June 12, 2026 • 34 mins
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
It's that time time, time, time, luck and load.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
The Michael Verry Show is on the air. It's Charlie
from BlackBerry Smoke. I can feel a good one coming on.
It's the Michael Berry Show.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
I believe it is very important any attempt to restrict
drinking and drunk.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
For you and me because we care so deeply about
our country. I need a drink of water. Hold on
them on.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
What is it? It is water.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
I believe that you and I should have a doctrinal
basis for our opinions because we're the ones here to
save this country. We're the backstop. Trump will be gone
one day, and we have to understand why we believe
what we leave, what we believe and why we believe that,
(01:03):
and not just well, I'm for this and I'm against that,
for what the Republicans doing, against what the Democrats do. Know,
we have to shape what is done because we're the thinkers,
we're the business owners, we're the smart people, we're the
people with experience, we're the people with the right values.
Not everyone in this country does. And there are people
who voted for Karen Bass to have more time as
(01:28):
the Los Angeles mayor. I mean, think about that for
a moment. So with that in mind, we turn back
to the words of Thomas soul and to the man
who inspired him, Milton Friedman. Milton Friedman so very important
to the modern conservative mind, and certainly to mine, and
hopefully after today, to yours, talking about things absent this election,
(01:52):
talking about these things long before Donald Trump was known
by more than one percent of the population, the nuts
and bolts, the underpinning the philosophical platform upon which we
believe we trust. Then we throw the word inflation around
(02:12):
like it's a number on a chart. Okay, gas is up,
groceries are up.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Whatever.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
But Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize winning economist, one of the
great minds of the twentieth century, one of the most
influential forces on my conclusions, he said, stop brought there.
Inflation isn't some random weather event. It's not bad luck,
(02:40):
it's not corporate greed. It's a disease, hear me out.
And like any disease, it has a specific cause, of
specific origin, and if you treat the symptoms without treating
the cause, you will never get well. Friedman spent decades
trying to get politicians and the public, frankly, to understand
(03:05):
this one simple truth. What you're about to hint here
is him laying out in plain language, no jargon, no charge.
He's trying to make it as simple as he can,
just the cold, honest diagnosis. This is what inflation is.
Here's Milton Friedman.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Inflation is a disease. It's a dangerous disease for a society.
It is sometimes a fatal disease for a society.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
It's a disease that.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
If allowed to rage unchecked, can destroy a society.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
And we have many such examples.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
The classic examples, of course, are the extreme examples of Germany,
of Austria, of Russia after the First World War.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
Really did reach levels.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
At which the kind of apocryphal story I told you
was a literal description of the reality when inflation reached
levels at which employers would pay their workers three times
a day after breakfast, lunch, and dinner so they could
go out and spend the money before it had lost
all its value. That's the real extreme cases. But you
(04:24):
don't have to go to such extreme cases to see
the enormous harm.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Which inflation left unchecked can do.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
You have the example in many examples in South America, Brazil,
before nineteen sixty four was brought down by an inflation
that led to a revolution that toppled the existing government
in order to stem the inflation. In the famous case
of Chile, with mister lee Yendi in power, he produced
(04:55):
an inflation, which was one of the major factors that
caused the economic catastrophe that led to the replacement of
his government by a military dictatorship. We are nowhere near
that stage in the United States, but it behooves us
as a nation to pay attention to this disease, to
ask ourselves, what is the cause of the disease, how
(05:19):
do you cure the disease, what are the effects of
the cure, what are the.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
Side effects of it? And what will happen if we
don't cure it.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
So inflation is a disease, and Friedman made that case clearly.
Then if we understand that, then the obvious next question
is who's the carrier who gave us this disease. Friedman's
answer was just as blunt as you would expect. The government,
not corporations, not oil shakes, not greedy CEOs raising prices,
the government specifically, whoever controls the money's supply. Because here's
(05:53):
the one thing. Only one entity on Earth has the
legal authority to print money. Only one entity on Earth
can expand the supply of dollars in circulation. And when
you flood the system with more dollars chasing the same
amount of goods, prices go up. It is not complicated.
These are laws of economics.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
It's just math.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
Politicians will tell you otherwise because they don't want to
own it, or they don't understand it. Milton Friedman owned
it for them.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
Listen, now, The first step to our understanding the cause
of inflation is to recognize that it is always, in everywhere,
a monetary phenomenon. It's always an everywhere a result of
too much money, of a more rapid increase in the
(06:39):
quantity of money than an output. Moreover, in the modern era,
the important next step is to recognize that today governments
control the quantity of money, so that, as a result,
inflation in the United States is made in Washington and
(07:00):
nowhere else. Of course, no government, any more than any
one of us, likes to take responsibility for bad things.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Where all of us human, If.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
Something bad happens, it wasn't our fault, and the government
is the same way. So it doesn't accept responsibility for inflation.
If you listen to people in Washington talk, they will
tell you that inflation is produced by greedy businessmen, or
it's produced by grasping unions, or it's produced by spendthrift consumers,
(07:33):
or maybe it's those terrible Arab sheikhs who are producing. Now,
of course, businessmen are greedy, who of us isn't? Trade
unions are grasping who of us isn't? And there's no
doubt that the consumer is a spendthrift. At least every
man knows that about his wife. But none of them
(07:56):
produce inflation for the very simple reason that neither of
the businessmen, nor the trade union, nor the housewife has
a printing press in their basement on which they can
turn out those green pieces of paper we call money.
Only Washington has that printing print, and therefore only Washington can.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
Produce and play. You don't know, Tony, don't you having much?
Speaker 4 (08:21):
You will bring me my way?
Speaker 5 (08:23):
Michael Perry's so, Milton Freedman told us inflation is.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
A disease caused by the government. Great Now, what do
you do about it? Because knowing the diagnosis is one thing.
Actually treating it is another. And the cure, he warned,
is not painless. We didn't get into this situation by accident.
