in that Sometimes humor or making fun of the egalitarian the socialist egalitarians is a good way to criticize them And I have found that they hate that more than anything else And so therefore I enjoyed more than anything else All right when you can ridicule and make fun of them because they take themselves so seriously all the time And so humor is a is a can be a very powerful weapon You know, why do you think why do you think they put comedy central on tv and all these all these all these comedians? You know what that what's her name holding the head of trump up and in the stuff like that? They think it's funny. They think that was not a very effective tactic that the severed head thing, but but that's But that's what they do You know, where am I? So Also socialism has been responsible for some of the worst crimes in human history I teach a course I'm teaching in the fall called capitalism and its critics and I use different books all the time But in one year I used the road to serfdom was one of the books I had the students read that well, it's very hard. It's not easy to read. So I had to Spent a lot of time in the class explaining explaining the book But then after that I had them read The black book of communism and write papers about it and this was a book Written by seven french scholars. It was translated into english in the sometime in the mid 90s, I think and it just details the crimes under communism and it showed why Why it was that in order, you know in the name of of imposing socialism on the people That these governments had to mass murder hundreds of millions of their own population of their own people It was an essential part of socialism for the whole 20th century And let me see if I can find the page number here And it's an example of the chapter in a road to serfdom of That where that hyac called why the worst rise to the top I think it's chapter 10 in the road to serfdom Why it is that under these socialist regimes, whether it's fascism or socialism or anything else You see the worst Rising to the top and and basically the basic reason one of the reasons is is that the essence of socialism is the imposition Of a a government plan or a set of government plans On the population that will replace their own private plans for their own lives And so you you have to use force and coercion because people don't like To have their lives and their own personal plans disrupted and and so forth That's why the Ukrainians for example Stalin had to murder six million Ukrainians That they wanted to be farmers. They wanted to keep their farms They didn't want to give their farms over to the to the government And so they they killed six million Ukrainians for starters in the 1930s And so and so and my students were my students were totally unaware of this They they didn't know that a single person died under communism. It seems like they never taught a darn thing about it They were and you know at first they couldn't believe it and then they Then they got into this book and uh, and uh, and I had them write short papers on Pick any one country that's discussed in this book and explain to the class the rest of the class How they went about enforcing socialism in cuba or wherever the country because that's what the black book of communism does Each chapter is a different country once you get past the first couple of chapters in it Let's see. So as far as the death count Uh, you don't have to buy a book you can go online and google rj rummel His book is called death by government But his website is uh talks about demo sites So if you just google demo site, you'll find this website of rj rummel He was a sociologist at the university of hawaii Who has probably had the most depressing academic job i've ever heard of you spend his whole career researching How many people were killed by their own governments for being dissenters not sent to war not world war two deaths or Vietnam war deaths, but people who were murdered by their own governments because they dissented to socialism basically and and it's a big long list and let's And you know one of the uh comments about this that I make in my book is that in the academic world The socialists if they if they do anything who who totally dominate higher education in america now and a lot most other countries They always take the moral high road You know the capitalists and the defenders of capitalism They're the ones who are evil if you defend decentralized government like jeff dice just did you're a neo confederate Who probably wants to secretly bring back slavery? Because you were decentralized government, you know the states rights. Oh my god uh, okay, so And so they always take the moral high ground and yet they are the ones who are associated with the worst crimes in human history Socialism and the in the mass killing of all the people who dissented to socialism. How does that happen? How are they? How are they? taken the moral high road according to uh This is from the black book of communism not rummel but rummels is the easiest to get a hold of you Don't have to buy his book. It's online. His website's online Now the soviet union 20 million people china 60 million vietnam 1 million north korea 2 million cambodia 2 million eastern europe 1 million latin america 150,000 africa 1.7 million afghanistan 1.5 million And then these are people killed by their own governments for merely dissenting not not being sent off to war or anything like that And and so and that's an important point. I think if you want to if you're if you ever get into a debate about socialism How can you defend that? You know, that's that's the real history of socialism Okay, and of course the defenders are always they always like to defend it on theoretical grounds Not not realistic grounds Okay Another point I would make is that fascism is a form of socialism After all Nazi the word nazi stands for national socialism You