The Ricochet Podcast - The Sowell Men

Episode Date: September 30, 2015

It’s always good when when our friend Dr. Thomas Sowell stops by to impart some of his wisdom and common sense and this visit is no different. We talk economics (read his new book Wealth, Poverty & Politics: An International Perspective), Ben Carson, yes, even a bit about that candidate who shall to be named. Also, those Planned Parenthood videos and Cary Fiorina’s response, and finally, are Rob... Source

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so it'll be this week. So they're just great. Here we go. Coming down in three, two, one. Hello, everyone. I'm not going to get, I don't know what's going to happen here. I don't have any information on that. They don't understand what you're talking about. And that's going to prove to be disastrous. What it means is that the people don't want socialism. They want more conservatism. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lileks and our guest today, Dr. Thomas Sowell.

Let's have ourselves a podcast. There you go again. Yes, everybody, welcome to the Ricochet Podcast with the background noise brought to you by my gutter cleaners who are right outside my window at this very moment, making a sound like that Dennis makes when he sticks that vacuum thing in your mouth. So everyone rinse and spit and sit back and enjoy. We're brought to you also by Casper Premium Mattresses. They're back. Premium mattresses for a fraction of the price delivered right to your door.

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has changed so much for the better, and we'll tell you about that later, too, but just trust me on this one. You'll get your email back. It's great, isn't it? It is great! I have been using it since I heard about it on this podcast last week. Fantastic. Go ahead. Sorry. Hey, we're also brought to you by

Mifusha.com, two members of which you just heard spontaneously shout their joy and glee like testifying from the back of the pews about the joys of our sponsors. Ricochet, of course. Without that, there wouldn't be a podcast. So let's see. Rob Long, why don't you tell us? I will tell you. If you're listening to this podcast and you're not a member of Ricochet, you better go to Ricochet.com right now. Here's what's happening on Ricochet.com.

There's a lot of conversation in the world on Twitter all over the place about the center-right and the presidential election and direction of the country and all that stuff. And if you go online and you want to have a conversation about that or you want to read just what people are thinking about that, it's impossible to do so without wallowing in filth because the internet is a filthy place except Ricochet.com. Go to Ricochet.com. We're actually having – I'm in the middle of a really interesting conversation about the – who is in the establishment, the establishment this, the establishment that. I just posted a response to it. It's right there on the front page. Take a look at it. Sign up for the Daily Shot, which is our daily email blast that goes in your email box. It's funny. It's witty. It's smart, and you can win any argument that day with any progressive liberal person you happen to have in your life, and I happen to have all of them in my life. So it helps me help you. Ricochet.com, we are striking a blow for the civil internet, the civil web, civil polite conversation. I know it sounds like – I don't know what, like we're going back to the 1950s,

but you know what? It wouldn't be such a bad thing. Ricochet.com. Join. If you were a member and you no longer are a member, use the coupon code REJOIN. Get two months free. If you're listening to this, you get a free 30 days to join. That means you get to post and comment and join the conversation and become a member. Get a lot of other goodies too. Ricochet.com slash membership. Use the coupon code JOIN. You get 30 free days. You also get to join us when we do debates or State of the Union stuff or any kind of like big event, we do a great chat. It's lots of fun.

And depending on what time zone you're in, you're either – it's either cocktail hour or right after cocktail hour, which always helps. There you go, folks. Yeah, yeah. Civility of the 50s. Rob Long wants to go back to the 50s. So Ricochet then is going to have a whites-only section for comments and a blacks-only section for comments. I don't mean all the 50s. And women won't be required – women won't be let to enter at all because they should be back in the kitchen.

No, I mean that's what – when you say anything positive about anything in America that happened prior to 2008. Essentially, that's what you get. So, gentlemen, here we are with a brand new week. You think really that America is transfixed by the speaker battle in Washington? Do you think that America has been watching keenly the Planned Parenthood tapes and seeing how those play out? Or do you think that there's some other tale out there that actually is going to be more in the news and more effective than the things that consume people who are fascinated by politics?

Peter, are you there, Peter? I am here. Ah, good, good. So what do I think Americans have been... The Pope over the last week just blotted out everything else. So he goes back to Rome and lo and behold, these stories have just been working their way along through the press, developing this way, that way. So I don't – I think Americans sort of forgot about politics for a week other than papal politics.

And here they are. The Planned Parenthood story is still there, still developing. Actually, it's not developing. The left just can't stop screaming about it. It's pretty clear that Carly Fiorina correctly described a tape. The Planned Parenthood tape that she described, however, included some B-roll, some role that was put in under the interview, the narration, under the audio to illustrate what the person was talking about. That is 100% standard

in all television journalism, putting in what they call B-roll. And yet the left is saying, didn't happen. She's a liar. Ridiculous. Actually, to me, the only thing that's interesting about that anymore is the left, the left's rumple stiltskin-like fury. They're wrong. The general point is correct. She did see the tape. They used a journalistic technique, which is 100% standard, and they just can't stop stomping up and down in their fury. That's, to me, the interesting bit about the Planned Parenthood tapes. Oh, well, they need the money for mammograms and also to pay for people to throw condoms at Carly when she shows up at a campaign spot. Rob, I heard you aspirate something perhaps.

Yeah, I was aspirating a little bit. The Ross Douthat column, we should put a link to that in the show notes. That is the – Ross Douthat is one of the better writers, probably the best writer of the New York Times, but one of the better writers on these topics and he sort of lays it all out the proper way. It is amazing to me that the very things that years ago certain conservatives were screaming about NBC News doing and all the progressive liberals were saying, oh, come on. It's just narration over picture. Now it's considered with this Planned Parenthood tapes to be outrageously beyond the pale. What's interesting to me is that nobody is arguing – I doubt that puts it that way. Nobody is arguing that the clinics, Planned Parenthood clinics aren't doing what she says they're doing. No one is saying, oh, you're wrong.

