 I recognize it's Friday afternoon. You've had a whole week of listening to economics talks and I'm sure you're all thinking, wondering yourself, well, I can't wait to listen to what Dr. Patrick Newman has to say, haven't heard him speak at all this week. So I recognize this is number four, but I saved the best for last. So this is, as we're moving through history on Wednesday, I, Freedom Fest, I spoke about the Constitution. Then after I spoke about here today at 9 a.m., I spoke about the early American history. And now we'll be speaking about the progressive era of the early 20th century and the new progressive era of the early 20th century. So we're moving through history. So what is this about? I'm going to compare the progressives of the past. So of the early 20th century, the progressive era, which Murray Rothbard documented so well in his book, The Progressive Era, and their policies with those of today. So the early 20th, 21st century, right? Because we hear a lot about how the years, the year we're living in now and the next upcoming decade, the 2020s, is going to be a new progressive era, a new great leap forward of all sorts of wonderful things, wonderful policies, a whole new revolution in how the government controls our lives in the economy and all sorts of great stuff. And I want to try and show that, well, in many ways it's very similar to what the progressives of the past were trying to do, right? Because we're continually told that, okay, this is progressive, we're moving forward. In reality, as I'll try and argue, the progressive era of the past, as well as the progressive era of today is really a regressive era. Like we're going backwards. We're adopting all of the stuff, all of the bad policies that we broke away from basically all new modern forms of mercantilism, et cetera. So I could talk about all the ways in which the progressives of today are similar with the progressives of the past, but that would take a whole week, not just 45 minutes. So I only am going to concentrate on a couple of things. I want to talk about their similar ideological backgrounds and just other aspects of their backgrounds. I want to talk about how both progressives have been working to cartilize industries to benefit big business, okay? So we'll talk about that. Also want to discuss briefly the progressives environmental laws and their labor laws. And I also want to finish up by talking about how they did fund their programs and how the progressives today plan to fund their programs. And it's with taxes. This may come as a surprise and I'm sort of letting out the big secret now. Draconian taxes in particular. So who are the progressives of the past? So we think of the individuals, the men and women who were responsible for pushing for all sorts of new laws. Some of these laws I'll briefly talk about later in the presentation. Who were these individuals? Surprisingly, they came from a very tight background, similar background, as I'll show many of the progressives today come from. They were Yankees. Okay, so that doesn't mean they supported the Yankees baseball team. That came later. Yankees really refers to, they were descendants of the New England Puritans, okay? They either stayed in New England or they moved to New York, particularly Western New York, the state, and the Midwest, okay? So it's a certain type of ethnicity basically comes from New England, all right? Most progressives were Yankees, okay? They also had an evangelical zeal. So they had this urge to really remake society initially by coercively stamping out sin, particularly alcohol consumption, okay? So the progressives were pietists or as Rothbard describes, they were post-millennial pietists. So a post-millennial pietist is someone who tries to bring about the thousand year kingdom of God before Jesus can return. So in order to do that, you have to get rid of all the impurities in the world. In order to save yourself, you also have to save others, right? So this started off with, you gotta crack down on alcohol consumption, Sunday fun, immigration, you gotta make sure kids are reading the right Bible in school, et cetera. They commonly classed with liturgicals, okay? So if the pietists were Methodist and Baptist, et cetera, who wanted to use the government to run society liturgicals, Catholics, certain Lutherans, et cetera, they said, well, as long as you just stick to the teachings of the church, you can just focus on saving yourself, you'll be good, et cetera. They continually clashed with those groups, okay? They were also intellectuals, right? So they had earned their PhDs in socialist Germany, so under Bismarck's, the Bismarckian socialism, the Second Reich, okay? So that was the area where PhDs were granted. Initially, the United States didn't have PhDs until the late 19th, early 20th century. I don't find it a coincidence that PhD granting institutions comes more socialist policies. It seems to be a correlation that is not merely coincidence. So anyway, all of these pietists, they went to Germany to get their PhDs and they learned how they could regulate the economy, right? To improve it. And then they came back to the