American Thought Leaders - How Impoverished Nations Become Prosperous: Dr. Rainer Zitelmann

Episode Date: July 29, 2024

Dr. Rainer Zitelmann is a German historian, sociologist, and the author of several books including, most recently, “How Nations Escape Poverty: Vietnam, Poland, and the Origins of Prosperity.”Why do certain countries that previously suffered under totalitarian regimes emerge stronger, economically, than others? What factors contribute to a nation’s financial success? And what holds it back? Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

You can only escape poverty with economic growth. And the precondition for economic growth is economic freedom. Dr. Rainer Ziedelman is a German historian, sociologist, and author of several books, including most recently How Nations Escape Poverty, Vietnam, Poland, and the Origins of Prosperity. In socialist times, there was no freedom of press. Everything was great most of the time, if you read the newspaper. Why do some countries emerging from totalitarian rule become prosperous economically,

while others languish? And what factors contribute to a nation's financial success? This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Rainer Ziedelmann, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you for inviting me. Well, I just finished watching a most wonderful documentary that you made that's actually related to your book, Poland from Socialism to Prosperity. And, you know, and of course, I've been very aware of the big changes

that happened in Poland post-89 and very proud of it as a, you know, Polish-Canadian and aspirational American. But you actually make the case that Poland did something special and that's what made it in particular successful in this transition phase. And so tell me about what happened. Poland was one of the poorest countries in Europe in the 80s. Poorer than the Ukraine, for example. And the GDP per capita was only half of the Czech Republic. So a very, very poor country.

People had to stand in long queues, long lines, to wait hours and hours, sometimes even days, to get product. If I can make a little comment, as a little kid, I actually spent about a year in Poland. It's a long story how that happened, but I remember standing in those bread lines. The bread was fantastic. Yes, and it was not in the 50s or the 60s, but we speak now about the 80s. And so Poland was one of the poorest countries in Europe and then in 1990 there started Balcerowicz, a great man, I think much more people should know about

him. I call him the Maggie Thatcher of Poland. For me he was one of the greatest politicians in the 20th century. He's responsible for turning Poland from one of the poorest countries of Europe to Europe's growth champion. Since three decades now, Poland is Europe's growth champion. And he started with economic reforms. Nothing special, you know. To allow private property and open the economy and welcome also foreign investors not seeing them as enemies but he understood that they will help Poland and he had to solve a lot of problems because before I

started reforms Poland had a lot of debt for foreign countries and the inflation was some 100%. And the biggest challenge was this. You have to understand when you start with free market reforms, that before things become better, first some things become worse. For example, hidden unemployment becomes open unemployment. You say hidden unemployment, and what that really means is that in a lot of these communist countries, they all had zero unemployment actually, right? Yes.

But the reality was a bit different. Yes. And the GDP declined for two years first. This happened everywhere. It was the same when Maggie Thatcher in the UK in the beginning of the 80s started with her reforms. Things turned to become worse before they became better. But, of course, now what was the problem? In socialist times there was no freedom of press.

Everything was great most of the time if you read the newspaper. And there were no other parties and this was different because it was not only that the economic system changed, but also the political change. Now they had the freedom to build parties, the freedom of press, but all the other parties said, oh, he promised it will become better. But you see what happens. It becomes worse. Let's go back to more state.'s to go back to more government and Bulgerowitz talent was not only to be a good economist but he was also good in

communication and this is so important and I think especially now today people in Argentina should learn from the Polish experience. I will promote this book, the Spanish edition, next month in Argentina. And the spokesman of Javier Millet, you know, who is now president in Argentina, his spokesman wrote the forward for the Spanish edition of the book. Because I told the people in Argentina, you can learn two things from Poland. First, these kind of economic reforms work. And Balcerowicz and Millet, in a way, they are colleagues.