They're not saying, oh, you're wrong. They're not doing this. They're just saying, oh, you said these frames of videotape occurred during a point at which someone was talking about this one thing and these two things are not in sync. That's really what they're arguing. They're really arguing kind of a Final Cut Pro argument, which is very, very strange. And when people are arguing that, you know they're losing. The second thing that happened, which I think – I just was just confirmed this morning, which just kind of blew my mind because it's the kind of thing you cannot – I could not have written as a parody is the pope. Pope Francis met with Kentucky County Clerk Kim Davis when he was in the United States. They had a meeting. Now, I didn't know that Kim Davis was a Catholic. She's a Catholic. Oh, she is?

I didn't know she was a Democrat about a month ago. She just – I think she just really re-upped – she re-registers a republican only a few weeks ago. They met. They had a conversation. This pope will now be disappeared from the ranks of the good popes. We won't be hearing much about his brave arguments about capitalism or his brave arguments about climate change. He will be disappeared from the ranks of cool popes. The fiat will be forgotten.

It's all – he's going to go back to pope jail where the liberals like to keep the popes in general. It is amazing. I'm reading this now. You're quite right. It is confirmed. It is confirmed. It's confirmed by the Vatican without much enthusiasm.

Who knows what's going to – spokesman for the Vatican says, quote, I do not deny that the meeting took place, but I have no comments to add. Because he wasn't there. He doesn't know which way to jump on that one, but it did happen. And it was catered by Memories Pizza. So, I mean, just everything about this is turning minds inside out. Your mind is probably going to be turned inside out by the air audition to come. And that's our cue to welcome once again one of our favorite guests, Dr. Thomas Sowell, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

His most recent book is Wealth, Poverty, and Politics, an International Perspective. And we welcome him back to the podcast. Good day, sir. Good day. Tom, it's Peter Robinson here podcast. Good day, sir. Good day. Tom, it's Peter Robinson here. How are you? Fine. How are you doing?

I'm fine. The book is Wealth, Poverty, and Politics, An International Perspective. And Tom, if you listen to people on the left, if you listen to President Obama, anybody who's poorer than the norm, anybody who falls beneath the poverty line in this country – we'll come to the poverty line in a moment. There's something puzzling about that because America is a rich place. If opportunity were evenly distributed, economic wealth would be evenly distributed. Doesn't that just stand to reason, Tom? I love Charles Murray's line that half of all the children are below the median. So you begin – go ahead.

One would be empirically. And a noted historian, Fernand Braudel, a French historian, said, you know, in no country and in no period of history have all regions of the country or all segments of the population had the same economic advantages. The more you look into it empirically, the more ridiculous the idea is that all groups and individuals, nations, etc., would have similar economic outcomes. Because the things that go into those outcomes are all radically different in many ways. One that I go into early on in the book are geographic differences. There are rivers and mountains and plains on all the continents, but the fact is that those rivers are not the same, those mountains are not the same. Even within one country like

Italy, up north where the ancestors of Pope Francis came from, has always been a wealthier, better educated, and more advanced part of the country. And as you look at the geography of the country, it is no great mystery. Mostly southern Mediterranean regions have very dry summers. Rivers almost dry up. Up in the Piedmont area, the Po River has ample water all year long because the rain up in that part of the country is more than double during the summer. The rainfall around Rome, and therefore the rivers have water from that source. But they also have water because in the summertime, the snows on the mountains start to melt, and that adds to it.

And then the river flows across a flat, level plain, and so it's very navigable in all directions. They have all the advantages. They don't have that in Sicily. And the reason people are poor in Sicily is not that people came down from the Piedmont and took their wealth away from them, but that they never had the wealth in the first place tom one of the fascinating passages in the book and again the book is called wealth poverty and politics contrasts russia with western europe and we know for example that russia the russian language was not written down until a couple of missionaries, Christian missionaries from Greece made their way north and put the Russian language into Cyrillic.

This took place about a thousand years ago. But by then, of course, the Western Europe, Latin, English even, all of these had been written languages for centuries. And in one way after another, Russia lags behind the West. And Tom Sowell notes that there are very good geographic reasons for expecting just that to take place, right? Yes. those reasons being, among others, that Russia has lacked the outlets to the markets of the world that you have in Western Europe, because they really have no easy access to the major waterways, to the Atlantic or Pacific. They could get through the Dardanelles if the Turks let them.

But St. Petersburg, for example, is frozen. The Baltic Sea is frozen. So there's not much they can do in the wintertime. And you make the point that isolation from the wider context, people who live in mountains as opposed to people who live in plains, Russia as opposed to Western Europe, there is something about isolation from the wider context of civilization or even from the wider context of, in very ancient times, simply meeting people from different villages somehow holds back economic development. Yes, if there's one factor that distinguishes the people who are not poor and backward, literally for centuries on end.

It is isolation. There are various kinds of isolation. There's geographic isolation. At LiveScoreBet, we love Cheltenham just as much as we love football. The excitement, the roar, and the chance to reward you. That's why every day of the festival, we're giving new members money back as a free sports bet up to €10 if your horse loses on a selected race. That's how we celebrate the biggest week in racing cheltenham with live score bet this

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in mountain villages or in on remote islands and like that, it's hard to think of any major advance in human civilization that has come out of those kinds of places. But there's other kinds of isolation. And one of the kinds that's most painful because it's so unnecessary is that groups that are lagging often have leaders who want to isolate them, because even though that will hold back the groups, it will benefit the leaders. Right. And so far as a group, let's say it's Spanish in the United States, and so far as they all grow up speaking English and making use of various opportunities in American society,

they eventually blend into the rest of society and they have no more need for leaders. Tom, could you contrast on that very same point? I've never thought of this before, so it could very well be this is a stupid question. You know me more than well enough to say, Peter, that's a stupid question, if it is. But can you contrast on this very point of wanting to keep a certain group isolated as opposed to encouraging them to open themselves to the wider culture? Is there a contrast to be made between, say, Frederick Douglass on the one hand and Al Sharpton on the other? Oh, my goodness. You could not have come up with up with a more radical difference. Of course, Frederick Douglass was all for blacks making use of the culture around them to benefit themselves, advance education, and so forth.