It's a longer clip, and it's worth every minute we're
gonna have to. Well, we'll see how much of it
we can get in. Friedman walks through exactly what has
to happen to bring inflation under control, the money you
(08:54):
make to make it go further. He's honest about the
fact that the medicine is going to hurt before it helps,
which is why politicians don't do anything about it, even
when they're shown a course of action, because people don't
want to hurt. They just want the good times slow, slow,
slow the growth of the money supply, no more stimulus packages.
(09:17):
Accept a period of economic pain, and that's hard. That's hard.
Don't let politicians panic and reverse course the moment unemployment
ticks up, because it will. He's describing in advance almost
exactly what poll what Not Paul Voker did in the
early eighties to break the back of double digit inflation
(09:40):
under the Reagan regime. Milton Friedman saw it coming, he
prescribed it, and he was right. This is how you
cure inflation.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
Germany nineteen forty five a devastated country.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
The nation defeated in war.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
The new governing body was the Allied Control Commissioner, representing
the United States, Britain, Friends, and the Soviet Union. They
imposed strict controls on practically every aspect of life, including
wages and prices.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
Along with the effects of war. The results were tragic.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
The basic economic order of the country began to collapse.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
Money lost its value.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
People reverted to primitive barter, where they used cameras, fountain pens, cigarettes,
whiskey as money that was less than forty years ago.
This is Germany as we know it today, transformed into
a place a lot of people would like to live in.
(10:46):
How did they achieve their miraculous recovery? What did they
know that we don't know? Early one Sunday morning, it
was June twentieth, nineteen forty eight, the German Minister of Economics,
Ludwig Erhardt, a professional economist, simultaneously introduced a new currency,
(11:08):
today's deutsch Mark, and at one fell swoop abolished almost
all controls on prices and wages. Why did he do
it on a Sunday morning? It wasn't as you might suppose,
because the stock markets were closed.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
On that day.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
It was, as he loved to confess, because the offices
of the American, the British, and the French occupation authorities
were closed that day. He was sure that if he
had done it when they were open, they would have
countermanded the order.
Speaker 3 (11:38):
It worked like a charm.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
Within days, the shops were full of goods. Within months,
the German economy was humming along at full steam. Economists
weren't surprised at the results, after all, that's what a
price system is form.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
But to the rest of the world.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
It seemed an economic miracle that a defeated and devastated
country could in little more than a decade become the
strongest economy on the continent of Europe. In a sense,
(12:23):
this city, West Berlin is something of a unique economic
test to set, as it is deep in communist East Germany.
(12:45):
Two fundamentally different economic systems collide here in Europe, powers
and there, separated by political philosophies, definitions of freedom, and
a steel and concrete wall. To digress from inflation, Economic
(13:28):
freedom does not stand alone.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
It's part of a wider order.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
I wanted to show you how much difference it makes
by letting you see how the people live on the
other side of that Berlin wall. But the East German
authorities who wouldn't let us. The people over there speak
the same languages of people over here. They have the
same culture, they have the same forebears. They are the
same people. Yet you don't need me to tell you
(13:56):
how differently they live. There is one simple explanation. The
political system over there cannot tolerate economic freedom. The political
system over here could not exist without it. But political
freedom cannot be preserved unless inflation is kept in bounds.
(14:19):
That's the responsibility of government, which has a monopoly over
places like this.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
The reason we have inflation.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
In the United States, well, for that matter, anywhere in
the world, is because these pieces of paper and the
accompanying book entry for their counterparts in other nations are
growing more rapidly than the quantity of goods and services produced.
The truth is, inflation is made in one place, in
one place only here in Washington.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
This is the only place.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
Where there are presses like this to turn out these
pieces of paper we call money. This is a place
where the power resides to determine ho happily the amount
of money shall increase.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
What happened to all that noise.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
That's what would happen to inflation if we stopped letting
the amount of money grow so rapidly. This is not
a new idea, it's not a new cure.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
It's not a new problem.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
It's happened over and over again in history. Sometimes inflation
has been cured this way on purpose. Sometimes it's happened
by accident. During the Civil War, the North late in
the Civil War overran the place in the South where
the printing presses were setting up where the pieces of
paper were being turned out. Prior to that point, the
(15:59):
South and head of very rapid inflation.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
If my memory.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
Serves me, write something like four percent a month. It
took the Confederacy something over two weeks to find a
new place where they could set up their printing presses
and start them going again. During that two week period,
inflation came to a home.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
After the two week.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Period, when the presses started running again, inflation started up again.
Speaker 4 (16:24):
Michael Man on the air night he starts off, y'all,
he's got it all.
Speaker 3 (16:33):
I want to follow what Milton Friedman says here about
inflation and understand that if you want to know the
true tax. It is how much the government is spending.
Politicians love to talk about tax cuts. It makes them
(16:54):
very popular. They love it when they can cut your
taxes with one hand and borrow trillions of dollars with
the other, because then they get to look like heroes
without ever paying any price. You say, if a politician says, hey,
I'm gonna cut your taxes and we're gonna cut welfare
(17:16):
over here, then the welfare recipients and they're they're activists,
will say, oh, you hate black people, you hate poor people.
I'm gonna cut your taxes and we're gonna spend less
on roads. Oh no, weck our roads. First time you
see a pothole, you blame them for that. So we
see this in Texas where the Republicans are all gonna
they're gonna cut your property taxes, and you all right,
(17:37):
what spending cuts are you gonna make? They never know,
They just pretend that question wasn't even asked. We're gonna
cut your property.
Speaker 4 (17:42):
Property taxes are evil, we won't have.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
Any property taxes. Okay, Well, well, how we're still going
to spend the same amount of money. Where's the revenue
source gonna come from? And they really hope that people
are not even stupid enough to go, oh yay, no
more property taxes. All right, But but they're not cutting
the spending. What are we gonna start borrowing money? What
are we gonna do? Milton Friedman saw through that trick.
(18:05):
And he's not a politician, he's a truth sayer, he's
an economist. His argument is simple. The real tax is
not the line on your paycheck. The real tax is
how much the government spends. Follow this because every dollar
the government spends is a dollar taken from the private economy,
either now through taxes or later through debt and inflation.
(18:27):
And we're at what forty trillion dollars? The label doesn't matter.
