 Okay the title is what you should know about socialism and originally it was you know what millennials should know about socialism but somebody essentially planned the schedule and changed it with this and the president of the Mises Institute has informed me that no student will be allowed to leave the building tonight unless you can prove you have purchased a copy of my book the problem of socialism over here so make sure you have your receipt in the copy of the book at hand or else you'll be spending the night here this that's Pinocchio on the cover by the way and my my publisher regularly publishing they debated the Pied Piper and Pinocchio those were the two the two finalists in the artwork for the front there was a great I preferred the Pied Piper because it had a big group of children following the Pied Piper behind the Pied Piper and I guess the Pied Piper is supposed to be Bernie Sanders you know the flutes but they chose Pinocchio instead and they thought it would stand out more in a bookstore with a big nose and all that sort of thing and so I just so I wrote this this book it's a fairly short book and Regnery contacted me when you know there were these opinion polls came out that some of you might be familiar with them of American young people and I guess millennials or I don't know anybody between 16 and 35 or something like that high percentage you know one poll had 60 percent said they prefer socialism to capitalism another ones 40 percent of them said they could vote for a socialist candidate for president of the United States and so so we decided it's it's important to put together a book that's easy to read you can stick it in your knapsack which is why it's this size it's not a it's a little smaller than human action you know as you can see but but but I did how many chapters that I write about 16 chapters that I fit in there and I promise different aspects socialism I try to make it as readable as possible but with lots and lots of footnotes so well documented in case anybody wants to follow up with anything and so I want to talk about today is basically things that if you if you get into a discussion or a debate with you one of your classmates the sociology major who's wearing a capitalism must die t-shirt on campus you can't really say go read human action you know convince them or something like that you know how could you have a conversation and so so I'm going to go down as many of these 10 points as I can get through in in 45 minutes and but first of all you know what is socialism it started out the definition of socialism as government ownership of the means of production okay in the early late 19th early 20th century but as Hayek pointed out in the road to serfdom and in the 1976 edition to the road to serfdom he said pretty much by the 1930s and 40s it came to mean not just that but but the redistribution of income through the welfare state and the progressive income tax and Hayek wrote that egalitarianism was always the ideology that was least put out there by socialists of promoting equality you know of outcome and and the vehicle started out as being a takeover of the factories but that didn't work out too well in Russia and so they kept the same goal egalitarianism but different means different vehicles meaning the welfare state and the progressive income tax and if you so if you were to go on the website of say democratic socialists of America you wouldn't see any definitions saying government ownership of the means of production you see all sorts of of things you know super minimum wage you know takeover of the electric power companies you know they would they want the government run you know a lot of government run industry still but but it involves a lot more you'd see you know a vastly expanded welfare state progressive income tax and so forth so it's it's it's a lot more than just government ownership of the means of production and and whenever I give these talks and when I write the book people I did 65 radio interviews in about in about a month after the book came out and people would always tell me well come yeah communism was bad but socialism might not be quite as bad but my answer is though was given to me by my old friend Yuri Maltsev who lived a big part of his life under communism and was a an advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev that there never was any such thing as communism you know communism is this utopian ideal that will occur once the state withers away okay but in the meantime we're all socialists we were working toward communism and so yeah that's why the soviet union you know it was the union of so of soviet socialist republics ussr they didn't call it the union of soviet communist republics because communism never existed it was what they wanted to achieve 200 years from now or whenever that was you know the utopian goal and so it's really is a red herring argument to say well yeah that was communism all that bad bad things that happened in the 20th century no it wasn't that's why misi's book was called socialism and not communism his critique of socialism he knew what he was criticizing out there okay another point that you would need to make is that if you want to destroy your economic future then go for it adopt socialism okay just just look at history you know look at history to quote my old friend Yuri again you know Yuri defected from the soviet union before the collapse and he's a good friend of the institute he was here on sunday from passing through town and he's taught he's lectured at the Mises in too many times he'll be at the supporter's summit