United States to set up their own PhD programs to try to increase the scope and power of government, et cetera. This is the transition from when they went from post-millennial pietists to sort of a more secular angle where they became less religious in the sense that they were less trying to focus on saving individual souls and more to improving public welfare. So this is a resurrection of the old alliance of throne and altar, right? To the alliance between the king and the church, right? The king would support the church and in return the church would basically preach the benefits of the king to the public. Saying the king is divine, you have to pay taxes to the king because he's an agent of God, et cetera. And then it became, well, you got to pay taxes because these taxes are going to improve GDP or they're going to improve public welfare, improve public health and all sorts of stuff, right? So it's just a similar, it's just another agent basically, right? This is why most intellectuals are interventionist because most intellectuals wouldn't be able to survive on the free market. Free market does not really pay for new analyses of Beowulf or all sorts of other stuff, but a public state school will. So anyway, it's a big surprise. They were also eugenicists. So they wanted to control and tinker with the labor supply to improve its quality. They basically thought humans were sort of no different than dogs and that could be selectively bred in sort of bad attributes could be very quickly ironed out. So there's a great book that came out by Thomas Leonard a couple of years ago called The Liberal Reformers and it's all about how progressives supported all of these policies, minimum wage, immigration restriction, labor laws, et cetera, because they wanted to prevent what they called race suicide. They said all of these immigrants from Eastern Europe, all of these Polish people, all of these Italians, you got people from South America, you got the Chinese, you got the Japanese, et cetera. They're all diluting the racial stock of the country away from the WASP, the white Anglo-Saxon Puritan stock. And even the women were working when they should be staying home raising children. So you read all of these progressives of the past and they're all very strong eugenicists. And in particular, they wanted to use the government to promote eugenics and get rid of the undesirables, so to speak. So the original eugenics was actually, couple of some academics in the late 19th century, they wanted to improve the quality of the labor stock. They advocated, well the government should subsidize, they should pay very intelligent people to procreate with other individuals. So basically they became these academics advocating subsidies directed towards them for them to procreate and there's a very clear special interest problem there. But anyway, then it became, it switched to a much more nefarious angle. Last but not least, they were bellicose on foreign policy. They didn't just wanna save the United States, they wanted to save the world. This is Wilsonian democracy. This is, we need to have bases in Europe. We need to expand into Asia. The progressives were ardent imperialists and they thought they were better than other countries and the United States needed to rule over them. So, all right, I've gone through a good amount of individuals, but of course you want names, right? So just a brief snapshot of who some of these individuals are, you've got Theodore Roosevelt, okay? He's the top left. He was a president in the early 1900s. He had a Harvard education. He married into the Boston Financial Oligarchy, okay? So again, some of that New York, he was from New England stock. He later became governor of New York. He was also a prohibitionist, okay? Alcohol consumption was bad when he was initially a police chief of New York City. He enforced the reigns law, which cracked down on Sunday liquor consumption and the selling of liquor, right? So progressives were very anti-fun on Sunday, right? The great progressive fear, the great pietist fear, as H. L. Menken once said, was that somewhere someone is having fun, okay? And that was the progressives were trying to stamp that out. He was also a militarist. So the rough riders in the Spanish-American War, he was an ardent imperialist. He eagerly advocated us basically ruling over other people across the world. You have Harvey Washington Wiley. He's on the top right. He was the main chemist behind the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, okay? Similar background as most other progressives. He was the son of a pietist preacher and he grew up with a lifelong obsession with purity. Certain foods were sinful were bad. Now what's kind of odd about this is that he was ardently pro-sugar, okay? He was connected with many sugar interests, which is why he was pro-sugar. But so somehow sugar wasn't sinful or bad for you. So he would attack saccharine, but he would be pro-sugar. And he had many lines. He said, childhood without candy would be like, would be heaven without harps, okay? So he wanted kids to eat candy. Again, I kind of find this odd because he's in charge of our