What if Producers Stopped Producing? (Atlas Shrugged Explained)

Hey guys, welcome back to the show. Today we're going to talk about what if the producers stopped producing? And this comes from a very famous book. I've been recommended this book by a handful of some of the most successful people I know. It took me a long time to get through and actually start reading this book because it's a daunting task. This book is 1,200 pages long. It's called Atlas Shrugged. And if you've heard of this book, an incredible book on how entrepreneurship and producers affect society. First time I heard about it was I went to my dad's business partner's house. You guys heard my story, this is the same big white house I went to and we were talking and he mentioned this book Atlas Shrugged and he goes look up on my shelf over there and he had on his shelf this statue of this guy, his name's Atlas. I didn't know this at the time. This guy from Greek mythology, he is the one that carries the world on his back like a big globe. You've seen probably statues before, he has a big globe on his back, this ripped guy. His name is Atlas. And he goes, you know, you should read this book obviously but the premise of the book is there's people in the world and this is what he said too. He's like, I have this statue in my house because I want to be like Atlas. Atlas or people that are like Atlas are people that hold up the entire world on their shoulders and their world, I'll get into that in a minute what I mean by that but they hold up the world and the book is Atlas Shrugged, right? What if they just shrugged and said, well, you know, I don't I don't want to do this anymore. And the premise of Atlas Shrugged, the book, is there's 2 types of people in the world. There's producers and there's looters. By producers, we mean people that produce, right? They start businesses like a lot of people here at Target. They start funds. They, inside of a company, they help create value. Even an entrepreneur, whatever they are, they're people that go to work every day and they produce something valuable for the economy. Those are producers. On the other hand, there are people in the world called looters. I do not dive much into politics on my show and podcast, but I think this is very applicable what's going on right now. There are people out there that are looters and not by— they're yes, looters that go and break into buildings but also looters like taxes. Anything that takes away from the producers are called looters in this book and so you have taxes, you have different riots or strikes that go on or people that take away from producers and the premise of the book is what if the producers in the world all went on strike? What if they said they just woke up today, people like me and you that produce and add value to the economy, to society, give jobs to people, what if all the entrepreneurs on the planet just said, well, you know what, I'm done. I'm going to be like the looters. I'm just going to be lazy and yeah, I'm just done. And that's kind of the premise of the book and it's very interesting. I have not, by the way, I have not finished this book. It's 1,200 pages and I'm getting through it right now but I want to give you my— I'll probably have a second episode giving you my final notes on the book. It's such an interesting concept. Of there are so many things that pull away from producing. I actually watched a great interview, Peter Schiff, if you've heard of him before, incredible economist. He's actually on Joe Rogan's podcast, and I was listening to that and some of his other stuff. He made a very famous video where he went to, this is back on the Occupy Wall Street time when everyone was protesting Wall Street, all this stuff. He went out with a sign on the street and said, hey, it said, I am the 1%, let's talk. And this is the time where everyone was mad about the 1%. These 1 percenters take all the money, they don't leave anything for the rest of us. And he said, hey, I'm the 1%, let's talk. And he is very articulate, very well-spoken. Go look up his podcast, I think it's incredible what he teaches and talks about, great economist. But in the video, he essentially talks to people, he goes, they go, well, we don't have jobs, you guys are taking money from us. And he goes, you know why we can't give you guys jobs? It's because the government literally takes half of everything we make. Half. Imagine spending your whole life grinding, staying up late, working hard, being an entrepreneur, doing all this stuff, and you go start a business and you barely start making money, right? It barely gets off the ground. It comes into fruition, it's doing okay, it's making a little bit of money, and the government comes in and says, hey, we're gonna take half of that money that you just made. And by the way, tax bracket at the highest level, that's half. It literally is half. They take half of your income. And producers, it's hard for producers to stop. People like me and you, and we would never go on strike because we love producing, we love giving back to the world and providing jobs for people. We go on and still, okay, with half, we have to— okay, we have to cut back on hiring. We can't hire as many because there's too many There's unions, there's strikes going on. We can't hire people. There's a minimum wage. So we have to, you know, $15, it has to be whatever it is. People want to raise it to $15 an hour right now. Well, okay, well, we have to pay people $15 an hour. So we're just going to hire less people. And that's why a lot of times you call into a business, they have the voicemail that bounces around, right, for 20 minutes. You can't talk to somebody real. It's because they have these work requirements. You can't hire somebody for $10 an hour. Even though there are people that would love to get a job for $10 or $5 or even $4 an hour, can't get a job because it's against the law. And this is what Peter Schiff talks about for a minute on minimum wage. The market decides what price should be paid for a certain job. If I run a restaurant and I can't hire someone at $15 an hour that can produce as much value or more, right, or I wouldn't hire them. $15 an hour or more to me as the business, then I'm not gonna hire somebody. And so, it's better to be employed at $5 an hour versus unemployed at $15 an hour, right? Better to make something rather than nothing. And there are plenty of high school kids that would love to take a job. But no, no, no, they can't take jobs anymore because— Minimum wage. the unemployment's too high and so businesses stop hiring more people. Anyways, I can talk about this for an hour, I won't, but you can hear Peter Schiff go into detail on minimum wage of why he says there should be zero minimum wage. Like it should be— there should not be a restriction there and how governments come in and loot from us entrepreneurs. And so in this video, back to Peter Schiff, he goes you shouldn't be protesting us, the 1%, the people on Wall Street, you should go protest your governments of why they have so many rules and regulations for us to hire you or fire you. Like we can't— it's very hard. sometimes to hire and fire people in a company. There's minimum wage requirements, there's unemployment, there's