 Well, let's get started. So, you know, thanks for coming on. We're talking welfare today. And we're going to just, I guess we're going to outline our ideologies and get into it. It's not a very formal structured conversation, more of a podcast style discussion. So I guess I'll start. My general philosophy with regards to welfare is that we need it. It's good. The government has a strong, to me, a moral role and an empirical sort of positive role in establishing a welfare state for people. And that that welfare state to me has been shown to alleviate to an incredible degree extreme poverty in the countries where welfare states have been implemented. Now, of course, we have to talk about what we define as welfare. To me, I define welfare as pretty much any cash or non-cash benefit that goes to people with some sort of, you know, qualification rights. So I would include health care programs, social security, food stamps, unemployment insurance. These are all welfare programs. And so that's my thought. YouTube. I see. So you're streaming YouTube. That makes sense. Yeah. All right. You guys should be able to hear me now. There's no conversation going on on Discord, is there? I mean, other than us. No, no. It's just us and it's streamed on different platforms. All right. You guys should be able to hear me now. But all right. So now that we've figured that out, my goodness. Yeah. So I would define those as forms of welfare. I think they're good things. And I think that in an American context, we could stand to expand those forms of welfare to some great degree. What are your thoughts? Yeah. So I take very much the opposite view. I think welfare state is inherently immoral and inherently disastrous primarily to the people who it supposedly is helping out. That is the poor and the extremely poor. I don't think the welfare state has brought anybody out of extreme poverty. I think extreme poverty, people have been brought out of extreme poverty. The economy has brought economic growth brings people out of extreme poverty. It's only relatively wealthy countries after they've grown because of relatively free markets that can even afford a welfare state. But the actual getting out of extreme poverty is a feature of free markets, not a feature of the welfare state. But more importantly, I think it's immoral. I think it's immoral for two reasons. One is, I think it is immoral for the state to use coercion to take my money for any purpose. And certainly for purposes that have, that basically reallocated to other people. That is, I think it is wrong for other people to gain benefit through coercion from my income. And it is a violation of what I think this role of the state is, which is to protect my freedoms, to protect me, not to violate my freedoms, not to coerce me. So I think it is a politically negation of the fundamental role of the state. And economically, I think it is, so one more aspect, morally, and then I'll go to economically. And finally, morally, I think it provides perverse incentives to poor people. I think it basically institutionalizes people into poverty and it reduces ambition. It reduces the things that make kind of a flourishing, successful, prosperous, long-term life. You know, really exciting and kind of worth living. So it hurts the people, it purports the help. Among other things it does that by, and this is my economic critique of the welfare state, welfare states are suppressed wealth creation. They suppress economic growth. And sadly, I don't have the counterfactual parallel universe to prove this, to prove it empirically. But poor people would be far, far better off without them. And so it hurts them by basically giving them the false illusion and letting them live in a fantasy land that is, everything is fine, everything's okay. When they could be living in a far better world, that requires a lot more of them, but actually provides them with far greater economic well-being. Yeah, we can kind of start on those lines. So I guess to talk about some of that stuff, what I would say is that welfare to me has been proven to be fairly effective at alleviating a great deal of extreme poverty in the world. You mentioned that the thing that alleviates a lot of poverty isn't welfare, it's markets, it's economic growth. And to a large degree I would agree, I'm not a socialist, I'm a capitalist, I think the profit motive in market economics makes a lot of sense. But I think that within reason though, we can imagine a world that is made better by distributing some of those games to lower income people who need it to the extent that you're incentivizing innovation. And to some extent also bolstering innovation. You mentioned that poor people would be much better off without welfare because it entraps them to some extent. It allows them to fall into the mindset of welfare to where they don't need to innovate, they don't need to strive. But I would tell you that to me it's the exact opposite. I think that in a lot of countries with pretty robust welfare systems, we see the opposite. Because after all it's pretty difficult to work on the next big technological innovation in your garage when you've got hunger and poverty looming over you the entire time, especially when you have to work another job or two in order to meet your needs. Rather I think that at least in my view welfare can provide a bolstering effect on innovation for that reason. You also mentioned that we don't have a counterfactual. Obviously we don't have a world where there's no welfare, but we did have that world for a long time. For a long time the government didn't provide very much social welfare. And that was a world with a lot more, let's say economic precariousness, a lot more poverty than we have today. Now obviously you could always ultimately say that the gains in poverty at those times were because of innovation, because of industrialization, because of economic growth. And again we don't have any disagreements that economic growth can bring people out of poverty. But when we started to see social security and welfare programs come online in response to like the Great Depression for instance, we saw real increases in people's standard of living. Social security has been one of the most successful anti-poverty programs of all time that the US has implemented themselves. And I would say that in sort of the broader context of the world, anti-poverty and welfare programs have been shown to give real increases in lower income people's standards of living. And I don't think it's a coincidence that the countries with the most welfare, or countries that we would perceive as having the most welfare, countries like Norway, Sweden, Iceland, the Nordic countries broadly, that those countries also have some of the highest rates of social mobility, entrepreneurship and income mobility in the entire world. I don't think that that is a coincidence. Wow, okay, so where do I start? It's a lot to unpack. And it's, you know, you're working off of a lot of kind of mainstream conventional wisdom, so I'm going to have to spend time unpacking the conventional wisdom. Unpack it, Jaren. Unpack it. Yeah, let's go. All right, let me just start by saying, so far we haven't talked about the moral aspects that I let off with. You know, I hope we go back to that because economics is interesting, but I don't think ultimately economics moves the world. I think it is morality, and I think that's why we have a welfare state for moral reasons. There's nothing to do with economics. But let me address the economic issues that you've raised so far. Let me start with the end. Let me start with Scandinavian countries. Scandinavian countries have high mobility only because the gap between relative poor and relative wealth is small. So if you have a distribution that is very narrow, yes, it's easy to move across that distribution very quickly. So it's meaningless to talk about mobility in Scandinavian countries and compare it to mobility in the U.S. What's much more interesting is the look at mobility in a country like the U.S. pre-welfare state and post-welfare state. And mobility was far higher in the United States before the establishment of any welfare programs, including Social Security in the 1930s than it was post a free market, a true free market, not relative welfare states. Not one welfare state is compared to another. A true free market is the most mobile because it is based on ability. It is not based on the fact that it is based on what you're able to do. You talked about the pre-welfare state world. Well, let's take the pre-welfare state world. In the 18th century, 17th century, however far back we want to go, basically if you look at Western Europe and the United States, almost everybody was extremely poor as defined by the United Nations, $2 a day or less. The entire population was extremely poor except for some aristocrats and maybe some city dwellers, some merchants in the city. During a period where there was no welfare state for about 150 years, extreme poverty was basically, as extreme poverty as the UN defined it, eradicated in the West, in Western Europe and the United States. Just take a country like Sweden, which is one of everybody's favorite countries because it used to have a robust welfare state, less so today. Sweden was the poorest country in Europe in the 1860s, 1870s. 1870 liberated its economy, basically created the freest economy in Europe, one of the freest in the world, if not the freest at the time. From 1870 through World War