 Our guest this weekend is our old friend Dr. Yuri Maltsev, a senior fellow here at the Mises Institute and a professor of economics at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Of course, Yuri is famous for having been a Soviet economist during the Gorbachev era and defecting to the United States. Yuri is here to talk to us about Trumpism, about the Bernie Sanders phenomenon, and Western progressive silly and enduring love affair with socialism, and what those often misused terms themselves, socialism and fascism really mean. Stay tuned for a great interview with Yuri Maltsev. Well, Dr. Yuri Maltsev, welcome back. It's great to talk to you once again on Mises weekends. It's very nice to be back. The last time we spoke, which is about a year and a half ago now, we talked about this silly, sort of enduring romance that Westerners and Americans in particular continue to have with socialism. Now, since then, we've seen the rise of the Bernie Sanders phenomenon. So I'd love to get your thoughts on Bernie and the crowds he's having and the impact he's making. Yes, it's very sad to see that right now the United States is kind of facing a choice between, I would say, socialism and national socialism. So we have candidates of both parties who are attracting the most active part of population, either Marxist-Leninist like Bernie Sanders, not many people realize that 15 years ago he published an article in which he demanded 100% tax on influence above $100 million. So he is in that case, he is very close to the ideas of Mr. Obama's father, Barack Obama's senior, who also suggested in 1965 that the state should impose 100% of tax on everybody, however providing people with everything they need. Mr. Sanders, he looks kind of benevolent, but from another hand, with the ideas that he has, definitely these ideas can only result in destruction of our economy, culture and in the future in mass murder. The Christmas Eve Day is an anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. And Soviet Union is a very good example of the country which was glued together only by fear because ideas of Bernie Sanders were exactly the same ideas which ruined the Soviet Union. If you will impose socialism on any country, you are completely destroying any incentives to work, any incentives to do anything. So then you need to apply violence and mass murder to make people to do what you want them to do. And no matter whether you are looking nice like Mr. Sanders or like looking pretty bright like our president does, then the logic of that system would turn you into a mass murderer. First Soviet government was the government of intellectuals. They have people like Trotsky who would write poetry in French. Lenin could speak seven languages and could play piano very well. All others were also very prominent scholars and philosophers in their field. But then the logic of that system, which does not have any incentives, turned them all into mass murderers and serial political killers. Well, it's interesting. You know, as libertarians we look at socialism and communism as force. We look at them as systems that inevitably lead to death and destruction and violence. But our progressive friends don't see it that way, right? They would say, well, look at Norway, Dr. Maltsev, look at Sweden. You know, these are not necessarily violent authoritarian regimes. And G. Wiz, in those contexts socialism can work. Yes. Well, I think that von Mises, he put it very right. He said socialism is not an economic system. It is a revolt against economics. Socialism is a simple system of commands, simple system of management. If you will look however at Norway and Sweden, you would not find that they are socialist countries. I would say Sweden today is probably economically more free than United States. Because what is socialism? Socialism means government, government ownership. Any government is a socialist institution. So from that perspective, the smaller the government, the better it is, the less socialism we have. And if you will look at, say, Sweden, then government ownership is very small. A regulatory mechanism is much smaller than we have in the United States. So besides that, I mean, Sweden and Norway, these are countries probably the size of a little bit more than Wisconsin. Maybe Wisconsin and Iowa combined and whatnot. And they were until recently, they were kind of ethnically and religiously homogeneous communities. And so these are not examples that it would work. If you will look in Denmark, for example, Bernie Sanders all the time would refer to Denmark as a socialist paradise. And the prime minister of Denmark recently, he blasted Sanders saying that just don't badmouth us. We are not socialists. We are a free market economy. It's interesting. You bring up the regulatory burden. In the U.S., we tend to think of socialism only in terms of mass redistribution of wealth. People in the U.S., especially people on the left, don't see the regulatory state as at least socialist, if not completely socialist. Regulatory mechanism is the same socialism as the nationalization of property. And if you will look at the national socialism regime and Nazi regime in Germany, that was a regulatory state which still was kind of acknowledged property rights. But these