 It's very nice to be here in Seattle. I was last year in 1999 on my honeymoon when I was 22. And the weather was beautiful the entire time. And then I came in yesterday and the weather was beautiful. And I began to think this whole rainy Seattle thing was like a myth that turns out it's not. I thought maybe Seattle and Seattle Lino's something. I don't know what you call it. I thought maybe you did what we do in Colorado, which is we tell everybody that the weather is terrible so they won't move there and make the place more crowded. But it seems it does rain here apparently some of the time. But nevertheless, I'm sad. I won't have more time to spend here. But I do hope to be back before too long because it is a very nice city. Now, I've been asked to speak about some other myths related to the campaign this year. And we could spend all kinds of time on various other myths. But we'll try and fit in as many as we can here for the next few minutes. And specifically, there's three areas that I want to focus on. Three categories of myths, I suppose, is what you could call them. Now, the first one is this idea that has been floating around the campaigns, especially with the Bernie Sanders campaign, and to a lesser extent with Hillary. And there's this idea that the United States spends very little money on social benefits. And this is something that a lot of people believe that the United States is kind of this highly capitalistic, social Darwinist country with virtually no safety net whatsoever. And that just this tiny amount of money goes to social benefits programs. That is not true. It turns out that the United States is actually very similar to European countries and to the other countries in the Anglo-sphere, like Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and so on. And by the way, all of this information that I'll be quoting has been covered in previous articles by me at Mises.org. And so when I do a text version of this on the site, I'll include links to all this information that you can look at in more detail. So yeah, there's much deeper information behind all of this. And I'll show you where you can get it later on the website. But let's just look at the US and compare its social policies to other countries. There's no way that we can make the case that the US does not spend a lot of money on social benefits. In fact, if we just look at the percentage of the GDP that is spent on social benefits from country to country, we find that it's more or less the same. For example, the United States spends about 18% governments in the United States. So we're talking about government spending, direct to government spending, is about 18% of GDP. And it's about 19% in Norway. And so what's the big difference there? It's about 19, 20% in New Zealand. Once you start to get closer to, say, France and a couple other big spending countries, they get up to maybe 22, 23% in terms of the GDP they spend on social benefits. And this isn't just government spending, mind you. This is things like retirements, health care, social security, and so on. So there's just not that big a spread there. It goes from about 22% down to about 17%. Down at the low end, you find Australia and Canada and Iceland, which are all below the United States in terms of social benefits spending. Of course, we've all been told on multiple occasions that Canada is this paradise of equality to the North. Maybe that is, but they managed to do it by spending less government money. And so the US just simply should not be viewed as this odd man out on these issues. Many other fallacies in terms of economic debate then proceed from this, that we need to spend more on this or that, the other thing, just so the US can start to be more humane like the other countries out there in Europe and in Australia, for example. And if it may be that there are other changes that could be made in order to address some of these issues that people on the left think need to be done, but I can tell you that the problem is not that there is not enough government spending that's going to these programs. We can look also at this in terms of just health care more specifically, if we look at health care spending, specifically government spending on health care, just people in general, not the private sector, we find that the US is number four in the world in terms of spending on health care. The only countries that spend more are Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Norway. And those tend to be very wealthy countries as well and the people there can attend to afford more in health care, but all the spending on health care, just it's again, a myth that the US isn't spending a lot on it in terms of government spending. Now interestingly, of course, the left will also use this as an example of why health care spending is bad in America. Look how much America spends on health care spending. If we would just adopt Bernie Sanders' health care plan, then the US would spend hundreds of billions of dollars less on health care. But of course we can't have it both ways, we can't have so much health care spending, we can't have health care spending in America be an example of both how America spends too little in terms of government benefits. And then at the same time have all of its high amounts of spending be simultaneously an example of how the US shouldn't have to spend that much. So which is it? In fact, if we look at the overall amounts of spending, we find that Denmark is right next to the United States. And so you will have people say that, oh, look how much America spends on health care spending in terms of government benefits. Clearly we need some major overhaul in the health care system. And then in the next breath, they'll tell us how Denmark does everything so wonderfully in terms of its health care welfare system. So which is it? If Denmark's spending about the same amount on health care as the United States in terms of government spending, how come that's okay, but it's not okay the way the US government spends on health care spending? So what we find when we start to look into this data is that there's just not that big a difference there. There's lots of government spending going on. In fact, if we look at how much the US spends when we look at tax policy, which is designed to help people with children designed to help people keep more of their money rather than pay it in in taxes. Once you take all that into account, when you start to incorporate American tax policy that's designed to help lower income people, what you find is the US is actually number two in the world in terms of policies designed to assist the poor in terms of helping them keep more of their income rather than direct spending. So we should just need to get over the idea that the US isn't spending a lot of money through its government programs on health care. If people want to debate over some different way to do things or some sort of change in the program, then that doesn't even really interest me that much, that's fine, maybe some of those ideas could, you could make a good case for them, but