know the only difference the big difference between the nazis and the soviets Is that the the german socialists? Claimed to be national socialists whereas the russian socialists said they were international Socialists that's the only difference really they're they're all socialists They all came from from the same roots and they all hated capitalism. They all they all criticized capitalism and whether it's italian fascism or or german fascism or japanese fascism or any other kind it's a form of socialism As far as that goes, you know, I think it was Stalin who came up with this false dichotomy of Fascism being different than socialism because you know after after hitler double crossed him He was originally with hitler, but then hitler double crossed him and invaded russia but But so they were they're they're on you know the same page for a while because they were just socialists with minor differences between them One's national one's international Maybe solid thought he could talk hitler into joining him and being international But it didn't quite work out that way as far as that goes, but um Let me read you some examples. This is number seven from this From the horse's mouth Here's benito musolini let's see Look at the right. Oh, yeah musolini wrote a book When I was doing research on this years ago, it was kind of funny I ran across musolini's autobiography, you know that I read and The title was kind of like if you were say a third grader and your teacher said write an autobiography What would you call it? He called it my autobiography That's musolini's biography, but this his other book is fascism doctrine and institutions Okay, he said this the fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the state And accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with the state It is opposed to classical liberalism Which denied the state in the name of the individual And so the fascist understood that the enemy was people like ludwig von mesis and hyac In the austrians primarily classical liberalism Read mesis book liberalism. He literally wrote the book on classical liberalism. It's online liberalism I'm using that in my class in the fall because I want my students to know not just what the institutions of capitalism are But the philosophical underpinnings that allow capitalism to exist as long as a segment of the population understands these underpinnings And and it's these underpinnings these these ideas that musolini was attacking here And and of course the german socialists did the same thing Same they attack the same ideas Yeah, well, that's all I don't want to read any more any more long quotes Anything like that. And so, you know, like I said, the nazis were national socialists Hayek wrote in the road to serfdom That quote all of the leading men of german and italian fascism began as socialist and ended as fascist or nazis So they just it was just a minor variation as far as that goes One other thing about socialism, you know, since I defined it kind of broadly as being Not just government ownership of the means of production, but also the welfare state and the progressive income tax You know, I I get to talk at a at a university or college in uh, north carolina in the spring and And I was asked about this about Well, how can I attack the welfare state? You know attack the welfare state and my response was To give examples of how we treat people on welfare in baltimore where I worked for for many years Where the public housing projects are are so decrepit that Some of them the police won't even go there because they get shot at Or there there are three or four generations of children who have grown up Never seeing a man who gets up and goes to work in the morning Is that really a good thing? I mean there there's been book There was a sociologist who wrote a book about that in in chicago about how there are three or four generations in some section of chicago like this And it kills off the work ethic it destroys families because Fathers are now off the hook once once we have welfare checks replacing fathers It eliminated the stigma that there once was to abandoning your children And so not all men will do that But a lot do if they think they're not going to starve They're not going to not have a roof over the head the government will take care of that It's easier to leave. It's easier to to be irresponsible And so so you have all these pathologies That we've been studying for many decades and if you really get into it, you see you see the pathologies of of this with You know In lower income communities, especially I think I cited one study that said that the teenage boys are something like three times more likely to get involved in crime If if they if they have a family like this has been abandoned by their father You know, we all know great examples of heroic people who avoided this But we're talking generalizations here about that And so so it's always easy for the socialists to to play these sympathy game about the poor people But what the poor people want to need is jobs and and and and uh, you know climbing up economic ladder first and foremost Uh, not not handouts Okay So that's one thing I would put See running out of time here, but another thing I would mention is The progressive income tax now in the communist manifesto, this is plank number two So this was a high priority to marks and angles in the communist manifesto You know, you know next to the abolition of private property A a a progressive income tax Uh, what they thought would would be a good tool for destabilizing societies. Remember Misi said destructionism Was always a part of socialism What I write about in the book though is one of the things that the progressive income tax did Was to nationalize all income think about it when the united states adopted the income tax in the year 1913 The government was essentially saying We now own all of your income. It's