II, Sweden basically grew its own fastest economic rates in all of history. Basically, it eradicated extreme poverty in Sweden without any welfare or with very, very little welfare in the 20s and 30s, but almost none. It then adopted socialist policies of massive redistribution of wealth in the 60s and 70s and through the 80s. By 1984, Sweden was basically bankrupt. Since then, it has been reforming its welfare state, shrinking the size of the welfare state. It's still big by U.S. standards, but it's significantly less than what Denmark has and it's significantly less than what it had in its past. But most of that wealth that was being redistributed during those 60s, 70s, 80s was wealth that had been created during its period of free markets. Sweden went through a period when in the 19th century, early 20th century, it had a significant number of the largest businesses in Europe were based in Sweden. It was entrepreneurial. It was massively innovative. It was, as I said, economic growth was robust. It then got to a point where in the late 1970s, the two biggest industries in Sweden were ABBA, the pop group, and Johan Borg, the tennis player. So it had lost its leadership industrial-wise. It had lost its leadership entrepreneur-wise. Today, entrepreneurship is back in Sweden, not in Denmark, not so much in Norway, not so much in Finland, but certainly in Sweden. And if you look at that, it has very little, if anything, to do with welfare because the welfare state has actually been shrinking from 1994 to today. But it has everything to do with the fact that Sweden has very, very loose regulations. It's reduced the regulatory burden on businesses significantly and, as a result, made it much, much easier to start businesses and be an entrepreneur in Sweden than it had been in the past. But again, the real contrast, and again, we can use social mobility. I forget the other two parameters that you use for the Scandinavian countries. But generally, if you look at Scandinavians, for example, Denmark, Sweden, if they were US states, in terms of GDP per capita adjusted for cost of living, would be well below the average of a US state. They would be closer to some of the poorest states in the South. The United States is significantly richer than on a GDP per capita basis than Scandinavia is. Americans live in bigger homes, they drive bigger cars, they have more money to spend and to save. And if you look at life expectancy, people always bring this up. Life expectancy of Swedes in the United States is about the same as life expectancy of Swedes in Sweden as are measures of happiness. So there's nothing special about Scandinavia. It's a nice place to live relative to what we have today in the world. But it's also a pretty dull place to live in a sense that there's little ambition, particularly in a place like Denmark or even more so in Norway. Productivity is not increased as much as it has in other places, certainly not as much as it could in a free market. Entrepreneurship is nowhere near the potential. Israel is more entrepreneurial than most Scandinavian countries. There's just nothing to write home about and then France, of course, which spends on welfare about as much as Scandinavia does. You don't get any of the so-called pluses that the Scandinavian countries seem to have. Maybe because France is bigger, less homogeneous and is more similar in that sense to the United States. So maybe if you take away some of the factors that make Scandinavia unique, you don't get some of the supposed benefits that everybody sees in Scandinavia. So no, I think extreme poverty was eradicated in the West by capitalism, by free markets. The welfare state has basically taken all the wealth that was created during that time and spends much of that wealth. And in the process, it has dramatically slowed economic growth. Poverty in the United States, relative poverty, not absolute poverty, of course, but relative poverty in the United States has not decreased since the 1970s. It was decreasing fast before the war on poverty started. It continued to decrease in the beginning of the war on poverty and since then has been flat. Poor people in the United States, social mobility in the United States has been hurt in my view by the welfare state. Social mobility has shrunk because of the welfare state. And economic growth is pathetic and has been pathetic since the 1970s, since we started this large experiment in massive redistributions of wealth. And we can talk about social security. I've spoken for a long time, so let me put aside social security. I disagree with you completely about social security. I think social security has been an unmitigated disaster and is going to be even worse in the future. But it's basically harmed Americans both because it reduces economic growth and because irresponsible people retire on less money. And what social security does is reward irresponsibility and penalize responsibility. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so yeah, we can hop just kind of point by point there. You talk about the Nord countries broadly, you mentioned that the only reason that they have high mobility is because the income inequality in those countries is very, very low. Obviously, what I would say to that is that the income inequality in those countries is very, very low because of the welfare programs that they have, the redistribution, the taxing schemes that they have there. Let me just point. I don't view income inequality, I don't view small income inequality as a good thing. I don't know why income inequality matters one way or the other. They have, I agree with you, they have smaller inequality, less inequality because of the welfare state, but why is that a good thing? Yeah, sure, I can talk about that. But in general, though, I don't understand why. To me, that doesn't make as much sense, especially relative to the next point that you made, which was that mobility before the 1930s, before all this U.S. welfare program came online was a lot higher. But I could also say that this was because there were a lot more poor people at the time. And we were also going through many technological shifts and economic growth that would bring a lot of people out of poverty. Again, we don't disagree that economic growth brings people out of poverty. The disagreement is really what the role of the welfare state is, what the role of the government is in terms of providing for its most vulnerable people. To me, that's the disagreement, not necessarily that economic growth can have these changes in general. You talk about Sweden cutting back their welfare state in general. As a proportion of the economy, Sweden spends about as much today on welfare as it did in the 1980s. To me, the fact that Sweden has lower incomes on average is not quite as relevant to me as how they take care of their lowest income and most vulnerable people. It's much better to be poorer in those countries than in our country, the United States. To me, that is a moral failing of the United States. It appears that these countries can quite effectively take care of lower income people. And all that I would suggest is that we borrow some of their success stories and apply them to our country. If we can eradicate certain forms of extreme poverty, then we should. Now, that's not to say we talk about the U.S. now. That's not to say that the U.S. has been a complete failure in this regard. Obviously, you mentioned that relative poverty has not decreased in the United States. The poverty line has been relatively flat, seems to hover between 10% and 15% since the war on poverty started. But the problem with this is that it's true, but it's kind of misleading. Because the poverty rate, at least the headline rate, is just an income. That's all that it's measuring. It's income. But it doesn't take into account any distributions that are afforded to people on account of the welfare state. The studies that I've seen that actually take into account these income transfer and distribution programs have shown that the poverty rate is actually the true poverty rate, the consumptive poverty rate, how many people have what they need, how many people have the income and the sort of in-kind contributions and distributions that they need to survive. That rate, on account of the welfare state, has gone down precipitously since these programs have been implemented. One study that I found, I think it was published by the Federal Reserve, found that basically since the war on poverty began, since these anti-poverty programs started in the early-mid 1960s, there's a huge disconnect between the official poverty rate and the poverty rate taking into account these income distributions. Official poverty rate, as of 2017-18, the end of the study's data, was about 12.3%. But then when you take into account all the distributions that you get on account of being very poor, very vulnerable, it's 2.3%. And so I think that that is very, very positive. It's decreased precipitously since the 1960s. And the last thing that I would say is that I would ask the question, you know, who is going to take care of vulnerable elderly people? Who's going to take care of people with disabilities, people who are unable to work, either temporarily or permanently? Who's going to take care of people who've been made disabled by the state? You know, we talk about cops, we talk about members of the military, stuff like that. To me, this is the bare minimum case for a pretty generous welfare scheme. Obviously, the