Both are professors for economics, both believe in this Austrian economics, both believe in the teachings of Hayek and Mises, different personalities, but they believe in the same things. And so first lesson for people in Argentina, it works. Next lesson, before it works, you have to accept that you can't change things that went wrong for decades in six months some things will become worse before they become better and my forward for people in Argentina is be patient learn from Polish people be patient of course, the parents, they are against it now. Oh, people are poor now. But they were poor before. But maybe some will become poorer. So this is the reason why I think the

book is so important, not only for Poland but also for other countries, for other nations who want to escape poverty. Before we continue, I want to talk a little bit about your background. Because I was reading up on you and back in 86, before all these reforms even happened, you published a very important book about National Socialism or the system of the Nazi Party. I studied history and political science. Today I have one PhD in history. This was about this topic.

I will explain more about this. But I made my second PhD only now eight years ago in sociology about another topic. But the first one was in history and this is the book, it's also available in English, it's Hitler's National Socialism and I was the first one to reconstruct Hitler's world view. So how did he think? But it is not a biography. It is about the way he thought and especially how he thought about the economy. And I showed that he was much more socialist and much more anti-capitalist than most people would

accept. I analyzed his both books. You know he wrote Mein Kampf but there's also another book that was never published. he wrote it in 1928, and he wrote a lot of essays and then hundreds, hundreds of speeches, maybe thousands. And at this time it was hard because I had to go through all of his archives to make photocopies of the transcriptions of his speeches and to make photocopies from the newspapers, from his speeches and to make photocopies from the newspapers from his speeches and then I read all, for example, the diaries from Josef Goebbels, this minister for propaganda, about his conversations and what was especially important, there are two editions of Hitler's, you call it,

Hitler's table talks or monologues in the Führer headquarter. It was like this. Hitler went to bed very late, like two or three in the morning. And then he sat on a table with his staff or with even assistants, people, friends, and he spoke and spoke and spoke about everything, about politics, about war, about history, about economy and people had to listen. No one else spoke. They had to listen.

Sometimes they were tired because it was late in the morning, in the night, but you couldn't go, okay I knew it before I'm tired, go to sleep. No, if the Fuhrer is speaking of course you have to listen, even if you're very tired. And there was one who took notes. And so we know what he talked. And this is very important because sometimes it's the same as you have in his book and his speeches. But sometimes it's different. I'll give you one example.

Hitler admired more and more the Soviet planned economy. He thought that the planned economy is much superior to capitalism. In one of his table talks, he said, you have to admire Stalin. Stalin, he's a genius. And he said, Stalin knows all his role models like Genghis Khan. And what he did was great. And he said he wanted to turn the German economy more and more into a direction of a planned economy.

He said when we won the war, we should turn it more and more in the direction of a planned economy because it's better than capitalism. And so I analyzed all these things and this is my book Hitler's National Socialism. I mean absolutely fascinating. It looks like I have more reading material planned in the future for me now. Let's go back to Poland. You know there's an example used. One of the things that made Poland different from the Soviet Union was that they were never able to nationalize the farmers or the farms because there was so much resistance from the farmers. I admire the Polish people.

I think, I don't have it now, but I think something like 70% of the farmers stayed private. I give you an example from the Soviet Union. They had a little bit private land, maybe five percent was private and 95% state-owned and they produced more things on this five percent which was private than the 95% in this collective and this didn't work. And even Stalin understood at one time, and he had a conversation with Mao Zedong in China, and he recommended, please wait a little bit with collectivization there.

But he did it in China, and it was the same disaster in China, the same disaster in Vietnam, everywhere. So Polish people were very smart to resist against this and and i i actually worked for a while in a region of poland where there that some of that collectivization did happen actually in the northwest um and that it was one of the most economically depressed parts of poland even in the this would be in the early 2000s, you know, so we were doing community development education in that area and people hadn't fully, it just had never fully recovered yet, even with all of Poland's reforms. So I think you say that the biggest, the most important indicator is the relative growth in economic freedom.

Absolutely. Please let me explain it. I think maybe you know the Index of Economic Freedom from the Heritage Foundation. Maybe not everyone who listens to us knows this index. I can recommend you can find it for free on the Internet. It's published every year and this is ranking about 180 countries about how economically free they are. At the top you find

Switzerland and Singapore and at the bottom you find Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea. The United States for example, they are on position 25 right now. But when I speak about relative changes, they published this index first in 1995. The United States lost seven scores since then. They have now the worst ranking since they started the index. There are two countries that gained most scores in this index.