nation's public health. But anyway, he studied at the University of Berlin, okay? So again, you got that German background. He was an imperialist. He was pro-annexing Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, okay? Last but not least, we've got Richard T. Eli. He was the main founder behind the intensely pietist and interventionist American Economic Association, right? This association of economists, which is still around was explicitly designed to be anti-leserfare. And many of its initial founders were directly linked with the social gospel movement of the past, okay? He was the son of an extreme pietist farmer. He got a PhD from Germany. He was a staunch eugenicist, he was pro-minimum wage. So Eli, along with many other progressive economists, said that, well, we need to raise them in a wage because this will explicitly unemployed immigrants. People who have lower marginal value products, marginal revenue products, right? So this is a blatant interventionist economist sort of the model of progressive economists, okay? And usually in history books, when these guys are discussed, a lot of the nasty details are sort of covered up. When they are, they're always sort of a, just dismissed away, right? None of these are ever big problems if they support intervention, et cetera. It's only the free market individuals of the past that all of their views are held up to extreme scrutiny. Okay, so with that being said, now we can compare them, these individuals or the general classification analysis of progressives of the past with progressives of today, right? So who are the progressives of today? The individuals in control of our lives now, right? Well, they're not necessarily Yankee, but they do live in Yankee regions, we could say. So they predominantly live in New England, right? If you think about the major, the Ivy Leagues, the center of a lot of intellectual life so we'll be talking about, that's in New England, as well as the major coastal cities. So you've got New York City for finance, Washington DC for politics, San Francisco for big tech, Los Angeles for media, et cetera, right? The rest of the country is so-called flyover country, either Chicago and maybe a city somewhere else, but everywhere else is just kind of irrelevant, right? There's also Miami too, right? You can go then there and have fun, but the rest of the country is just sort of this rural place that you can see when you're flying in a plane, okay? They are social justice warriors, as we all know. They're not religious traditionally, in fact, they're often explicitly atheist, but they are crusaders for egalitarianism and other initiatives. So they have that same desire that drive to really remake society and to stamp out sin, right? So to speak, right? By racism, sexism, et cetera, all these problems in the world, they're finding them and they're all pointing to one ultimate cause and it's the worst ism of all capitalism. So they're saying all of mankind's social ills, everything from global warming to discrimination, to viruses, to et cetera is all due to the profit making motive in private property, et cetera, right? I'm not telling you anything you don't already know. We've all seen this time and time again. They are intellectual, so they're heavily educated, usually at Ivy League universities and other prestigious universities. This includes University of Chicago, the elite California schools on the West Coast and so on. And they also want other people to be educated but not as educated as them, right? So we all go, we have to go to the schools beneath them, right? So you hear about this now or before everyone needed to graduate high school, now everybody needs to get an undergrad degree. The phrase as an educator myself, I hear about K through 20 more and more where now the further beginning of college is supposed to transition students from high school into college and now the dividing line has to be a master's degree, right? So we're moving from everyone has to have a high school degree to everyone has to have an undergrad degree to everyone has to have a master's degree. Eventually in 10 years, I'll be giving this talk and everyone will be getting a PhD, et cetera. We'll be just like the Soviet Union. Everyone's got PhDs and all sorts of things. They're social engineers. They're elitists that want to mold society. They want to shape people's ideas. They want to get rid of certain undesirable behavior, right? Toxic masculinity. So now our razors, they're gonna tell us how we should behave. Certain bad behavior needs to be canceled, et cetera, right? Everyone else can be molded but the progressives are the rulers, right? We're just the ruled, right? So there can be exceptions made for them. If you kiss up to the right people, et cetera, well, you can get away with certain bad behavior but everyone else can't, okay? And that's their main drive, you could say, along the cultural front. They're cultural imperialists. They're gonna get rid of all the other cultures except their own, all right? And the last but certainly not least, they are globalists, right? So these men and women are foreign interventionists. They