Booktv continues on cspan2, television for serious readers. Next on booktvs afterwords, republican senator rand paul argues theres a new threat socialist thinking on the rise in america. He is interviewed by republican congressman matt gaetz of florida. Afterwords is a weekly Relevant Program with hosts interviewing nonfiction authors about their latest work. Senator rand paul, youre one of the most interesting people in american politics of the Republican Party. I was a fan of yours long before i got the chance to meet you and work with you in congress, eager to chat about your book the case against socialism but maybe first reflect a little bit about the role that you have within the congress, within our party is an independent voice and someone willing to strike out on issues that other republicans are not willing to strike out on . Sometimes i think im a lonely voice, keeping balanced budgets or believe we should spend less or have limited Constitutional Government really controversial things like that, limited Constitutional Government. We never get any of the other side but we lose a lot on our side that could be better at it and that is one of my frustrations but i try very hard to have the same republican the same opinion whether a democrat republican president , spending power was hours, things like that that we should keep our hands on, the power to declare war is ours. We too easily give that up and one of the interesting things i found coming up here is democrats are better on these issues when it is a republican president they want to oppose, republicans are better on this when it is a democrat president but when the parties are the same they tend to acquiesce a little bit on separation of powers. Host in this book the case against socialism you write it operates to me very much like a debate guide against those who would try to grow the left Political Movement by advancing socialist ideas, embracing socialist dictators, talk a little bit about the need for the book through the lens of which Political Movement is expanding or contracting. Guest most people view the station that is the case against socialism, great idea but wish it wasnt necessary, you wouldnt think it would be necessary and it is true. I was born in the 1960s and we were still experienced coming in the early 1960s crew show was just admitting to stalin, the terror of stalin, the programs the millions of people who died in the famines, the great famine in china had just happened in the 50s so many of these things were just becoming known but throughout most of my lifetime people were horrified by what happened with socialism. Now we turn the page and have polls showing young people, half of them are enthusiastic, almost have hate capitalism and have think socialism is something we ought to try. Perplexing to some of us who have read the history of socialism. We have a couple of socialists on your side, we have a socialist on the senate side and when i was a kid i think there were socialists but they were embarrassed, they didnt want to be called socialists. They were liberals, then they didnt want to be called liberals but they knew it wouldnt be popular. Now they are in your face say im a socialist and we want to bring socialism, the democrats socialists of america, they are proud of it and it alarms me that young people arent going oh my goodness, what does socialism mean for our country. It has been in a short time that we have seen democrat socialist embracing socialist brand as a growth agenda. You said something earlier in your political career which i have never forgotten about our prospects for growth and leveraging liberty for growth and use it specifically once that our party needs more people who have tattoos and more people who dont have tattoos. Do we need to find people with tattoos to join the party or do we need to tattoo more people . With ponytails, without ponytails, we need to be a hipper cooler party young people want to join. That is part of the problem. Socialism has become hip or cool but they dont know exactly what it is. The same studies that they therefore it, 10 of the people for socialism can define it as the government owning the means of production. They think it is about fairness. The government schools teach everybody can have selfesteem and if your son cant spell we will give him across because he needs to feel good about himself and pass out selfesteem, passout fairness and somehow the government will make things fair. One of the things we point out is there is still a top 1 in socialism. The differences under our system it is at least mostly are to a large extent based on merit, who becomes wealthy. If i am sam walton, so something you want, really good at selling industry meeting i can become a billionaire but nobody forced you to buy my stuff and san juan became a billionaire because he will voluntarily but his stuff, the same with most billionaires in our society but when you look at socialism there is still top 1 . You think maduro doesnt have the top 1 , his generals are well fed. One thing we point out about maduro, the leader in venezuela is the average person lost 20 pounds down there but he makes ted kennedy look slim. Hes wearing size 68 jacket, and keeps getting fatter and fatter. I never read a book that better fat james than yours. You went through this project is an interesting endeavor, you wrote the book with your wife. Im not married but i heard wallpapering together can be difficult. Just talk to us about the process of writing this book with your wife and you write a beautiful poem at the beginning to your wife which speaks to a lot of people who have endured some sense of sacrifice and the notion that sacrifice is linked to another human being that you love. Kelly and i work well together. They give you advice in marriage, when your wife says something you divide things and ultimately let her make the final decision and that is not entirely true but it kind of is in that i wrote a lot of stuff and she came to and read it and said it would be interesting to add in this hand. Give us a kelly paul unique sweetener addition . The discussion of the Covington Catholic boy was largely hers and it