Interview program with relevant guest hosts interviewing top nonfiction authors about their latest works. Host senator paul, you are one of the most interesting people in american politics and in the Republican Party. I was a fan of yours long before i got the chance to meet you and work with you in the congress eager to chat about your book but maybe first reflect a little bit about the role that you have within the congress and our party as an independent voice that somebody willing to strike out on voices. Sometimes i think im a lonely voice. Sometimes you believe in balanced budgets or that we should spend less or how they limited constitutional government. Really controversial things like that, limited constitutional government. Unfortunately, we never get the other side but then we lose a lot on our side. I guess that is one of my frustrations i try very hard to have the same opinion whether republican or democratic president that the constitution is a specific, the spending power of hours and we should keep our hands on the power to declare war, but ours. I think we too easily give that up. One of the interesting things i found coming up here is that democrats are better on these issues when its a republican president and democrats are better when its a democratic president. When the parties are the same they tend to sort of a quiescent little bit on the sort of idea of separation of powers. Host in the book you write in the case against socialism, it operates to mean ver me verya debate guide to those that would try to throw the left Political Movement by advancing socialist ideas, embracing socialist dictators. Maybe talk about the need for the book through the line is of which Political Movement is expanding or contracting. Guest most people sort of hear the title the case against socialism and say thats a great idea, but i wish it wasnt necessary. You wouldnt think it would be necessary. I was born in the 1960s and we were still sort of experiencing the 1960s christoph kirchhoff kt admitting to the killing of millions who died for the fan about that time the great famine of china happened in the 50s and so many of these things were just becoming known throughout most of my lifetime people were horrified what happened with socialism and so now we turn the page and we have the polls are showing young people, half of them are enthusiastic. Almost half of them hate capitalism and think socialism is something we are trying and its perplexing to some of us have actually read this. But i think it is necessary. We have a couple of socialists over on your side. We had a socialist on the senate side. When i was a kid i think there were socialists but they were embarrassed of the label. So, they were liberals and then they didnt want to be called liberals, but they knew that it wouldnt be popular. Now they are in your face saying i am a socialist and they have a party and they are proud of it and it alarms me people are going mike is what the socialism really mean for the country and its been a short period of time wastinwasting democrat socialist embracing this brand as a growth agenda. You said something in your political career that i never forgot about our prospects for growth and leveraging liberty for growth and usage specifically our party needs more people that have tattoos and more people who dont have tattoos so the question is do we need to find people to join the party or do we need to tattoo more people with and without, with pony tails, without, with earrings, without, i think we need to be a cooler party that young people would want to join. So i think that is part of the problem. Somehow now socialism has become hip or cool or they dont know what it is, so the same studies that say they are for it like 10 of the people that are for socialism can define it as the government owning the means of production. They think its about fairness. Part of this lay blame on the government schools, frankly. They teach everybody can have selfesteem and if your son cant spell we will give him a prize anyway to feel good about himself if youre going to pass our selfesteem and fairness. They get this idea somehow the government has been to make things better. One of the things we point out here is they are still a top 1 in socialism. The difference is under our system as it is at least mostly or to a large extent based on merit but becomes wealthy. Wealthy. If im sam walton and i saw something you want, im good att something and does everything it, i can become a billionaire. Nobody forced you to buy stuff. People voluntarily bought his stuff. Its the same thing with most billionaires in our society. But when you look at socialism, theres still the top 1 . You think maduro doesnt have a top 1 , the generals are all well fed. One of the things we point out about the leader in venezuela is that the average person has lost 20 pounds down there but he makes ted kennedy look slim. He is wearing a size of 68 jacket or 74 chest jacket and because he keeps getting fatter and fatter. Host ive never read a book that better shot to fame is iasbeing your book. [laughter] you went down this project to po sort of have an interesting marriage as well. You wrote the book with your wife. I am not married but ive read wallpaper can be difficult. Talk to us about the process of writing this book with your wife and you write a beautiful poem at the beginning of the book that i think speaks to a lot of people that have endured some sort of sacrifice and the notion that its linked to another human being that you love. Guest we work pretty well together. Its like they give you advice in marriage when your wife says some didnt you divide and ultimately let her make the final decision and that isnt entirely true but it kind of is. I wrote a lot of stuff than she came through and read it and said it would be interesting to add to this. Host gives us a unique addition. Guest the coming of the catholics was largely hers and it got her going and got her upset and all of us that watched this, but the media did to this end o the sort of link the socialism that weve gotten to the point we have a sort of propaganda filling the airwaves and under socialism this is coming from private entities, but he was an innocent 15yearold boy. Our kids went to catholic school. He never says a word and get all of these adults on cnn were saying he has a punishable face. I met with some