in september here in auburn and he defected from the soviet union and it's a remarkable story so one day he's an advisor to Gorbachev and he's one of the architects of perestroika and a couple weeks later he's a civilian employee of the us army and and employed by the cia and he's debriefing dick cheney the defense secretary on the sides of the soviet economy and the story he tells is that he told cheney the soviet economy was no more than five percent of the us economy and cheney tells him well our cia he says it's more like 65 percent so surely it's probably somewhere between five percent and 65 percent and Yuri was adamant no five percent that was it and so he apparently is the guy who convinced the us government that the cold war is over that you know the so the soviets could never wage a war against gahu as somebody said on tv last night even today they're still like mexico with nukes as far as the size of their economy you know there's nothing wrong with mexico but in terms of gdp size of economy is so you know just like you know we're not worried about mexico dropping nuclear bombs on us and neither should we worry about them necessarily and so uh and it was much smaller than so it was no more than five percent of the us biggest country in the world most natural resources a huge population of very talented people uh the russians have always been creative and talented people for hundreds of years they produce a lot of brilliant people and and look what they did i well i had an mba class once somebody asked me uh well what or i asked the class well you know who can think of any good product that was produced by russian socialism and nobody could say think of anything and i had a couple of uh military guys in the class a couple of us army guys that were getting an mba degree and they said ak-47s and that's that's all they could think of but i but even that you know who knows that they they probably spent five thousand dollars in resources to produce a five hundred dollar gun you know yeah it was the ak-47 but probably it wasn't probably wasn't even profitable produced in that manner under socialism and then of course after world war two the british decided to ditch uh winston churchill as their prime minister when he ran for prime minister and hayek was one of his advisors at the time and he kept quoting hayek and that probably didn't help him out very much because it's right at the end of world war two and there's this guy with a vaguely german accent as an advisor to winston churchill i didn't fly politically in in england at the time and so they adopted fabian socialism in the 1940s right after world war two their own version of socialism and by the 1970s the whole world was talking about the british disease because they nationalized all the commanding heights of the economy the steel industry electric power of the railroads coal mines and and they did what what always happens with with socialism is they they took for every one thousand dollars in resources they turned it into something less than a thousand dollars and you do that year in year out you're in big trouble so it was known as the british disease and that's how margaret thatcher got it got elected in and tried to turn things around through privatization uh argentina you give another example they had a sort of a combination of socialism nationalization of industry and fascism where they had they allowed private enterprise to exist but heavily regiment regimented by government pervasive price controls pervasive regulation that's essentially economic fascism and i'm going to talk in a minute about how fascism always has been a just a form of socialism there's no difference really between fascism and socialism is minor differences uh and then argentina did what uh what all these countries do eventually what venezuela is doing today they ruin their economy and they try to bail themselves out by printing money and they ended up with 12 000 price inflation in the 1980s and argentina went from the 10th richest country in the world at one point in history to barely ahead in the rankings gdp per capita gdp rankings barely ahead of equatorial new guinea and so that's what socialism did for argentina after after the british left uh as rulers of india in uh india the indian government had the bright idea that soviet central planning would be the wave of the future so they literally hired a soviet economist or two to come over and to to uh cooperate with a couple of uh indian economists and and of course naturally india became synonymous with poverty for many decades after that until rajiv ghandi came along and began privatizing and cutting taxes and liberating the indian economy so you know if you want to create poverty and misery there's your roadblock after colonialism in africa the slogan that the african potentates gave is uh africa must cannot prosper without socialism and of course by that they meant cannot prosper without us being dictators in centrally planning society pretty much and of course the rest is history most of africa became synonymous with dire poverty as well for many decades until some of the countries anyway began liberating and of course you have the example of china and hong kong you know for all those years but before china started allowing more and more private enterprise to exist uh there was a glaring example hong kong was one of the most prosperous countries in the world even though it's basically a big rock with no water no oil but a lot of freedom in a in a 10 flat income tax under british rule and right next door the same people the same culture the