The spending is the tax. Thirty seven second clip. Write
it on the wall.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
As I said before, keep your eye on one thing,
and one thing only, how much government is spending, because
that's the true tax.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
Every budget is balanced.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
There is no such thing as an unbalanced federal budget.
You're paying for it if you're not paying for it
through it in the form of explicit taxes, you're paying
for it indirectly, in the form of inflation, or in
the form of borrowing. The thing you should keep your
eye on is what government spends. And the real problem
is to hold down government spend it as a fraction
(19:10):
of our end.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
And if you do that, you can stop worrying about
the debt.
Speaker 3 (19:14):
The difference. By the way, let me say this. People
tell me all the time. You know, I didn't get
to go to college. That's okay. I didn't get to
study these things. That's okay. I'm no genius. I explained
to you things that I understand or believe I understand.
(19:35):
I try to raise questions that I honestly have, and
I try to share the inputs the influences of people
who've influenced my way of thinking that they make sense
to me. So that's all we're doing here, quick and
devastating right here. Thirty two seconds, Friedman explains the distinction
(19:55):
that most people intuitively sense but can never quite articulate.
Why does the DMV feel different than Amazon? Why is
Amazon more efficient than the people who give you your
driver's license? Why does the post office feel different from FedEx?
It's not just attitude or culture, it's structure. Here's important
(20:17):
for it. It's incentives. Private organizations answer to customers who
can leave and go to the competition. Government agencies answer
to nobody because you can't leave. Where are you going?
Don't like what the government, you don't like the fact
that your social security is check is late.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
What are you going to do?
Speaker 3 (20:37):
Go somewhere else for your social security? You don't have
a choice. There is no competition, You have no alternative,
and an organization that does not have an alternative in
delivering what they deliver to you, that that doesn't have
a consumer that has an alternative, they start serving themselves.
(20:57):
Milton Friedman call this one of the most fundamental deals
differences in all of political economy. At thirty two seconds,
he nails it.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
If a private organization makes a mistake, does things badly,
it will lose money and it.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
Will have to go out of business.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
If a public organization does things badly and governmental organization
does sing variedly and makes bad mistakes, it will be expanded.
It will be expanded because they'll say, well, it's all
because we just didn't have enough resources to it, or
else it will be left to stand and another organization
will be set up to do what it was supposed
(21:35):
to do.
Speaker 3 (21:36):
Play that again. I think people have to hear that twice.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Play that again, if a private organization makes a mistake,
does things badly, it will lose money and it will
have to go out of business.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
If a public.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
Organization does things badly, and governmental organization does sing variedly
and makes bad mistakes, it will be expanded. It will
be expanded because they'll say, well, it's all because we
just didn't have enough resources to it, or else it
will be left to stand and another organization will be
set up to do what it was supposed to do.
Speaker 3 (22:12):
So here is the perfect combination of politics and economics.
This is Milton Friedman talking about because he's a libertarian
at heart. If you're going to have a welfare state,
which we have, then you cannot have free immigration. It's
just that simple. So that's why we once had at
Ellis Island some degree of free immigration or you know,
(22:34):
wide open immigration, but we were not a welfare state.
Once you start promising people all of these dollars and
cents and packages and jobs, then you can no longer
be open to the world because it will inevitably bankrupt.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
You always been amused by a kind of a paradox.
Suppose you go around and ask people the United States,
as you know before nineteen fourteen had completely immigration.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
Anybody could get on a.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
Boat and come to these shores, and if he landed
on Ellis Island, he was an immigrant.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
Was that a good thing or a bad thing?
Speaker 1 (23:10):
You will find hardly a soul who will say it
was a bad thing. Almost everybody will say it was
a good thing. But then I suppose I say to
the same people, but now, what about today, do you
think we should have free immigration? Oh no, They'll say,
we couldn't possibly have free immigration to death.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
Why that would do? That would flood.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
Us with immigrants from in the end god knows where
we'd be driven down to a bare subsistence level.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
What's the difference?
Speaker 1 (23:39):
How can people be so inconsistent? Why is it that
free immigration was a good thing before nineteen fourteen and
free immigration is a bad thing today. Well, there's a
sense in which that answer is right. There's a sense
in which free immigration in the same census we had
it before nineteen fourteen is not possible today.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
Why not?
Speaker 1 (24:00):
Because it is one thing to have free immigration to jobs.
It is another thing to have free immigration to welfare.
And you cannot have both if you have a welfare state,
if you have a state in which every resident is
promise a certain minimum level of income or a minimum
(24:21):
level of subsistence, regardless of whether he works or not,
produces it or not, well, then it really is an
impossible thing. If you have free immigration, and the way
in which we had before nineteen fourteen, everybody benefited.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
The people who were here benefited.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
The people who came benefit it because nobody would come
unless he or his family thought he would do better
here than he would elsewhere. And the new immigrants provided
additional resources, provided additional possibilities for the people already here,
so everybody can mutually benefit. But on the other hand,
if you come under circumstances where each person is entitled
(25:01):
to a pro rate a share of the pot, to
take the extreme example, or even to a low level
of the pot, then the effect of that situation is
it Free immigration would mean a reduction.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
Of everybody to the same uniform level. Of course I'm exaggerating.
It wouldn't go quite that far, but it would go
in that direction.
Speaker 6 (25:22):
You've got the Michael Berry Show.
Speaker 3 (25:49):
Why can't government just fix poverty? Democrats will tell you
they're gonna solve, We're gonna fight probably always, We're always
having a war on drugs, a war on poverty, a
war on illiteracy. We're gon do we ever win any
of these wars. They're forever wars. We spend more money,
but we don't solve the problem. It only gets worse.
(26:09):
Government does not have the responsibility to eliminate poverty. People
have that responsibility. Bilton Friedman makes a point, and this
makes some people uncomfortable, and that was exactly his intention.
We've built an entire political culture around the idea that
fighting poverty is a government's job. No, it's not.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
No, it's not.
Speaker 4 (26:31):
Washington must act. This person is hungry. Washington must act.