One is Vietnam. The other is Poland. They gained like 20 scores. There are some very small countries with only a few million people living there. Maybe they gained more, but I'm talking now about the bigger countries. By the way, a lot of people don't know how many people live in Vietnam or in Poland. If I ask people, what do you think, how many people live in Vietnam? Some 20 million, 30 million? No, it's 100 million.

It's one of the biggest countries in the world. It's bigger than my country, Germany, and then every European country. And Poland is about 40 million people. And they gained much more in economic freedom than all the other countries. I analyzed, you know, here in this book, both of these countries. I had several reasons to take Poland and Vietnam. First, both countries have a lot in common. First of all, they were victims of terrible wars.

And in Vietnam, you know, they had not only the war with the United States, but also with China, with Japan, with France. So they had both these terrible wars. After the war, they introduced the planned economy in Poland and in Vietnam. And what was not destroyed by the war was destroyed by the planned economy. And then they started in Vietnam in 1986, in Poland in 1990 with free market reforms. And then they started to grow. And, you know, these both countries have a lot in common. And also another reason why I was interested in it, to be honest, I had some girlfriend's relationship in my life, but the longest relationship was with one girl from Poland and the other was from Vietnam. So I was a little bit familiar with both of these countries. I know the mentality.

I absolutely do want to talk about Vietnam. I do want to talk a little bit more about Poland because I have this particular, obviously particular interest in that. That's my background. Why do you think that Poland did better than East Germany? Yes, East Germany received a lot of help, much more than Poland received also help from the European Union but East Germany much more from West Germany. And I think it's the mentality. You know, the people in East Germany,

some of them had an inferior complex against West Germany and they thought, ah, the West Germans took us over. So there is a special issue between East and West Germans today. And even a huge difference for example, Polish people don't like Russia and they are very, for example, in the war they support the Ukraine and they are not positive about Russia. In East Germany it's different. They are much more pro-Russia than in West Germany. I don't know why.

Because it was not so great to live there under pressure from Russians. So there are a lot of differences. Of course, some people say Poland got much money from the European Union, but I think this is not the most important factor. You see it if you compare it with Germany. East Germany received much more from West Germany, but this is not the reason. No, you have to do it by yourself. I think this is one reason. And then there's another thing what I like with for Poland It's this is something that is very often underestimated by

economists, it's the attitude towards capitalism the attitude toward wealthy people I Commissioned a poll, the biggest poll ever done, about the image of capitalism. I commissioned Ipsos Mori,

what is one of the most prestigious polling institutes in the world, and we did it, two polls, one poll about the image of capitalism and the market economy in 35 countries and the other poll about the image of wealthy people now in 13 countries. By the way, I have two other books. One book is In Defense of Capitalism, you have some of these results, and the other book is The Rich in Public Opinion. This is about the prejudice against wealthy people. And now in Poland, we saw from all 35 countries, Poland is number one, where the population is pro-capitalist. Number one.

There's no other country in the survey where people support so much capitalism than Poland. The other ones that were pro-capitalism, the United States, but not so much as Poland, South Korea, Japan, the Czech Republic. And then there are a lot of countries, most of the countries, the population is anti-capitalist. For example, France, Spain, my country, Germany, Italy, most of the countries. There are only 6 out of 35 countries where the people are positive towards capitalism. At the top is Poland.

You can find this survey if you google my name and economic affairs. Economic affairs is a prestigious economic journal in the UK and I publish a lot of my scientific surveys in economic affairs. You can get it for free there. And also you find a lot of results here in this book. And the other survey is about the image of wealthy people. And I calculated something. We call it the social envy coefficient. We asked the people a lot of questions about wealthy people. And there's a huge difference, for example, between Poland.

