 Let's take on Mark Cuban. I mean, Mark Cuban is pretty pathetic. Obviously, Mark Cuban's self-made billionaire comes from a true, comes from a working class family, got into the internet very early. Basically, I think it was internet, kind of internet radio, music, over online, sold to Yahoo at the peak of the bubble. Unlike many others, didn't keep a stock, didn't invest massively in .com, thinking it would go up, but implicitly or explicitly recognized that there was a bubble and basically took his money out, out of the market. And ultimately is best known for having invested in the Dallas Mavericks and becoming the owner of the Dallas Mavericks and being quite visible out there as a billionaire since then. Basically, that was the one transaction that made him. I'm sure he makes money at the Dallas Mavericks. I'm sure he's made some other good investments that have just fueled his billionaire status. But the real big thing was he got on the internet early. He made a lot of money and he was smart enough because I knew a lot of people who became very, very rich for a few months and then basically lost most of it. He did not because he was smart enough to get out. So here's on Fox, he's actually sitting, you'll see him sitting right next to Steve Forbes, who is much better at defending capitalism on Cuban but also pretty weak. And we will watch and see how he addresses Medicare for all and socialism and defense capitalism. Cuban is here, he has been a capitalist his whole life and he actually started with nothing and became a billionaire because of hard work and just smarts. And luck. And luck, it does always. Yeah, I mean, they always emphasized the luck. I mean, maybe he was lucky too, I'm not saying he wasn't. Timing is important, but why don't you just leave it at, you came from nothing, you worked hard and you, and you're smart. Why do you have to undercut yourself? Why do you have to undercut yourself? By emphasizing luck. I mean, Bill Gates does the same thing, Warren Buffett does the same thing, but that's because they're embarrassed. They have no self-esteem tied up in this wealth that they've created. And they feel guilty to some extent, at some level, they feel guilty. Now, Stephanie asks, has he ever tried to talk to these billions? Yeah, I mean, I've exchanged emails with Mark Cuban, but he only replies with one word to my emails. Anybody know what that word would be? I mean, Mark Cuban actually answers his emails, and I have his email address somewhere, and his answer is always no. And I've asked to meet with him, the answer was no. I asked him to support the distribution among high school kids of his favorite book, The Fountainhead, and he has said no. I've asked him to support the essay contest on The Fountainhead, his favorite book, he says, and he has said no. To help expose young people to the book that inspired him. And he has said no. So anyway, that's Mark Cuban. So immediately it's luck, right? Let's keep going. Mark, of course, so tell me about that. What do you think about how 2020 is shaping up in capitalism versus socialism? Well, I mean, capitalism's gonna win. Capitalism's gonna win, and his confidence that capitalism's gonna win is not an ideological confidence. It's not comes from an understanding of capitalism, and we're gonna win the intellectual debate with the socialists. His confidence that capitalism will win is a practical confidence, but we have the money. Socialism doesn't work, and people don't do what doesn't work. I mean, I would argue, so security doesn't work, Medicaid doesn't work, welfare doesn't work, regulations don't work, and we still do them. So there's a huge amount of evidence to suggest that people actually do, actually do vote for and embrace things that don't work. But most of these billionaires, most of these rich people who've made their money in the markets don't believe the world will turn against markets because markets work. Question about that. But look, I'm never against open discourse. That's what makes this country great. People being able to convey their opinions, now I'm not gonna agree with all of them. Socialism just doesn't work. Medicare for all. Notice, it just doesn't work. Not wrong, immoral, indefensible, causes people to die, starve. It just doesn't work. Now, what about all the socialist stuff that we have in America today? All the places in which to govern intervenes in the economy that is basically adopted elements of socialism like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, welfare, and of course, the regulatory state. That works. But he's gonna defend all that, actually. I believe healthcare is a right. Whoa, did you hear that? She said when it comes to Medicare for all, I agree healthcare is a right. Well, look, that's it. Once you accept healthcare as a right, then it's over. There is no debate. Socialism has won. You can't deny people rights. If healthcare is a right, you have to provide it. And in order to provide it, you can only do it through government. And to do that, you have to use force against doctors, nurses, hospitals, and other taxpayers to take their money so that you can provide that healthcare. Once you've given up, healthcare is a right, you've given up the whole debate. You've given up everything. There is nothing more to really talk about. This is Mark Cuban defending capitalism. He's on the show to defend capitalism, to argue against Medicare for all. But