I mean, you just read Frederick Douglass's autobiography, and there's been an edition put out in recent years in which there are all kinds of footnotes where they explain to today's expensively educated students what certain words mean. And here is Frederick Douglass, born a slave, never formally educated, and he's using words and concepts that our expensively educated students have trouble understanding without footnotes. Meanwhile, you listen to Al Sharpton, the man is semi-literate. And so he's had ten times or a hundred times the opportunities that Frederick Douglass had, but you see that degeneration in leadership. That's not peculiar, incidentally, that many kinds of crusades

start out as noble endeavors and end up as a tawdry racket. I think that's what's happened to the civil rights movement. Tom, I have one more question before Rob and James Lilacs, who I know want to get in and they have questions of their own. The book, again, is

Wealth, Poverty, and Politics. Here's the question. I mentioned the whole question of poverty and the poverty line. And you and I have talked about this and you touch on it in the book. That the United States of America in the year 2015, one of the biggest health problems among the poor is obesity. We have the first country in the history of the planet in which poor people tend to be overweight. You noted when we were talking the other day, you noted that people below the poverty line is perfectly typical to own a car, to own a smartphone, to have central air conditioning and all to fall below the poverty line, which isn't to say that people below the poverty line in this country don't have terrible problems, a family breakdown, endemic, crime, endemic. But it seems to be the case that in this country, poverty is not material want. Poverty is not poverty as mankind has understood it for centuries. Poverty is something new.

It's social pathologies. Is that correct? Absolutely. It might also be described as moral squalor. You can see the retrogression. There's a whole section of the book dealing with progress and retrogression, especially among the low-income people and uh... housing projects are classic example

that back in the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties housing projects were radically different from what they became by three nineteen seventy people up for example people on saturday mornings about families that had kids and which also had a television set, which was something of a luxury at the time, that they would leave their apartment doors unlocked so that their children's friends could come in and join them in watching television. You know, well, today the average person in poverty has cable TV and multiple TV sets, but they wouldn't dare leave their apartments unlocked in a housing project. Tom?

I'm sorry. Oh, go ahead. I'm sorry. James? My microphone was off. Dr. Sell, I'm fascinated by the housing projects in New York and other big cities because they started out with such marvelous intentions. Here are these horrible tenements, people living in squalor. We will build them these magnificent new places with all of the great new European ideas about how societies should be organized. And it seems that there were two things that brought them down. One, the places themselves were disconnected from the city.

They were these large towers arranged in empty spaces, oases away from the grid and the familiar interaction that you got in the city. They were these large towers arranged in empty spaces, oases away from the grid and the familiar interaction that you got in the city. And two, it seemed that they changed the standards so that when it started, you needed to be an intact family. But eventually, that became seen as unfair to the people who, for whatever reasons, found themselves without a mate, but with children. Could you expand a little bit more on why they failed and whether it was ever possible for something so disconnected from the city to succeed and whether it was a wise idea to change the standards which led to the dysfunctional family environments today?

I think the architecture was the least of its problems. I can remember in the 1940s, one of our relative of ours was admitted to a housing project in New York down on the Lower East Side. We were so proud because in those days, you had to be an upstanding person. You didn't have to have a high income, but you were someone who had a steady job. You were married if you had children and so forth. And you had projects of that era, both in black and white neighborhoods, were nothing like the projects of the day. When Sonia Sotomayor was appointed to the Supreme Court, there was an article in the

New York Times saying she came out of a project. But then as you read what those projects were like, they were just absolutely nothing like the project of today the non-judgmentalism in who gets in and and the sense of fairness divorced from qualifications uh what was it was enough to doom the whole prospect? Hey, Dr. Sol, it's Rob Long. I'm in New York City right now. You're a New Yorker. And there is another native New Yorker running for president, running sort of as an outsider, Donald Trump.

Oh, my gosh. I thought I was having one Donald Trump free day somewhere. No, no, no such luck, sir. No such luck here. No such luck. Setting aside for a minute, whatever – I read your column and I totally get it. What do you think the appeal is? Of Donald Trump? Hello? Yes, of Donald Trump. uh... one here the tracking the republican establishment and a poll recently showed

that sixty two percent of republicans or dissatisfied with the republican leadership such as it is and so he's he's he's he's capitalizing on that and people who are also dissatisfied will go for someone who otherwise they would not pay any attention to. I mean, Donald Trump, he's really an overgrown, spoiled brat.

And normally they would reject such a person, but there are so few alternatives that they have any faith in. But do you see any kind of – we spoke – Peter and I spoke last week to Senator Rob Portman who had an interesting theory. His theory was that part of the appeal of Trump is that he sort of is a doer, that he builds things. He can point to stuff he's done and that there are a lot of rank-and-file Republican primary voters who kind of like that, even though he's sort of clearly not with them on a lot of issues, not just the social issues but a lot of economic issues. They kind of like the idea that this is a guy who can do something or has done something. Is there any way that you think that Donald Trump could at least win you over 51% or 49%? Oh, I think 3% would be quite an achievement. You cannot transfer achievements in one field to another. As a professor of political science in Princeton once said to Einstein, I don't write about physics.

Why do you write about politics? You know? And there's an impressively long list of successful businessmen who've gone to Washington to take over various agencies and whatnot who have been absolute failures because the circumstances are different, the skills are different, and the constraints are different. So, Tom, Peter here again. You're breaking my heart, though, when you say that

because that argument rules out Dr. Ben Carson, who is such an impressive human being. Yes, I wish that he would operate on the brains of the people in Congress instead of running for office. So, Tom, I have one more question about poverty. And then I know Rob and James want to talk a little bit more about current politics. You grew up in Harlem. You went from while you were living in Harlem, you went to Stuyvesant High School, which is a – I don't want to use the term because it's an elite – but it's a public school,

but you have to test to get into it. And you turned out to have been recognized as an unusually bright student young. So you went there. You went to Howard University and then you went to Harvard University. At any point in that remarkable intellectual rise, did anyone accuse you of acting white? Did this is one of the means of isolation. If you want to acquire skills. If you just want to speak standard English, that alone is enough to bring the wrath down upon you. Actually, when I left home at 17, the first place I stayed was at the Home for Homeless Boys in the Bronx. And I have no idea how other guys got there, but they were not the elite by any means.