same language uh totally the opposite totally the dire poverty until they started turning around about 15 years ago i had a student who uh came to school he wanted to be an entrepreneur uh he was a freshman i'm going to be an entrepreneur when i get my economics degree and he spent his junior junior year in china in his study abroad and he came back and he told me that uh he thinks there's more economic freedom to be an entrepreneur in china than there was in united states at that time and uh and and he went back to china he he did what he said he became an entrepreneur in china learned mandarin chinese he got married and then came a businessman in china okay so so if you want to ruin your economic future socialism is the perfect roadblock for it that's the most one message you can tell your your classmate with the capitalism must die t-shirt okay another example another thing i would say is you cannot reform socialism and reforming socialism and making it work this time is kind of like saying well you know i'm highly allergic to poison ivy and but here's what i'm going to do there's a lot of it in my yard so here's what i'm going to do i'm going to get a pair of scissors and you know poison ivy has three leaves on it and i'm going to go all through the yard i'm going to i'm going to clip off one leaf of every poison ivy plant i'm going to reform poison ivy and so that'll do the trick or or if you live in alabama and you have kudzu that's taken over your your pine tree it's kind of like saying well i'm going to do the same thing i'm going to get some scissors and clip around the edges of some of these kudzu leaves it'll stop it from growing it won't well the problem solved and of course you cannot reform socialism uh despite what george stiglitz says in george stiglitz the Nobel prize-winning leftist communist economist uh when he was working for bill clinton offered an article in the new york times claiming socialism can work after all he just need to have smart guys like me in charge and of course how many times has that argument been made over the past hundred hundred or so years over and over and over and over again you know what you know what a hubris you know can you have it it shows you that you don't need to know anything about economics really to win the Nobel prize in economics and uh and it reminded me of when a speech my old professor gordon telequence made at a meeting of the mont pellerin society in in cambridge england that this was back in 1984 when i was only two years old in the in the gordon brought down the house these were all these uh hyac was there you know you're all classical liberals and he and he's given the speech how to win the Nobel prize and all he had was a bunch of quotations from james toben and he would just you know read one of these things and the whole 700 people would just break out and laugh during it over and over again and by these are people who are familiar with austrian economics or at least the bastard child of austrian economics chicago school economics and we still knew knew knew knew that and so so they got it they got his jokes she cannot reform socialism because of the incentive problem the old incentive problem the calculation problem that you all should be schooled in by now in this room and the knowledge problem the idea that a small group of planners could somehow possess all the knowledge that is in the minds of the millions of market participants uh and you know in other words the ipencil the famous essay ipencil by linard read you know read that and you understand that what the knowledge problem is basically of organizing the allocation of resources takes a lot of information of time and place in the minds of a lot of different people and so you can't reform socialism for these reasons and uh you know when i teach principles of economics you know week one week two at some point i tell the class here's uh or sometimes the first day of class uh what when we're gonna here's how i'm going to grade everybody we're going to give multiple choice exams here it's principles of microeconomics and uh i'm going to get all the exams and if and uh what i'm going to do is i'm going to get the higher scores and i'm going to redistribute the points so if you got a hundred i'll probably give 20 or 30 points away to the guy who got a 40 so that everybody gets a C the same grade because i'm going to adopt academic socialism that's that's what we're going to do and so you've got so you've got that problem and so of course every single one of them understands well why should i study why should i spend one minute studying i'm going to get a C no matter what happens and so and that's that's the incentive problem but the more the more important problem though is the calculation problem now how do you know how to how to put resources together in an efficient manner to produce goods and services if there are no private property and market prices if the prices are arbitrarily dictated by government and they don't reflect scarcity or supply and demand in general then you're just doing everything random it's like it's like trying to drive around a strange city without street signs and find where you're going it's it's an impossibility okay uh point number four i would make is that uh democratic socialism there's no reason why democratic socialism cannot be just as destructive as any other kind of socialism uh bostiot friedrich bostiot wrote in his famous book little book the law that in his day he recognized that well what's the difference between the government just confiscating factories and people voting to