no longer yours. It's ours And we will tell you how much of it you can keep by setting the tax rate So you go to work and you're working for us And if we decide the tax rate is 20 you keep 80 if we decide it's 80 you keep 20 But we'll tell you we'll let you know What the tax rate is going to be so the government essentially nationalize all income with the income tax And another thing that uh, there was a result of the income tax that most economists don't really discuss at all really Is that when we got we got the Fed and the income tax at the same time And of course, that's another thing that's in the the the 10 point platform of the communist party And it's also in the 25 point platform of the nazi party. You can google that If you really want to become a nazi scholar, you can google 25 point program. I have my students read it So they know what it was Was government control of money is always right up there. It's always an important thing as far as as far as that goes Government control of money, but once the government has the ability to print money and the ability to tax However much of your income they claim to need Well, they can do just about anything They they can bribe any governor any mayor Who resists what they want to do any community that resists one what they want to do They can impose military conscription for their wars And if you run away from the army, they can send a hundred men out to round you up In the united states, you know, one of them, you know, I've written a good bit about the american civil war and all that there's one book written by a Female civil war scholar whose name I can't remember right now But on desertion in the civil war and it was massive. There were there were some of the big battles Where the generals in the in the us army were on the eve of battle They had 80 000 men and then the sun comes up and there's 10 000 You know, where'd they go? Where'd they pretty go? Massive desertion Especially in places like the mountains of pennsylvania where I grew up actually That'd be a good hiding place in the 19th century because it's pretty wild It's like pittsburgh over here philadelphia over here, and it's all mississippi in the middle In pennsylvania But I tell people like I I came from pencil tucky. That's better. You should have called the pencil tucky But but abe lincoln even abe lincoln didn't have the resources to send people out to round up the deserters But you give them the income tax that we have now and and a central bank That's a piece of cake and you can do that very easily so they could do just about anything So in other words, it created a massive centralization of power Which is why all socialists everywhere of all sorts are always Dead set against decentralized government secession nullification states rights, whatever you want to call it And and they're always for more and more centralization of power in in the central state The neocons are for that too because they think they can as long They see nothing wrong with the highly centralized powerful state as long as they can be in charge of it And I wouldn't they don't call themselves socialists. They're just uh evil status I would put them in that category But uh, but they're but they're no different But that's why you see you see these in one of my debates over lincoln And since I wrote two books on lincoln I debated the late harry jaffa hold your applause, please when I since I said the late harry jaffa, but But uh, but he I knew he had before I went to the debate. I knew he always He always had these with a disgusting tactic of insinuating that anybody who disagrees with him It would be a nazi sympathizer He looked at delusional and nazi and sure enough he did that with me You say it's something like oh, they don't fitler would probably agree with dealer inzo or something like something to that effect That's when I knew I wanted to bait, you know If you could you hear that desperate to start name calling, you know But but what I did was I had I had taken a course in college on european history And the professor actually had us read parts of mind comp European history hitler's hitler's book and I remember there was a whole big chapter on federalism and states rights in mind comp So I went I couldn't wait. I was in california for the debate So I couldn't wait to get home because I think I still have that book somewhere I got home and I dug that dug mind comp out. So, you know, if anybody saw me, they would think well, jerry jaffa's right Look at him. He's reading Sitting there reading mind comps and I flipped through sure enough Here's and here's adolf hitler paraphrasing abraham lincoln's first and all girl address Uh, where where lincoln says the states were never sovereign And hitler used that to say well neither were the german states never sovereign So we should not have any states rights or federalism in germany He was making a case for a powerful centralized rike in germany And he used abraham lincoln of all people as his as his model in in mind comp So I wrote up an article on lou rockwell.com called uh jaffa's hitlerian defense of lincoln So you could find it on it's on the web so lou rockwell.com And so and so the conclusion was that all the worst tyrants in history Were naturally socialist tyrants in world history Were enemies of divided sovereignty states rights federalism whatever you want to call it The things jeff dease just talked about in his talk and he's the parts that I was listening to From from the doorway over there And so and and it's the income tax and the control of the central bank That that enables them to do that more than anything else In in democracies not just dictatorships but democracies also And my time's about up. Maybe I have time for one question of Or a brilliant announcement or anything like that Other than uh, you know wend's dinner or anything like that. Okay, if not, well, that's it for now