I never felt any need to change the way I spoke or to behave differently or anything like that, nor did anybody there accuse me of acting white. So how do we get back to the culture that permitted a young Thomas Sowell to – a young and brilliant Thomas Sowell to act on his intellectual capacity and develop it by going to these wonderful institutions, although I do love – I once heard you say that the principal advantage of a Harvard education is that never again in your life do you have to be impressed by a Harvard education. But is there a way back to that kind of culture? It seems to me that the government can't give us a culture back.

Well, as Ronald Reagan is supposed to have said, and you can correct me if this is wrong, if someone told him that a certain problem was complex, and that Reagan said, no, it's simple, but it's not easy. Right. So like I do a column on that theme, that is the whole thing about affordable housing in California. It's a complex. It's not complex. It's simple, but it's not easy because you will pay an enormous political price if you if you repeal the open space laws. But that would that alone would would would would handle at least 90 percent of the problem.

So so how do we go? Go ahead. I'm sorry. Well, I guess, first of all, we've got to want to. We've got to recognize how we got where we are. As Hayek once said, you know, that we shall not grow wiser until we realize that much that we have done was very foolish. That's hard to do, But it's not complex. Right. And family breakdown, that's how, I just don't know. Oh, good.

So we could, go ahead. Subservicing a teenage mother, unwed teenage mothers. Okay. So even that one is simple, hard, but simple. Yes. Got it simple. Yes. Got it. All right. Rob Long and James Lilacs, over to you guys. I'm talking a little bit about wealth creation and about a stake in the big picture. There are a bunch of tax plans out now from the various candidates, and some of them are offering sort of a – if you're below a certain income level, you pay no federal income tax.

How do you feel about that? Should there be a – I think it's a terrible idea. It means that people can just be parasites. I remember when I left home and I made $25 a week of unskilled labor, and out of which $2.50 was taken for taxes. Now, whenever I heard about the government wasting money, I was more outraged than any millionaire because I could have used that $2.50, and they're out there wasting it on all kinds of similar stuff. So the government is just sort of Santa Claus or Sugar Daddy with no cost. Once they see that cost out of their own paycheck, that will change a lot of minds. People used to say that the best conservative direct mail piece of propaganda was a pay stub because you saw it and you thought, I'm voting for the guy who's going to let me keep more of this.

What about wealth creation? I mean part of what you say is true about the poor in America. They have air conditioning and they have televisions and they have smartphones. What they don't have is money in the bank. How do you change that? Again, you make it necessary to have money in the bank. When you open up all kinds of safety nets, as they call it, for people who have not

bothered to save anything, people don't save as much. Again, it's really not rocket science. I can remember, again, going back to the era when I was a teenager living on my own. I had a terrible time when I ran out of money and was hungry and behind on the rent and so forth. But you know, once I got a job, At one point, I had two jobs. And from that point forward throughout the rest of my life, I never spent all my income, whether it was a small amount or a large amount. I mean to this day, I never put royalties in my budget Thomas Sowell for President campaign, and I come to you with your focus group results, candidate Sowell, and I say, listen, it's not good.

People heard you say that, and they think you're mean. They think you're unfeeling. They don't think that you're sympathetic enough. You've got to figure out a way to weasel word that or maybe change it here or there. What do you say? What advice should I give? Well, first of all, my talents and weasel words are somewhat limited. I know. That's why you sell so many books. And why I've never run for public office. And I've actually turned down appointed officers as well. I think

again, you have to let people know that no matter where you are in the economic scale, you can only make your choice among the options actually available. And one of the great appeals of the economic scale, you can only make your choice among the options actually available. And one of the great appeals of the left is that they can sell out the options that are not available, but that they can make seem available through rhetoric.

And I think we have to learn, and we also have to have in our schools some attention paid to getting people to analyze beyond words to the realities that underlie those words. Tom, Peter here. One last topic, if we may, and that is immigration. Broadly speaking, the Republican candidates agree on the following couple of points. We need to get control of the border, which means close the border. Everybody's talking about building a longer fence. There's a fence across much of the southern border now. So the first thing you do is get control of the border. And then there are disagreements about how to handle the estimated 11 million

immigrants who are in the country illegally now running from Donald Trump saying, send them all back. They have to go to Jeb Bush, who wants a very long, he has very elaborate path to citizenship, which is so long and so elaborate and involves paying certain penalties and so forth that he says it's not an amnesty. It's going to be such hard work that it won't feel like an amnesty to anyone. In other words, it won't create incentives for more people to try to come here illegally. Where does Tom Sowell stand? Broadly speaking, you're in the camp that views human beings as economic assets, not liabilities, right? No.

Some human beings are economic assets and some are liabilities. As Europe is discovering, you know, when you bring people in by the millions who hate the values that you treasure and have no compunction about violating your laws and standards, you have problems, including explosions and subways and so on. So, no, people are not, you cannot homogenize people. You can't talk about immigrants in general because there are no immigrants in general. There are immigrants from various places, some of whom come here with great amounts of skills and so forth and have been a treasure to the country.

And there are others from other places who come here, commit a wholly disproportionate amount of a crime, and live off the welfare state. And if you don't have control of the borders, you know, there's no way you're going to make the distinction. I suspect that the Republicans are mistaken in thinking that all Hispanics are dying to have open borders. I don't think that most Hispanics would welcome a bunch of criminals coming in from Mexico and heading probably for their communities and will probably commit the majority of their crimes in their communities. Okay. So get control of the – what about the illegals who are already in this country?