allow government to confiscate the factories the only difference is well we took a vote on it but the end result is the government confiscated the factories and so he made the point that you know if the government votes to have some one uniform plan or the people vote that one uniform plan put on all of society it's the same as communism the communism which is put one uniform plan on society by the government it doesn't really matter whether you took a vote on it or not you get the same you get the same result and of course if you just look around the world you look at venezuela today i probably we're gonna have and i encourage everybody to listen to the presentation by our students from venezuela tomorrow what time is it tomorrow what is it 12 30 12 30 tomorrow about the venezuelan economy because your your classmate with the capitalism must dye t-shirt needs to know about what's going on in venezuela today and it has been going on for quite a while brazil argentina the same thing these are all democratic countries hitler was elected you know democracy doesn't necessarily guarantee peace and prosperity at all and as far as that you know what one of the one of the questions i always get when i when i did radio interviews about this is uh what about sweden you know what about sweden some of the Scandinavian countries well you know what one of the things i did in my classroom last year when i was talking about this is there are these indexes of economic freedom and the heritage foundation does one kato institute does one the phraser institute in canada does one and and actually walter block is is sort of the founding father of these indexes of economic freedom i mean he worked with the liberty fund jeez it was like the late 80s early 90s and to start have some conferences that just start talking about this concept of uh indexes of economic freedom and i attended one of the very first ones that walter organized and i sat next to milton and rose freedman and uh richard strupe was there and charles murray and who's a fabulous statistician and people like that and we're just talking about the concept of well what should we include in these indexes of economic freedom but now they're they're very well worked out there's there's scholarly articles that have been written about them in all the top economics journals and if you look at the latest rankings they rank countries and they give them a number by uh you know the degree of economic freedom you know freedom freedom of exchange free trade uh uh foreign exchange rate controls by government sank you know protection of property rights all these categories that they use and sweden and the united states are pretty much tied today you know the ranks like like 116 and 117 is the index number basically so so the degree of economic freedom in other words in sweden is about today about the same as in the united states it wasn't always that way though sweden you know after in the post world war two years adopted their version of democratic socialism and among the things and so and they were able to do that because sweden was a very low tax uh high high economic freedom country in the late 19th early 20th century they produced many great entrepreneurs who uh you know the sob automobiles and and things like that uh dynamites you know for Nobel and dynamite and so it became very prosperous one of the wealthiest countries in europe certainly and if not the world for a while and then they made this big u-turn adopted post war socialism and according to the swedish academy of economics i guess it's their version of the american economic association not a single net new job was created in sweden from 1950 until 2005 not one net new job was created 55 years of zero job growth in sweden as a result of swedish socialism and so by the 1980s they did what venezuela is doing today they did what they do argentina did in the 80s they tried to inflate their way out of it they created a lot of inflation and 500 interest rates in sweden in 1980s and so that caused a great retrenchment so they've been retrenching uh cutting back cutting taxes uh even doing away with some socialized medicine privatizing industries so that today they're back they're ranking their economic freedom index ranking is much closer to the us you know as you know we've been marching in their direction we've been marching in that direction so what what i told what i told some of my students was that when bernie sanders makes speeches say we should be more like sweden he means sweden of 1970 the sweden of his youth he doesn't he doesn't mean sweden today and then the government of sweden adamantly uh denies that they're a socialist country you know who wants to be called a socialist country aside from the crazy people in venezuela cuban and and a few other places like that in the government uh today you know you know invest here we are a socialist country yes another point that needs to be made about socialism uh is uh and i encourage everybody to read the chapter in in the road to serfdom hyax famous book the road to serfdom uh on the called the worst rise to the top and the fundamental idea is that under socialism and and collectivism of any kind no matter what you call it uh it basically requires the forceful imposition of a government plan or a set of government plans to replace the individual plans that people make for their own lives and so it it always requires some degree of coercion force intimidation uh and it's a matter of degree you know it's like the leftist today in america that you see setting fire on buildings because a tom woods type