those changes can be made without a need for any additional tax revenue or any greater spending because the US is already spending more than quite a few countries on its social benefits. So any sort of program that any sort of idea where someone like Bernie comes out and says, well, we're gonna overhaul the program and it's gonna save us billions of dollars, but first we just need to spend another 50 billion more, another 100 billion more, another 500 billion more, and then we can come back and then we'll actually spend less later down the road. But we're gonna have to spend more upfront and then we'll spend more later. Well, obviously you shouldn't fall for that because you're never gonna get to that point where the spending goes down again. So if we just compare the US to other countries, there's no lack of spending on benefits and we should just proceed accordingly. Certainly it would be great to argue that those, that that overall spending should be cut, but certainly if we can make the comparisons there's absolutely no case that could be made for the claim that the US just simply isn't spending much. So no, the United States is not some kind of a capitalistic paradise where we're all keeping all of our money and the poor people are getting what they deserve or whatever the caricature is of capitalists. That's just simply not the case. And really the US should be looked at more at just like all of these other social democratic countries. A lot of spending going on, tons of government programs and we don't even have time to go into the realities of poverty in the United States in terms of air conditioning, in terms of cell phones, in terms of automobile ownership and all of those things that the poor have in the United States that they do not have in other places, especially in Southern Europe where a middle-class lifestyle would be living in a two-bedroom apartment without air conditioning and raising your family there. The reality here is much, much different. What you find has almost a religious tinge to it where you try to argue that the US is really just not something special. It's not this odd man out. It's not this extremely stingy, miserly country where nobody's paying out anything in government benefits. Once you start to challenge that, people become very upset and it's living on in the current election cycle. Now, so this of course relates to the poverty issue and this is where we see some of the most long-lived and die-hard myths coming about. The second group of myths are those related to the fact that we're told we need government to protect us from the cruelty of market economics and this can take many forms. We need government, of course, to give us retirement. We have government to thank for creating the weekend. This is an often repeated thing. If it weren't for government regulation of the workplace, we'd all be working 80 hours for essentially subsistence wages. But fortunately, we have progressive governments that force the government to pay us what we're worth and that force the government to give us weekends and vacations that force the government to give us time off to spend with our families, maybe a family leave, which is a big plank of Hillary right now that we're going to mandate more family leave for people and of course the Obama administration just came out with tighter regulations on the use of overtime pay, essentially making it so that more, fewer people who traditionally would be salaried are now going to have to be paid more in overtime. Of course, we all have been told a million times that if we didn't have government doing those things, we'd all be working long, long hours for next to nothing. Now, of course, that's not true at all. The reason that we're not working hours as much as our great grandparents were or even our grandparents is because of worker productivity being very high. Now, Walter didn't have time to get to this, but that's the flip side of the minimum wage. If we're going to talk about wages, how do we bring up wages? Well, you can't just set the wage. In order to make it feasible, you have to actually increase worker productivity. And the way you do that is by labor-saving machines, by making it possible for people to produce more value in less time. And that's the only way that you can actually make a society richer. Obviously, you can't just simply declare that everybody's going to be wealthier in the future. You need to come up with some way to make that happen. And since the Industrial Revolution, we've been pretty good at that as a species using machinery, using devices to help us produce more. Now, a simple example would be in, I used to be a janitor for six years, so let's use a janitorial example. Now, in the olden days of janitoria, you had the little, the floor buffer that has the spinning brush on the bottom. Now, in the older days, those would only spin at like 80, 100 RPM. And that was very, very slow, very, very time-consuming. It took you forever to polish a floor. Now, in more recent decades, however, they've developed the high-speed burnisher which rotates at hundreds of RPM. That allows you to, say, polish an entire gym floor, if you will, in minutes compared to hours before. Now, just think about what this means, then, for your average janitor. As now, they can do two or three of these floors in the same time they would have taken to do one before. Now, the outcome of that, of course, is he now can make much higher wages. He can go from place to place, doing more and less time charging, not as much as he could before probably because now other people will have those burnishers as well, and there will be some competition to bid down the price. However, overall, the effect will be that janitors will be able to simply do more work in less time, they'll be able to do more of it, and the other upside of that will be that more people will have cleaner floors more of the time at a lower price. That's the only way that we can really actually increase the wages and the lifestyle of, in this case, janitors who use that equipment. We've introduced some capital, which, by the way, was made possible by the savings and capital accumulation of people in the past who were able to put money into an entrepreneur developing that equipment. Janitors use that equipment, they make more money, and they become wealthier. Simply declaring that we should all play janitors 20 bucks an hour would not accomplish that and would not make it possible and certainly not sustainable in any way. The only way to increase wages is by increasing worker productivity. And it's not just wages, of course. This allows us to just have a higher standard of living in general, it allows us to work fewer hours. Tom Woods and I did an episode of his show a little while back where we talked about how just having more jobs doesn't necessarily mean that we're getting richer anymore than also just working more hours in a week doesn't mean we're getting richer. Now, it can mean that, and so I think under current conditions, you can make the case that you do in fact need to add jobs in order