there was no argument against Medicare for all if healthcare is a right. And somebody says, how can he not defend capitalism while being on a show that shows capitalism in action, which is a shock tank? Well, because he doesn't have the self-esteem to defend capitalism. He doesn't have the philosophical tools to defend capitalism. Indeed, he rejects them because he's obviously read The Fountainhead, thinks it's his favorite book, but has no understanding, no understanding of what the book actually means. He won't defend individualism. He won't defend egoism. He won't defend capitalism. And he won't defend, he will defend the idea, as he just did, that healthcare is a right. Now let's talk about what is a right? Where do rights come from? Rights are not given to us by something external. Rights are not in us as some intrinsic thing. Rights are moral principle, moral principle that is necessary for human beings to live in a community, in society. It is a moral principle, a moral truth about the conditions necessary for human success when living in a social context. So if you believe that the individual has a right to his own life, if you believe the individual has a right to pursue his own happiness, he must be free to use his mind, to choose his values, and to act in pursuit of those values. Rights are a recognition of that. Rights say you are free to act in pursuit of your rational values, in pursuit of your survival and happiness. Free of coercion, free of force, force, free of authority. You should be left alone. So you can use your mind to pursue your values. Now where does a right to healthcare come there? I mean, the rights articulated in Declaration of Independence are clear, you have a right to life which means to take the action necessary to sustain and to live a flourishing life. You have a right to liberty which means a right to think and to articulate those thoughts as you see fit recognizing the importance of thinking, the importance of reason, the importance of knowledge, the importance of speech to your own survival. But that, not at anybody's expense, nobody has to give up anything so that you can speak freely, write freely, think freely. And you have a right, let's say, to property. Property doesn't come at anybody else's expense. Property is something you create by your effort in voluntary interaction with other people. You can't use force. It's not property, it's not your property, it's not private property if you use force to get it. So again, no expense of anybody else's. It's about how you need property in order to pursue your life. You need to be able to keep, to keep that which you create. That's what life necessitates. That's what your life necessitates. You need to be able to speak and you need to have property. And a pursuit of happiness, again, pursuit of happiness, free of coercion, free of force. Not anybody else's expense because happiness doesn't come at other people's expense. So there is no right to other people's stuff, to other people's work, to other people's effort, to other people's wealth. I mean, there's a sense in which there's a right to healthcare, but not the sense in which Mark Cuban means it. The right to healthcare, it's just like the right to anything else, is the freedom to use your mind and to use your resources to pursue the healthcare you need. It doesn't guarantee you anything. It just makes it possible for you to choose whatever doctor you want. Medicare for all is a violation of your right to healthcare because it tells you which doctor to go to. You cannot choose. You cannot select. You cannot use your mind to judge which doctor, which drug to take, which procedure to engage in. No, some gum at bureaucrat gets to tell you all of that. So right to healthcare is a right to freely choose, to freely engage in market transactions, to go to any doctor who's willing to trade with you, to engage with any hospital willing to trade with you, to buy whatever drugs a drug company or pharmacy is willing to sell you. The right to healthcare is a right to engage in voluntary transactions that enhance your healthcare. It's a freedom, but that's not what's meant. What's meant here is the right to healthcare means you get to be taken care of. We're gonna take care of you. By the government, funded through coercion and coercion used on doctors, hospitals, nurses, medical practitioners of all kinds and all sorts, forced used on them to make sure that they service you. No, none of this voluntary transaction, none of this idea of choice, none of using your mind or the doctor's mind or the pharmacy's mind to make decisions about what is best. No. The so-called right to healthcare is a right to enslave all of us to the medical bureaucracy, to the bureaucrats who will tell us what kind of healthcare we should pursue. But this is the definitive capitalism, saying we have a right to healthcare. But you're not gonna all of a sudden create an environment, let's just talk about her plan, right? We're not all of a sudden gonna have many can fall. How about later? How about slowly? Yeah, and you had a Twitter battle. Yeah, not even with her, right? I think she just let me go, but you know, if you look at her plan, there's just things that just have no chance of passing. So it's a practical issue. Practical, nobody's gonna pass this. Nobody's gonna have to make it happen. And of course all the arguments he's gonna make are economic arguments, financial