speaker might show up at berkeley thinking of talk or or antifa beating the daylights out of somebody because he's not a communist like them on the college campus you know all this violence i mean that's nothing compared to the mass murder of millions that occurred under socialism in the 20th century but it's still the use of violence coercion intimidation and so forth it's it's ingrained into the psyche of every collectivist that they know best and that they have some sort of inherent right to force their way on you and so uh so there's a big uh big you know a matter of degree of how much coercion and violence they're willing to to impose on on you and hyac makes that point that under under socialism uh it requires the people who rise to the top or the people who have the fewest qualms about brutalizing their fellow man and so if you look at some and this is something that uh your classmates uh should need to know about if you're going to debate them about socialism because they're professors with the who still some who still have big pictures of malty tome or shea grovara in their office or casero or or you know whatever other mass murdering communist that uh that they still have a i still see the t-shirts on campus all the time they might want to take a look take a look at this book the black book of communism that uh there was probably some years ago by seven french scholars and translated into english i don't know if you can read that but uh this is a the death toll this is uh the number of people murdered by their own governments because they descended from socialism this is not war deaths this is not world war two or anything like that this is how many people were murdered by their own governments because they did not want socialism soviet union 20 million china 60 million vietnam one million north korea two million cambodia two million eastern europe one million latin america 150 000 africa 1.7 million in afghanistan 1.5 million deaths and uh there's a sociologist named rudy rummel r u m m e l he was at the university of hawaii for many years and uh he has a website he wrote a book called democide and uh and another one called death by government and you can you could google him and you could find all these statistics on this and it's death by government it's it's his chapter and verse of this and so what what hayek basically said the way this works is under socialism you have to impose some sort of central plan on society and because of economic reality the plan fails okay that's step one the plan fails step two is rather than admit failure the powers that be uh such as in in in venezuela uh will will adopt even more dictatorial powers and the guys from venezuela will tell you how they disbanded their led national legislature and put their political cronies in power instead and so they're sort of uh doing away with democracy all together all that and then at some point hayek said the powers the governmental powers will have they must choose between the disregard of normal morals and failure either they're going to admit failure or they have to disregard morals and become brutal and which one do you think they're going to choose they're never going to admit failure and so that that leads eventually to more and more uh violence and so and so forth and if you in the the black book of communism has some very uh telling it's kind of disgusting reading i had students in a class read read this book once and uh i might have caused psychological problems some of them and uh here's here's what they write about what happened in uh in the soviet union for example among the techniques these are techniques used to deal with people who dissented against socialism among the techniques employed by socialist regimes not just soviet union but all over the world firing squads hanging drowning battering gassing poisoning or car or quote car accidents something reminds you of bill clinton doesn't it the destruction of the population by starvation through mad made famine the withholding of food or both deportation through which death can occur in transit you know accidentally of course or through forced labor exhaustion illness hunger or cold the soviet union's experiment with socialism included what these authors call its venture into planned logical and politically correct mass slaughter so so when your professors have these pictures of malty tongue in their office where you see somebody wearing a shea guavara t-shirt and they always take the moral high ground don't they on the college campus as a socialist they're always a social justice you know the social justice these are the people they assert are associating with this is what they're associating with you know how how how much justice to all these millions of dead people get who dissented against socialism so you need to throw that in their face i some of my students uh that were members of college republicans got the uh were in my class and they they got these data on all the deaths and they had sort of the the day where you can join they all set up booths on campus outside and you can join this club or that club they you know the the fencing club or the swimming club or the and they had the the republican club and they were handing out these statistics on death by government and and they told me that they didn't run across one student who had ever heard anything at all about any of it they totally didn't know one person ever died under under socialism in the 20th century and these are all you know 20 21 year old students okay the next next point i would make is fascism is the same as is a