This was your question on the one hand and Germany on the other hand in Germany rich people are scapegoats they don't like rich people they are envious they don't like rich people in Poland on the contrast of course there are also envious people in Poland but not so much by far as in France or as in Germany. So they admire wealthy people. The same in Vietnam, by the way. People in Vietnam and in Poland, there are more people who admire wealthy people. They are role models, successful entrepreneurs, in contrast to countries like France and Germany

where they see them as scapegoats and they blame them for all negative things that happen in the world. And this attitude, because you asked the difference between Poland on the one hand and East Germany on the other hand, in East Germany people are very anti-capitalist. And in Germany people don't like rich people. In Poland it's different. So there are a lot of different things. I have it here in my book, some questions of our survey

where we compare the answers from Polish people and from German people. Because I don't have it now 100% but for example we had one question like or one statement rich people are ruthless and in Germany like for example 50% agree in Poland 25% agree so that's a huge difference. French people, they are the most envious people in our survey. So you see it now. They voted now for a new government. They will have

a leftist government. Do you know what was the first thing that they announced? A new government in France? Tell me. We want to tax everyone who earns more than 400,000 euros, what is about $400,000, with 90% tax rate.

90, not 19. 9-0. 9-0. 9-0. This is their idea. They love the state, they love the government, and they love taxes. And they don't like my books. My books are published in 35 countries all over the world,

even in Mongolia, in Korea, in Vietnam. But none of my books is published in France. They hate capitalism so much that we don't want to read these books. What about the United States and Canada? How do they fit on this coefficient of, did you call it envy? I can't remember. Yes, a social envy coefficient. Unfortunately, the survey about social envy we did only in 13 countries and the other survey about the image of capitalism we did in 35. The reason is only one, money. I paid it all by myself, $660,000.

I paid it on my own pockets. I could afford it because I'm not only an author, I was a successful entrepreneur and investor in Germany. But I can't do it for every country. I couldn't go on. I need someone to support it in the future, because otherwise I have money now. But if I spend it all for surveys, then I would write my next book,

How to Become Poor with Promoting Capitalism and Doing Scientific Research About Envy. And I'm not sure whether people want to read this book. I definitely don't want to write it. Last but a very quick question. So on the capitalism sort of side, how did Canada and the United States fare? Yes, Canada was not part in our survey for this reason only because of money. The United States, they are not as envious as European, most European countries, but there is a huge difference in the United

States. The older Americans in my age, older than 60, they love rich people, entrepreneurs, they're very, very positive. Younger than 30 were by far not so positive. They were not extremely negative, but more some positive, some negative, neutral. So it's the biggest contrast from all countries. For example, in Italy, it was exactly the other way around. The older ones are negative against rich people. The younger ones are more positive. But in the United States, there's a difference

if it is about rich people. For capitalism, it was a little bit similar. Older ones are much more positive than younger ones. But anyway, if you sum up, the United States are number two after Poland for the image of capitalism. This is fascinating. And I think there's some work to be done in the sort of impact of education.

I think you could draw some conclusions with comparing different countries. But yeah, so very exciting work for me. One of the things that strikes me when you were comparing Poland and Germany, the fact that they got a lot more aid was actually problematic for East Germany. And so I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on that and how development aid impacts the countries becoming prosperous out of a poverty situation. If you have only one reason to read this book, this is chapter two. Chapter one is about Edward Smith.

First, because he wrote in his book, The Wealth of Nations, about the topic, how can nations escape poverty? This was his main question. And his answer was economic freedom. Because he said you can only escape poverty with economic growth. And the precondition for economic growth is economic freedom. So he was right. And, you know, I read a lot about Adam Smith, and I had the honor.

It was last year, it was his 300th birthday, and I had the honor to write the big article in the Wall Street Journal about Andrew Smith's birthday. I was very proud about it. So the first chapter is about Andrew Smith. The next chapter is about development aid. And I read a lot of studies about development aid and the conclusion is crystal clear. Development aid does not help. On the contrary, in a lot of cases it hurts countries much more. It helps the elites, the corrupt elites.

But don't think, don't expect that the money that they give will come to the really poor people. And there are a lot of scientific studies and they prove it. Development aid does not trip. There are two countries that spend so much money for development aid as no other countries in the world. One country is the United States, the other country is Germany. We are so fascinated by giving development aid to overcome poverty and refinance a lot of stupid things. We should stop it. I don't mean, you know, humanitarian aid if there's a natural disaster. So, for example, one should help with a lot of money.