free market is free at any time to solve a lot of the poverty that we see today, but the free market chooses not to. And it's because, well, you know, obviously giving a bunch of money to people who are poor isn't a very profitable venture. If I were to call myself a capitalist, I would recognize that this is a market failure and it is a societal failure if we don't do anything about it. Well, I completely disagree with that. That is, I don't measure the success of anything based on the poorest in society. I'm not a Wallsian and I don't think the standard for measuring economic success or moral success or well-being is how is the poorest in the economy doing? I think that is a false measure. I think it's ridiculous to measure it based on that. Most of us are not good poor. Why not base it on how most of us are doing? But I don't think even that is a good measure. I think the best measure of whether a system is a virtuous system is whether virtuous people do well in such a system. And I think what happens in virtuous here in the context of economics is people who are rational, productive, hardworking, people who want to try to make their life better, people who are ambitious for themselves. And here I think the welfare state is an absolutely unmitigated disaster. I think basically what the welfare state tells a young poor kid who's growing up in the inner city first, it tells them the society doesn't actually care about him because they send him to the worst school possible because public education, which I think is part of the welfare state, is an unmitigated disaster. He then, it grows up in an environment where people are not working, where people are getting checks from the government because the government thinks so little of them that they don't think they can survive through their own effort, through their own entrepreneurial ability, through their own hard work. That we as a society think so poorly of them that we send them checks to keep them down and to keep them away from us and to keep them so vile, if you will. And he grows up with that kind of attitude and that kind of mentality. And if he's ambitious and wants to do stuff, then he realizes that if he gets a job, the marginal income tax rate he actually pays if he gives up welfare to take a job is through the roof. It's over 90%. And that everything society is indicating to him, everything the government is telling him, everything, every signal he gets from the people around him is, why work, why be ambitious, stay poor, stay ignorant, just stay out of our way. And to me, that's what we've done. And you can talk about, you know, poverty has gone down to 2. something percent because of the redistributive effect. Yes, but those people who survive because of redistribution, what kind of life are they living? They're living a horrible life. They're living a life of dependency, a life of entitlement, a life that is morally oppressive to them, a life of no ambition and no work. And if we believe, I believe at least, that much of our self-esteem, much of our dignity, much of our self-respect in life comes from work. When we deny people work, which I think the welfare does to a large extent, then we deny them the ability to have all those things, self-esteem, self-respect, and the knowledge that they can take care of themselves, the knowledge that they can feed their families, and we deny them all of that. So I think all of that is horrific. I think the welfare state does a horrible, horrible job of treating the poor, and I think it's the poor I'm most concerned about. Of course, I think the welfare state is also a moral in placing a duty on me. Now, what would happen to the poor in a non-welfare state? Well, they'd work, and they'd work because capitalism free markets, when you don't tax, at the rates that we've taxed, creates many more jobs than are available. This is why free markets tend to be massive magnets for immigrants because there's so many jobs. They would get a job, and their productivity would increase, and their wages would increase with productivity, and not only would they ultimately earn far more than they get from the welfare state, but they would also, at the same time, have the respect, the dignity, the self-esteem that comes from knowing that they produced the wealth they didn't take from somebody else. They weren't just words of the state and actually had the dignity and self-esteem to stand up and be proud of their own life and their own work and their own ability and their own success. That's how I think we eliminated poverty in the West before the welfare state. And what happened that once we established welfare states, starting in Germany in the late 19th century and across the West in the 20th century, is we took that option away from people. And as I said, I don't have the counterfactual other than to say that the developing world, you know, the countries that have seen the greatest reduction in absolute poverty over the last 40 years don't have welfare states. They have brought people out of poverty through markets. They brought people out of poverty without a welfare state, but through economic growth. And that is the right way, the moral way and the way that benefits poor people the most. Okay, yeah, I get what you're saying there. I guess we can kind of go, again, a little line by line here. I don't think that, number one, I'm not sure if I've heard an adequate response. It sounds like we've moved beyond some of my talking points to some extent. So obviously when I talk about how, you know... Happy to go backwards if I miss something. Yeah, no worries, no worries at all. Obviously when I talk about, you know, the real poverty rate doesn't take into account these distributions and me, when you take into account those distributions, that shows that the poverty, anti-poverty programs of Western countries have been very successful. To me, you kind of end up going into more of a talk about... Well, morally speaking, I'm not sure if it makes enough sense to judge a system's efficacy by how much it takes care of the poor, which seems to be implying that at least in a cash sense, in a benefit sense, these programs do take care of poor people in terms of getting them the money and the in-kind benefits they need to consume the things that they want to consume. So it appears we might agree on that to some extent. It seems like what you're saying is, well, even if that's true though, that's bad because that's not the best way to judge how moral a system is. So I take it that we agree that, well, the welfare programs are actually effective at getting people the consumption they want or need, but rather, we're just disagreeing on, well, is that actually long-term beneficial? You say that the welfare state is an unmitigated disaster because it tells a person who's poor, you're worthless, you can't survive on your own hard work, and it also tells the same person that if he does get a job that the marginal income tax is over 90% and who the heck cares about working hard if you're going to have to pay all those taxes anyway. And my response to that would be that, well, obviously I just disagree, but I think that really what it tells him is that he lives in a society which takes care of its most vulnerable people, a mutualist society that you can be the richest person on one day and if you go bankrupt and become the poorest person the next day, you'll have these systems to fall back on and you'll pay a disproportionately larger percentage into those systems when you've gotten that step up, when you've made it out in general. You talk about a marginal income tax rate of 90%, I think obviously you'd recognize you're exaggerating that to some extent. I don't know of any, frankly, of any country that the marginal income tax is 90%, maybe that was back in the day, that was true, but that was a very small portion of people that paid that and it's also marginal at the end of the day anyway. It's a progressive tax system, I agree, but where are we going to say yarn? You're missing the point. If you're in welfare, you get, I don't know, you get X number of dollars in welfare benefits. When you start working, you lose that benefit. That loss is part of that, you know, so if you calculate how much you've got net, net of the benefit by working, what's left to you is very, very little. So if you take the taxes you pay plus the loss of benefit, the equivalent marginal tax rate is 90%, that's what I meant and you can see calculations like that on Denmark, Sweden and in the United States that the incentive to actually get a job given that you're losing benefits is very, very low, but let me address a different issue that you just brought up. I agree with you that, yes, if I give somebody a check, they didn't have that check before, so they have more money to use, you know, to consume. The real question is from the perspective of the wellbeing of people, is that the best way in which we can eradicate poverty? And I mentioned the fact that I didn't believe it was, that I thought economic growth, free markets, jobs, increase in productivity, which I think are all reduced because of the welfare state. I think those are much better ways, both morally and ultimately economically, than having people checks and you can run this, you know, I'm going to make some assumptions that you're going to disagree with and that's fine, but let me just run with this for a second, right? Let's assume that the welfare state costs us a couple of percentages of economic