form of socialism and Hayek explained this pretty clearly in the road to surf surf them you know there was a false dichotomy that is credited with Joseph Stalin himself where he claimed that uh you know there's a difference between communism and fascism because you know the germans were fascist and uh and uh his enemies you know after a while they were his his allies for a while at the beginning of world war two but then his enemies and so he the the russians pretty much they succeeded and with a lot of help by leftist academics and others to say that if well if you're not a economist and if you're not a communist you're a fascist and who wants to be associated with hitler and so you want to be associated with the nice socialist Stalin and so you know in our mouthy tongue and so but they're basically the same thing you know after all uh Nazi means national socialism the national socialist german workers party after all that's that's what it what the word means um so here's what Hayek said the dominant feature of fascism Hayek said was a fierce hatred of anything capitalistic individual profits seeking large-scale enterprise banks joint stock companies department stores international finance and loan capital and the interest the system of what they called interest slavery you know the charging interest slavery in uh in in general okay and so if you look at the the the fascists of the 20th century like Mussolini Hitler uh before they became into power especially Mussolini they spent years denouncing classical liberalism adam smith what they call the english tradition which would have been the english tradition of john lock adam smith classical liberalism and they actually used the word classical liberalism and their denunciations so let me take it from the horse's mouth uh i read uh years ago i read Mussolini's biography autobiography you know it's kind of funny he writes an autobiography and he was a phd and he had a phd in philosophy i think he was a highly educated uh italian and but but his biography the title reminded me of uh well if you gave a third grader the assignment write a bi autobiography and give it a title that's your homework assignment for the weekend and his the title of his autobiography was my autobiography it's like a third grader my autobiography right well well i went got ice cream and i went and yes but anyway but but the substance was there's more substance than that and his is uh he also wrote a book called fascism doctrine and institutions he said this the fascist conception of conception of life stresses the importance of the state and accepts the individual only insofar as his interests coincide with the state it is opposed to classical liberalism doesn't get any clearer than that of course classical liberalism is the philosophical underpinning of capitalism you know read misi's book liberalism that's why misi's called his book liberalism classical liberalism and he said it is opposed to classical liberalism which denied the state in the name of the individual okay that's Mussolini he was on to say the maximum that society exists only for the well-being and freedom of the individuals composing it does not seem to be in conformity with nature's plans which care only for the species and seem ready to sacrifice uh the individual he says uh the idea that individuals should be sacrificed for the greater good is the essence of the fascist philosophy so that's uh Mussolini himself in the german fascism there's a man named paul lynch who was one of the sort of the ideological godfathers of german fascism he wrote a book called three years of world revolution and uh he said he said this he condemned english liberalism classical liberalism he said is a classical embodiment and which was adopted by the spokesman of the german bourgeoisie in the 50s 60s and 70s of the 19th century but these standards are old-fashioned and shattered just as old-fashioned english liberalism has been shattered what has to be done now is to get rid of these inherited political ideas and to assist in the growth of a new conception of state and society and this sphere also socialism must present a conscious and determined opposition to individualism that's that's one of the intellectual godfathers of naziism saying that and so of course socialism and fascism were the same thing and uh the jews were were seen as symbols of capitalism to the nazis uh hayek wrote this he wrote uh he quoted uh him saying the party nazi party come this is hitler himself speaking from mind conf the party combats the jewish materialist spirit within and without us and is convinced that our nation can achieve a permanent health from within only on the principle the common interests before the self-interest and so right out of hitler's mouth himself he said that you know he thought the jewish people were symbols of capitalism and that's why he wanted to destroy them and capitalism and the nazis by the way nationalized about 50 percent of the german economy they just took over about half of all the factories and things and the rest were heavily regulated and regimented by the government so that they were de facto nationalized and so uh and hayek wrote in the in red serfdom that you know the government takes over 50 percent of all the means of production and regulates the other 50 percent endlessly it's pretty much pure socialism it's it's uh it's not anything else okay point number eight that i would make since you know if you look up the democratic socialists of america and other other leftist groups today they want unlimited welfare uh they want to bring in all the every