This company has failed. Washington must act. These people don't
have housing. Washington must act. Friedman pushed back on this premise,
and so should we. His argument wasn't that poverty doesn't matter.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
Of course it does. He cared deeply about the poor,
and so do you, and so do I. It's painful
to watch someone suffer. His argument was that when you
hand responsibility for poverty over to the government, two things happen.
Number One, the government fails at it. Government's not good,
(27:09):
and individuals stopped feeling responsible for each other. He believed
that voluntary action, civil society, individual charity, and community were
not just more effective than government programs, they were morally
superior because they come from genuine human concern, not coercion.
How many Democrats who say the government needs to provide
(27:30):
free housing, the government needs to provide a job, the
government needs to provide a guaranteed income. How many of
those people personally give charitably. They don't. They don't want
the government to give because they want to solve the problem.
They want the government to give, or to say they
do because they want the power. They want poor people
to vote for them so that poor people will get
something in return, and they too will get something in return,
(27:51):
they will accumulate power.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
First of all, the government doesn't have any responsibility. People
have responsibility. This building doesn't have responsibility. You and I
have responsibility. People have responsibility. Second, the question is how
can we as people exercise our responsibility toward our fellow
man most effectively.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
That's the problem.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
So far as poverty is concerned, there has never in
history been a more effective machine for eliminating poverty than
the free enterprise system.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
In the free market, the period in.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
The period in which you had the greatest improvement in
the lot of the ordinary man was a period of
the nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
Those of us in ours this.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
Room are the heirs of that. We benefited from the
way in which our parents and our grandparents were able
to come here, and by virtue of the freedom that
was offered to them, were able to make a better
life for themselves than.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
Them and us.
Speaker 3 (28:49):
Milton Friedman made the point that government has created the
world's great achievements. I'm sorry that government has not. Did
I say government has? The government has not created the
world's greatest achievements. Individuals have. That's the way it works.
This is a quick one. It's a thirty two second clip.
It's a perfect rebuttal to an argument. You hear constantly
(29:12):
the idea that government is responsible for all the great
achievements of civilization. No, Al Gore, government is not the Internet,
the moon landing, the interstate highway system. You didn't build that,
what a Hillary Clinton say. Friedman's response to that line
of thinking was characteristically blunt. He wasn't denying that governments
(29:33):
have done things. He was pointing out what they haven't
done and what they could never do. Innovation prosperity, human flourishing.
Those come from individuals, from free people making free choices,
not from bureaucracies with bureaucrats. If that were the case,
the people of Russia would be wealthy. He says it
(29:55):
better in thirty seconds than I could say in thirty minutes.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
Road runs on individuals pursuing their separators. The great achievements
of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn't
construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford
didn't revolutionize the automobile industry that way. In the only
cases in which the messes have escaped from the kind
(30:22):
of grinding poverty you're talking about, the only cases in
recorded history, or where they have had capitalism and largely
free trade.
Speaker 3 (30:29):
Then of course there is the mantra of the democrats
steal from the rich and give to the poor, robinhood,
which has as its core robbing the idea that you
can make this person better off by taking from that person,
and what you end up doing is making them both miserable.
This is nineteen seconds Milton Friedman at full speed, Take
(30:50):
from the rich, give to the poor. He shreds it
in less than twenty seconds because the government is not
a neutral conduit. Money just does doesn't flow cleanly from
the rich to the poor. It passes through an enormous, inefficient, well,
I guess I'm being redundant bureaucratic machine, and a lot
(31:11):
of it never arrives, and the people running that machine
have their own interests which are not your interests, and
they're not the interests of the poor people. In terms
of linked it's nineteen seconds. In terms of power, Wow,
give this a listen.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
You can only aim at equality by giving some people
a right to take things from others. And what ultimately
happens when you aim at equality is that A and
B decide what C shall do for D, except that
they take a little bit of a commission off on
the way.
Speaker 3 (31:45):
We did not create this, and we don't typically use
artificial intelligence, but nothing here has been changed. It's just
creative editing. So it's things that were said that are
laid next to each other, ating a montage over a
course of a period of time, or Nat King Cole
singing with Natalie, where you're just taking the two of
(32:06):
them singing the same song editing them together. So it's
still intellectually honest, but it didn't happen. At the same time,
somebody in a very creative editing suite decided to pit
Milton Friedman against Bernie Sanders. And I'll just let you
listen to this.
Speaker 5 (32:21):
We have an economic and political crisis in this country, and.
Speaker 4 (32:26):
Now Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders debates the late great Milton Friedman.
Speaker 7 (32:31):
We need to develop a political movement for pad to
take on and defeat a ruling class whose greed is
destroying our nation.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
Tell me, is there some society you know that doesn't
run on greed? You think Russia doesn't run on greed,
You think China doesn't run on grade. The world runs
on individuals pursuing their separate enders.
Speaker 5 (32:55):
Democratic socialism means that we must create an economy that works.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
For all, not just the very wealthy.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
The reason why you say that is because it is
so hard for people to get out of the notion
that life is a zero sum game. They think if
one man benefits, another must lose. But in a free market,
both people can benefit.
Speaker 5 (33:17):
That if somebody works forty hours a week, that person
should not be living in poverty.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
In the only cases in which the masses have escape
from the kind of grinding poverty you're talking about the
only cases in recorded history or where they have head
capitalism and largely free trade.
Speaker 5 (33:34):
We must raise the minimum wage to a living wage.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
The minimum wage law is a law requiring employers to
discriminate against low skilled people. That's not the way anybody
will describe it, but that is in fact what it is.
Speaker 5 (33:48):
It makes far more sense to me to put millions
of people back to work rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure.
Speaker 1 (33:57):
The great achievements the sibilis have not come from government bureaus.
Is it really true that political self interest is nobler
somehow than economic self editors? You know, I think you're
taking a lot of things for granted. And just tell
me where in the world you find these angels who
are going to organize society for us.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
Well, I don't even trust you to do that.
Speaker 5 (34:22):
Our vision is transforming American society.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
He gentlement As has left for guilty.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
Thank you, and good night.