growth a year because of a reduction in long-term investment, which I think is real. So take a state like the United States today, which is growing at 2% a year, and take the lowest income you can imagine and grow it at 2% a year over the next 40 years, and you'll get, you know, you'll get a significant increase in wages over those 40 years where somebody is doing much, much better. But it's nothing to write home about. It's not dramatic. But then grow the economy at 5% a year and suddenly there is no poverty. There's not just no absolute poverty, but there is no poverty. Everybody's making, you know, well into the six figures and everybody's making a great income. So to the extent that the welfare state actually reduces economic growth, which in my view there's no question that it does, it is hurting poor people because it's reducing wages and it is reducing opportunities and as a poor people, it's hurting all of us and there's no reason to sacrifice the middle class or the wealthy or anybody for another group. Again, both morally and economically, the welfare state is a drag on the entire economy and the entire world. Sure, sure, yeah. I don't, again, I feel like you keep coming back to the idea that, you know, the best way to alleviate poverty is economic growth, you know, market economics. And I don't disagree to some extent, right? I think there was a quote attributed to the former mayor of Detroit who once said that there's no problem that a good paying job can't fix, right? And obviously I agree with him that if someone who had a terrible job or who had no job gets a good paying job, there's quite a few problems in that person's life that are solved. However, obviously what we would have to quibble over is, well, how do we get those jobs, right? And I think that the government plays a really strong role in not only encouraging economic, what do you call it, economic growth, innovation, investment, but also providing for those people who are stuck in those vulnerable circumstances for one reason or another. For instance, there was a, there was a big report that came out about the people of Bangladesh. Bangladesh right now is going through a pretty big industrial, you could call it an industrial revolution, basically an economic awakening, which is built partly on the back of market economics. They're specializing, right? They're basically becoming the textile manufacturer of all of South Asia and Greater Asia and the world. And that's caused them to be per capita wealthier than Pakistan for the first time, I think in their country's history. So ever since they broke off from Pakistan, right? However, what this survey also showed was that a lot of the poverty that was associated with the people of Bangladesh was based purely on a lack of capital. And when exogenously there was an increase in the amount of capital that they had available to them, whether it came from the private market or from government incentives or from international grants, that that in and of itself was able to end the cycle of poverty that many, many millions of these people found themselves in. So giving people that initial help, that one-time injection or that continuous injection of cash into their pockets or in-kind benefits into their pockets is very, very crucial at alleviating the worst effects of poverty and getting rid of that cycle of poverty that seems to affect so many generations. And when you talk about the last thing that I'll mention is that a point that I couldn't get to before you jumped in was that you mentioned that without the welfare state, people would get better jobs, they would stand up, they'd be proud. You mentioned it seemingly, again, just now, if we didn't have the welfare state, basically people would just get better jobs, incomes would go up, and you wouldn't need the welfare state. I think the problem with this is that it's ahistorical. Again, for hundreds of years, we didn't have a welfare state. And although a lot of people got out of poverty based purely on mostly market mechanics, sort of, you know, incomes going up, industrialization, you know, innovation over time, we didn't eliminate poverty in the West. Obviously, you referenced the poverty rate earlier. So you know that that's not true. We still had a lot of poverty before the welfare state. And so I don't agree. However, when you look at poverty rates after we, what do you call it, implement the welfare state, they've gone down when you actually take into account those benefits. I don't agree. I think that people are much better off with a welfare state. And I don't think it hurts economic growth. I mean, you know, you talk about, the last thing I'll mention here is that, you know, you mentioned, well, just the last thing I'll mention is that you mentioned, you know, the countries with, the countries that are growing the most that are getting rid of the most poverty right now are countries with very, very little welfare. You know, you talk about China, or you didn't mention any countries, but you could talk about China. You could talk about, you know, maybe Singapore as an example, the Asian Tigers, stuff like that. Those are all countries with a huge amount of government involvement in the economy. And the Asian Tigers specifically have an incredibly large amount of welfare. For God's sakes, in Singapore, they have decommodified housing to a great extent. You can barely buy a car in Singapore. So, you know, all these countries are success stories, partially on the back of good government policy and stewardship of the economy. Although, of course, I wouldn't advocate anyone going to live in China anytime soon, but you get what I'm saying. Yeah, so a number of things. You're equivocating here on a lot of different things, and that's wrong. So, capital is not the same as welfare. Yes, any poor country can benefit enormously from capital invested in that country. That is ultimately the way in which you eradicate poverty is to bring capital into a place like Bangladesh that is exactly what's happening with the textile revolution and other revolutions that are happening there. That is the appropriate way to eradicate poverty, and that's not something the government does. That's something the private sector does. The government can do it. It just does it much less effectively. And in order to get that capital, it has to tax capital. It has to tax investment. It has to tax the wealthy. And therefore, by doing that, it's actually reducing investment and reducing capital that goes to create the jobs that alleviate the poverty in places like. So, you can equivocate between giving somebody a check as a welfare and between producing capital that actually is going to produce real jobs. You're also equivocating between absolute poverty and relative poverty. And when you talk about extreme poverty, that's absolute poverty. Extreme poverty is something that does not exist. Or if it does exist, it's so minor, it's to be irrelevant. In the United States and in Western Europe, there is no extreme poverty. Not $2 a day or less. Nobody in the United States, maybe a few homeless people live in $2 a day or less in the United States. Now with welfare, not without welfare. It just doesn't exist and it hasn't existed for a long, long time. Relative poverty is always relative poverty. Relative poverty is just a bell curve and you're deciding that randomly below some number is going to be poverty. And I'm sure that if everybody in the United States today was earning an income of six figures, everything else held constant, somebody would define people as relatively poor in spite of the fact that we're all relatively rich. So again, you can equivocate between relative poverty and absolute poverty. There are two different concepts. And the fact is that before capitalism, capitalism is a new thing. It's about 200 years old. Before capitalism, everybody was absolutely extremely poor. And capitalism without any welfare state and with very little government involvement, government basically involved in the protection of individual rights, primarily property rights, but that's it. Actually raised people out of absolute poverty. Yes, some people stayed relatively poor, but even that relative poverty, based on some number that somebody in the government defined in the Social Security Administration in the 1960s, even that number was declining before the welfare state in the United States was established, was declining precipitously before the welfare state was established, and continues to decline afterwards if you include redistribution as you mentioned. Okay, big deal. I could easily argue, and I think this would be true, that if we hadn't established a welfare state in the 1960s in the United States, then the poverty rate as defined by the Social Security Administration in the United States today would be even closer to zero than what you claim it is today. But you know, it's hard for me to prove that because as I said, I don't have a parallel universe in which that's run. But the fact is that the only way that you have been able that you can reduce, that you've reduced this relative poverty is by taking capital or taking wealth from some people and giving it to others. And this is the other equivocation you make. Of course, the welfare state reduces economic growth because where does economic growth come from? Economic growth comes from investment. It comes from entrepreneurship. That's where economic growth comes from. And what do you do with the welfare