ones. Things that just don't make sense. So part of her plan says employers will take the money that we were paying for insurance and put that into the payment for Medicare for all for their employees. Now she had the choice of saying, let's increase payroll taxes by a certain amount. Now, why is that? I mean, he comes up with all kind of convoluted reasons here, why that doesn't work. But why wouldn't that work? All you do is you take the stuff that employs the health insurance premiums and pay it now to the government instead of to an insurance company. That's what she's proposing. If you're a statist, if you're a socialist, if you believe in Medicare for all, why would that not work? And if you're not, and that doesn't increase taxes. Now it doesn't work numbers wise. But what's his objection? Would have been the more viable way, but what she chose was something called a head tax which says for my company, is any company that has more than 50 employees, rather than paying a higher payroll tax, we're gonna charge you the average of the last three years plus an inflator each year for each one of your employees. Now that means that in her mind, that we'll be paying $7,500 to pick a number per year per employee. Now for somebody who's making $200,000 a year, okay, that's not bad. But what's the impact on someone who's making $10 an hour or $12 an hour or $30,000 a year? If you know if you have to hire somebody and the payroll cost is instead of 6.12% or whatever it is, right, you're having to pay $7,500 per year, you're gonna have second thoughts about hiring that person, even worse, as you evolve into her plan, you're gonna see companies cut payroll benefits because they know if they push their costs down leading into the plan for the calculations, it's gonna cost them less per employee and that's gonna create a difficult problem. It's you not thought out. So it's alright, so it's not thought out, so maybe Bernie's plan is more thought out, or maybe somebody can take Elizabeth's plan and make it more realistic. These are the arguments against Medicare fall? Come on up, we lose. Come on up, we lose. Well, yeah, I mean, yeah, look, for the Dallas Mavericks, it cost me for a family of four, we self-insure, my insurance costs are $29,900 per year. But I'm okay with that, because our insurance is great and it's a great premium for our employees. Under Medicare for all, they're gonna take a huge step back in what they get, and like to your point with unions, for their Cadillac plans, you're gonna have a lot of people that are very upset that Medicare for all doesn't provide the quality of care that they're used to. But everybody gets it and it's a right. Gonna create huge transitional problems. So when I look at this whole thing though, right, so we've got these policies and you're saying that they can't work, except the American people are, a lot of people think they're good ideas. And then you look at the landscape, right, and on the left and you see, we've got new entrants, I think that are saying we're going too far left, let's try and be a little bit more moderate. You've got Bloomberg. You've got Deval Patrick. Deval Patrick, you've got Bloomberg coming in. I think what happens there is it hurts the moderates because it takes, they all fracture and then you end up with Elizabeth Warren more likely to have a path to success. I'm not so concerned, like when the Bloomberg comes in, I think that's good. I think they're looking to be power brokers. I don't think they're necessarily looking to win. So if you're getting down to the convention and you've got an X number of delegates and you have influence, I think that's a good thing for Michael Bloomberg and that takes the Democratic Party to the center because you need your delegates to have a candidate, right? So is that reinforced by the whole proportional representation they have now in the primaries that if you get 15% this is all about the election, it's kind of boring stuff. Sometimes you have to take all or you could put a majority together before the convention. Yeah, and so it changes the calculus, if you will. Tom Steyer tweeted at you, only one person here is diverting attention from reality at Mark Cuban. And the reality is that we need a wealth tax according to Tom Steyer. Oh, look, I'm not opposed to a wealth tax. Notice that he's not opposed to a wealth tax. The defendant capitalism, the billionaire, it's not opposed to a wealth tax. Then why would anybody else be opposed to a wealth tax? Out there. If the billionaires want to pay it, and again, you hear the same thing from all of them. Bill Gates, Juan Buffett, they all want taxes to go up for themselves. Now he's going to be opposed to a wealth tax in a minute. He's not opposed to a wealth tax, but. It gets the job done. Does it get your job? One thing that I'm opposed to is wasting my money. So he's opposed to wasting his money. So he's opposed to a wealth tax because it doesn't work. He's a pure pragmatist, like all of these guys. Like all of these guys. He's opposed to a wealth tax because it doesn't work. Maybe they can increase a different tax on him. No, we'll work. I mean, that's Juan Buffett and Bill Gates want to increase all the other taxes. Say it again, businesses cannot survive if their communities are, if there's social unrest in our communities. So he's worried about social unrest. So what he's really trying to do, and I hear this a lot from