property rights were funny. These property rights would be the same as you have property rights on wetlands in the United States. So the government would tell you when to open, when to close, whom to hire, whom to fire, everything was in place. Lenin himself, Lenin was, I would say, kind of pleasantly surprised that his revolution was so quick and he achieved everything in one fell swoop. Because before that, he thought that it will be a long process. And at first, he said, we should impose regulations so capitalist would do what we want them to do for us. Well, having lived in the former Soviet Union and come to America, give me your thoughts on the current state of the American right wing. And in particular, what do you think of Trumpism? Trumpism. Yes, Trumpism. I think that this is the same kind of phenomenon that we had in Europe in 1920s and 1930s. It is a reaction and I would say predictable reaction against the wildly radically socialist agenda of Obama administration. And people are just scared. And when people are scared, then anyone who is promising them everything is doing very well. I would say that Trump, definitely, he's, I mean, I don't see him having any chances except putting Hillary in place in the White House. But from another hand, it's very troubling from another hand phenomenon because Trump is not a friend of liberty. He is not a constitutionalist. His major ideas are unknown to me. He is just playing on people's fears. But people, they do have these pretty legitimate fears, especially if you will look at immigration. I am an immigrant myself. I am all for free immigration. However, immigration today is completely different than it was before. Now immigration is a huge welfare program, which is run by the federal government with a bill of several billion dollars a year. So it's not that this her old masses, rich masses from all the cities who were prosecuted are trying to get into the United States. No, the people are being picked up according to the standards of social, ethnic, political engineering of the federal government and brought here at your expense. And for example, Tsarnaev brothers who bombed Boston Marathon, these people, they consumed about 120,000 US dollars in all kinds of welfare schemes to kill people who paid for them. And this tragic event in Boston. So if you will remember history of the United States, many, many, many people from Britain came to the United States as endangered slaves even, endangered servants. So they were, yes, so they incurred a lot of costs themselves. That was their choice. Today, if we are going there and picking up whom we want and bringing them here just to dilute people that Mr. Obama doesn't like, I think that this is a travesty. And Mr. Trump, he is making this point. And that's why people do support him. Well, turning back from onward to Sanders, it's not just young people and millennials are Occupy Wall Street types of Israelis. We see older baby boomers with ponytails too. Is America just so rich that even people who ought to know better, people who are in their 50s and 60s, they've just never experienced what socialism or what hardship or what a planned economy is like. And thus, they don't get what they're really advocating. Jeff, I hate to say that, but I think that even the demise of the Soviet Union contributed to that. Soviet Union was kind of like a village drunk or village idiot and people who'd look in that and see no socialism does not work. It's impossible that in the country, which is spreading to 11 time zones, people cannot find bread or butter or other things that we enjoy in the United States. Today it's gone. Today, nobody can point anywhere. And then this old social envy, old socialist ideas, they are coming back. And Bernie Sanders, if not many people, at least not our mass media, is telling us that Bernie Sanders not only he is a socialist, he is also a national socialist. To that extent, he can be very well compared to Mr. Trump. Because Bernie Sanders, if you remember, he was trashing Koch brothers and everybody else on the right for the free borders concept. His point was that these are these greedy capitalists who want to bring people to exploit them in the United States. And no, no, no, like that. And so he's also, he's very bad news. But I'm also, maybe I'm wrong, hopefully I'm wrong. But I think that he has only one role in this campaign is to provide a good background for Mrs. Clinton. Do people ever truly change their minds? In other words, if I went to the former Soviet Union today, let's say I went to Moscow and I found some people who are 80 or 90 years old. Wouldn't some of them say, despite all the evidence, the contract that the collectivism works and that the old system was better and that they don't believe in free markets and capitalism, even today? Jeff, you wouldn't believe it. When I was last time in Cuba, I met some professors from the University of Montana. They would be looking at all this manmade disaster, which is Cuba, and they would say, isn't it beautiful? There are so many intellectuals who would go to Soviet Union today, to Russia today, and they would visit these memorials of this death concentration camps where people were exterminated by millions. And they would say, no, this is not true. Or they