state? Two things. One is you take money away from people who tend to invest it, not to consume it. So reduce long-term investment in the economy by taxing that money away from them. And secondly, you reduce the pool of entrepreneurs because again, you incentivize poor people not to become entrepreneurs. I don't know anybody who started, I know very few people who started companies in Silicon Valley coming out off of welfare. Now, it's true. There are other things that suppress poor people's entrepreneurship. Licensing laws are horrific and they victimize the poor more than anything else. Various zoning laws, the restrictability within poor communities to start businesses are incredibly destructive to poor people. All kinds of fees and taxes placed on small businesses as they start are incredibly destructive to poor people. We have in the United States, sadly, very, very destructive policies in terms of the ability of ambitious poor people to be successful in their lives. Now, with regard to people who might still not be able to be successful in a free market, with regard to people who might still be poor in spite of all the job creation, in spite of the economic growth that is created by free market, well, then whoever cares about poor people has every ability to help them. That is, there's nothing in a free market, in a non-welfare state free market that prohibits people from helping poor people out in whatever way they want. And indeed, before there was a welfare state in the United States, there was a robust system, a private charity and private insurance, you could buy insurance to get poverty. It was quite robust, quite effective, and I think was partially, and rewarded people for actually doing the things that would actually get them on their feet again versus, again, the welfare state which provides the worst kind of perverse incentives to keep people in poverty rather than allow them to escape it. Okay, yeah. So, I guess to talk a little bit more about Bangladesh and the example thereof, I would disagree with how you frame that. So, I would say that welfare can absolutely be capital injections, right? I mean, after all the trials in Bangladesh, we're talking about giving people things like cows or chickens, what not. This can be welfare, right? I mean, giving someone a cow is not... Yeah, go on, Yarn. My cool lending is not welfare. I mean, it's very confusing if you're going to use those kind of... Welfare is a check from the government. Welfare is food stamps. Welfare is a direct assistant. Well, yeah, but giving someone a cow versus giving someone an EBT card. The cows are being... By nonprofits, the cows are being given to them by charities and the cows are being given to them by micro-lending organizations that are not government welfare programs. Well, wait, wait, wait, but no, but the point of that, the point of referencing that is not to say that this is a credit onto the Bangladeshi government. The point of referencing that was to say that, obviously, when you give people money or you give people some amount of capital, in this case, we're talking about basically feedstock and stuff like that, that that can result in a reduction in the cyclical poverty that might be ailing those communities, right? Whether it comes from private companies or it comes from the government. The experiment shows that when you do that, it's positive. So, I mean, that's the point of referencing that. There's been an experiment with UBI in Finland and it doesn't show that. But let me just point this out. Well, UBI is not something I'm advocating for, to be fair. Finland's also a very wealthy country. Obviously, there's a marginal trade-off here. There's a marginal benefit and cost here. If the money is given to the farmer or to the poor person and the poor person uses that money to consume, then that is not capital. The cow is capital. I agree with you. Stock seed is capital. Money given to the person to start a business is capital. There's a huge difference between money just handed to a person, which is what the welfare state does. It's handed for them to consume versus for them to invest and produce. Let me ask a question. If the US said, hey, instead of earning income tax credit, we're going to give you five grand a year to invest in the stock market. Would you call that welfare? In the stock market. Well, you're buying businesses. You're a business owner when you're a stock owner. It's a much more complicated question. But if you gave people $5,000 to start their own business, $5,000 to invest in a business locally that they could get cash flows from, I would say I would much favor that type of welfare program than I would a welfare program that just gave them. Yeah, sure. I mean, and again, I started out this conversation by saying we have to define what welfare means. And when the government is taxing or taking on a deficit to give people directly capital or cash, that they can either do what they want with or has strings attached to in the form of EBT or in-kind benefits like example giving them directly just giving them food or giving them cows or giving them assets or whatever they can work on. I would find all that is welfare. But apparently we have some differences in definition here. It misses very important differences. The fact is that no so-called welfare state in Western Europe and the United States gives people money in order to start businesses or get a cow where they can produce milk from. You know, it's really, really important that all these systems give people is cash. And that is a big difference. It's a big difference. And it's why I don't consider Bangladesh a welfare state whereas I do consider Sweden a welfare state. But if just cash transfers is what you're calling welfare, would you call a healthcare system that's subsidized by the state, would you consider that welfare? I consider that welfare, but again what I don't consider welfare is although I'm still against it but what I don't consider welfare is for example the government acting as a venture capitalist. That's not welfare, right? The government making investment in businesses or the government giving individuals money in order to start, like the small, what do you call it, the small business administration SBA loans. SBA loans are not welfare, even though they run very, very good terms and they're not on market terms. But it's not welfare in the same sense as me guarantee you a certain income that you're going to spend on consumption. Yeah, sure. I understand. It provides different incentives and it's wrong. If you said here two systems. One, we go into poor neighborhoods, we get everybody cash on an annual basis of food stamps or whatever, or we provide them with seed capital to start a business. Yeah, I'd be much more likely to support the seed capital than to give them a check. I'm against the government doing either one of them but of the two, the seed capital is by far superior. Not just the check, but often the welfare state limits what the person can do with the money. New consumptions, for example, food stamps is the money that is given to people in a sense that they can only buy food with rather than plant a garden from which they can take food. So it's the whole way in which the welfare state provides disincentives of people to invest, to produce, to work, to create. It reduces, as I said, it reduces ambition and it reduces happiness, it reduces success it reduces... We're going on a bit of a tangent there. All that I would say is that the purpose of bringing up the Bangladesh example is that the government can play a role in providing people either capital or, in my view, benefits so that they can achieve their initial consumption that they need today, they need the next week and they can therefore have more disposable and discretionary income that they can use for other purposes, whether it be entrepreneurship or whether it be simply paying off debts or whatever it might be. I don't think that's an unreasonable role of the government. Obviously, you also mentioned that sort of an add-on to this is that basically the government can in theory invest in capital that gives people but the government can't do that very efficiently relative to the market but I think that what I would disagree with is that the government can actually invest in capital to such an extent that you have net asset creation that is not wealth destroying. Obviously, when we've got scenarios where the government invests in human capital especially in many developing countries it seems to be very positive especially for the economy when the government invests in things like education or health systems whatever it might be. To go on to your other points that you mentioned before we got off on this talking about capital is that you mentioned that extreme poverty basically doesn't exist in the west you mentioned that obviously when it comes to extreme poverty it depends on how you define it but I mean I'm not really changing my definition of extreme poverty over time if we look at the relatively consistent ways that we've defined extreme poverty over time and how we've measured it across time those measurements show that welfare makes poor people wealthier it makes them to me live better lives overall. You can also say that capitalism is what alleviated a lot of extreme poverty I don't disagree I'm a capitalist I think that again good paying jobs economic growth that is the thing that reduces a lot of poverty it's more about the role of the state