want America to play a leading role in world affairs. So everything about the neoconservatism of George W. Bush and many Republicans, it's really just a variant of progressivism, right? Because these individuals are more or less just big government just like the progressives, all right? Maybe not in certain areas or they wanna have to give certain tax cuts, et cetera, but it's really just about using our military to promote the right values abroad, to rule over other countries to tell them how they should govern themselves, so on and so forth, okay? So the American empire is alive and well among progressives, right? America should play a leading role, should subsidize Europe, should play a role in Asia, et cetera, so on and so forth, okay? But what I now wanna do is analyze the particular types of policies, progressives of the past pushed for, as well as progressives of the future, right? So this is gonna be partially looking at some of the prior government laws of the past and I wanna try and spend more time on the current laws that have already been passed as well as in the future with particular emphasis on 2020 and beyond, so the COVID crisis, okay? So progressives wanted to cartilize industry. So we think about cartilizing industry, they wanted to basically create government run agencies that would enforce the pricing and production decisions of businesses. So they wanted businesses to group together, restrict supply and raise price, right? On the free market, you can't do that because of competition, so that's why any cartel that lasts to the extent it lasts at all has to be propped up with government intervention, okay? So the progressives passed a whole, tedious laundry list of various regulations. They resurrected the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, the Elkins Anti-Rebating Act of 1903 regarding railroads, the Hepburn Act, Meat Inspection Act, Pure Food and Drug Act, Federal Reserve Act, Federal Trade Commission, et cetera, okay? So all of these laws restricted price and product competition, okay? So just go through a brief example, we've got rebating. Rebating was a way businesses competed with one another by offering discounts to their customers that bought more. This is no different than the fact that you go to a grocery store, you have to buy a loaf of bread, it costs X amount of dollars. If a restaurant is buying bread from a wholesale or grocery store, they're going to get it at a cheaper amount. Why? Because they're buying more, okay? This is basic economics, this is a way businesses compete, but businesses got tired of doing this, okay? So they got the government to outlaw these rebates, okay, that railroads were granted to shippers and so on, okay? They also got rid of product competition by cracking down on so-called adulteration, which is when you would change the composition of food. So you might add additional meat into some sort of sausage to improve its flavor or some grain or ice or whatever. And they would say, well, this is an impurity. Again, you got to think about like, what would Harvey Washington Wiley say, right? And this is bad, we need to get rid of this, et cetera. This is just a form of competition. And big businesses supported these laws because they weakened free market forces, the internal, the constant competitive pressures inherent in the business world and because it would sort of stop more hostile regulation from socialists, right? So they're trying to block out capitalism and communism for that middle of the road way, so to speak, okay? In these laws, of course, they raise compliance costs on newer and smaller businesses and this promoted big business at the expense of small business. Now, when you read about this in your traditional American history course, you're not gonna hear that at all. You're gonna hear the opposite. Oh, these are against big businesses, fought these, et cetera, et cetera, but instead our wise politicians switched to laws that would improve the public welfare, okay? So progressives cartilizing industry now, I know this has been discussed. We've got big tech, so the large companies, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, et cetera, they all support increased regulation, right? Over their companies as well as other companies, social media companies, et cetera. They wanna stop the passage of harmful legislation and they also wanna hurt smaller competitors, right? So newer social media sites such as Odyssey, Rumbler, Rumble, Parler, et cetera. This is a great screenshot of an article that came about a year ago in the Wall Street Journal. It says, tech giants, new appeal to governments, please regulate us, okay? And at the bottom there's a quote, there's no question in my mind that artificial intelligence needs to be regulated. Alphabet, which is in charge of Google, CEO Sundar Pichai said in early January, the question is how best to approach this, right? And how best to approach it is the way the large companies wanna approach it. I mean, that's fairly obvious. Of course, he's not gonna say that. He's gonna speak in a much more grandiose language. So how exactly are these laws going to hurt smaller