got her going, got her upset, got all of us upset who watched this what the media did to this and the link into socialism is we have gotten to a point where we have propaganda filling our airways. Under socialism it is directly from the government, this is coming from private entities. That was an innocent 15yearold boy, he went to Catholic School waiting for the bus, never said the word. All these adults on cnn were saying he has a punchable face. I met with these people a week later when the truth come up still saying looked like we got to punch him. Really . Do you not understand what you are saying . Everything about that story was wrong and i hope in the end the courts say you cant lie about somebody. There is a court case here. There have been kids who do inappropriate things on social media or whatever, he didnt do that but is being lumped in with people who are racist or say bad things. He might be excluded from school and ultimately careers because people think he was a terrible person and in reality he never said a word, never did anything and the other side, all these terrible adults getting in his face, yelling horrible epithets at him and the others in the media got everything wrong because they had an agenda. She does a great job of describing that and drawing it into this idea of what happens under propaganda and socialism. The democrats socialists we serve within Congress Tell us socialism is really the path to fairness. Who are the Fairness Police . How do you write about them . Guest in the abstract they say we will have fairness but the thing is you have a conception of fairness, i have a conception of fairness, representative omar might have a conception of fairness but for her to invoke hers on us if we disagree with her she is not going to sell her ideas of fairness, she has to send the police basically and this is where it breaks down because this is why it has become popular, the idea of fairness is they conflate fairness with things like charity and being her brothers keeper. I believe we should be our brothers keeper, i believe in christianity in the christian idea that we are a community and should take care of our people but has nothing to do with government. They believe, they conflate it and say charity is if i come to your house and take your money and give it to someone else, charity is if you give of your own money and it is not charity when the government comes but it also isnt very charitable in the way the government does it because ultimately the more you want socialism, this is one of the points, if you want a little bit of socialism, maybe tolerable. You want a little more you will have more state violence but if you want to take the property and when mao came to take the farms or stalin collected the farms truly there is a point in which people rebel and the only way you can get it is through violence. You have to kill the people. That is what happened under stalin, not just a few people, millions. From that we tried to develop the question, i taught a course at George Washington on the dystopian novel and kids kept asking as violent an accident of socialism is violence inherent . Is inevitable you will have violence . More socialism, absolutely, it is inherent. The closer you get to taking peoples property people will resist and you cant just find them. You have to put them in jail or shoot them. I interacted with a lot of folks who came to me as a young conservative and said how can i motivate my child, my grandchild to embrace the principles that made our country great, i say the book does detail out all the arguments the socialists make and goes into i think a good Historical Context and when do we move past the Tipping Point . You cite a harvard study that says more than half of people under the age of 29 have a favorable view of socialism. Have we crossed the rubicon or do we have to go and win back this argument with people who have embraced that . We are in danger of it. Every generation has to renew, water the tree of liberty and that is true with socialism and bad ideas, every generation has to realize the problems with socialism and what comes from it. The big lie that is out there right now in the big sort of superficial platitude is they say the intellectuals and community used to like stalin and then that is not the socialism we want. We used to like castro. Bernie was a big fan of castro, then we learned it wasnt so great. We used to like chavez but not so much what we really like his sweden. We love scandinavian socialism. It is the kinder gentler socialism. A big point of the book is disproving that, one that sweden and scandinavia is socialist because they are not, they rank pretty high on the freedom indexes for trade and a lot of other things and one of the main policy things bernie wants is raise the Corporate Income tax, 221 , scandinavia has been in the low 20s for 30 or 40 years and it is part of the success, they had slow business, we want to be sweden and scandinavia but he doesnt want below Corporate Income tax, wants to raise them. Scandinavia doesnt have a minimum wage. The other interesting thing, the biggest lie of the left, the biggest lie of all the socialists is you can have all this free stuff, something for nothing, free college, paid leave, give you free money and only tax rich people. The big lies thats not what they do in scandinavia. They have a welfare state, free stuff they give you but that tax the heck out of everybody and bernie and his clan and his troop of socialists wont tell you that because they want to stick it to the rich, not the middle class but in scandinavia everybody pays 25 sales tax, everybody also pays a significant income tax on the income tax, 60 starting at 60,000, 60,000 is the middle class, this isnt the rich, thats how they get so much money, tax the heck out of the middle class but you wont see bernie or aoc going on tv saying we will do 10 trillion for Climate Change and 60 trillion for medicare for all and the middle class is to have 60 income tax, they are lying to you saying there wont be any tax increase, just the rich people. It is ally. Is capitalism 0 some you that is the argument they may, the rich get richer