I speak about development aid. No. And you see it. If you compare Africa on the one hand and Asia on the other hand. Africa received much more development aid than Asia. Much more. But Africa is still the poorest continent. And Asia, people are much better off. And why is that? Because they have these economic reforms like in Vietnam and Taiwan, very positive. Singapore, Hong Kong, but even mainland China. It's a one-party system. It's a dictatorship, yes.

But they started with these economic reforms in the times of Deng Xiaoping in 1981. 88% of people in China lived in extreme poverty and then it decreased because they had more market, less state. Unfortunately, Xi Jinping goes back now to more state and less market, which is very bad because what Deng Xiaoping started was good but Deng Xiaoping goes back to more state and less market now. So they had their economic reforms, introduced private property and this is the reason how they escaped poverty, not development aid. I mean they also successfully convinced the US to massively invest right

and they also steal arguably trillions worth of intellectual property depends over what time period but definitely trillions and you know I tell you how stupid we are in Europe and maybe also in the United States

the European Commission now And I tell you how stupid we are in Europe and maybe also in the United States. The European Commission now banned the registration of cars with combustion engines by 2035. It's not allowed to register any new car with combustion engines. Everything should only be electric China is happy about it because they can make this electric vehicles much cheaper and now they Export this to Europe and what do they in Europe? Higher tariffs, you know my country we were so proud about our Mercedes BMW you know, my country. We were so proud about our Mercedes, BMW, Volkswagen. And now, have you ever heard that the country voluntarily forbid his most successful product?

How crazy should the government be to do these things? And this is what the European Commission does. And the Chinese, they are much smarter they produce their electric vehicles much cheaper and they go on also producing cars with combustion engines so it's it's really crazy. The Western nations you know kind of outsourced their environmental degradation to China and So everything gets produced over there and then gets come back and we stay clean. So this is a very interesting strategy, right?

And of course, this very strong industrial policy. Yes, but I don't believe in this industrial policy. I have a friend and he teaches at the Beijing University. It's a little bit not so easy for him today because he believes in Hayek and Mises and he wrote a great book he published with Cato Institute, The Logic of the Market. Its name is Wang Chang.

And he told me always, don't think that they were successful because of the state in China. No, they were successful not because of the state, but in spite of the state. They were successful because they introduced private property there. And I mention this only for one reason, because you asked about development aid. And I compared Africa on the one hand and Asia on the other hand. And, you know, if you compare Asia today, Asia 50 years ago, what was Asia 50 years ago?

Very, very poor. China was so poor. South Korea was, even in the 60s, as poor as African countries today. Today it's a prospering country, South Korea. I've been there several times. In Seoul, one of the leading export countries in the world. And so you see, no, development aid doesn't help. What helps is economic freedom. This is what my book is about.

No, 100%. And, you know, this is very true, actually. They sort of, you know, with the economic reforms that Deng Xiaoping brought in, the Chinese people are very industrious, very entrepreneurial, and they just sort of unleashed that. It was just sort of simmering, kind of waiting to go. That's my view on this. When I talk about industrial policy, I mean giant subsidies for companies like Huawei.

Why is Huawei in so many countries? Because it's a national security priority for the regime Maybe in a short time it helps but in the long run I think it will cause a lot of problems with for China. It helps only the short run this Some people are so crazy even we have a minister for economy in Germany He's stupid. You know what he before, he wrote books for children. He's from the Green Party. He believes 100% in this Green ideology.

And he thinks that this industrial policy in China is very successful and that we should copy this in Germany. I see. Fascinating. Oh, no, that's... Absolutely crazy. The thing is, I had some lectures in China, of course, not about my books about capitalism, because it's not allowed to come.