competitors? Well, I think it's very revealing when you have Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg saying, quote, we don't want private companies making so many decisions about how to balance social equities without a more democratic process. Doesn't that just sound great? You know, he just sounds like such a nice guy. He's looking out for you and me, particularly after 2016. So he's saying, what is fair and democratic? Or when you really think about it, he's saying, well, what the government in the business is lobbying it decides, okay? So the large companies are going to be doing everything fair and democratic, but it's the other companies that are not going to be doing things fair and democratic. Just like the large companies of the past, well, they didn't adulterate their products, right? It's just the small companies. They're the ones doing everything bad, okay? Well, it's very clear that the government would play winners and losers in the expensive artificial intelligence in the platform requirements would impose compliance costs that would hurt the smaller social media companies, okay? So that's why they really want this stuff to consolidate their monopoly positions, positions they've gotten through government intervention and lucrative government subsidies such as from the military, et cetera. I also find it important to note that in the current administration, there's certainly a friendly forum, all right? Kamala Harris, current vice president has many close ties to big tech, okay? Big tech has funded her previous elections in California. A former senior counsel is an Amazon lobbyist, okay? So again, one of the major e-commerce giants. Her first campaign manager now works for Google. Her brother-in-law is a chief legal officer for Uber, et cetera. Okay, so these companies have invested well in her. So if she's in a position where she can exercise influence on this in this regard, she's gonna push for policies that will block out more hostile legislation for more hardcore socialists and really hurt big techs competitors, okay? You're going to invest your money where it will do the most good for you as a large business. It's just like the progressives of the past, okay? So progressives then as well as progressives now want to cartelize industry. They also support these costly environmental laws, okay? So these laws of the past progressives, they channel taxpayer subsidies into the research and development of irrigation while restricting use of timber. So they didn't complain about global warming 100 years ago but they said, well, we're using too many of our resources too fast. We need to stop this and we need to promote more eco-friendly lines of production, right? Irrigation, which supposedly is. Now this encouraged all these subsidies, encouraged the uneconomic development of irrigation and settlement out in the West, right? So that's why sometimes a lot of times you just see these towns out like the middle of nowhere and you're like, how did this get there? And you go like, well, that was federal subsidies for irrigation or some other law. The restriction of the use of timber, so making all of these national parks and blocking off lumber companies from chopping down trees in certain areas, et cetera. This benefited land speculators and railroads. Why? Because then they could sell their trees at higher prices. It's no coincidence that the major financial backers behind all of these timber laws and regulations were the railroads, okay? Because they knew that their property wouldn't be effective. It would just be other property outside of their control. And the progressives were able to realize this through various laws and regulatory agencies, the Bureau of Forestry, the Reclamation Act, the Public Lands and Inlands Waterlands, the Waterways Commission, excuse me, of the early 1900s, okay? So all of these environmental laws were pushed by the progressives. This is all under the mantra of conservation, et cetera. Well, as we know, progressives today are strong environmentalists. You've got the Green New Deal, which is gargantuan program estimated by some that cost over 10 years, 93 trillion dollars, okay? That's a lot. You know, again, I cannot stress how much that is and how much that would hurt the economy. And this is in real terms, so it's not in nominal terms after inflation or whatever. And this would restrict the use of fossil fuels and subsidize eco-friendly sources. AOC, the famous congressman from New York City, is prominent behind these saying, well, we've got to save the planet in order to do so, we have to push for all of these laws, getting rid of fossil fuels and getting rid of our ability to eat cows and all sorts of other stuff. Now, we're not there yet, right? Many progressives they've been pushing for these laws and in the current regime, you're instead only getting a more moderate approach, right? And you get progressives, they're sometimes upset about this, they're saying, oh, well, this isn't enough, but this is just classic strategy, right? Because you get the opening wedge, right? You get your foot in the door, so to speak, by pushing for a moderate