rich people, we need to bribe people so that they're not going out into the streets and breaking windows. And the only way to bribe them is I pay more taxes and it's redistributed to them. So it's okay to raise my taxes if it would reduce the probability of riots in the streets that might hurt me. You can't open the store. You can't do business. But is a wealth tax really gonna pay for all of these things? No, of course not. That's the problem. It's like, you say it's a wealth tax, would they say? Is that the problem? They won't pay for these things? Isn't it the problem that it's their money? That you're taxing savings and investment? That you're taxing production? And what are you doing with that money? You're throwing it away. You're consuming it. You're destroying with it. You're not doing anything of value with it. Isn't that the problem? Not that it can't pay for all their plans. What if it could? Then you'd be for it? Tech just on the top 1%. You're gonna have to raise taxes on everybody. Yeah, of course you will. Maybe she doesn't. I don't look the wealth tax in a vacuum, right? It's part of a bigger tax. And of course you're gonna try to tax everybody as much as they can. The question is how do you spend it and what kind of results do you get? Taxes hurt the economy. The more taxes you put on, the more they hurt the economy. Now, you know, Steve Fort says that, but Mark Coopin is like, yeah, well, I don't really believe that. It's a cartoonish idea that you're sitting on billions of dollars in cash. They don't realize it's an asset. Yeah, no, it's true. And when you tax the asset, you're gonna affect the value of that. The other thing is how do you value stuff? I mean, you've got, or I mean rich people buy a lot of stuff. You know, you own the Mavericks. How do you value this stuff? So I said, Now the problem with the wealth tax is this. Notice this. It's not that it's confiscating your money. It's not that it's destroying production investment. It's that you're gonna have to sell your investments and that's gonna drive their value down and other people will be heard by that as well. All true. Began such trivial arguments. But this is all he can muster. One of the economists that were listed in her plan and I asked that very question because I did the math for myself. Look, I'm the luckiest guy in the world and I thank goodness every day how blessed I am. But I did the math and her 6% wealth tax would cost, would require me to pay more after the first year and a half that I have in cash. And so I sent an email to one of the economists and I said, look, did you guys do take into consideration liquidity when you defined your wealth tax and bottled it up? That's a good question. They said no. They said no. But they think you can sell off a business and hope for the best. So what I think would happen is if you're forced to sell off assets and everybody in a similar situation is forced to sell off assets, then you'll see something like we saw in the 80s where the Japanese and foreign investors will come in. So now the bad thing is, now the bad thing is, notice. I mean, this is so era of Trump kind of like. So now the real evil of a wealth tax is that all these wealthy guys are gonna have to sell assets and that ooh, foreigners are gonna buy them. Oh my God, this is the worst case scenario. Foreigners like the Japanese and the Chinese or the Europeans or maybe even the Saudis are gonna buy all the assets because these guys will be liquidating them. And that's the real evil of a wealth tax is it's gonna cause foreign ownership of businesses to go up. I mean, really, it is so nutty. It is so pathetic. It's so weak that it's no surprise that we are losing the battle for capitalism. It's no surprise that the left has captured the imagination of young people. It's, ah. See Saudi Arabia and foreign entities come in and just buy up everything because there's no Elizabeth Warren is counting on China to bail out or bail out. Yeah, it was Saudi Arabia, right? You make a good point because the other day Bernie Sanders says there should be no billionaires. Yeah. I mean, what do we want? Do we want the billionaires to go to Europe, to go to China? I mean, already? Look, I'm not leaving. No matter how much you tax me, I'm not leaving this. There you go. So he's saying it doesn't matter how much you tax me, I'm not leaving. So, you know, it doesn't matter. You're right. But he said it's immoral from billionaires. Look, everybody's getting very Trump-y in these days, right? You, Donald Trump was brilliant at picking, looking at his base and saying, what group of people are they not gonna care about that I can pick on? Now Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have picked up that skill, right? And they said, billionaires, you know, our base, let's throw them under the bus because no one's gonna stand up and support them. So, you know, Elizabeth Warren is becoming very Trump-ian and she's taking a big page out of the Trump playbook. Do you think she's gonna be the candidate? No. So he's right. Elizabeth Warren is becoming very Trump-ian in that sense. Pick somebody that everybody loves to hate, pick somebody who you can blame all the problems of the world on and then run on that, and she is. So, and that's always been a strategy of kind of authoritarian types. Donald Trump made it into an art form. He did it particularly well and I think for the first time in American