But I have some other books like The Psychology of the Super Rich, or I have another book, Dare to be Different and Grow Rich. And these are books very successful in China. They love these books. And then I had some lectures there, and people are very interested. I love these people there. They are very industrious, as you said. And I mentioned sometimes the name of Deng Xiaoping. And after one lecture, one man came from maybe from the party. Everything great what you have done, but please don't mention

too often Deng Xiaoping you can mention, but not so often. I think they should be proud what he did there. Not in politics, you know, not this, but in the economy. He did these economic reforms there, but they are not proud about him. They were only about Xi Jinping is the greatest, but Deng Xiaoping not. Fascinating. That's a very, very interesting insight. They were partly on a good way when Deng Xiaoping started. But this happens in a lot of countries. Then they go back to more government, to more state and less market. And I think this is dangerous for not only for China, for the whole world, because we depend a lot about the economic

situation there. This is actually really interesting because the theory of why we should invest so greatly in China, of course there's this great market, there was an opportunity to make a lot of money on this market, but the idea was that with investment would come political freedom and would come more economic freedom. This didn't happen. Milton Friedman was one of the first. He was several times in China. I wrote an article about it, Milton Friedman and China. He was a visionary. He saw that economic reforms will help China to grow. He knew it. But he had also some, he hoped

that maybe it can also come to political freedom as it happened in Chile for example in Chile they started with capitalist reforms on a dictatorship of Pinochet but then they got rid of Pinochet and they became also democratic country but this is what happened not in in China Vietnam if you compare Vietnam and China of course it's also a one-party system and they have no freedom of press there. All newspapers are owned by the government. But in Vietnam it's more free if you compare. For example, you can use Google, you can use Twitter, all in Vietnam. Also in the economy, some companies now go from China

to Vietnam because they say it's more free. And if you look in the economy, they have much more this agreements with other countries. The interesting question we had Paul in Vietnam about, we asked him a lot of questions and one question was, which economic system do you admire? And we gave them, I think, 10 or 12 countries.

You have this in this book again. Oh, so in this book again, 12 countries. The top was Japan, followed by Singapore and South Korea for young people in Vietnam. Number two was the United States. And the last at the bottom was North Korea. And the one before, the second last, was China. So this is how people in Vietnam think. They admire, they love capitalism and maybe they call themselves socialists with the Party, but don't believe it. They are very entrepreneurial.

I was invited to several universities in Vietnam. For example, the Frontrade University, that is one of the most prestigious universities in Vietnam. They translated my books, they published my books. They invited me to a workshop with the topic, how can we improve the image of wealthy people? This was their question. By the way, the image of wealthy people in Vietnam is more positive than in all other

countries, but they wanted to find out how can we improve it even more. I was also invited to several universities, a lot of universities in Europe and the United States. But I was never invited in the United States or in Europe to a question like this. When they invited me, I had a panel discussion one month ago in Berlin, where I live, at university. The topic was how can we tax rich people higher or how can we take money away from them. But how to improve the image of wealthy people, this was the thing they were interested in Vietnam. If I may ask though, in these communist countries, and of course Vietnam

is a lot freer indeed than communist China and certainly North Korea, the rich people also have, let's say, perks, right? Like the communist cadres have a lot better time at being rich or maintaining. Yes, yes, of course. This is also a lot, this is also the corruption also, and it is a very close link between the politics on the one hand, not only yes you have

This old money, you know like in the financial industry or banking industry, but you also have also entrepreneurs who have a lot of entrepreneurial spirit like Take check Mars example, but in the moment when they become very successful It's it's hard for them. So but you have also in Vietnam, I know a lot about Vietnam, you have also some billionaires today. For example, they have even a female billionaire in Vietnam and she became wealthy with an airline. I have it in my book, funny marketing ideas,

because the stewardess in the book, funny marketing ideas because the stewardess, you know, in the airline they were in bikini. This was their marketing idea. Wow, that's that I don't think that would go over well here. No, no, no. Sexist and whatever, they criticize her for the rest. She said, I think it looks beautiful. You have a lot of competitions, beauty contests in the world because it looks beautiful. And if our guests enjoy it, why not? I asked people in Vietnam, what is about this gender ideology

and all this crazy stuff that we have here in Europe and we have in the United States. We don't have it. Only if people study the United States and they come back, they bring it to us sometimes. And about freedom of speech, I have also to mention one thing. I had a discussion with a think tank in China. And he was not a member of the Communist Party. I told him, I admire your success, but you can never convince me about a system

where there is no freedom of speech and freedom of press. He said, yes, I know what you mean. If you speak to him, they are honest. I know what you mean. But, he told me, I was in the United States, professor in Chicago. And I had always fear to be in an elevator with a student, female, or in a room alone. I had always fear in my lecture to say anything that can be sexist or racist. And when I come back to China, I say, we don't have these problems here. Of course, as long as I don't say something against Xi Jinping or something,

