 At this point in the US, our schools and media have become so bad that any accurate discussion of what capitalism and socialism really are almost sounds like revisionism. But fortunately for us, our own senior fellow, Dr. Tom Di Lorenzo, is particularly well suited to that task, and he's got a great new book out called The Problem with Socialism. It's a great read, and he recently gave a fantastic talk on the book at Mises University entitled Ten Things Millennials Should Know About Socialism. I think you'll enjoy it, so stay tuned. This talk is related to my new book The Problem with Socialism, and the idea for this book came from, you know, some of you might be familiar, there have been opinion polls. There was a Pew Foundation poll that said 69% of voters under 30 said they could vote for a socialist for president in the United States, and there was a YouGov.com poll of millennials, that is, people born between 1982 and 2004, 43% of them said they preferred socialism over capitalism, and so my publisher, Regnery Publishing, they contacted me and we talked about the need for a book that would explain why this is a bad idea, you know, so marketing a book to the millennials in particular, and my editor there said, we want every conservative parent to buy this book and give it to their kids before they go off to college, in one of the blurbs for the book, Walter Williams wrote that, here's what he wrote, it's a worthwhile investment for parents with college-aged children to buy two copies, one for them and one for their kids, and then he said he calls universities socialist indoctrination camps, before you send your child off to socialist indoctrination camp, give them some ammunition, intellectual ammunition, and so that's the purpose of the book, and so what I thought I'd do today is another, an alternative title for the talk could be, how to argue with your Bernie Sanders following roommates back at school, something like, something like along those lines, and so it's 16 short chapters, they're short but I tried to make them as concise as possible and there are several hundred footnotes to the book, so it's based on all of our literature, but written up in a sort of economics in one lesson type of style, so I'm going to go over some, you know, as many of these as I can get through some of the, you know, one or two of these, this crowd probably doesn't need to hear about too much, but I'm going to do it anyway because we have a diverse crowd here, but first of all, you know, what is socialism, all these, the millennials who say, yeah, socialism is the good thing for my future, I hope to, I like to assume they don't really know what it is, you know, and that if they do learn they'll change their minds, but what it is, the way I define it is, first of all, it includes the traditional definition of government ownership of the means of production, so any nationalized industries, government-run industries, and I do have a chapter called Islands of Socialism, it's about government-run enterprises, they're not nationalized, but it's the state government or the local government, you know, hospitals, schools, all the things that governments run, but then in the 1976 edition of The Road to Serfdom, Hayek wrote that the meaning of socialism had evolved by that time to include government income redistribution programs through the welfare state and the progressive income tax, and he said that the goal was always ostensibly equality, the pursuit of material equality, egalitarianism was always the goal, but the means evolved from nationalization of industry to the welfare state and the progressive income tax, and the progressive income tax of course is plank number two in the communist manifesto, plank number one is abolition of private property, and then the second most important goal of Marx and Engels was a progressive income tax in capitalist economies, because they thought it would help to destroy capitalist economy, undermine capitalist economies, so part number one is nationalized industries, part number two is the welfare state and the progressive income tax, and then I also include what Misi said in his book Socialism in one of the latter chapters, he said that socialists have always had a dual strategy, the first part of the strategy was to nationalize as much as possible, to have the government run as much as possible, second part of the strategy is what Misi calls destructionism, to destroy the private property free enterprise system with heavy taxes, heavy regulations, inflation, whatever works, taking over the educational system and brainwashing the kids with the virtues of socialism and the evils of markets, whatever works, destructionism, and so with that definition, it's not the old early 20th century definition of government ownership of the means of production, it's much broader, so I have 16 chapters in the book, 16 short, it covers a lot of ground. If you look up the website of Democratic Socialists of America, for example, they highlight a super minimum wage as one of their top objectives, and so that's not government ownership of the means of production, but it's a government mandated $15 an hour minimum wage, and so I take it from the horse's mouth in other words by looking up what the socialists of our day are saying they want, and just last night, Hillary Clinton looked at Bernie