that comes at someone elses expense and you use some illustrative examples to go through circumstances where it is capitalism that is the rising tide lifts all boats. Income inequality has been bandied about by the left, this terrible thing. The interesting thing, pakistan and ethiopia have less income inequality than us, move there then, you think it is going to be great . It isnt about how close you are to each other but what your level is and income inequality, one of the authors we quote this is like a jealousy trope. It is about me caring how much money you make when in reality that is a bad, almost covering someones property, do you care how much rich i am . Another one of the big lies from the socialists, they say the economic pie is fixed and if i get some you are getting less. The truth of the matter, statistics are overwhelming on this, the economic pie is getting bigger and bigger and there is less poverty. Theres a group called human progress. Org associated with cato, just amazing, poverty, 90 of people lived on 2 a day, that is how the world bank defined, when i was born it went from 90 in 1820, to a third of the world living in poverty in the early 1960s, status 10 so that is incontrovertible. 137,000 people escape extreme poverty every day for the last 25 years so their facts are just completely wrong. The world is so much better than it used to be. Better water. Antibiotics. Take the global lens. I expect to the book to focus on domestic policy reforms you champion to enhance liberty, the size and scope of government, but readers can expect a very global view of how qualityoflife is impacted as folks have moved toward big government. The thing is the facts are there that the World Economy is going, the us economy double eight times, it is just happening, poverty, everybody is richer, we are all doing so much better. I start es by saying there has never been a better time to be alive. I wanted to sink in. This maybe not in venezuela. You take on venezuela very directly. People eat their words on venezuela, you take joy in pointing out not only bernie but folks on cnn and even oliver stone championed venezuela as a great utopia. You have a different critique. Venezuela is such a disaster, people eating their pets. We tell the story of a young lady, a teenage girl, she has a gang at her gang is to defend the turf of trash. A certain garbage receptacle, those are her garbage receptacles looking for food, people killing rats in the street to eat them, pigeons and it is a sad thing. Back to the World Economy, why the World Economy got better and why venezuela is deteriorating into chaos and that is part of what the book is doing. The debate we should be having appear that we are not having in congress is we are not talking about which Economic System is better and nobody in the media seems to care what aoc is supporting or bernie is supporting is stalin and mao and paul pot and these terrible ideas and they get away with it because they arent challenged. Host you trace the roots of socialism back to the arab world which i think would be enlightening to many who would cast these monarchies and other arab endeavors as rightwing governments, not leftwing governments but you cite the abdel nasser socialism as a brand of socialism that has been particularly violent and harmful. Guest that is part of the problem we have had since the 1930s. Kayak and others said when you had hitler come on board, they were talking about a rightwing dictator. I dont think this was accidental. These were political scientists who decided to develop a spectrum of right and left. They put not he is him over here in socialism and communism over here when in reality they are different variances of socialism. Hitler was proud of his socialism. He said like most inventors of something he wanted to make sure it was distinct and his was nationalistic, not international and it was racist and obviously genocidal but he was proud of those things but said this is unique, he came up with a unique form of socialism and you look at his original plank they are basically from the communist manifesto. They did it because after the war people became so horrified, the holocaust, the socialists said we cancel socialism if they think it is a socialist, so, capitalist or rightwing authoritarian. The same in the arab world. The commonality and this gets back to the top 1 is mubarak, nasser, all these dictators in africa, many had a socialist bend but it was socialism combined with club soccer see and enriching their family but it happened under socialism too. They say we will help everybody out, we are free quality and everyone will get a chicken in every pot. It always seems castros daughters really rich, maduros daughters really rich, they seem to enrich themselves. You attack the notion that socialism is attainable by saying in the book that every economy in the world will distribute resources unequally. There is no opportunity for equal distribution of resources so in a world of unequal distribution of resources you prefer merit over cronyism. Do we follow summers in the United States congress of leaning into those elements of crony capitalism and does that take us on the slow march to these . Guest i think so. The whole idea of how things are distributed and the quality of it being a goal, if things were equally distributed the problem is you would like incentive. You want to increase your share of the pie so getting rid of the incentives was always a problem. Do we fall into the trap here . Yes because sometimes in order to get the things we want by reducing taxes on the economy, taking people off at the lower end who pay no taxes, we have a tax system that is different than scandinavia. Instead of everybody paying we are more tipped towards very progressive tax code. Our rate has come down at the top of the vast majority of taxes like the top 20 of earners pay 90 of the taxes now. Host you are very critical of the way socialist system can view the black market and how that can undermine peoples purchasing power and opportunity to live within a normalized Economic System. What were the most striking examples to you in your research of the imposition of s