I have no fear to be mentioned as sexist or racist. So it's interesting if you travel to so many countries and learn about so many different cultures, You see, you learn a lot. Well, you're making me think of a recent interview that I did with Richard Legutko, actually a Polish professor emeritus of the Aguilian University. He wrote The Demon in Democracy. And one of the things that he looks at in there is basically he's looking at similarities between liberal democracy and communism.

He says, of course, liberal democracy is a better system, but there's a shocking number of similarities and there's ways in which speech is controlled in liberal democracies that are quite different than under communism, but the effect in some ways is similar. Yes, it is. And even a friend of mine, I motivated her to write a book. She writes a book now, like back to the GDR. You know, she comes from the GDR, East Germany, about her hope. And then she sees now in the reunited Germany that step by step by step, there are things that remind her of the time in the GDR,

especially when it is about freedom of speech. But when people say it's the same, no, it's not the same, because in the GDR you had to go to prison, or if you want to travel to another country, they shoot you. No one will shoot you, and you will not come to prison. So I think, yes, it's true, there are some things similar, but it is a difference whether you're cancelled from crazy people

at the university or whether they send you in prison for 10 years. 100%. I mean, I guess I think his message is we can learn from this. Yes, absolutely. Listen, this has been an absolutely wonderful conversation for me.

Any final thought as we finish? Any final thought? Oh no, maybe only for advertisement. No, not for this book. I mention it much often, but I want to mention another book that is very important for me. This book is In Defense of Capitalism. In Defense of Capitalism, I debunk the ten most important myths about capitalism. I have a chapter, for example, capitalism is to blame for hunger and poverty, for inequality, for climate change, for environmental

destruction, for monopolies, for greed, for fascism, for wars. And I debunk all of these myths. And this book is now, I'm very proud, published in 30 countries all over the world. In English, it's In Defense of Capitalism. And I had a lot of interviews, I think, in the last year. I had more than 100 interviews with American radio stations and Last someone asked me do you think you can convince? Anticapitalist with your books I said no, I don't think so And he said why do you write books when you don't think you can convince them? I my answer was I know they will not buy them. They will not read them

I know it if I post it on Twitter or so, I get, oh, this is all nonsense, all right. And then I ask, have you read the book? No, I will never read a book like this. I wrote my books for people who are pro-capitalism, pro-free marketing, maybe more in an emotional way, but they have no time.

For example, for my book, I read a lot of books for my books. For my book about indefensive capitalism, you'll find it in the bibliography. I read 360 books and scientific papers. Not everyone has time to read as many books. And I give you all the facts, all the arguments, that if you have a discussion with anti-capitalists,

maybe at the university, that you have all the arguments and all the facts, and I can guarantee to win every single discussion. And this is why I hope so much that people go on Amazon and that they look for my name and find some of my books. Well, and I just wanted to add as we finish now that there is this group of people that maybe are let's say

very accepted accepting of the most mainstream of narratives maybe they're particularly credulous to mainstream media for many other reasons but there's always things happening in the world that are starting to make them wonder hmm did i really was everything that i believed true or not and i think that's where the opportunity lies in fact that's where at epoch times we're

we're we're looking to to speak to some of those people right because um that it we're living in a strange time. And I think there's an opportunity to reach out to people of that nature. Perhaps your books can help with that. Well, Rainer Ziedelman, it's such a pleasure to have you on. Thank you. I appreciate it. Thanks. Thanks a lot. Interesting interview. Thank you all for joining Rainer Ziedelman and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.