Sanders and said your cause is our cause to Bernie, and so I guess you could look at the Democratic Party platform and a lot of the Republican platform as being socialism or socialistic as far as that goes, so that's what it is. Point number two I wrote down here, probably don't need to explain this to this group that socialism will destroy your economic future, and so I write a little bit about the history of the Soviet Union, for example, our friend Yuri Maltsev, who has taught at Misi University in the past, was an advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev who defected from the Soviet Union, and when he defected he ends up, it's a very interesting story, I don't have time here to tell Yuri's story, but he ends up in the office of Dick Cheney, who was the Defense Secretary at the time, and he told Cheney that the Soviet economy was no more than 5% of the U.S. economy, and Yuri's story is that, well, Cheney says, well, our CIA says it was, it's more like 50%, and Yuri was insistent, no, 5%, and he was right, and so the country with the largest natural resource base on the planet really had no economy, and it's 5% of our economy at most, and it never produced a single product marketable on international markets, with the exception of possibly of caviar, but that comes from a fish and not a factory, and so it'll certainly ruin your economic future, and I also talk about, you know, when India gained its independence, they adopted sort of a Soviet-style five-year economic plans, and India became synonymous with third-world poverty, but India was once one of the wealthiest countries on earth, you know, a long, long time ago, but when they had more economic freedom, they've made improvements since those days, but it was a terrible disaster that they went in that direction. Africa did the same thing after colonization ended, all these African countries adopted socialism of one form or another in central planning, and if you're interested in that particular topic, one of the authors that I cite is George Ayete, who's written many books on this. Last I was in touch with George, he was teaching at American University in Washington, D.C., and he's from Ghana, but he's been in the U.S. for many years, so if you're interested in that, you can read George, and he, you know, he's written books on how Africans had, you know, they had a culture of entrepreneurship and individualism, you know, before colonialism, and instead of going back to that culture, their government's embraced socialism and central planning, and, you know, the rest is history, and so if you want to destroy your economic future, there's no shortage of examples. Argentina did the same thing. The latest example would be Venezuela, which I'll talk about in a minute. Point number three is you cannot fix socialism. You know, I've been at this quite a while, and whenever if I write op-eds criticizing some government program or some government regulation or legislation or something like that, I will inevitably get email from somebody who says, but we can fix this, we can get smarter people in charge, or we can do it like they did it over there in that country or something like that, but the thing about socialism, of course, is there are inherent reasons why it inevitably fails as an economic system, regardless of who's in charge, and I lay it out in my book to a lay audience, and, you know, the three basic reasons are the incentive problem, the old incentive problem, and I don't know, maybe some of you have heard this story before, but if we use socialism to grade the exams at Mises University, you know, we have these written exams, and then tomorrow we start the oral exams, what we would do is that we would tell the faculty, when we do the oral exams tomorrow, give each student a number of points, maybe from one to ten, if you're an A plus student, you get ten during our interview with you, okay, and then we'll add up all the points divide by the number of students and give every student a marginal fail, or some of you have the same grade, or marginal pass, some sort of mediocre same grade, that would be using socialism. That's the incentive system, you know, it causes the free rider problem, if there's no link between effort and reward, you get less effort. Reason number two is high-ex knowledge problem, the idea that it's the information of time and place, decentralized knowledge that makes an economy work, and so the pretense is that a small group of politicians or government planners could possibly possess all the knowledge that's in the minds of millions of people, consumers and workers and investors and managers, and that's why Hayek called it the pretense of knowledge, and the third reason, of course, is the calculation problem. Without private property and free market prices, you don't have the guidance of free market prices, it becomes impossible to organize production without prices determined by supply and demand, it all becomes chaos, it's kind of like trying to make your way through a foreign city without street signs, without prices based on supply and demand, and so these are the reasons, it doesn't matter who's in charge, socialism is economic poison for all of these three reasons, and that's why it has destroyed every economy where it's ever been enthroned. Point number four is the myth of democratic socialism, and