One, stop facilitating – well, one, stop having sanctuary cities. Right. I mean, the people say, well, you can't round them all up and send them all back. You know, we haven't rounded up all murderers. We therefore don't repeal the laws against murder. Right. Which would be the political solution to that issue, following the example of the immigration issue. Right. Dr. Sol, James Lalix here. In Minneapolis, St. Paul, the twin cities in which I live, we have two competing Black Lives Matters groups, which I wasn't aware of. They have combined in the past to disrupt a couple of things.

They disrupted the Minnesota State Fair and then the Vikings opener by shutting down some light rail transit. And now there's a schism in the organization. It always happens. People, you know, they split into competing modus operandi and have decided that they're going to protest at the marathon, the big fall marathon, where all the people get up and run until they drop. And they're going to interrupt that at the finish line. And there's, of course, a big argument about whether this is a great tactic or a bad tactic, about whether making the comfortable less comfortable is necessary for going forward how do you see the black lives matter movement going is it going to turn into the usual institution with uh you know funding and board of directors and the rest of it or is it going to be an ad hoc city to city thing that that eventually turns into who knows knows, into nothing or something.

What's your take on the movement? I have no, I've not looked into the current organizational structure of these movements. I do know that insofar as people are rewarded for doing such things, one might expect them to do more such things and to escalate until such time if there's a backlight sufficient to stop them from doing it. Again, it doesn't strike me as that complex an issue. Well, the backlash may indeed come when they disrupt the marathon, because if there's anybody

who's inclined to support them on a general principle, it's all the good people who will be running on that fine, crisp Sunday morning. We'll see. And we'll see you down the road, I hope, as we hope to have you back on the podcast at the earliest possible opportunity for the next book or the next collection or just because you're so much fun to talk with. Thank you for joining us on the podcast today, sir. Thank you for having me. Thank you, Tom.

Wealth, Poverty, and Politics in International Pers international perspective by Dr. Thomas Sowell. Thank you. You know, of course, the Black Lives Matter organization is following the old dictum of journalism, which is to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. I always love it when journalists say that because journalists themselves are generally comfortable folk. But they regard that their job is to walk around with snowballs and knock off the top hats of the plutocrats as they walk with their oyster, you know,

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you'll want to swap them out as well. Go to casper.com slash ricochet and use the coupon code ricochet at checkout. You will sleep better knowing you did. And we thank Casper for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. All right, gentlemen. You both and myself were taken to task on the member feed, and I think it's gone to the main page

because of the establishment. Well, we were not taken, to be fair, we were not taken to task. We were asked for input. Robert McReynolds wrote a really great piece, a great post, asking for our thoughts on the establishment

and why we are or are not members of it and why we are or are not defenders of it and why we are or are not defenders of it. And Rob's answer is? Well, I wrote – I responded. My answer – first of all, my answer was – it was sort of three parts. One is I totally understand the frustration with the Republican leadership in DC. They didn't do anything.

They sat on the ball. They didn't do anything interesting. All these Republicans are ready to cheer them even if they lost, right? I mean the anti-establishment Republican frustration voter out there, they're not stupid. They can count. They know what 67 means. They know what overriding a veto means. But they still wanted to see some attempt, right? They still want to see these guys playing. They want to see something happen. All these people remember, if you're old

enough to remember, remember what it was like when Republican presidents didn't have the Senate or the House, and the Senate and the House or just the Senate made life difficult for the Republican president, and they kind of wanted to see a little of that payback. And that's completely legitimate, and they got nothing. And instead, they kind of felt like they were the problem, that they were a problem to be solved by Mitch McConnell and John Boehner rather than Obama being the problem to be solved by Mitch McConnell and John Boehner. I think that's legitimate. There's also – if I may interrupt for a second, there's also what they call failure theater as if they're doing this – these elaborate stork dances to say we're doing

something when failure is baked into the effort that they're doing. But failure is fine. I don't think any of these – I mean certainly no frustrated Republican voter who wants to light the establishment on fire that I've met isn't able to count and doesn't understand that Obama won two very, very clear popular vote victories. And the president of the United States, whoever it is, has a lot of power and sway and that you need 67 votes or plus votes in the Senate to override a veto and that's that. They know that. But what they wanted to see was an attempt by the Senate, an attempt by the House to

do something and to force this guy to veto something popular, a clean bill that he vetoes so that he vetoes it rather than this, well, he's going to veto it anyway, so why even pass it? So they didn't want to see them sit on the ball, which is what they did. And so as a response, they – and I totally get that. But what I don't understand is this idea of anybody you disagree with, you call suddenly the establishment, as if somehow it's the establishment, these guys smoking cigars in some DC steakhouse who decide everything.

The Republican primary voter out there in the hinterlands, that's who chooses the next president, not the donors, the Republican Party primary voter who are by the way, psychographically and by all polls and by actually matched-up addresses, they match very closely to self-identified Tea Party members. And they have decided through umpteen cycles – they may change their mind now, but for umpteen cycles, they have decided to nominate the next guy in line. Now, that has been a – that is a trait of republicans across the country. Republicans are conservative. They tend to nominate the next guy in line. They may change their mind now, but you can't really blame Boehner and Mitch McConnell for that.

That's on the republican primary voter, and if they want to change that, they can change that. My only frustration with that is that it's the idea that somehow this thing and i don't think i mean obviously we're not getting into that in in um you know rob mc reynolds is not saying that in in his post it's supposed to very thoughtful post um but what i what i sometimes when i say that to people outside of ricochet in the great uncivil world they sort of respond to me and say something like, oh, well, you just – you don't like Trump. You're for Jeb, which is sort of insane. I don't like Trump because Trump is for a single payer. And if Trump said I'm not for a single payer, I'm a conservative.

I believe in conservative economics. tax plan that he released yesterday didn't exempt so many people at the bottom of tax rolls from any federal income tax, I'd be more in favor of it. Then I'd be happier, right? But right now, I can't really support him. But that doesn't mean that I'm – the establishment design is designed to create a boogeyman so that nobody out there who's a Republican primary voter has to take any responsibility. We can just say, oh, all the advisors of Mitt Romney, they made him timid as if somehow he wasn't running against an extremely popular sitting president. Anyway, that's my rant. Yeah. Yeah. I've been thinking about the establishment a lot also over the last couple of months because the same things happened.