environmental program, because then a couple of years down the line, you'll be able to get what you want, okay? So you sometimes will advance radical legislation by just continually pushing for more, more and more moderate. It's not like once you pass this, you say, all right, well, we get this infrastructure bill passed and this environmental law passed, that will satisfy them, like now we'll be good. It's just gonna be the next congressional cycle, so to speak. Biden's proposed infrastructure spending bill, which is as of April, about two and a half trillion dollars, certainly contains enough of this opening wedge. Half of the proposal is really just a plan to reduce CO2 emissions through energy efficient homes, public housing, carbon free energy grid, et cetera, right? All under the guise, well, we got to do all this stuff, particularly the United States, we have to cut down on all of our emissions. And it's interesting to note, just like big business was behind environmental laws of the past, big business is certainly behind the environmental laws of the present. Hedge funds and tech companies are very big green energy investors, okay? So they're saying, yeah, well, we support all of this because if you wanna have solar panels on every house, well, there's gonna be companies making these solar panels, et cetera, and those are gonna be the companies we will invest in. Okay, of course, that's not really discussed so much. So if businesses are doing that, that's just their altruism, right? They're just generous, unlike all of us greedy individuals. You've got expensive labor laws, all right? So progressives of the past pushed for very expensive labor laws, such as compulsory workman's compensation laws, right? These provided for a system of disability insurance, which we'll talk about in the Federal Employees Compensation Act of 1916, okay? So the progressives wanted to, they said, well, the labor markets are imperfect. We have to push for all sorts of new policies that are going to revolutionize how bosses deal with their workers, how the employer deals with the employees, et cetera. So these workman compensation laws of a worker got injured on the job, well, there would be a mandatory insurance fund that would basically pay out for their injury, okay? Bear in mind, before these laws, injuries and accidents were going down as a result, not of progressive legislation, but because of greater technology, more savings that was leading to safer mines, safer factories, et cetera, right? That downward trend never gets discussed. You would think there was just as many kids working in sweatshops in 1909 as there were in 1809, okay? And these laws were promoted by big business. Why? Because they already had their own compensation programs and these laws forced businesses, as well as taxpayers to cough up funds for worker welfare and disability insurance. And this raised compliance costs on small businesses. They are now forced to keep track of these programs. They had to hire accountants and other sorts of individuals, as well as just the whole apparatus of keeping them up and running, all right? And these laws were sort of the opening wedge to a much more nefarious labor law in my view, which is the Social Security Act of 1935, right? Which is the program libertarians know and love because it's never gone in solvent and will always continue to earn enough money. I mean, completely sarcastic here. It's continually headed towards bankruptcy and it's been near and solvent before. This law required companies to basically set up retirement programs for workers, businesses, and the workers would have to pay a payroll tax, okay? Payroll tax that would supposedly never have to be raised in the future, et cetera. And the government would have surpluses after surpluses for the future. No surprise that big business supported this program because it would raise compliance costs on smaller businesses, whereas smaller businesses viciously fought the adoption of Social Security, particularly under the National Association of Manufacturers, okay? So again, these are some of the revolutionary labor laws of the past, right? Well, what are some of the revolutionary labor laws of the future, okay? Well, we hear about this a lot continually. The specter of technological unemployment, which bear in mind has always been a problem. People were saying in the 1950s and 60s, machines were gonna take over. People were saying in the 1980s, computers were going to take over. Now people are saying artificial intelligence is going to take over. Everyone, of course, ignores the fact that well, declining work was actually a sign of progress, right? Machinery automation increases real income, this lowers prices of goods and it creates new jobs, right? Your parents or my parents, when they were growing up in kindergarten in the 1960s, the education system prepared them for jobs that were not gonna be around when they were working in the 1990s and 2000s, just like today, right? It's the same thing, but people always say this time is different, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? So now we hear well in the face of this