we hear a lot about this, maybe some of you saw Larry David on Saturday Night Live portraying Bernie Sanders, have you seen him? He's a white-haired old guy, and he kind of looks like Bernie Sanders, kind of like the crazy chemistry professor look with a hair everywhere, and beady eyes and bulging vein in his forehead, and that's Bernie Sanders anyway. It kind of reminds me of a thinner Nikita Khrushchev when he gives speeches, he leans forward, he screams into the microphone and he's pounding his fist, and he did, by the way, Bernie very charmingly spent his honeymoon in Moscow when he was a young man, in the darkest days of the Soviet Union, he chose Moscow of all places for his honeymoon, his wife must be a real sweetie to go along with, stuck with him for all these years after he took her to Moscow in the 1960s. But democratic socialism, look at Venezuela today, they adopted democratic socialism. Well, my story about Saturday Night Live is Sanders, one that is saying there's a huge difference between socialism and democratic socialism, and the comedian said, oh, huge spelled with a Y, is it? Huge, like that. But there is no difference. Socialism is socialism. Obamacare is a form of socialized medicine, doesn't matter if it was imposed on Americans by a dictator or by a democracy, it's still the same thing, and it's still going to be just as chaotic and disruptive, doesn't matter how it's imposed. Socialism is basically the forceful imposition of a government plan or set of plans on society that replaces individual plans for their own lives and for their own careers. And so you can do that through a majority rule vote, or you can do it through a dictator, but you still get the same thing. Friedrich Bastiat wrote that and made that very point in the law published in 1850. So this is nothing original with me. But Venezuela today, they adopted socialism and democratic socialism in 1999, and today their economy is a shambles, middle class people who had very good jobs. Venezuela has more oil than Saudi Arabia, are out rooting through garbage in the streets looking for food to eat. They got hyperinflation of 1600% a year at least. A hamburger and Caracas will cost you the equivalent of $170 today. And animals are starving, people are abandoning their pets, and it's just anybody who can leave is leaving. And so they've destroyed what was once the wealthiest country in Latin America in about 15 years with socialism, democratic socialism. Same with Argentina, did the same thing. Brazil, Bolivia, same thing. Sweden is a country that is often talked about by Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton as a model for Americans. We should be more like the Scandinavian countries. But the truth about Sweden is that Sweden was very prosperous from the late 19th century till about the 19, till about 1950, because it had a limited, very limited government low taxes, high degree of economic freedom that produced all these great inventors like Alfred Nobel who invented dynamite, the people who created Volvo and Saab automobiles, refrigeration technology, and a lot of other businesses and products. And then they adopted, first they sort of experimented with fascism, and then they moved to socialism and by nationalizing a number of industries, creating a big welfare state, heavily progressive income tax, and lots of regulation of what was left of private businesses. And as a result, Sweden had zero job growth from 1950 until 2005, according to the Swedish Economic Association. They did not have one single net new job created for 55 years, which means they were basically eating up the capital that was created by the earlier generations of entrepreneurs and capitalists and taxing it away. And it created a bit of a crisis for them, as you would imagine. And so they did what governments, socialist governments always do, is try to print their way out of trouble and bail themselves out by printing money. And they printed so much that they had 500% interest rates in Sweden at one point. And that caused them a bit of a reaction, sort of a Margaret Thatcher style revolt, where they privatized some industries, they deregulated banking and a number of other industries, cut marginal tax rates and made a bit of a comeback. But Sweden today still has per capita income less than Mississippi, which is the poorest state in the United States. And so when people make the case that, well, it's successful in Scandinavia, it was before they adopted socialism. Yeah, Scandinavia was, Sweden was successful economically. They had the highest per capita income growth from 1870 until about 1940 in the whole world. And then they abandoned that, they threw it all away. In Denmark, I quote a Danish economist saying that they have such heavy taxation, in addition to the income tax, which is quite heavy and quite progressive, there are things like 180% sales tax on cars when you buy a car, national sales tax I think is 25%. And he said the total tax take that this Danish economist I quote is about 70%. And so, you know, government takes 70% of your income. And so in following my friend Walter Williams, I would point out that a good definition of slavery is forcing a person to work for the benefit of another person. That's a pretty good definition of slavery. Now the real slaves were slaves for 12 months out of the year, but the