It's that time time, time, time, luck and load.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
The Michael Verry Show is on the air. It's Charlie
from BlackBerry Smoke. I can feel a good one coming on.
It's the Michael Berry Show.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
I believe it is very important any attempt to restrict
drinking and drunk.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
For you and me because we care so deeply about
our country. I need a drink of water. Hold on
them on.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
What is it? It is water.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
I believe that you and I should have a doctrinal
basis for our opinions because we're the ones here to
save this country. We're the backstop. Trump will be gone
one day, and we have to understand why we believe
what we leave, what we believe and why we believe that,
(01:03):
and not just well, I'm for this and I'm against that,
for what the Republicans doing, against what the Democrats do. Know,
we have to shape what is done because we're the thinkers,
we're the business owners, we're the smart people, we're the
people with experience, we're the people with the right values.
Not everyone in this country does. And there are people
who voted for Karen Bass to have more time as
(01:28):
the Los Angeles mayor. I mean, think about that for
a moment. So with that in mind, we turn back
to the words of Thomas soul and to the man
who inspired him, Milton Friedman. Milton Friedman so very important
to the modern conservative mind, and certainly to mine, and
hopefully after today, to yours, talking about things absent this election,
(01:52):
talking about these things long before Donald Trump was known
by more than one percent of the population, the nuts
and bolts, the underpinning the philosophical platform upon which we
believe we trust. Then we throw the word inflation around
(02:12):
like it's a number on a chart. Okay, gas is up,
groceries are up.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Whatever.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
But Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize winning economist, one of the
great minds of the twentieth century, one of the most
influential forces on my conclusions, he said, stop brought there.
Inflation isn't some random weather event. It's not bad luck,
(02:40):
it's not corporate greed. It's a disease, hear me out.
And like any disease, it has a specific cause, of
specific origin, and if you treat the symptoms without treating
the cause, you will never get well. Friedman spent decades
trying to get politicians and the public, frankly, to understand
(03:05):
this one simple truth. What you're about to hint here
is him laying out in plain language, no jargon, no charge.
He's trying to make it as simple as he can,
just the cold, honest diagnosis. This is what inflation is.
Here's Milton Friedman.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Inflation is a disease. It's a dangerous disease for a society.
It is sometimes a fatal disease for a society.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
It's a disease that.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
If allowed to rage unchecked, can destroy a society.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
And we have many such examples.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
The classic examples, of course, are the extreme examples of Germany,
of Austria, of Russia after the First World War.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
Really did reach levels.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
At which the kind of apocryphal story I told you
was a literal description of the reality when inflation reached
levels at which employers would pay their workers three times
a day after breakfast, lunch, and dinner so they could
go out and spend the money before it had lost
all its value. That's the real extreme cases. But you
(04:24):
don't have to go to such extreme cases to see
the enormous harm.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Which inflation left unchecked can do.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
You have the example in many examples in South America, Brazil,
before nineteen sixty four was brought down by an inflation
that led to a revolution that toppled the existing government
in order to stem the inflation. In the famous case
of Chile, with mister lee Yendi in power, he produced
(04:55):
an inflation, which was one of the major factors that
caused the economic catastrophe that led to the replacement of
his government by a military dictatorship. We are nowhere near
that stage in the United States, but it behooves us
as a nation to pay attention to this disease, to
ask ourselves, what is the cause of the disease, how
(05:19):
do you cure the disease, what are the effects of
the cure, what are the.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
Side effects of it? And what will happen if we
don't cure it.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
So inflation is a disease, and Friedman made that case clearly.
Then if we understand that, then the obvious next question
is who's the carrier who gave us this disease. Friedman's
answer was just as blunt as you would expect. The government,
not corporations, not oil shakes, not greedy CEOs raising prices,
the government specifically, whoever controls the money's supply. Because here's
(05:53):
the one thing. Only one entity on Earth has the
legal authority to print money. Only one entity on Earth
can expand the supply of dollars in circulation. And when
you flood the system with more dollars chasing the same
amount of goods, prices go up. It is not complicated.
These are laws of economics.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
It's just math.
Speaker 3 (06:13):
Politicians will tell you otherwise because they don't want to
own it, or they don't understand it. Milton Friedman owned
it for them.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
Listen, now, The first step to our understanding the cause
of inflation is to recognize that it is always, in everywhere,
a monetary phenomenon. It's always an everywhere a result of
too much money, of a more rapid increase in the
(06:39):
quantity of money than an output. Moreover, in the modern era,
the important next step is to recognize that today governments
control the quantity of money, so that, as a result,
inflation in the United States is made in Washington and
(07:00):
nowhere else. Of course, no government, any more than any
one of us, likes to take responsibility for bad things.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Where all of us human, If.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
Something bad happens, it wasn't our fault, and the government
is the same way. So it doesn't accept responsibility for inflation.
If you listen to people in Washington talk, they will
tell you that inflation is produced by greedy businessmen, or
it's produced by grasping unions, or it's produced by spendthrift consumers,
(07:33):
or maybe it's those terrible Arab sheikhs who are producing. Now,
of course, businessmen are greedy, who of us isn't? Trade
unions are grasping who of us isn't? And there's no
doubt that the consumer is a spendthrift. At least every
man knows that about his wife. But none of them
(07:56):
produce inflation for the very simple reason that neither of
the businessmen, nor the trade union, nor the housewife has
a printing press in their basement on which they can
turn out those green pieces of paper we call money.
Only Washington has that printing print, and therefore only Washington can.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
Produce and play. You don't know, Tony, don't you having much?
Speaker 4 (08:21):
You will bring me my way?
Speaker 5 (08:23):
Michael Perry's so, Milton Freedman told us inflation is.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
A disease caused by the government. Great Now, what do
you do about it? Because knowing the diagnosis is one thing.
Actually treating it is another. And the cure, he warned,
is not painless. We didn't get into this situation by accident.