massive burst of unemployment that's coming, we need to have universal basic income of say $12,000 a year. So that's about $1,000 a month. Politician Andrew Yang from New York is a very ardent proponent of this, saying that well, people, everyone should be entitled to $12,000 so they can not work and they can pursue their hobbies and everything and we live in a post-scarcity world, so this is gonna be great. Well, we're not there yet, but we're certainly making progress to it, unfortunately, we know that during COVID, there was all sorts of stimulus checks and very generous unemployment benefits provided. So last year in March of 2020, there was the CARES Act, it was about a $2 trillion stimulus package, which included $1,200 stimulus checks for individuals in certain income brackets, as well as $600 in extra unemployment benefits for a certain period of time. Then at the end of the Trump administration in December, 2020, you have the Consolidated Appropriations Act, another $600 check, $300 unemployment benefits, and last, well, not really last, probably not last, and certainly not least, you have the American Rescue Plan Act of March, 2021, which is $1,400 stimulus checks for certain individuals in $300 unemployment benefits. So if you've received this money, this is about, again, it's several thousand dollars that the government has just provided to you and that's excluding whether or not you're collecting unemployment benefits, okay? So this is kind of the beginning of the stimulus checks because now the public is going to expect some form of stimulus each year. So they're like, where's my stimulus check? Now, where are my Biden bucks, so to speak, okay? And then this is gonna be, okay, what's gonna happen? And similar to Social Security of the past where politicians would vote on granting Social Security payments right before an election, you're gonna probably see, again, additional pressure for stimulus checks before an election to benefit incumbents in power. The unemployment benefits, if you're paying people not to work, they're not going to work, right? Just like if you tax something, you're going to get less of it. If you incentivize something, you're going to get more of it. This is basic economic logic, which is probably why it's so hard for various people to understand, okay? And then if you're paying people not to work, they're not going to work and then the rest of us are going to have to wait a long time to order food at a restaurant or get something done at a basic service industry. This is not criticizing the individuals doing this, they're just following the money, so to speak. It's criticizing the politicians. This is a great little chart showing the spike in the number of people on various forms of unemployment benefits and it's a surprise to various individuals that the job market, the labor market has recovered more sluggishly. People are not taking as many jobs as we thought they're looking for higher benefits. The decline in people on these programs is decreasing, but again, it's at a relatively slower pace than many envisioned, okay? And this is the consequences of what would happen if we actually adopted a full on universal basic income, right? Many businesses would be forced to go bankrupt because they could not compete, right? Large businesses could get away with paying their workers more, but many small businesses could not. They would be forced to pay for expensive automation or pay more for workers, et cetera, and this is gonna result in higher prices in reduced production for all of us, okay? The market can bring us towards nirvana, so to speak, we'll never get there, but if we try and speed it up through government intervention, we're not going to get closer, we're just gonna go backwards, okay? So this to me is sometimes the most astounding thing is that we see it all the time when we go order stuff, et cetera, and some people are like, no, it's not due to the unemployment benefits. I think now it's sort of being grudgingly admitted. It's like, yeah, maybe paying people not to work, yeah, that could possibly, partially maybe, cause people not to take jobs, and you're like, all right, that's progress. We're getting there, at least in terms of greater economic knowledge, but I'm not sure at what pace, okay? Last but not least, we've got draconian taxes, so this is what every progressive loves, right? The raised taxes on other people. In the past, you had the corporate income tax of 1909, which was legally considered an excise tax, right? So it was like, well, corporations, on all income over a certain amount, just for the privilege of operating a corporation, you have to pay a tax. This was initially 1%, right? On all business income over $5,000. Back then, $5,000 was actually a pretty decent amount, right? So it was actually on the, just on the unrelatively wealthy corporations, and it's a small amount, 1%, okay? Then you had the 16th Amendment of 1913 that's legalized the income tax, right? Before, an income tax was unconstitutional. It was made constitutional, and the highest bracket was 7%, okay? Again, on the top, so that's not a whole lot. And this is what