would just would not say anything but return back and would pray so should they make it. Sure, there is a lot of people, older people, who would, it's kind of human nature. I remember I spent one month in the Soviet Army, and I wasn't thinking that I would survive that month. It was the most horrible month in my life at that time, as I remember it. From my perspective today, it was kind of fun. It was interesting experience, which is over me. And many older people in the Soviet Union, because their youth was, I would say, wasted by the socialist regime. But that's the only thing they knew at that time. They, some of them, they remember it fondly. And that's why they embrace people who are promising them something for nothing. The same way as people do embrace this kind of promises in the United States, unfortunately. Well, if you look at today's government in Russia, you know, it's no longer communist. How would you describe it? Would you say it's oligarchic? How would you describe Putin's government? Again, von Mises, he provided us with a great insight. He said there are two patterns of socialism. One is German pattern in which all the entrepreneurs, all the owners become just managers for the government. And there is a Soviet pattern where the whole country is run like a post office general, run by postmaster. So then everything is owned by the state. So they got rid of this Soviet pattern. But I think that today's government embraced this German pattern because there's no free market. It's a huge regulatory state. It's a huge kind of place. Some people call it chronic capitalism. I think chronic capitalism is an oxymoron. There's no such thing. It's a chronic socialism. And this is a chronic socialism when the people around the throne, around Mr. Putin, people who are his friends, his buddies and loyal to him, they're enjoying unbelievable standard of living, unheard of in Russia, unheard of even under tsars. So this is very far from being free market. Having said that, however, I believe that even German pattern is much better than Soviet pattern because even ordinary Russians enjoy today much higher standard of living than they did under communism. So still an improvement in a sense. It is. It is. Yeah. Because they, I would say under Gorbachev, they reached absolute bottom. There was no way to go lower. When you worked as an economist in Russia and Gorbachev was president before you had left, correct? You spoke in our last interview about having read the Road to Service. Did anyone in Russia at the highest levels in politics and economics, I mean, were people reading Mises and Hayek? Were they aware of them? I mean, did they have some understanding of what we would call Austrian economics? Well, I would say that the people like me and people, I would say, somewhere like in the middle of this pyramid, were very interested, intellectuals, very interesting in exploring one Mises and exploring Hayek and exploring again, and exploring all ideas of freedom of George Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, whomever they could find. From another hand, people on the very top like Mr. Gorbachev. I don't think that he ever read, he ever read Road to Service. I was even interested in doing that. And that was the funniest thing I heard from him, that we had the chief economic advisor, the advisor to Gorbachev, was Abela Ganbegan. And Abela Ganbegan, the biggest economist in the world, we called him because he was maybe 500 pounds. And he used to say all the time that what we need now is to build Swedish, Swedish model of socialism. And Gorbachev, when he heard that the second time, he said, Abela, where would you get all the Swedes? And that was exactly right. So these people didn't know. I mean, most people thought that still socialism is good, it's just Stalin is bad, that the Gulag is bad, that murdering people in the middle of the night is bad. But there's this wonderful, wonderful image of socialism, which I think Mr. Obama is sharing. I think that Mr. Sandras is way to the left of him, Mr. Obama. I think if Mr. Obama we can qualify as kind of a Marxist, then Mr. Sandras is a true Leninist. We only have time for one last question. You've lived in a former Soviet Union, you've taught in America, you've been all around the world. Do you think one's inclination to be collectivist in outlook or libertarian in outlook, do you think that's nature or nurture? Do you think there's potentially a genetic component that leads us to be more libertarian or more statist? I would say that it is social rather than biological in a sense that I think that educational system that we have in the United States, the culture it leads, they're promoting collectivism. If you will look what public schools, what universities are doing, if you will look at whatever predominant culture. The culture is that we are responsible for all the bad things in the world. People, a lot of my students, they feel guilty for no reason. And this is very sad because collectivists are exploiting this. And very sad for me to see that because I am too old or ready to defect again. Now we'll have to keep you right here where you are. Yuri Dr. Yuri Maltsev, thank you so much for your time and a great interview. Ladies and gentlemen, have a great weekend.