of these people a week later and we are still saying it looks like that. Really, do you not understand what you are saying. Just everything about that story was wrong. And i really hope that in the end the courts will say you cant fly if somebody because there is a court case here. Thereve been two that do inappropriate things on the social media. He didnt do that. But hes being lumped in with people that are racist or say bad things and might be excluded from schools and careers because people think he is a terrible person and he never said a word. They were yelling horrible epithets at him and the others and the media got everything completely wrong. She does a great job of sort of describing that and drawing into this idea of what happens under the propaganda and socialism. Host the democrats and socialists we served with tell us that socialism is the path to fairness. So, who are the Fairness Police and how do you write about them . Guest that is a great point. If we disagree she isnt going to sell the ideas of fairness, she has to sell the police basically. This is where it breaks down. Its like its become popular in the idea of fairness as they complete with things like charity and being your brothers keeper, i believe we should be our brothers keeper. Christianity and the idea that we should take care of our people, but they believe it and if i come to your house and take your money and give it to someone else, charity is if you give up your own money and its not charity when the government comes but it also isnt charitable in the way the government does it because ultimately the more you want to socialism, this is one of the points we make you want a little bit of socialism, it may be tolerable. When the only way you can get it is to kill people and. On the dystopian novel the kids asking is that inherent or is it inevitable and i think the more we get to the market is inherent, the closer you get to taking peoples property, people who resist and then you cannot just find them. You have to put them in jail or shoot them. I interact with a lot of folks i talk to me as a conservative and say how can i motivate my child, my grandchild to embrace the principles that have made the country great and i would say sy the book does detail else all of the arguments the socialists make a. Of the age of 29 they have a favorable view of socialism. Jefferson is one that is that every generation has to renew the water of the tree of liberty. To have the problems with socialism and what comes from it, the big lie that is out there right now and the big sort of superficial platitude they throw at you as they say well, you know, the intellectuals of america used to like stalin then we learned it was bad and that t isnt the socialism we want. We used to like castro. But then we learned it wasnt st so great. We used to like china but not as much as we now like sweden and scandinavian socialism, it is the kinder, gentler socialism. They ranked pretty high on the Freedom Index for trade and a lot of other things and one of the main policy things that he wants is to raise the Corporate Income tax. We lowered from 35 to 21 . Interestingly scandinavia has been in the low 20s for 30 or 40 years now and part of the success they have had low business taxes. He says we want to be sweden and the scandinavia but he doesnt want a low Corporate Income tax. He wants to raise them and also interesting, scandinavia doesnt have a minimum wage. The other interesting thing, and this is probably the biggest lie of the left and of all of the socialists as you can have all this free stuff, free college, paid leave, everything you want to just give you free money and only tax the rich people and the big wide that is implicated in scandinavia. They have a welfare state, theres a lot of free stuff they give you but they tax the heck out of everybody. This truth will not tell you that because they want to stick it to the rich and upper middle class but in scandinavia everybody pays the 25 of sales tax from the poor to the rich, 25 everybody also pays a very significant income tax so the 60 starting at 60,000 is the middle class thats how they get so much money they tax the heck out of the middle class. 60 trillion the middle class has to have a 60 income tax and now they are lying to you saying they wont have any income tax just the rich people can stick it to the rich people, that is a lie. Host the rich get richer and that comes at someone elses expense and i think that you use a variety of illustrative examples to go through the second kansas that is the rising tide of. One of them point out that pakistan and ethiopia have less income inequality than us. You think its going to be great. It really isnt about how close you are to each other, it is about your level. Income inequality one of the authors we quoted said that its sort of like a jealousy trope. Its about me carrying how much money you make and in reality thats just sort of coveting someones property. I just care if im getting richer but another one that comes from the socialists they say it is a cost and if i get some, you are getting less. The truth of the matter and the statistics are overwhelming it is getting bigger and bigger and there is less poverty. Is there a group that we quote from called human progress. Org. The statistics were just amazing. Poverty, about 90 of people pee lived on less than 2 a day that is how they define it. They do constant dollars. It went from 90 in 1822 about a third of the world living in poverty in the early 1960s. Today less than 10 . So, that is incontrovertible. We are getting 137,000 escaping every day for the last 25 years so th the facts are just compley wrong. Its so much better than it used to be. Host i expected the book to focus on the domestic policy reforms to enhance liberty and reduce the size and scope of government but i think the readers can expect a global view of how the quality of life has been intact but as the folks have moved towards the Big Government or liberty. Host the facts are there if may have doubled eight times. We are all doing so much better and i start up the speech is now by saying there is never, ever been a better time to be alive. I want that to sink in. Host maybe not in venezuela though. You take them very directly in the book and make some people eat their words. You seem to take joy in pointing out not only bernie but folks on the