usually happens when taxes are advocated. They say, well, it's only going to be on certain individuals who are making a lot of money and the amounts are going to be that high. Trust me, right? That's what usually happens, but of course, give it a couple of years. If not a decade, the rates are going to go up, right? To pay for World War I, taxes rose, including on the less rich, the middle class were paying income taxes in World War I. By the late 1920s, the corporate income tax was 11% and the highest bracket for the personal income tax was 25%, okay? So they were higher during the war, but then they were cut in the 1920s, but they were never cut back down to their original level, okay? So what's the lesson here? The lesson is the severity and scope of taxes always goes up, right? Because after this, in the Great Depression, taxes rose on the middle class, including the payroll tax I mentioned before and in World War II, et cetera, right? So initially, it's always advocated saying, oh, the rich are only going to pay this tax, but then what happens, give it enough time, the middle class, the less rich, even the poor, et cetera, will pay a tax, okay? Well, we can see this now with the new taxes progressives are advocating, right? We can start off with a wealth tax, right? So progressives advocate wealth taxes on the rich. Most prominently, you've got Senator Elizabeth Warren who says, well, we need a 2% wealth tax on a net worth of greater than 50 million, 3% tax on net worth greater than 1 billion, okay? So this is on individuals who are making a lot of money, such as me, this is incredible, I'm just joking, I don't make anywhere near 50 million, it's more like 40 million, but anyway, so I'm safe for now. And they say, well, Warren's even championing, well, you got to impose an exit tax so on rich people who leave the country and they move their wealth out, the government's going to hit them on their way out and they're going to collect like a 40%. Something ridiculous like that. So it's a very draconian tax. These taxes are not going to remain only on the rich, they're going to spread given enough years on less rich people and on the middle class because in order to fund all of these expensive programs, the middle class has to pay. The middle class finances social security, it's not on the Uber rich. Again, most people, most progressives just say, well, the rich can pay for everything. We divide the amount of money Jeff Bezos has and we take the current price of a car, everyone could get a new car, et cetera, and the math, that's just completely wrong, et cetera, but that hasn't stopped anyone from changing their math. Interestingly enough, this is one of the most fascinating proposals, this is more recent, is Biden and the Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen, they want to raise the corporate income tax to 28%. All right, so President Trump cut it from about 35% to 21%. Biden wants to raise it up back to 28%. Our corporate income tax used to be very high relative to other nations, including for things like deductions, exemptions, et cetera, which made our businesses less competitive. So what's fascinating is that Biden and his Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen is a former chair of the Federal Reserve, they recognize this, they say, well, if we want to pay for our infrastructure programs and all sorts of other stuff, we're going to have to raise taxes, but this will make US businesses less competitive. Oh, I know the solution. Why don't we get the rest of the world to raise their corporate income tax? Just like any sort of cartilizing progressive, right? You recognize, well, you've got to get everyone involved to prevent the external competition. So Biden and Yellen are pushing for the rest of the world to adopt a 21% minimum corporate income tax. And they would enforce this by basically companies that aren't complying, they would then, for countries that aren't complying, excuse me, they would get rid of various exemptions, et cetera, aka they would raise taxes on their country, on their companies operating the United States. So if some Eastern European country refuses to comply, well, that country's companies are going to face increased pressure in the United States. And this is very clearly to reduce competitive disadvantages from higher US corporate income tax. This is extremely blatant, this is the anti-competitive, just animus of most progressives, all right? You're trying to weaken your competition, okay? All right, so we're conclusion, we're out here. I know, it's been a long day. Today's progressives are very similar to yesteryear's progressives. The policies of the past created a regressive era, the policies proposed now would do the same. You haven't done so, you should buy Murray Rothbard's Progressive Era, which was edited by me. And so you should buy it, not just for that, but because it's a great book. And you should also read my Mises Institute articles, Are We on the Cusp of a New Progressive Era? And is Kamala Harris the 21st Century Woodrow Wilson? With that, I think I will conclude. So thank you so much, I hope you enjoy my presentation.