history really launched a campaign, ran a campaign and won the presidency basically on the idea of blaming the other for all of our problems. Tyler asks, are there any business leaders today who stand up for capitalism with moral conviction? No. Nobody's significant, nobody's significant. There might be some small business leaders, there might be some, but no, nobody. Literally nobody. Even the ones who are semi-libertarians. Look at the guy who used to own Whole Foods. Oh, I forget his name. I mean, he's coined in YouTube, conscious capitalism because capitalism is not good enough. We need conscious capitalism. We need capitalism where we pay our work as well and where we care about the quality of the product that we sell people. Yeah, I mean, if you're in Whole Foods and you charge massive margins and you serve a clientele that's quite wealthy, then yeah, you can afford to pay people more than Walmart can. But if everybody paid people the way Whole Foods did, there'd be no Walmart. And where would poor people shop? It's nonsense like that. As if to make money in a capitalist economy when it has to treat your employees poorly. As if to make money in a capitalist economy when treats your customers, suppliers, shareholders, debt holders, everybody else poorly. I mean, it's just they create a fiction about capitalism and then have to moderate it by calling it conscious capitalism. Or people like Jeff Bezos or Zuckerberg or any of these guys who either say nothing or constantly apologizing. Wikipedia says Mark Cuban is a big fan of Iron Man. Yeah, he's a fan of the fountainhead, not of Iron Rans. I mean, Wikipedia is not to be trusted. And in this case, I can tell you factually, he's never read Atlas Shrugged. He has read the fountainhead. He loves the fountainhead. He often says that when he feels down in life, he goes, reads the fountainhead to give him a pick me up. But that's about it in terms of his fanhood of Iron Rans. The fact that you read a book and like a book does not make you have any understanding, as you can see, of her philosophical ideas. Not even of the book, not even of the philosophical ideas expressed in the book. No, Howard Walk would never say any of the things Mark Cuban just said. Oh, I was lucky. Oh, yeah, I'm not gonna leave this country, no matter how many people come and take my stuff away from me. Oh, I think health care's all right. On and on and on and on. All right, let's see. Tell me the value of selfishness. Use another word, self-esteem. The value of selfishness is that you esteem yourself as a value that you leave according to your nature, which means by the judgment of your own mind and you respect your own mind, you respect your own ability to do the right thing. Therefore, you respect the possibility of being a morally virtuous person and you regard yourself as a value worth preserving. Let me bring it down from Kant a little bit to a bromide that I had drummed into me as a child and maybe you've heard it. Happiness comes from making other people happy. Oh, yes, I've heard it. Who hasn't heard it? And that's the trouble. Let's aim at the day when people will not hear it anymore because it isn't true, it isn't justifiable. And the first question you would have to ask is, why? Why is it good to want others to be happy but not yourself? And I suppose you will be told that well, but they will work for your happiness and not their own. Well, it's like an exchange of Christmas presents that neither party wants, but that you have to exchange presents and you're not allowed morally to do something for yourself. Whereas what I say, you can make others happy when and if those others mean something to you selfishly. If you love them, then you want to make them happy. Fine. If you don't love them, that's not a moral crime. You don't have to love everybody. You cannot love everybody because it's a meaningless expression. You can love only those whom you value and if they contribute to your happiness, you contribute to theirs. That's fine. But each one of you has to be selfish about it. Supposing somebody were in love with you and said, I love you because you're so bad. So I sacrifice myself and I'm going to love you. Would you accept that or would you say it's the most? No, sir, I wouldn't either. That's the most insulting thing anyone could have said to you and yet that's what altruism would demand. And there is a great Russian writer who tried to practice it, Dostoevsky, who did marry a poor, stupid little simsters who he didn't love at all out of the desire to make her happy. The end of it was she committed suicide. Now that is an altruist practice. That's what altruism leads to. How about it's more blessed to give than to receive? Well, that's obviously the welfare state. That's a clearly motivated slogan. To please give me something and you'll be blessed but I will keep your material good. Using the super chat and I noticed yesterday when I appealed for support for the show, many of you stepped forward and actually supported the show for the first time. So I'll do it again. Maybe we'll get some more today. If you like what you're hearing, if you appreciate what I'm doing, then I appreciate your support. Those of you who don't yet support the show, please take this opportunity, go to Iranbrookshow.com slash support or go to subscribestar.com, Iranbrookshow and make a kind of a monthly contribution to keep this going. I'm not sure when the next...