in terms of helping people along the way that aren't necessarily helped the market which brings me to your last point which was that you ended up bringing up what about people who can't work or are still at the end of the day disadvantaged by the market mechanisms surrounding them without welfare and you mentioned that well obviously working people can help those people however they want and again I would just pose the thought that today all people who are living in relative poverty all people who are homeless I imagine we'd agree to some extent that homeless people are living in living pretty rough let's say you know those people are free to be helped by the market at any time and the market certainly has the wealth to help those people but they don't right they don't for one reason or another private charity and private donations simply doesn't have the direction and magnitude that can help in such a deep way to help those people as broadly subsidize social welfare programs and many countries do a lot better taking care of homeless people than we do here in America and I think that it's important to learn from those models because those models don't seem to in any significant degree sacrifice their standard of living in order to take care of those people and that's what I would advocate for all right a few things one you're not a capitalist I believe things you know like I am yarn a capitalist how do you define capitalism capitalism means something capitalism is a system in which it does not interfere in the economy period does not hold on yarn can I ask a question we live in a mixed economy we live in a mixed economy today we have elements of capitalism we have elements of redistribution of socialism we have elements of call it fascism which is what I call the regulatory state can I ask a question so is your opinion that I mean genuinely is this your opinion is your opinion that capitalism is when the government doesn't do stuff is that your opinion my opinion is not at all I think the government has to do stuff the question is what stuff my opinion is the capitalism is that system in which the government only does what I think it's supposed to do which is protect rights that is protect property rights in the economic context protect individual and then we have a police force a military and a justice system but it has zero involvement in the economy so that is what capitalism is capitalism is when the government doesn't do economic stuff that's right I disagree I don't think that sounds like a contemporary definition of capitalism I think that if capital is free markets what are the markets supposed to be free of market to me capitalism is market mechanisms private investments the profit motive some combination of those three things yeah but all of those I have heavily heavy interventions from the government all of those manipulated and completely distorted by government policy so it's not pure capitalism in any kind of sense it's a mixed economy with capitalist elements all the things you mentioned are capitalist elements but we've got massive government involvement in every aspect of the economy so it loses meaning to say that the US today is a capitalist economy because then what's the difference between the US today and the US 100 years ago is it more capitalist less capitalist what does it even mean so there's more redistribution sure we're not capitalist anymore we are a state I disagree you know when the government is spending 40 plus percent of GDP we are no longer which it does if you include state and local government we are no longer capitalist economy so okay so that's my first point second point look I don't think the government has any role in the economy I don't think it does any good in the economy I don't believe that China and the asian tigers got rich because of government intervention I think they got rich in spite of government intervention and I can go through any one of those countries and show you how that happened indeed the best example of this of a country that got rich without government intervention is Hong Kong where there's almost no government intervention and got just as rich as all those other countries with a lot more difficult circumstances so no I don't think the government has had any positive role even though it's not to say that any particular investment didn't turn out a lot of its investments have had a positive wealth creation but in total relative to having left that wealth in private hands there's no doubt in my mind that we suffer from lower economic growth and less innovation and less prosperity because the government has become such a big part of our economy and invests so much so so I think we're net much worse off because of the government has taken on a role and I think that's true of the asian tigers and certainly true and China is learning going to learn that the hard way certainly true of China China China all the growth in China is from those sectors of the economy where the government basically was hands off and as the government is becoming more hands on right now you'll see dramatic economic shifts in China and a reduction in economic growth I don't think neither of us are central planners we can agree on that even the piece of the government that does central planning today whether it's a federal reserve or whether it's investment in different areas I think is ultimately economically destructive I don't think welfare people live better lives so you say they get more money they live better lives I think the alternative in which they don't get that money even if that means that for a while they are poorer I think their lives are better in those circumstances and some of us live worse life because we have to pay a lot of taxes in order to make their lives a little better why am I a sacrificial animal why is it okay to use coercion I mean no no I'm serious I'm absolutely serious you think you live a significant well I just want to answer the question you think that people like Bill Gates and you think they live significantly worse lives when I live in California 50% of my 50% of the margin was taken from me as a proud Texan I'd never advocate for living in California I mean you gotta we agree on that let me end by the point on charity which I think again is so deceptive first of all why do we have so many homeless people I mean we're not going to get a whole debate on that but we have a large homeless population in the United States because of government policies in a free market you would not have any way close to the number of homeless people you have today in America you'd have far far far less it is because of the welfare state as a whole primarily housing policy of our governments and local governments and federal governments that has caused that has caused a crisis in homelessness in the United States and by the way somebody who travels all over the world homelessness is a problem in other countries as well differently they hide it better but you know if you go walk around downtown Paris and France by the way spends I know you love to talk redistributionist status love to talk about Scandinavia but France spends about as much as Scandinavia does on welfare if you walk around Paris there are lots of homeless people in Paris and it's interesting France has never brought up but so I think homeless is a problem of government policy and the solution to it is not more welfare but less government intervention and primarily housing but what about charity today yeah of course charity is lower today I am a lot less charitable when 50% of my income is taken by the government then I would be if none of the money was taken by the government I'm far less charitable when I am told see we shut up when I'm told by the government that they're taking care of it don't worry we've got this but again in a free market charity would be substantial but I think more importantly it would be effective it would be like what's going on in Bangladesh it would be much more involved in providing the cow than in providing cash for consumption it would be much more involved in making sure the kids get a good education than the what in public schools that we have today it would be much more incentive adjusted to make sure to provide poor people with the right kind of incentives and not to destroy those incentives so I'm a huge believer in public charity in private charity but you know government crowds out capital always does everywhere it enters everywhere it goes private enterprise doesn't go because government crowds it out yeah I you know we can talk about France a little bit here I agree that France does spend a pretty good amount on well a lot of stuff I mean they have a pretty broad and expensive welfare state much like most of northern western Europe but really I guess Europe broadly and developed countries broadly but I don't necessarily disagree with that all that I would say is that I would advocate for models that appear to work and I wouldn't advocate for models that don't appear to work right obviously there are some welfare states that France is between Sweden and Denmark in terms of the amount of money they spend on social spending yeah I think in terms of public social spending yeah go on yarn what would you say less than Denmark or more than Sweden right right yeah and so I'm not I would never take the position that more money on welfare broadly means you know less poverty right it just depends on how you spend it right I mean obviously I have critiques