It's a longer clip, and it's worth every minute we're
gonna have to. Well, we'll see how much of it
we can get in. Friedman walks through exactly what has
to happen to bring inflation under control, the money you
(08:54):
make to make it go further. He's honest about the
fact that the medicine is going to hurt before it helps,
which is why politicians don't do anything about it, even
when they're shown a course of action, because people don't
want to hurt. They just want the good times slow, slow,
slow the growth of the money supply, no more stimulus packages.
(09:17):
Accept a period of economic pain, and that's hard. That's hard.
Don't let politicians panic and reverse course the moment unemployment
ticks up, because it will. He's describing in advance almost
exactly what poll what Not Paul Voker did in the
early eighties to break the back of double digit inflation
(09:40):
under the Reagan regime. Milton Friedman saw it coming, he
prescribed it, and he was right. This is how you
cure inflation.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
Germany nineteen forty five a devastated country.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
The nation defeated in war.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
The new governing body was the Allied Control Commissioner, representing
the United States, Britain, Friends, and the Soviet Union. They
imposed strict controls on practically every aspect of life, including
wages and prices.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
Along with the effects of war. The results were tragic.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
The basic economic order of the country began to collapse.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
Money lost its value.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
People reverted to primitive barter, where they used cameras, fountain pens, cigarettes,
whiskey as money that was less than forty years ago.
This is Germany as we know it today, transformed into
a place a lot of people would like to live in.
(10:46):
How did they achieve their miraculous recovery? What did they
know that we don't know? Early one Sunday morning, it
was June twentieth, nineteen forty eight, the German Minister of Economics,
Ludwig Erhardt, a professional economist, simultaneously introduced a new currency,
(11:08):
today's deutsch Mark, and at one fell swoop abolished almost
all controls on prices and wages. Why did he do
it on a Sunday morning? It wasn't as you might suppose,
because the stock markets were closed.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
On that day.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
It was, as he loved to confess, because the offices
of the American, the British, and the French occupation authorities
were closed that day. He was sure that if he
had done it when they were open, they would have
countermanded the order.
Speaker 3 (11:38):
It worked like a charm.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
Within days, the shops were full of goods. Within months,
the German economy was humming along at full steam. Economists
weren't surprised at the results, after all, that's what a
price system is form.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
But to the rest of the world.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
It seemed an economic miracle that a defeated and devastated
country could in little more than a decade become the
strongest economy on the continent of Europe. In a sense,
(12:23):
this city, West Berlin is something of a unique economic
test to set, as it is deep in communist East Germany.
(12:45):
Two fundamentally different economic systems collide here in Europe, powers
and there, separated by political philosophies, definitions of freedom, and
a steel and concrete wall. To digress from inflation, Economic
(13:28):
freedom does not stand alone.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
It's part of a wider order.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
I wanted to show you how much difference it makes
by letting you see how the people live on the
other side of that Berlin wall. But the East German
authorities who wouldn't let us. The people over there speak
the same languages of people over here. They have the
same culture, they have the same forebears. They are the
same people. Yet you don't need me to tell you
(13:56):
how differently they live. There is one simple explanation. The
political system over there cannot tolerate economic freedom. The political
system over here could not exist without it. But political
freedom cannot be preserved unless inflation is kept in bounds.
(14:19):
That's the responsibility of government, which has a monopoly over
places like this.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
The reason we have inflation.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
In the United States, well, for that matter, anywhere in
the world, is because these pieces of paper and the
accompanying book entry for their counterparts in other nations are
growing more rapidly than the quantity of goods and services produced.
The truth is, inflation is made in one place, in
one place only here in Washington.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
This is the only place.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
Where there are presses like this to turn out these
pieces of paper we call money. This is a place
where the power resides to determine ho happily the amount
of money shall increase.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
What happened to all that noise.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
That's what would happen to inflation if we stopped letting
the amount of money grow so rapidly. This is not
a new idea, it's not a new cure.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
It's not a new problem.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
It's happened over and over again in history. Sometimes inflation
has been cured this way on purpose. Sometimes it's happened
by accident. During the Civil War, the North late in
the Civil War overran the place in the South where
the printing presses were setting up where the pieces of
paper were being turned out. Prior to that point, the
(15:59):
South and head of very rapid inflation.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
If my memory.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
Serves me, write something like four percent a month. It
took the Confederacy something over two weeks to find a
new place where they could set up their printing presses
and start them going again. During that two week period,
inflation came to a home.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
After the two week.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Period, when the presses started running again, inflation started up again.
Speaker 4 (16:24):
Michael Man on the air night he starts off, y'all,
he's got it all.
Speaker 3 (16:33):
I want to follow what Milton Friedman says here about
inflation and understand that if you want to know the
true tax. It is how much the government is spending.
Politicians love to talk about tax cuts. It makes them
(16:54):
very popular. They love it when they can cut your
taxes with one hand and borrow trillions of dollars with
the other, because then they get to look like heroes
without ever paying any price. You say, if a politician says, hey,
I'm gonna cut your taxes and we're gonna cut welfare
(17:16):
over here, then the welfare recipients and they're they're activists,
will say, oh, you hate black people, you hate poor people.
I'm gonna cut your taxes and we're gonna spend less
on roads. Oh no, weck our roads. First time you
see a pothole, you blame them for that. So we
see this in Texas where the Republicans are all gonna
they're gonna cut your property taxes, and you all right,
(17:37):
what spending cuts are you gonna make? They never know,
They just pretend that question wasn't even asked. We're gonna
cut your property.
Speaker 4 (17:42):
Property taxes are evil, we won't have.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
Any property taxes. Okay, Well, well, how we're still going
to spend the same amount of money. Where's the revenue
source gonna come from? And they really hope that people
are not even stupid enough to go, oh yay, no
more property taxes. All right, But but they're not cutting
the spending. What are we gonna start borrowing money? What
are we gonna do? Milton Friedman saw through that trick.
(18:05):
And he's not a politician, he's a truth sayer, he's
an economist. His argument is simple. The real tax is
not the line on your paycheck. The real tax is
how much the government spends. Follow this because every dollar
the government spends is a dollar taken from the private economy,
either now through taxes or later through debt and inflation.
(18:27):
And we're at what forty trillion dollars? The label doesn't matter.