peasant every last peasant from the third world and put them on welfare here in the united states you know they say it right there in their websites and so what do we know about socialist well welfare state well of course it encourages dependency which is a form of slavery to the state uh it crowds out private charity uh when you know people people a lot of people take the attitude well the government will take care of my parents and their old age so i don't need to save up for them social security will take care of them i don't need to educate my own children the government is educating my children i don't need to lift a finger to help the poor people in my neighborhood uh the single mother who lost her job and it still has three kids to feed i don't need to do anything for her because the government is taking care of her she gets a welfare check and so it crowds out private individual efforts either individually or collectively to do these things and of course the private efforts are always much more effective it destroys families and that was always one of the one of the things that was emphasized in the in the communist manifesto the abolition of the family because if you're if you're uh if your allegiance is to your family you can't it's not to the states and so you can't have that you know every type of allegiance must be eliminated whether it's the state the local government or anything else religion you know you can't can't let that exist and so uh and there's a big literature on this i would recommend reading charles murray's landmark book losing ground if you if you've never heard of it or read it about the effects of the welfare estate charles murray worked for the federal government for 15 years after getting his phd in political science and statistics from mit and his job was to evaluate welfare programs and boy did he learn a lot and then then he left the government and years later wrote this book losing ground that had to do with a lot of the research he had conducted all this time about the effects of the welfare estate so uh i don't have time to get into it much more than that but i would just recommend uh looking that up if you want to learn a little bit about these things i just said about the effects of the of the welfare estate you know the first plank of the communist manifesto is abolition of private property big capital letters plank number two there's a ten ten planks of you know ten i ten things that we've pretty much adopted all of them here in the united states saved a long time ago but the second one was a progressive income tax the heavy used the word heavy heavy progressive income tax the second plank you know second most important thing to carl marx and frederick angles and of course we know that the the income tax penalizes work thrift and entrepreneurship and and fuels envy and class warfare and that's called fairness that's what we call that we call that fairness but it does something even worse than that is it's the nationalization of income when the u.s. government adopted an income tax in the year 1913 it was announcing that all the income that you produce from now on is ours we the government own all of your income and we will tell you how much of it you're allowed to keep by setting the tax rates but it's ours if we want to set the tax rate at 90 we have that right now if we want to set it at 10 we have that right too but your income is ours so they nationalize the income and and what that means is that you know the government when uh as a lot of you know i've written quite a bit about the american civil war and lincoln and these things uh well there was a huge desertion crisis in the u.s. army and during the civil war you read you read i've read these books about desertion and you never taught this in school but there would be times when on the eve of a big battle there would be 80 thousand union army soldiers in camp and then the next day when the battle begins there's 10 thousand where'd they go they're massive and but the government was small enough that it just didn't have the resources to hunt down the the deserters they they hid out in the mountains of pennsylvania or someplace like that but with an income tax with the government's ability to put its its paws in everybody's pockets there's no problem you know you're not going to desert from the army they're going to track you down and shoot you probably you put you in prison make you live in a cage for a long time or execute you because they can hire thousands and thousands of people to go out and find you once they have all that money and so the income tax created a tremendous centralization of power in the nation's capital because now the nation's capital had its its hand in everybody's pocket with the income taxes so it basically nationalized everybody's income uh the final point i would make since all of your your your uh snowflake uh uh classmates with the capitalism must die t-shirts uh claimed to be environmentalists they need to know that the worst environmental catastrophes in human history have taken place in the socialist countries uh during the right when when communism was socialism collapsed in the soviet union and eastern and central europe you know these were closed societies for the most part for decades and so you couldn't just go and look around uh there this this same this mont Peller and society meeting i attended to when i was uh a long time ago i was young a story about that is that the meeting before that was in the west berlin and you were allowed to go into east berlin and so hayek himself and milton freedman and