Danes are slaves for just 70% of the year. So they're not quite as bad off as real slaves. They're only slaves to other people for 70% of the year, instead of 30% of the year. And of course they get something back from this, I guess. And so in Hayek addressed this, this whole issue of democratic socialism to explain that it's like oil and water. Socialism eats away at and destroys democracy eventually. And I'll read you one little passage from Hayek to give you some idea of the type of thing that he says about this. He said the democratic statesman who sets out to plan economic life, socialism, will soon be confronted with the alternative of either assuming dictatorial powers or abandoning his plans and admitting failure. He would soon have to choose between disregard of ordinary morals and failure. It is for this reason that the unscrupulous and inhibited are likely to be more successful in a socialist society. This is from the road to serfdom by Hayek. And so, you know, for the reason they gave earlier, socialism always fails. And then the politicians never admit failure and they never give up. They grab more power. And a lot of the public will want a strong man. The public will come out of favor. Yeah, we need a strong man or a strong woman to be in charge and become more dictatorial. And of course, that's the opposite of what we think of as democracy. And so that's just one of the reasons. Hayek gave quite a few others, but I don't have the time to go into a review of the road to serfdom here in this lecture. But that's just one part of his logic of how socialism is actually destructive of democracy. It's not compatible. Point number five I would make is it's false. It's false that socialism produces equality. And I deny that it's even a moral objective. I think it's an immoral objective. I have a chapter entitled egalitarianism versus human nature. And of course, we're all different. We're all made different. We'll have different interests and degrees of intelligence and strength and biological characteristics and so forth. So when the government devotes itself to the pursuit of forceful equality, it becomes more and more totalitarian because that's the only way you can get it. And what it really has become, the push for equality, is sort of a war on the division of labor, a war on the international division of labor, which is what makes the economic world go around. We all specialize in something in our work lives. We make money doing that. And then we trade with other people who specialize in other things. If we didn't do it, it's what keeps human civilization together as Mises wrote in Human Action, the International Division of Labor. So the socialists like Marx and Engels knew what they were doing when they attacked the division of labor in the name of equality, which always sounds so nice, equality. They knew they were destroying the heart of the capitalist system that keeps human civilization together, the International Division of Labor. And so that's why they went after it. And I quote more than just economists in this chapter. For example, I quote H. L. Menken in one page. And since I have an opportunity to quote H. L. Menken, and not all of you are familiar with H. L. Menken, so I'll introduce you to something. The story has it that Murray Rothbard, on his wedding night with his wife Joey, spent the whole night laying in bed reading H. L. Menken quotes to each other and laughing their heads off. And I believe that's a true story. I think it was Joey that told us that years ago. Probably at a Mises University. I always wonder if that's why they never had children, myself. But who knows? I didn't know them that well. But anyway, so Menken was Murray's favorite writer as far as, you know, the people who they really had a touch for bashing the state. And here's one of the things he said, the great Menken, about this topic of equality and 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 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 be democratic, then it seeks to protect the man who is inferior in every way against both. One of the primary functions is to regiment men by force, 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 it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives, that is, an invasion of 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, end quote. That's what political correctness is all about, isn't it, to censor all these criticisms of the superstitions and taboos that we're all supposed to believe in at the hands of the state. That reminds me of another thing Hayek said in the road to serfdom is that under any kind of collectivism, whether you call it socialism or fascism or anything, there's sort of the end of truth. One of the chapters is called the end of truth because truth becomes something that is handed down by the state and is enforced by its enforcers in the media and academia and elsewhere. It's not something that is discovered through discussion and conversation, research and learning. It's something that is told to us by the state, and then anybody who questions that is dealt with, that's under socialism in one way or the other. And that really is what political correctness is all about, isn't it? I also cite Kurt Vonnegut as a non-economist here and in his famous essay, Harrison Bergeron, who sort of spoofed the whole idea of equality, forced equality at the hand of the state. Not equality under the law, but the state's attempts to make everybody equal in some way. And here's what Vonnegut said. He said, the year was 2081 and everyone was finally equal. They 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 anyone else. Nobody 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 the handicapper general worked as follows. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn't think about anything except in short bursts. But George, George, while his intelligence was way above normal, he had a little mental handicap radio in his ear put there by the government. 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 then I finally quote Murray Rothbard after this and saying, the reason why writers like this sort of spoof egalitarianism and forced equality and make it sound like a nightmarish thing is because it is a nightmarish thing. Rothbard wrote, when the implications of such a world are fully spelled out, we recognize that such a world and such attempts are profoundly anti-human. Being anti-human in the deepest sense, the egalitarian goal is therefore evil, and any attempts in a direction of such a goal must be considered as evil as well. And so the governments always fail to do anything but make everybody equally miserable under socialism. But the political elites and their supporters in the so-called private sector always do very well. For example, you can read in New York Times in a Wall Street Journal today that the wealthiest person in Venezuela where upper middle class people are rooting through garbage in the streets looking for food, the wealthiest person in the country is the 35-year-old daughter of the late Hugo Chavez, who is worth reportedly $4.2 billion, even though she never ran a business or had a job as far as I know. The former Treasury Minister of Venezuela is reportedly worth $11 billion, even though he was in the same situation. I'm sure he didn't create $11 billion of value for anybody or any value at all. They just stole the money. And so in the latest Big Long New York Times article about Venezuela that I read, there were about 10 pages of pictures of all these awful pictures of the poor people scrounging for food and things like that. And at the same time, there were pictures of Hugo Chavez's political pals all joining country clubs, the Caracas Country Club, where it would cost the equivalent of $70,000 to join. And they're just having a good old time because that's what socialism does. It's always been like it was true in Russia, true in Africa, India, wherever it has been. You've got grotesque inequality. Look at all the Latin American countries. You've got this elite at the top who lives high on the hog and then everybody else. There's no middle class. Everybody else is in the lower class. That's the model. Your classmates and your roommates, so when you go back to college, should know that your professors who always take the moral high road by touting socialism and criticizing markets or associating themselves with an ideology that is responsible for the worst crimes in all of human history. That there's a book called The Black Book of Communism that you can read about these crimes in. There's another read a book called Death by Government by RJ Rummel. He also has a website. You can just Google death by government. What a depressing career that must have been. He spent his whole career calculating how many people were murdered by their own governments throughout the world. And he has huge websites, several books about it. And just to give you some idea of the magnitude of this, the next time one of your professors takes the moral high road and goes, you know, in promoting socialism, the Russians murdered 20 million of their own people. These are not war deaths. These are murders of dissenters to socialism. China 60 million. Vietnam 1 million. North Korea 2 million. Cambodia 2 million. Eastern Europe a million. They're pretty good in Eastern Europe. Latin America a mere 150,000. Africa 1.7 million. And Rummel calls this demo side. It's a death by government. And so I also had one big long paragraph that I quoted from one of these studies of sort of the methods of torture that were also used to against dissenters. And so that's something that nobody knows. I gave some of my students this. I teach a course called capitalism and its critics. And I have them read some of the bad guy stuff. I have them read the communist manifesto and then parts of socialism by Mises and go back and forth like that. And I gave them a table from RJ Rummel's book to let them know about this. And then a couple of these guys were in the college Republicans and they had one of these days where all the clubs on campus had a little booth out on the quad and they hand out literature or something or sell cupcakes or whatever they do. And of all the things they were giving out my handout of the death by government handout to all the students who are walking by instead of handing out selling cookies or something like that. And they told me that nobody knew anything about this. Nothing classmates knew anything about this. They thought it was communists were all like Bernie Sanders. Cute little grandfather types that you see at Christmas. That's such big sweetie pies. And so I don't know how much progress they made