of the US social spending that they do on welfare as well that could be made more efficient in my view but it's not to say that you know because what would you call it because some models work better than others we should throw away all the models no I mean we just again we advocate for models that work and we don't advocate for ones that don't work just because you spend more on social welfare it doesn't mean you necessarily get those same benefits it's obviously going to depend on how you spend it right now I'm not deeply familiar with the French model of how they you know take care of homeless people or what the context is behind all those people being homeless but obviously I would assume that clearly something's going wrong if they're spending a shitload on trying to house homeless people and you still got a bunch of people living on the street or maybe there's for instance some people you know maybe a lot of people migrated to France and they're not eligible for those benefits so those are the people that are homeless I mean who knows what the context is now when we talk about charities taking up the gap left by a world where we no longer have government welfare I don't know I feel like there's a lot of empirical data that would lead to some well frankly the opposite conclusions right we've had tax cuts before and it doesn't seem like whenever we've had pretty big tax cuts we've seen proportional increases in the amount of money that goes towards private charities it seems like where that money ends up going oftentimes is just proportionally into wealthy people's savings accounts or into corporate treasuries and I don't know if that's the most productive use of spending on a societal level at least relative to what we could do with that money should we tax it and spend it on programs that could reach that income to homeless people or disabled people or whatever what have you what context it would be that you would spend that money on and so that's happened over the course of history and again I do agree that you know when you look at the phases of industrialization technological shifts economic growth before the welfare state obviously you're gonna see pretty big decreases in poverty but we still had a massive amount of poverty even though we did have a lot of wealthy people and upper income people who could have theoretically taken care of those homeless people and there's many many wealthy people today and upper income people today who are able to take care of homeless people in the form of social welfare and charity if they were able to do so the reason I pick homelessness is because by all accounts homelessness is a pretty shockingly affordable problem to solve and it would only take a few billion dollars of aggregate investment a year to substantially reduce the number of people experiencing homelessness but you know the market doesn't make those investments right all that I'm saying like my whole point is that I just don't think that the market necessarily is incentivized to take care of those people I think that as a government a collectively democratically accountable government you are incentivized to take care of those people you keep saying that well I feel like I just you know I just think that of course it's the case that welfare necessarily reduces economic growth I feel like I've given a case where it could actually increase economic growth lead to more innovation empirically it seems to be the case that it does when it comes to economic growth being decreased by welfare I'm not sure it's substantial not sure it's demonstrable and I think it overall just leads to a net better life for many of those people who are involved and last thing that I'll say is that we're coming up on the hour mark yarn I'll give you the last statement but I'd love to after you're done talking responding to me I'd love to throw it to the audience for some questions so a few things I highly recommend a book that my friend and co-author was co-author of books with me Don Watkins wrote I think it's called Roosevelt care of Medicare but with Roosevelt first that's available on Amazon and I think the book will show convincingly that pre the great great depression there was robust charity in the United States there were robust institutions to take care of the poor and to help the poor in spite of the fact that the country over was much poorer than it is today the whole mentality of freedom which I think we had in the pre great depression era the whole mentality of not expecting the government to take care of things you know the world was a different world and people behaved very differently and there was a very very very robust system of safety net there was completely private and nothing to do with government investment I find it interesting that you claim not to be a central planner but yet you sound exactly like a central planner you ask the question you say well I don't know if rich people putting their money in a saving account is the best use of their money why is it any of your business what rich people do with their money it's none of your business indeed only a central planner thinks in those terms ooh how can I take all the money that people put in their savings account and do something better with it it's not your money take your greedy hands off of it right it's my money I get to decide what to do with it now as an economist I can tell you that by far the best thing to be done with that money is to put it in a saving account and therefore fuel future economic growth that's how economies grow through investment so yes you can do these empirical studies by small marginal changes in the text code and see if charity goes up yeah I'm not surprised you're not seeing anything there because the whole mentality has shifted in this country to the point where what people are going to be taking care of the government we wealthy people don't have to worry about that because we're paying it in our taxes and don't worry about charity in spite of that Americans are the most charitable people in the world Americans give more charity than any other country in the world maybe because at least until recently we were also among the freest people in the world and then you made a point about homelessness homelessness cannot be cured by a few billion dollars that is bizarre and absolutely wrong indeed as the state of California is proving every single day the more money you throw at homelessness the bigger problem it becomes homelessness needs a structural shift structural change it primarily needs a shift in housing and indeed the more free housing you give homeless people the more homeless people they are it's basic economic 101 if you give something out for free demand for that thing will increase we've got a the problem of homelessness is a mental health problem which America has had since the 1980s when we changed the way we deal with mental health and the second is it's a massive housing problem we do not build enough houses in the United States we short about 10 million units of housing in the U.S. and that is a problem of zoning of government control of capital allocation of immigration not allowing enough immigrants to come in to actually build those houses and a bunch of different things money does not solve homelessness California that spends the most money on homelessness has the biggest problem all right well in the spirit of closing statements I will not respond to any of that and I'll go straight to the audience questions I'll keep you for about 20 25 minutes talking to the audience then we can be on our way yarn the first question from exponent what line of GDP spending makes a country socialist well I don't know I don't know that I define countries based on on socialist I mean socialism means technically that the government owns the means of production or has ownership over the means of production in one way or another I don't believe America socialist I don't believe America's capitalist I don't think those are the only two options I think America and most countries all countries in the world almost all countries on mixed economies some countries lean more towards fascism some countries lean more towards socialism I think a country like you know Cuba North Korea probably more socialist communist a country like China's more fascist and most of Western Europe and most of the United States are countries that are mixed economies leaning towards fascism and fascism I say because fascism is a system in which people we pretend that people are private property but we regulate it so much that it's meaningless to call it private property so I think America and Europe are far more fascist than they are socialist because the government doesn't control the means of production at least it doesn't own the means of production it does control them and that's I think the difference between socialism and fascism whether they own it or whether they control it yeah I guess for me and my response to that question would be that to me socialism is when you have collective ownership of the means of production collective like Jarn said could mean government it could mean mix of cooperatives and government ownership could just be cooperatives and to me that would make a country socialist to me I'm comfortable calling pretty much the whole entire world capitalist countries for the most part except for the obvious examples of like North Korea or something like that capitalist I think China falls into a fascist economic model although