People have accused me of being a member of the establishment. And for somebody who's training, somebody who came up under Bill Buckley, who although he was a wealthy man and spoke with this old-fashioned accent, which no longer even exists anymore, one of the pleasures of watching and to be fair it did not even exist then well but if you listen there is a certain there is a certain there's a george plimpton diction that's gone gorvey doll had it bill right bill was bill was atypical even then but there was a certain arch new york upper east uh northeastern diction among certain people that's just his van in any event event, put that aside. If you came up under Bill Buckley who was politically very much an outsider and then worked – gave your heart to Ronald Reagan who was again an outsider. He was not George H.W. Bush.

Good a man though he was or Howard – those were establishment figures. So for me, I've never thought of myself as anything but other than an outsider. So what do people mean by establishment? And I can see why you get lobbyists in Washington, rich guys in New York and certain office holders. And there is for sure business that they're doing with each other. For sure they are doing business. Money changes hands and legislation, quite often regulatory legislation, that is taking place. Now, it takes place on both sides of the aisle. And because the federal government controls everything these days, it makes all the sense in the world for anybody who's in business to have to have a presence in Washington to defend his – OK, fine.

I can see that. The other bit that I think I can see and understand is that John Boehner and Mitch McConnell look and sound all wrong. They look and sound like just what they are, which is men who want to do deals as opposed to Ted Cruz who wants to break furniture. And it seems that the, what I do see clearly

is that John Boehner and Mitch McConnell fail to give any understanding of how angry people are. They just don't – Bob Dole's old horrible old line when he was running for president, where's the outrage? He was asking why aren't the American people more outraged at that time. It's a very good question. Why are the republican leaders in congress not more outraged at that time. It's a very good question. Why are the Republican leaders in Congress not more outraged? So I don't know who's going to end up as the next speaker. By the way, that – Well, can I just say one thing about it? Of course.

I think that's exactly right, is that they wanted to do deals. But I think what seems so outrageous to everyone watching from the outside is that we all knew – on the one hand, yes, wanting to do deals is good. Dealing is good, right? That's politics, right? But we all knew that the person they were trying to deal with down the road on Pennsylvania Avenue had no intention of ever making a deal. So these two naives were trying to make a deal with somebody who was never, ever going to budge. And that would just seem naive to us, whereas Ted Cruz, who wants to break furniture and showboat and throw a chair around and do all sorts of stuff that's kind of pointless, ultimately pointless to getting an actual bill passed. But at least he knew the endgame was this guy down the road is never going to ever going to ever

going to bend. Not one shot, not one word of what he wants is going to change. So why not make him pay for it rather than cower? It's also the nature of the deal. It's what they want to deal about. If somebody comes to you and says, I am going to take all three of your children, and at the end of the negotiation, they only take one, oh, that's great. I'm only down one kid. The slow one, maybe.

What perturbs people, I think, when they look at D.C. is the way that the Republican side of the aisle constantly rolls over for things that they don't regard as particularly important or because they don't want to look bad when it comes to certain issues. And so, I mean, the first comment in the thread is from E. Kent Golding who said when he was toting up the things that have been mentioned about the aggravations that the state has imposed upon us. He said, I would add appliances that do not clean because they are designed for energy and water efficiency rather than cleaning. Mandated expensive light bulbs that give off funny light censorship of non-pc ideas now let's do those first two things everybody who's got a house in a dishwasher knows that your dishes don't get clean anymore because they ban certain chemicals and that you can't you can't do it anymore you actually have to go to europe and smuggle back stuff with phosphates and tsp

in it if you want to get your dishes clean. And everybody knows that we've been forced to do the change of the light bulbs. Now, these things were done – we know the whole light bulb thing was perhaps a little GE deal, a little backsc American society and the daily experience that we live and contest them and argue against them and hold them up as examples of where liberty, to use that word that, of course, is just crazy, foamy mouth, John Birch type stuff, that liberty is constantly diminished by the imposition of the state into every single' area of our life. I mean, if low-flush toilets and low-pressure water shower heads were imposed on the nation by the EPA, you expect that the GOP would roll over and say, all right, well, can we have a five-year phase-in? And that would be for them victory. That's what irritates people. They give the small things away, but the small things add up and the small things are crucial to the other side.

I mean if you want to fundamentally transform America, the first place you start is in the showerhead, how much water it comes, how hot it is and how long you get to stay there. It's true. Yep. That's true. Yep. Yep. That's true. Yep. Yep. The, uh,

yeah, I'm just thinking about Boehner again. The, the, the other side, they've got to, they've just got to stop this though. So funnel.

So to Bain, this is my reading and I could be wrong and correct me if you want to tell me why you think I'm wrong, but Boehner and McConnell are both so intent – by the way, McConnell still – I find it very impressive and still will forever be to his credit that when he was minority leader, he held the republicans in line so that Obamacare passed in the senate without a single republican vote. He made a clean distinction and that was a very, very difficult and frankly, very aggressive thing for him to do as minority leader. But these guys are either temperamentally ill-equipped or they've made a decision not to use rhetoric. The Senate used to be called, now we can't say this without a smirk coming across. You can't say it with a straight face. It used to be called the greatest debating chamber in the world.

And the other side – so if, for example, we know – and we had Rob Portman. Rob and I – Rob Long and I discussed this with Rob Portman for a Reagan members podcast. And this notion that because the Obama administration has not complied with the Corker legislation, which required it to place all side agreements – I'm talking about the Iran deal – all agreements including side before the Senate, then the 60-day period hasn't even started and the Obama administration has no right for that to be brought to a vote on the floor of the Senate. And Rob Portman, who is thoroughly conservative but temperamentally moderate, Rob Portman feels very strongly about that. So where is the leader of the Republican Party? Why is he not in the Senate chamber screaming and hollering bloody hell? They passed legislation. The president of the United States signed it and the administration is in unambiguous

violation of agreed upon legislation. Where's the – well, the American people won't be with us. It's just – They just wanted to go away. Yes. There will be rhetoric and I'll tell you where that rhetoric is going to be. That rhetoric is going to show up in a very well-composed email to somebody and it's usually, dear friends, can you stand with me today?