to show some gains in the economy. However, over time, especially if we look at over, say, 30 years in the past or 50 years in the past or 80 years in the past, our ancestors worked longer hours in most cases and they certainly had a lower standard of living because of it. The reason that they were able to work few hours over time, the reason that we don't have to slave in the field like our farmer ancestors did or work long hours in a highly dangerous factory is due to the benefits of increases in worker productivity. And that creates extra money, creates this wiggle room, if you will, because now workers are so productive and creates more profit and creates higher standard of living for everyone that workers can work less. It also gives their employers more extra money in order to make the workplace safer and to do a lot of things that actually make work less onerous, less time consuming and better overall. So when people tell us that we should be thanking for the government for the weekends we should be thanking the fact that we can earn enough to live a nice lifestyle now in 40 hours a week whereas our ancestors could only do that in 60 or 70 hours a week in many cases. It wasn't simply because the government declared now that we're gonna work fewer hours. If in the 13th century a king had simply declared we're gonna work fewer hours now that would have just meant more people would have starved to death. The reason we can work fewer hours and not starve to death is because worker productivity is so high. So we need to stop of course seeding that whole premise to the activists who wanna come in and make the claim that work life will simply be better if we start regulating more. The reality of course is that what we really need to do is help entrepreneurship and help people produce more in less time. And then the final myth is this issue that markets make things more expensive and we need the government to make everything more affordable. And we see that now in a variety of areas. We see it in housing, healthcare and higher education is where most of the debate has been featuring lately in higher ed and healthcare especially. Now the problem is of course that virtually everything that the government does when it claims to be making things more affordable and more available is actually to increase the price of goods and services and to make them less accessible to people. And then what they do is they come back and they say well, we'll give you more money, we'll subsidize your income or we'll subsidize healthcare and that will then make you able to access it. Whereas of course it would be far more efficient to simply allow the market to work to bring down the cost of things because that's of course what naturally happens in the marketplaces. The price of goods and services come down. It's why we pay less now for many electronics of course which is relatively unregulated. But of course to build a car with the same amenities that a car had in 1960 would be far, far less expensive today. Now we added all kinds of stuff to cars that makes them more expensive now. But if we didn't add all that and didn't have all of these smog check requirements and all of that, you could purchase a car for next to nothing and certainly for a much tinier percentage of your income than your grandfather could. And so the goal should be always to lower the price of goods and services not to regulate them and not to subsidize them which only increases and brings up the price of healthcare. And we saw this a lot in a recent debate between policy makers over higher ed where Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado pointed out that it is absolutely not true and now Campos isn't exactly a free market guy but he was nevertheless honest enough to point out that higher ed is not more expensive because there's less government spending going into it. Now all the data shows quite clearly that there's more government spending now than ever on higher education. The reason it's more expensive is because it is so heavily subsidized that it creates more demand for the product and the price continues to go up. Now at some point then you need to start rationing in order to keep prices down. That's the only way to keep prices down. The market either rations it in terms of only providing certain services to people who can afford it or it actively rations it in terms of the government only allowing you so many services that you can use. Now the Germans have free education but they ration it heavily through the use of tests. You're only allowed to go to higher ed if you qualify through a regime of government tests and other countries do this as well. The U.S. of course lets you go to college regardless of who you are is very open with that and that tends to push prices up quite a bit but that is a direct result of the subsidy. The same is true in housing, both in for purchase and for rent housing where there's both through section eight where they subsidize the renter and that allows then renters to, or it allows the landlords then to demand more money because the rent is being subsidized, partially subsidized by the government and of course home ownership is constantly being subsidized by a wide array of government programs, Fannie, Freddie, FHA and so on that help drive up the price of home ownership as well. But all the while that all this is going on and all the price of these basic things that we need to buy every day, we're being told that somehow magically the market is making all of these things more expensive whereas this mechanism is never quite explained or if they do manage to come up with something in the market that shows why something's becoming more expensive there then they just leave out the fact that a huge portion of the market is being subsidized. The, and of course healthcare as we noted in the first part is heavily subsidized as well through all of its massive amounts of spending which of course makes the US the fourth in the world in terms of government spending. So through all of this, then we're just supposed to sit back and watch the debates as all of these myths are repeated again and again, the market is our enemy because it makes things more expensive or does nothing to help us afford things but fortunately the government will step in to do that. When then we're left of course with this idea that the US is somehow unique and more heartless than other places and none of that is true. And unfortunately it doesn't look like those myths are gonna go away anytime soon. They were around four years ago, eight years ago and even more so actually in periods in the past and they're coming back full time now and you're not even seeing any sort of substantial debate about it. I don't think we'll see any kind of real debate over social security or in any real cutbacks to health spending or anything like that. And so I suppose it's now helpful to know about these things and maybe at some future election cycle we might see a more rational treatment of these things. But until then thank you very much and thank you for being here.