it appears Jarn and I disagree on what fascism means but to me capitalism is when you have private ownership of the means of production mixed with the profit motive market economics and to me for the most part that's what America has the way that I would define fascism and the reason that fascist economics is a little hard to define is because it's kind of a kind of a liquid term depending on who uses it but at least the most reasonable definition of fascist economics is a system by which the government conspires or co-ops corporate investment and development in order to achieve state means and that isn't really capitalism it's also not really socialism and that's kind of what I would put that's kind of the category that I would put countries like China in and like Nazi Germany for instance I don't disagree with that I think we're very close in terms of the definition of fascism and that's why I think we agree that China is more fascist than socialist or capitalist alright let's see Lyra for $4.99 thanks for the donation my friend got a government grant to go to college for free he improved his life and income through this in your opinion is this number one welfare is this immoral yes absolutely it's immoral I know people who have stolen money from other people and it's improved their lives materially at least I know people who have committed fraud and it's improved their life materially the fact that somebody's life materially improves does not make the action moral the fact is that your friend went to college this is expensive I don't blame him for that because we live in a system where that is how you go to college but a system that promotes redistribution of wealth to benefit some at the expense of others is a fundamentally immoral system well wait but you said if the government were to give you money to invest in a business you would be more okay with that and I feel like the government giving you money to invest in your education I mean isn't that a good use of government money more okay with it that doesn't mean I'd be okay with it you're more okay you're more okay with college education but it's still you would still say you're not yeah okay I see it wouldn't it would still be immoral I see I see Jaren have you ever been at poor well what do you mean by poor yes in a sense that I came to the United States as an immigrant with no money I had two children were born I was a student making what was I making in those days about $15,000 a year and you know with two kids and a wife who couldn't work because she was in a H was an F F2 visa which didn't allow her to work only I could work and I could only work on campus and so yeah I mean for six years when I was a student I would say by any definition economic definition I was poor now I didn't consider myself poor in a sense that I was I was a student I was getting educated I was improving my life I was living a good life I can't complain about the life that I lived I couldn't go out I didn't go to see the movies I didn't go to restaurants I didn't do stuff like that because I couldn't afford it my largest expense on a monthly basis with diapers but in spite of that we lived a good life and the prospects of the future were good because I was getting an education but I was poor by any technical measure and I think you'll find that many of the 2% that you consider poor are students and therefore I'm not sure that that's the kind of poverty you actually want to eradicate well hey I think whether you're poor as a student or poor as an adult I think you know being poor sucks right and so some welfare programs to me make some sense what were you saying you aren't sorry Huckton I got no I got no welfare you know you could argue that you know because I was an immigrant so I got no welfare I think my healthcare maybe being subsidized a little bit by the university I was studying that certainly my education was subsidized by the state of Texas but other than that I got I received no welfare I received no state assistance and I think I did quite well for myself so you know being poor does not suck being it depends what you do with it and it depends how poor you are and it depends again I had 2 kids making 15,000 bucks a month a year only I could work my wife couldn't work I don't know if you get people a lot poorer than that and yet I can't say those years sucked at all there was some of the best years I've had well I know it sounds like they would have been made a lot worse if you didn't have the government helping you out with your education though right if I didn't have the government helping me with education then I would have found a different different solution and I would have been fine I would have been fine alright well I came to the United States with enough money to pay for out of state tuition at the University of Texas for a semester and I figured I'd figure it out when I got to the US and I did and I think we underestimate what people are capable of doing we underestimate what people can do we overestimate the dollar sign and we underestimate because again I was poor and I don't consider my life bad but some people who are poor have a rough life a lot of it has to do with the attitude you bring to poverty and a lot of it has to do with whether you think you're on the way up or on the way down and I would like to see a free market where people ambitious people can strive and be as ambitious as they want and not be penalized for that and I think that requires the elimination of the welfare state alrighty well there you go I guess that's where we would disagree I think that if anything penalizes you for being poor it's being poor but obviously we stay poor they stay poor because the welfare state advises them to stay poor alright yarn what's your solution to climate change what would you envision left field what's my solution to climate change I mean it's the Israeli route invest in desalination plants suddenly desalination plants is one I would say cheap energy is another so nuclear power more fossil fuel burning if that's the cheapest form of energy building dykes where sea reclaiming land from the ocean where sea levels might be rising expanding air conditioning to places that might have not needed in the past what's going to happen would you do this with government coercion or would you just expect the market to do it or what private individuals in the market can do it you could imagine that communities might want to come together for example to build dykes so things like that but those things are relatively cheap with modern technology if you compare it to what it cost when they built the dykes in the Netherlands I think all the solutions to climate change can be done on a voluntary basis by free people without the use of government coercion last question what is yarn's plan for prisons will they be structured by markets too privatized how do you do prisons in your ideal society I think prisons are part of the justice system they're part of the police and the legal system and therefore I think they should be run by the state and they should be part of again very little should be run by the state basically a policing and judicial which I think prison is part of that and the military but that's about it the state would be before the beginnings of the office state and the Great Depression government spending outside of periods of war on a state, local and federal level combined did not exceed 5% of GDP I think we could easily go back to less than 5% of GDP total government spending and the amount of wealth that would be created in the United States and the amount of poverty alleviation that would happen in the United States would truly stun you icon boy as well as I think your audience it would be an unbelievable economic engine that we would create in this country if government shrunk to what it really should be all right well there we go that was the last question obviously I disagree although I think we agree that some regulations are dumb you mentioned some of the housing regulations I mean zoning laws and stuff like that certainly should be scaled back licensing laws hopefully yeah yeah people people talk about occupational licensing I mean I think you should probably get some sort of a license to be a doctor you know something more technical but I mean I don't see why you need a license to be a you know cutting hair that seems a little ridiculous to me but but hey you know things you wouldn't need as much welfare so a lot of people would get jobs so there you go so we can agree some regulations are bad for sure well all right yarn I mean to my audience got about oh I don't know 50-60 people watching shout yourself out what do you want them to check out where would you point them to oh yes you're on bookshow.com and just check my youtube channel you're on book and of course if you want to dig a little deeper check out at the shrug the fountain head and Einran.org A-Y-N-R-A-N-D and again my youtube channel you can you can find a ton of content on there there we go people well thanks yarn for talking to me have a good rest of your weekend what time is over in Puerto Rico right now I assume it's not too different east coast time eastern time that's what I figured yeah people forget that what do you call it time zones go vertically so it's not that you know Canada and all those guys about the same time as it is here but alright well have a good time yarn thanks for coming on I appreciate it invitation thanks for having me on no problem see ya