It'll ask you for five bucks and it'll be earnest and your mother-in-law will send it to you, but it doesn't make a damned bit of difference because that's what they save it for. That's what they do. And you know what? I get those every single day and a few of these guys, I don't care how big and how important they are and how I should really

listen to their message, they've gone into the black hole for me. And what's that you ask? Well, if you are a to their message, they've gone into the black hole for me. And what's that, you ask? Well, if you are a SaneBox member, you know what the black hole is. It's this wonderful place. You drag a mail into that folder and you never hear from them again, ever. Now, you may say that a black hole doesn't work like that, actually, that it would, that email would hover on the event horizon in perpetuity.

No, think of it as being sucked into the black hole. Not the Disney version either where it's actually hell in the middle. Although, you know, for some of these letters, that would be great. Let me stop. I'm talking about SaneBox. SaneBox, if you read your email, of course, you know that some of the best conversations you'll have will happen through your email. A friend, colleague reaches out to say this or that and you write back. And before you know it, you've got a new friend or a new fan or a new customer or just somebody you've been

dealing with for a long time and some new ideas. But the emails that keep going and you get 100 and you get 500 and it's not long before you've just got thousands of messages choking up your box and you've got no time at all to sift out the conversations that are worth having. Now, if this sounds like you're in box and it does, then here's your cure, SaneBox. It does the sifting for you. And it's, you know, there's a term that was used two or three years ago when people developed algorithms that did things for you. And the term was automagically, and I hated it. But the term flooded into my mind recently when I saw exactly what was happening

with my e-box. You train it a little bit. You tell it this, you go back, you review some things. There's a little initial setup that it learns who you want to talk to and who you don't. The trivial stuff gets diverted into a separate folder. So all that's left are the emails that matter to you. There's one click unsubscribe for things you don't want, the ability to snooze non-urgent emails until next Monday or until you're back from vacation with just a click. Countless hours will be saved and your email productivity will be increased by 25%. They say for me, it's like twice that much. So that's more time you can spend engaging your audience or just the people you want to talk to. Try it for yourself. Two free weeks of SaneBox. Visit SaneBox.com

slash ricochet to start your trial. You don't need a credit card. And after that, you get $25 off a membership. That's the deepest discount you'll find anywhere. Again, it's S-A-N-E-B-O-X slash ricochet. And Rob and Peter, you're both very happy, satisfied customers as well. This has changed everything, hasn't it? I've been a satisfied SaneBox customer for a couple of years, yeah. And there's just a real creepy, violent

thrill. It's like to actually move something to the black hole and then you never see it again. And may I just say how annoyed I am with my brother and comrade, Rob Long, because for months now he's been saying to me, ah, Peter, Peter, Peter, every day,

zero inbox. I get to every single one of my emails every single day. And I've been thinking, how does he do that? I'm drowning. Did Rob ever mention SaneBox to me? No, he did not. Because my idea of hell is trying to explain it to you. I would never in a million years ever. I mean, my God.

But I have SaneBox now. And it's almost self-explanatory. I did have to, I did have to call Scott, uh, Blue Yeti and ask him a few little questions. Just ordinary people will be able to do this. And then I did send an email to Rob to ask him one.

Yeah. But which went right to SaneBlackHole by the way. And now for, for, for two days out of the last six, since I've been using SaneBox, two days I did get to zero inbox myself. And that may sound only a third of the time, but I'm getting better. And those are the first two days I've gotten to zero inbox in months. It does change everything.

It does. So do you fear that Washington, when it comes to the rest of us, all have us in the same black hole folder, that it's actually just a, an institution that is impervious to what we do, no matter if we had the house, the Senate and the presidency, do you think that anything would change or are we so far gone down the road of accepting the left's terms,

preconceptions, definitions, uh, that there's no getting out of the hole that they, they dug for us and appointed so lavishly? No, I don't think so. Look, I mean I don't think we're going to get everything. I mean you don't elect a president and change the culture.

That doesn't work that way. And also remember that – our side always forgets. Barack Obama won two smashing public – I mean popular vote victories. People liked him and they voted for him. They won. The other side won and they didn't win because they tricked us and they didn't win because they were smoke and mirrors. They won because they persuaded the American people to vote for him and he remains personally popular. So the idea that somehow we were going to sneak past the finish line and no one was going to notice, no. Again, the answer is – Thomas Sowell said the answer is simple but it's hard, We'll just find some other guys down there in the basement and they'll come up and then our numbers will be bigger. And that's simply not going to happen.

We're going to have to persuade people who voted for someone else that they made a mistake and they have to vote for us. Some people who drink Pepsi are now going to have to drink Coke. It's hard, but it's not unwinnable, but it's something we have to do. And it's not going to be done by the colorless McConnell or Boehner, right? So we're going to have to replace them and they're being replaced. It also depends whether or not people are inclined to be persuaded. The other day I was showing my daughter the cover of the Wall Street Journal, which had a picture of Putin and Obama. I don't know if you saw it.