there but that's what they did. I guess I'm on point number seven is fascism is a form of socialism. You know one of the most evil words in the English language fascism. Hayek called it a violent anti-capitalistic attack fascism. After all the Nazis were the national socialist German workers party. That's what that national socialism is what Nazis stood for. And so Hitler called himself a socialist although fascism was just a version of socialism was national socialism. The Russians called themselves international socialists. And by the way they didn't call their government communist. They called it the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. They didn't call it the Union of Soviet Communist Republics. Communism was the utopian ideal of Marx of Karl Marx that they they hoped to reach someday when their Vanna would be attained. But in the meantime they're all socialists. And when the Soviet Union finally imploded Gorbachev was going. Mikhail Gorbachev was going to Lithuania and Estonia and all these the possessions of the Soviet Union. And he was telling them go ahead and do whatever you want as long as it's consistent with socialism. He didn't say consistent with communism. He said socialism. So they always considered themselves socialists not communists. We call them communists in this country. And the fascists all came from communism. For example I quote Mussolini here. And so my critics will probably say don't read his book. He quotes Mussolini you know as a you know the implication being I quote him favorably which which I don't. I also quote Hitler in this book too. Here's something just one short quote from Mussolini in his book Fascism, Doctrine and Institutions. I read his autobiography by the way. And Mussolini was once a he had a PhD in philosophy political philosophy. And he wrote an autobiography and it's kind of like if you gave a class of third graders the assignment to write an autobiography and put a title on it. His the title he chose is My Autobiography by Benito Mussolini. It's how imaginative you know PhD in political philosophy and my autobiography. So but this book of fascism the fascists knew who the enemy was. The enemy was classical liberalism. That was the enemy. It was Adam Smith, John Locke. You know all the early 20th century libertarians in political philosophy and economics. Here's what he said. 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. He literally said that which denied the state in the name of the individual. Okay so he opposed in particular. I have another long quote in there from one of Mussolini's theorists, fascist theorists, who goes on and on denigrating what he called English liberalism. English liberalism. What is that? Adam Smith, John Locke, you know the whole philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment that is a big part of liberalism. And if you read Misi's book Liberalism you'll find that the fascists like Mussolini that I quote here and his other theorists, fascist theorists, they very harshly criticize every element of what how Misi's defines liberalism, classical liberalism in his book Liberalism, which is online by the way. You could probably buy it out here in the bookstore but it's also online on Misi's.org. You can find it. And so fascism always was a form of socialism. If you look at what the German fascists did they nationalized about half of all German industry and the other half was so heavily regulated and controlled so that it operated for the state and not the individual that Hayek wrote and wrote to serfdom that they sort of de facto nationalized the whole industry, all of German industry, even though they had ostensibly private ownership of some of it. It was so heavily controlled you had to produce what the Nazis told you to produce and how to produce it and who to sell it to and so on. And so it was de facto nationalization. And so how that ever came to be construed is capitalism. It's not really a wonder they lie. They lied about it. It was nothing capitalistic at all about it. It was a violent attack, violent anti-capitalistic attack as Hayek said. Point number eight that I make in the book is a socialist welfare harms the poor. And you're probably all familiar with the incentive effect of welfare payments. I'll give you one anecdote. The Kato Institute did this study where they picked out seven popular welfare programs, federal welfare programs out of 126, just seven out of 126 and asked the question, well, how much money is that state by state? And in the highest state, Hawaii, it's $49,000. In the lowest welfare state, Mississippi, it's $18,000. So in Hawaii, that means if you're on welfare and you get $49,000 in money and in-kind benefits from the government for not working, if you want to get off welfare, you'd need a job that would pay you what? About $65,000, $70,000 before taxes to get just to break even. And so that's a pretty big incentive not to get off welfare. And in Mississippi, which has a much lower cost of living, if you can make $18,000 by doing nothing, well, you'd have to make maybe $25,000, $30,000. And if you're a high school dropout or you have little skill, that's going to be darn tough to get someone to pay you that kind of money. So why would you ever do that? Especially if you had children. Well, why would you ever do that and try it? And so a lot of people