The spending is the tax. Thirty seven second clip. Write
it on the wall.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
As I said before, keep your eye on one thing,
and one thing only, how much government is spending, because
that's the true tax.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
Every budget is balanced.
Speaker 1 (18:48):
There is no such thing as an unbalanced federal budget.
You're paying for it if you're not paying for it
through it in the form of explicit taxes, you're paying
for it indirectly, in the form of inflation, or in
the form of borrowing. The thing you should keep your
eye on is what government spends. And the real problem
is to hold down government spend it as a fraction
(19:10):
of our end.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
And if you do that, you can stop worrying about
the debt.
Speaker 3 (19:14):
The difference. By the way, let me say this. People
tell me all the time. You know, I didn't get
to go to college. That's okay. I didn't get to
study these things. That's okay. I'm no genius. I explained
to you things that I understand or believe I understand.
(19:35):
I try to raise questions that I honestly have, and
I try to share the inputs the influences of people
who've influenced my way of thinking that they make sense
to me. So that's all we're doing here, quick and
devastating right here. Thirty two seconds, Friedman explains the distinction
(19:55):
that most people intuitively sense but can never quite articulate.
Why does the DMV feel different than Amazon? Why is
Amazon more efficient than the people who give you your
driver's license? Why does the post office feel different from FedEx?
It's not just attitude or culture, it's structure. Here's important
(20:17):
for it. It's incentives. Private organizations answer to customers who
can leave and go to the competition. Government agencies answer
to nobody because you can't leave. Where are you going?
Don't like what the government, you don't like the fact
that your social security is check is late.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
What are you going to do?
Speaker 3 (20:37):
Go somewhere else for your social security? You don't have
a choice. There is no competition, You have no alternative,
and an organization that does not have an alternative in
delivering what they deliver to you, that that doesn't have
a consumer that has an alternative, they start serving themselves.
(20:57):
Milton Friedman call this one of the most fundamental deals
differences in all of political economy. At thirty two seconds,
he nails it.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
If a private organization makes a mistake, does things badly,
it will lose money and it.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
Will have to go out of business.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
If a public organization does things badly and governmental organization
does sing variedly and makes bad mistakes, it will be expanded.
It will be expanded because they'll say, well, it's all
because we just didn't have enough resources to it, or
else it will be left to stand and another organization
will be set up to do what it was supposed
(21:35):
to do.
Speaker 3 (21:36):
Play that again. I think people have to hear that twice.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Play that again, if a private organization makes a mistake,
does things badly, it will lose money and it will
have to go out of business.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
If a public.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
Organization does things badly, and governmental organization does sing variedly
and makes bad mistakes, it will be expanded. It will
be expanded because they'll say, well, it's all because we
just didn't have enough resources to it, or else it
will be left to stand and another organization will be
set up to do what it was supposed to do.
Speaker 3 (22:12):
So here is the perfect combination of politics and economics.
This is Milton Friedman talking about because he's a libertarian
at heart. If you're going to have a welfare state,
which we have, then you cannot have free immigration. It's
just that simple. So that's why we once had at
Ellis Island some degree of free immigration or you know,
(22:34):
wide open immigration, but we were not a welfare state.
Once you start promising people all of these dollars and
cents and packages and jobs, then you can no longer
be open to the world because it will inevitably bankrupt.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
You always been amused by a kind of a paradox.
Suppose you go around and ask people the United States,
as you know before nineteen fourteen had completely immigration.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
Anybody could get on a.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
Boat and come to these shores, and if he landed
on Ellis Island, he was an immigrant.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
Was that a good thing or a bad thing?
Speaker 1 (23:10):
You will find hardly a soul who will say it
was a bad thing. Almost everybody will say it was
a good thing. But then I suppose I say to
the same people, but now, what about today, do you
think we should have free immigration? Oh no, They'll say,
we couldn't possibly have free immigration to death.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
Why that would do? That would flood.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
Us with immigrants from in the end god knows where
we'd be driven down to a bare subsistence level.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
What's the difference?
Speaker 1 (23:39):
How can people be so inconsistent? Why is it that
free immigration was a good thing before nineteen fourteen and
free immigration is a bad thing today. Well, there's a
sense in which that answer is right. There's a sense
in which free immigration in the same census we had
it before nineteen fourteen is not possible today.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
Why not?
Speaker 1 (24:00):
Because it is one thing to have free immigration to jobs.
It is another thing to have free immigration to welfare.
And you cannot have both if you have a welfare state,
if you have a state in which every resident is
promise a certain minimum level of income or a minimum
(24:21):
level of subsistence, regardless of whether he works or not,
produces it or not, well, then it really is an
impossible thing. If you have free immigration, and the way
in which we had before nineteen fourteen, everybody benefited.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
The people who were here benefited.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
The people who came benefit it because nobody would come
unless he or his family thought he would do better
here than he would elsewhere. And the new immigrants provided
additional resources, provided additional possibilities for the people already here,
so everybody can mutually benefit. But on the other hand,
if you come under circumstances where each person is entitled
(25:01):
to a pro rate a share of the pot, to
take the extreme example, or even to a low level
of the pot, then the effect of that situation is
it Free immigration would mean a reduction.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
Of everybody to the same uniform level. Of course I'm exaggerating.
It wouldn't go quite that far, but it would go
in that direction.
Speaker 6 (25:22):
You've got the Michael Berry Show.
Speaker 3 (25:49):
Why can't government just fix poverty? Democrats will tell you
they're gonna solve, We're gonna fight probably always, We're always
having a war on drugs, a war on poverty, a
war on illiteracy. We're gon do we ever win any
of these wars. They're forever wars. We spend more money,
but we don't solve the problem. It only gets worse.
(26:09):
Government does not have the responsibility to eliminate poverty. People
have that responsibility. Bilton Friedman makes a point, and this
makes some people uncomfortable, and that was exactly his intention.
We've built an entire political culture around the idea that
fighting poverty is a government's job. No, it's not.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
No, it's not.
Speaker 4 (26:31):
Washington must act. This person is hungry. Washington must act.