some of these older mont Peller and members got on a bus and went on a tour and and and the the the guards the east german guards found out that they were part of the mont Peller and society and mont Peller and is a mountain in switzerland so they thought it was a mountain climbing society and they see feeble old william h hut here you know and hayek you know he's he they said these guys aren't mountain climbers so they held them up for like hours they maybe went through all the any luggage they had and everything and as far as that goes but uh but once communism collapsed we were able to freely walk around and so there were all these books have been written with titles like ecocide in the ussr ecological suicide and i wrote quite a few articles there's one the easiest to read one is in the freeman i think i think they titled it how socialism causes pollution but what we found was with things like uh in lake bycal the biggest freshwater lake in the world uh there were they uh non-treated sewage had been pumped into it for for 70 years and uh and there were articles in the in the wall street journal new york times places like that about how there were islands of sewage three miles wide and eight miles long floating around lake bycal because you imagine being on a sunny day being out there in your sailboat and you kind of fall asleep because you've had a couple of beers and then the and the boat kind of crashes into something and you and you wake up and there's an island of crap eight miles long just ran into uh and there were stories of uh in parts of eastern europe where the soil was uh contaminated down to a foot deep because of decades of overuse of chemical fertilizers nothing would grow uh in poland if you have lung disease they would send you to underground uranium mines to to improve your health and i would think it's not not the safest place to be next to uranium under the earth but uh in in parts in the industrial parts of poland there were stories of how several times a day uh fire trucks would go through town with big hoses to knock the lead and cadmium dust out of the air uh and uh an old friend who who uh grew up and lived in former ukoslavia and was a lawyer for the government iven pungrasic senior yeah there's some of you might know the young iven pungrasic with his father uh he was a government lawyer under the ukoslavian government of communism and so he had privileges and so having privileges he was able to get a nice apartment but he picked the 30th floor in a building with no elevator and so and i asked him once uh did you do that for physical fitness you know in training for the senior olympics or what's that he said oh no i'd say the the pollution is so bad that you can't if you can't open your windows below the 30th floor as you know that you can't see anything for one thing and it's a and then all the pollution the lead dust and everything comes in in your house and so so we have these economic catastrophes and so uh and that by the way calls into question the whole paguvian theory about pollution doesn't it because the basic theory is that the root cause of pollution problems is unregulated free markets but in these societies that outlawed unregulated free markets for 50 60 70 years we had the by far the worst pollution problems in the world and so and so that's that's that point now one more point i'll make is that and we'll wrap it up is that socialism is uh is a is a cause of inequality not equality capitalism is the great equalizer you know how many stories do you need to be told of the immigrant who comes to america or the person born into a poor family who makes something of himself and creates starts a business and becomes an entrepreneur and becomes wealthy how many how many times you have to see that its capitalism is the great equalizer economic freedom is the great equalizer socialism is the great stultifier out there because as hayek said under socialism the only power worth having is political power so the politically connected live very well everybody else is equal in their poverty i read i read a while back for example that the daughter of the former president of venezuela is reportedly worth what's the number they gave reportedly worth i think uh four billion dollars or something like that some huge amount of wealth and uh you know did she invent microsoft or something like that apple computer how did she become worth billions of dollars i also read that the former finance minister of venezuela who no longer who left the country i think he lives in switzerland now is worth billions of dollars in wealth and so i also read it is as dire as things are for the ordinary people in venezuela today still the politically politically connected still belong to country clubs and live live a pretty decent life there while other people are eating dogs and cats and things like that in that in that country and so and that's always been true of socialism no matter where it is the political elite live not live well the castra fiddle castra had you know he had five or six big mansions on the on the caribbean and as far as that goes joseph stallin was the wealthiest man in the world during his time not john d rockefeller he essentially claimed ownership to the whole soviet union rockefeller never owned that much property as far as that goes so of course socialism is the great unequalizer not the great equalizer and it looks like my time is about up and that's my story for now and i'm sticking to it and so and remember jeff deist is standing by the door and he won't let you out unless you buy a copy of this of this book