cnn come even all of her stone championing them as a different critique. Guest it is a disaster, people literally eating their pets. We told the story of a young lady, a teenage girl who has again that they are to defend their turf of trash so certain garbage receptacles. They are hers to look for food. How sad, people killing rats in the street to try to eat them, pigeons, and it just is a sad thing is kind of going back to the World Economy we have to understand why it got better and why venezuela is deteriorating into chaos and i think that is part of what the book is doing. The debate we should be having a peer but they dont seem to have it in congress, we are not really talking about such economic system. Host you also trace the roots of socialism back which i think would be enlightening to many who would cast the monarchy but you cite it as is a brand a tv for nationalism that has been violent and harmful. Guest thats part of the problem we have had since the 1930s. Basically you have hitler come on board by the 1930s they are already calling him a rightwing dictator and i dont think it was accidental. They were critical scientists who decided to develop a spectrum of right and left and so they put nazis over a year into socialism and communists over here when in reality they are different variances of socialism in fact hitler was proud of his socialism and said like most inventors of something he wanted to make sure that it was distinct. His was naturalist and the international and racist and obviously genocidal but he was proud of those things and said this is unique. They are all the collective but they said we can do so socialism lets call them a rightwing authoritarian. The same is true in the arab world i think the commonality, and this gets back to the top 1 is mubarak and all these dictators in africa many of them have a socialist event but it was socialism and enriching their family, but it happens under socialism, too. They may say they are going to help everybody out and everybody is going to get a chicken in every pot and it seems like they are very rich and family seems to enrich themselves. Host and then you attach the notion that its dependable by saying every economy will distribute Resource Resources o, there is no opportunity for the equal distribution of resources and so in a world where there is unequal distribution of resources, you prefer marriage over cronyism. So, do we fall at some risk in the United States congress that sort of leaning into those elements of the crony capitalism and those that take us on the slow march . Guest the whole idea of how things are distributed into things are equally distributed, the problem with the u. S. Lack incentive you want to increase your share of the pie and getting rid of the incentives was always a problem. Do we fall into the trap sometimes . Ds because in order to get the things we wanted like reducing taxes weve taken people off at the lower end so now we have a tax system different than the scandinavia. We are towards the progressive tax code. The majority of you like 90 of the taxes now that host you are critical of the way that they can fuel the black market and how that can undermine peoples purchasing power and opportunity to live within a normalized economic system. What were the striking examples detailing the research of the imposition of socialism directly fueling that nefarious market economy . Guest theres always the price point if you set the price too lois too low all of the goos would be gone in if yo if you se price too high they rot on the shelf. Its one of these things i think even conservatives screw up sometimes and say what is the just price . Is where it crosses and you have to leave it up into the supply and demand into the invisible hand of the marketplace and those wanting to strive for more have more efficiency. Once the government set prices, we get into a world of hurt because they dont know the correct price of anything that is either too low or too high. Its never that prio never thate project price but it leads to horrific problems and the balance of the black market and also in several examples we talk about how under socialism that cannot be tolerated because you tolerate a little bit of it and it undermines the whole system so you have to have informants and families informing on families and neighbors informing on neighbors and then after a while jury trials are too slow and buying bread on the black market becausmarket is that if r family and all of the people of the jury. They will not get a conviction and so things become more authoritarian because the policies are very unpopular but people will it is like one of the examples in venezuela somebody selling stuff on the street and its more than the price ha and to kind of apologi. We have stuff and we are giving it to people. We want the price to be 50 cents so everybody can have it then when they do it well intentioned that we keep it cheap that there is no bread at it happens everywhere. That he tells us the bread lines are good. As you citehave you cited in thk people are waiting in long lines and that is the sign of healthy socialism. We suggest you see what they are like in venezuela. I dont think people are too excited. It still ignores the great wealth of the country. Our country is so wealthy right now we do not have a food problem. We have in excess of food problem. The biggest problem in health right now, one of the biggest is too much food. Im not saying that its great to be poor but the poorest are in the middle class than most around the world. And we have to figure out how they get people excited about being part of that. There still is a problem. Workforce participation, those that dont participate with 38 and in some of his 50 of people not working so w so that it stil needs to be this thing and i think it is also coupled in the drug problem people are not working and they are divorced and that whole process but they are more likely to get into the drug problem, but we still have that problem even hear the problem of plenty and every day you probably hear when you go out before the businesses say i cant find enough workers, the biggest problem right now they cant find enough but we still have a bunch of them that are not participating. You draw from the resources within the liberty movement, but i sensed reading the book that you are at times frustrated by the