This company has failed. Washington must act. These people don't
have housing. Washington must act. Friedman pushed back on this premise,
and so should we. His argument wasn't that poverty doesn't matter.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
Of course it does. He cared deeply about the poor,
and so do you, and so do I. It's painful
to watch someone suffer. His argument was that when you
hand responsibility for poverty over to the government, two things happen.
Number One, the government fails at it. Government's not good,
(27:09):
and individuals stopped feeling responsible for each other. He believed
that voluntary action, civil society, individual charity, and community were
not just more effective than government programs, they were morally
superior because they come from genuine human concern, not coercion.
How many Democrats who say the government needs to provide
(27:30):
free housing, the government needs to provide a job, the
government needs to provide a guaranteed income. How many of
those people personally give charitably. They don't. They don't want
the government to give because they want to solve the problem.
They want the government to give, or to say they
do because they want the power. They want poor people
to vote for them so that poor people will get
something in return, and they too will get something in return,
(27:51):
they will accumulate power.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
First of all, the government doesn't have any responsibility. People
have responsibility. This building doesn't have responsibility. You and I
have responsibility. People have responsibility. Second, the question is how
can we as people exercise our responsibility toward our fellow
man most effectively.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
That's the problem.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
So far as poverty is concerned, there has never in
history been a more effective machine for eliminating poverty than
the free enterprise system.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
In the free market, the period in.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
The period in which you had the greatest improvement in
the lot of the ordinary man was a period of
the nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
Those of us in ours this.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
Room are the heirs of that. We benefited from the
way in which our parents and our grandparents were able
to come here, and by virtue of the freedom that
was offered to them, were able to make a better
life for themselves than.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
Them and us.
Speaker 3 (28:49):
Milton Friedman made the point that government has created the
world's great achievements. I'm sorry that government has not. Did
I say government has? The government has not created the
world's greatest achievements. Individuals have. That's the way it works.
This is a quick one. It's a thirty two second clip.
It's a perfect rebuttal to an argument. You hear constantly
(29:12):
the idea that government is responsible for all the great
achievements of civilization. No, Al Gore, government is not the Internet,
the moon landing, the interstate highway system. You didn't build that,
what a Hillary Clinton say. Friedman's response to that line
of thinking was characteristically blunt. He wasn't denying that governments
(29:33):
have done things. He was pointing out what they haven't
done and what they could never do. Innovation prosperity, human flourishing.
Those come from individuals, from free people making free choices,
not from bureaucracies with bureaucrats. If that were the case,
the people of Russia would be wealthy. He says it
(29:55):
better in thirty seconds than I could say in thirty minutes.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
Road runs on individuals pursuing their separators. The great achievements
of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn't
construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford
didn't revolutionize the automobile industry that way. In the only
cases in which the messes have escaped from the kind
(30:22):
of grinding poverty you're talking about, the only cases in
recorded history, or where they have had capitalism and largely
free trade.
Speaker 3 (30:29):
Then of course there is the mantra of the democrats
steal from the rich and give to the poor, robinhood,
which has as its core robbing the idea that you
can make this person better off by taking from that person,
and what you end up doing is making them both miserable.
This is nineteen seconds Milton Friedman at full speed, Take
(30:50):
from the rich, give to the poor. He shreds it
in less than twenty seconds because the government is not
a neutral conduit. Money just does doesn't flow cleanly from
the rich to the poor. It passes through an enormous, inefficient, well,
I guess I'm being redundant bureaucratic machine, and a lot
(31:11):
of it never arrives, and the people running that machine
have their own interests which are not your interests, and
they're not the interests of the poor people. In terms
of linked it's nineteen seconds. In terms of power, Wow,
give this a listen.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
You can only aim at equality by giving some people
a right to take things from others. And what ultimately
happens when you aim at equality is that A and
B decide what C shall do for D, except that
they take a little bit of a commission off on
the way.
Speaker 3 (31:45):
We did not create this, and we don't typically use
artificial intelligence, but nothing here has been changed. It's just
creative editing. So it's things that were said that are
laid next to each other, ating a montage over a
course of a period of time, or Nat King Cole
singing with Natalie, where you're just taking the two of
(32:06):
them singing the same song editing them together. So it's
still intellectually honest, but it didn't happen. At the same time,
somebody in a very creative editing suite decided to pit
Milton Friedman against Bernie Sanders. And I'll just let you
listen to this.
Speaker 5 (32:21):
We have an economic and political crisis in this country, and.
Speaker 4 (32:26):
Now Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders debates the late great Milton Friedman.
Speaker 7 (32:31):
We need to develop a political movement for pad to
take on and defeat a ruling class whose greed is
destroying our nation.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
Tell me, is there some society you know that doesn't
run on greed? You think Russia doesn't run on greed,
You think China doesn't run on grade. The world runs
on individuals pursuing their separate enders.
Speaker 5 (32:55):
Democratic socialism means that we must create an economy that works.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
For all, not just the very wealthy.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
The reason why you say that is because it is
so hard for people to get out of the notion
that life is a zero sum game. They think if
one man benefits, another must lose. But in a free market,
both people can benefit.
Speaker 5 (33:17):
That if somebody works forty hours a week, that person
should not be living in poverty.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
In the only cases in which the masses have escape
from the kind of grinding poverty you're talking about the
only cases in recorded history or where they have head
capitalism and largely free trade.
Speaker 5 (33:34):
We must raise the minimum wage to a living wage.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
The minimum wage law is a law requiring employers to
discriminate against low skilled people. That's not the way anybody
will describe it, but that is in fact what it is.
Speaker 5 (33:48):
It makes far more sense to me to put millions
of people back to work rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure.
Speaker 1 (33:57):
The great achievements the sibilis have not come from government bureaus.
Is it really true that political self interest is nobler
somehow than economic self editors? You know, I think you're
taking a lot of things for granted. And just tell
me where in the world you find these angels who
are going to organize society for us.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
Well, I don't even trust you to do that.
Speaker 5 (34:22):
Our vision is transforming American society.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
He gentlement As has left for guilty.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
Thank you, and good night.
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