don't. So there's the work incentive effect. There's a family breakup effect of welfare that has eliminated the stigma that once existed that men had when they abandoned their children. And so as long as they get a government check that can let the mother and the children at least survive and get along, it has eliminated the stigma of that. So there's been a 400% increase in out-of-wedlock births since 1960 in the United States. And I cite literature research that shows some of the effects of that or the children, we all know single mothers that have done a great job raising children. But in general, the research says that such children or the girls are twice as likely to have out-of-wedlock children themselves, which could, since they're in poverty to begin with, a lot of them can make it very tough for them ever to get out of poverty. And the boys are three times more likely to be involved in crime in families like this. And those are just two of the statistics that I threw out in the book. And I also talk about the crowding out effect of the welfare state that displaces private charitable efforts that are usually much more effective in helping people who need help than government bureaucracies are. And so that's point number eight about how the welfare state actually harms the poor. But it puts them right where the politicians want them, as dependent on them, the more the better. I might get through a couple of these. Point number nine is the progressive income tax is social poison, I would call it. And again, you've all heard of the probably the incentive effects of the progressive income tax that imposes progressively higher tax rates on the more productive people. So the idea is to tax the more productive people in society who earn, who therefore earn higher income at a higher rate and then use the money to subsidize less productive or unproductive people. And we're not talking about disabled people here. We're talking about able-bodied, less productive people. And that's called tax fairness. That's called tax fairness. It takes robbing people who work hard and so forth. So we have the phenomenon of the entrepreneur who goes broke three or four times trying to become a successful business person and finally hits upon a good product that it succeeds and he makes a lot of money. And so what do we want to do with him? We want to tax his pants off. We want to put him in the 70% marginal tax bracket if we could someday. And so or the novelist who writes three, four, five novels and makes no money and finally hits writes a Tom Clancy novel. Okay, let's tax the daylights out of that person. And I will never forget years ago when I was at George Mason, and we had a guest lecturer from Sweden. I'll never forget this female novelist from Sweden who was who we were told was one of the most better known novelists in Sweden at the time. And she had just moved to the United States. And one of the faculty members there knew her somehow and brought her to the economics department to give a talk. And her talk was that the main reason she was moving to the United States is that she finally succeeded. You know, she struggled for years and didn't sell many. And finally, she had a couple of novels that were big sellers and her tax rate was 110%. So if she made 100 grand on a novel, she owed $110,000 in tax. And that's why she was living in Fairfax, Virginia at the time. We don't have anything like that in this country. But that's, you know, that's sort of the end game of the, of what where progressive incomes taxation takes you. But the most insidious part of the income tax in general, I quote, Frank Chotarov, who wrote this great book, The Income Tax, Root of All Evil, which is for sale out here. It's also online, Chotarov, that when we adopted the income tax, the government basically said, we now own all of your income, the nationalized income, and we will tell you how much of your income you can keep by setting the tax rate. So the income was nationalized. And the federal government got a gigantic new source of income. You know, there was no income tax in the original Constitution. And so what did that do? That led to a tremendous centralization of power. Because now the government had all this income. But Chotarov writes, for example, during the Civil War, there was a lot of, there's a lot of, a lot of soldiers in the, in the U.S. Army went AWOL or, or, you know, just left, left the Army, but Lincoln did not have the resources to hunt them down. But Chotarov writes, but after the income tax, the U.S. government does have the resources to hunt down, you know, people who, you know, leave the Army and things like that. They also have the resources to bribe a lot of people, giving them government grants and threatening the withdrawal of the grants, if they don't behave in the way the government wants them to behave. And that includes the state and local governments. And so Chotarov sees the income tax as something that was sort of the final nail in the coffin of American federalism or state's rights, and that it created this tremendous centralization of power in the central government. And centralized power is always the enemy of freedom. And so, and so I look at the income tax, the progressive income tax much more broadly than just sort of the minor economic work incentive effect at the income tax. Thank you.