The president has his hand out and Putin is giving him this look, this look of amused contempt. And I said to my daughter, this sums up where we are in the world today, right here. This man is weak and the country is weak because of him. And she was appalled. She said, what do you mean America's weak? We're the strongest country in the world. And I said, not under this man, not under what we're doing. We're losing ground. It's the same feeling that I had at the end of the 70s when the Soviets seemed to be on the march. And now we got not just Russians on the march but we have ISIS as well. Daily Mail reporting today that a guy who's been embedded with them for a long time says they have a plan essentially for a nuclear holocaust in the west to just sweep us out of the way to make the establishment of the caliphate a little bit easier. So that's the kind of stuff that makes people looking for strong

leaders. That's the sort of thing that concentrates minds. Absent that, though, with things just sort of plodding along as they do, Peter, do you think people are inclined to say, I don't know about this Marco Rubio guy. I think this Joe Biden fellow is a far steadier hand on the till. Yeah, that could be. I haven't seen short answer. My sense of it is, and I believe the polling confirms that the country is very closely divided, but open to a change in a way that it was not four years ago. So Donald Trump is now beating Hillary Clinton in the polls. Joe Biden, I agree. Joe Biden is to me a major question mark because he's a nut. He actually hasn't had a coherent policy thought, but he's a likable man.

He seems to be an entirely decent human being. So if what you want – his message is I'm status quo and I'm reassuring. Don't take the risk on change with those republican crazies. Just stick with reassuring old Joe. That could be a very potent argument. So what am I saying? Is it politics? I don't know.

I don't know. But it just does seem to me that the country is more open to a change than it was four years ago. There's a better – much better chance this time around. It does feel like this is a – people always say there's three kinds of elections, right? There's the change election and then there's the stay the course election and then there's the blow it all up election. It's hard for me to believe this is a blow-it-all-up election because our side hasn't really done anything, right? I mean what we're blowing up is sort of a DC

apparatchiks who don't have any particular – they don't have any particular statute. I mean they're not national figures, right? Nobody really – the voters in the middle here don't really care who the Speaker of the in the middle here don't really care who the Speaker of the House is. They don't really care who the Senate majority leader is. Those are – that's inside baseball stuff. I suspect that what we're going to look at is who is going to make people feel – I mean all of the anxieties that you mentioned, James, I think are all part of the same sort of general anxiety, which is that we've allowed things to go for eight years without any improvement, which means that they've steadily unimproved. They steadily deteriorated. Nothing has gotten better, and if things don't get better, they get worse.

Things don't stay the same. Everybody kind of knows that, right? The world's – international security is worse. Nothing stays – these don't stay the same. Everybody kind of knows that, right? The world's – international security is worse. The economy and unemployment is worse because it's not getting better. So everyone kind of expects the next piece of news to happen to be bad, and when you anticipate bad news, bad news usually finds its way to you. And so what I think people are picking is, OK, who is the person I want there to handle the bad news but also to make me feel good every day about the potential of the good news right who's who's the who's the who captures that kind of reagan sunny optimism but also hey if stuff really does get turned sour this guy's going to make the right decisions and you know you could make the case you can easily make the case for biden if you're a democrat i think more it's more so than bernie sanders more so even than hillary clinton i think

you make the case probably the way he's talking with Rubio. I think you can make the case for – on the Republican side, it's harder right now, but probably Carly right now because she seems like she's in command. And if she sounds a little bit more upbeat maybe, if she can get a little more upbeat, maybe she can have that kind of half and half, upbeat and plus in command. But I suspect that calming people's nerves and inspiring them will be the two things you're going to have to do to really break free and get to that 51 percent. I don't see anybody doing that right now. No, neither do I. And when you started that, you said the electorate is not in a blow-it-up mood. If you hear from the Trump side, detonation is all they want, of the establishment, that is.

And I'm always amused that – I understand that, but what do they expect will come afterwards? If you destroy the structure, what do you – the institutions – what do you think comes after? Where has this worked out well where you completely burn some organization down to the ground and what comes – what springs from the blood-soaked soil afterwards immediately brings you victory? That was extremely dark. Yes. Well, I mean that's sort of where we are. That was extremely dark. And Troy's in the chat room saying that he's spending his last day in the office trying to get these cigarette burns out of the carpet and spackling the holes in the wall that he put there when he punched his fist or something like that. Also, we're going to – there was a poll that I'm supposed to mention here and we're actually crafting this on the fly as we speak. You may think that this thing comes to you as just a set piece with all of its edges sanded.

No, no, no, no. I'm literally speaking things that are coming to me on Google Docs at the moment. And I'll read to you exactly what just came over that I'm supposed to read. Shut up, Lilacs. Oh, no, that's the next one here. Please put on a call for Iowa and New Hampshire members to write about the caucuses and primaries and mention the GOP nominee poll. Yes. All right. So there is a poll to be looked at on Ricochet.

You got to look at it. And everybody who's in Iowa or New Hampshire who's a Ricochet connected person, tell us what's going on on the ground because here are two states that everybody forgets about except when it's four years later and it's time for them to choose our next leader again. Thanks a lot, guys. It'll be fun to see exactly how they deal with ethanol because I just love having people who are against government subsidies and want a limited hand of the state in their pockets saying that – except for the corn. Except for the corn and the ethanol. Except for that, yeah.

That we absolutely have to have. I'm completely rock-ribbed on every single other issue except for the ethanol. Not thinking that everybody has their ethanol. Everybody has their ethanol. Maybe that's a post that we should do. What's your ethanol? Well, what's your excuse for not going to Casper.com and entering the coupon code Ricochet? I don't know.

Maybe you don't like to sleep. But if you do, that's where you go. And also SaneBox.com. Now, again, if you want to spend half your day dealing with email and trashing the stuff you never want to see and dealing with Nigerian letters to write for your million dollars, go right ahead or go to SaneBox.com and enter the coupon code Ricochet and start for free, no credit card required, a new email experience that will change the way you look at email period. Of course, also brought to you by the Ricochet Store. Go there. Lots of Ricochet swag available that you can use to parade around and to let people know where you stand on the spectrum. There you go.

Been fun, guys. We'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 2.0. Next week, fellas. Next week. Coming to you On a dust road Good loving I got a truck load And when you get it

You got some So don't worry Cause I'm coming I'm a soul man I'm a soul man. The hard way And I'll make it better Each and every day So honey Don't you wait Cause you ain't seen

Nothing yet I'm a soul man I'm a soul man I'm a soul man. I was educated Would stop When I started loving Oh, I can't stop I'm a soul man I'm a soul man I'm a soul man

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