all these benefits. It costs us so much money to hire new people, that's why we a lot of times we just automate it. We say it's way easier to have a computer do it because it's going to cost so much money to hire people and the government's taking 50% taxes from us right now. So, back to the book Atlas Shrugged, it really plays out this great thing of what if producers just shrug like Atlas? People that are Atlases on the planet that hold up all this incredible economy we have and growth and do it even with being taxed 50% can still do it. What if they just said, you know, we're not going to produce anymore? It's a very interesting concept about what's going on in governments right now, what people are voting for. First off, it's very hard to start a business, to get one off the ground, and then all of the hoops you have to jump through and regulations. For instance, like funds. You guys, my channel, this whole channel is built on the SEC and IRA. There is so much regulation. You need someone like me to explain the rules to you, and yes, I understand why regulation happens. It helps keep people safe. And you know gets frauds out of the way. But there is so many hoops to jump through. It's stopped. This has stopped many people who would have been incredible entrepreneurs or many products that would have been off the ground that didn't happen because there was too much looting from the government or different programs taking away from entrepreneurs and I love this quote from Jeff Bezos. He got asked a few days ago, are you— do you feel kind of bad that you have a— I think it was like $130 billion fortune? Do you feel bad about that? He goes, no, not at all. What do you mean? He goes, Amazon has a market cap of like $1.5 trillion and that means I have created— at the time I can't remember the exact numbers but he's like, I've created about a trillion dollars of money for other people. I've made a trillion dollars for other people and yes, I've taken a slice of that but I've made other people super wealthy and their families are changed forever and they can go out and change the economy and change what they're doing and now I'm all for charities, I'm all for churches that go out and help give welfare. I'm not saying We got to just leave the poor people to die. I'm all for making a lot of money and giving it back. If you want to change the planet faster than anything else, make a lot of money and that gives you a platform, a place to go and change the world. It's hard to change the world when you're broke living on paycheck to paycheck from a basement apartment. It's a lot easier to change the world when you have a lot of money, a system that's built, that's making you money, and it gives you experience and helps you see how the world works a little bit better than, you know, you're flipping burgers for $10 an hour. So to clarify some things, yes, I believe in charities. I believe in giving back a lot of money. I think that's the most noble and best thing you can do. Usually when government touches stuff, it ruins it, right? People, well, what if the government gets taxed and give it back? They typically don't do that. If you've looked over the last 50 years, they haven't done it very well. Why not let entrepreneurs first off get their businesses off the ground and stop taxing people? We get taxed income tax, property tax, death tax. We have to pay unemployment severance packages. There's a phantom tax that's come out. A phantom tax is where you pay taxes on potential future revenues you're gonna have. You have to prepay your taxes. That's the same reason we revolted from— the United States revolted from the United Kingdom or England, I guess you'd call them before. That's the reason we revolted was because of taxes and it makes it incredibly hard for us, people like me and you, to launch and scale businesses when we're getting taxed at such different levels. Now, I'm all for— yes, we do need to be taxed. I'm not pushing for zero taxes. We need taxes for defense systems and to to protect our country and to protect our markets. But beyond that, I think free markets should decide for themselves what prices are set. Consumers vote with their wallets, that's the best part. Governments don't need to vote and decide. You as the consumer can vote whether you want to buy organic products or not, and if you've noticed the last 10 years, all these companies are shifting to organic not because they want to save— I mean, maybe they do want to save the world, you know, help cage-free, all this kind of stuff. It's because Customers like me and you are demanding and we actually like buying organic even if it's a little more money. We will buy it because we like how it tastes, we like how, you know, it helps the environment. We believe in that social impact. Organizations will move, that'll move them faster than anything else is consumers, me and you, voting with our wallets. If you hate billionaires and hate rich people, well then stop shopping at Amazon then. If you're so against it, stop buying your Starbucks coffee. The owner of Starbucks, he's like, worth about $4 billion. Stop using Apple products, stop using Apple Podcasts, you're listening on Spotify. Don't listen to anything. You got to vote with your wallet, right? So, I'm very against a war on billionaires. These billionaires have provided a lot of value to me and you. Why would we protest billionaires? Why would we say, well, you got to give all your wealth back, or essentially socialism that's become popular. It's very intriguing to someone that's never worked in their lives, a looter. A looter type of person, the millennial personality. It's very nice to hear that to them when socialism has never worked in any country ever and don't tell me Sweden or Norway or whatever is social, they're not. They're a market economy, it's different than socialism. So go look at it, you can check those out but when people come and take from these billionaires, guess what happens? They first off will just move somewhere else, take their value somewhere else to a different country and then those amazing products, the value they've given to your life, to make it so convenient for you to drive to a grocery store and buy bread for like, you know, 58 cents. They've made your life so convenient that you can buy something on Amazon, it's at your door in 48 hours. If you're so against billionaires, then, you know, you should obviously vote with your wallet. You can don't use their products anymore, but I believe they should— you're compensated about how much value you give to the world, and they should be compensated well. And the final thing I'll say is this: money is not finite. A lot of people think, well, if you make a dollar, You're stealing a dollar from somebody else. That's not true in a lot of cases. Yes, it is. Now, I'm not going to go way deep on this, but it is partially true but partially not. For example, the Fed right now, it is lending money to banks almost for free. It's like 0.5%, 0.25%, whatever it's at. It changes every day a little bit about where their interest rates are at. It's like half a percent for free. It's essentially free money. Banks have free money they can give out to whoever they want. Also, reserve ratios in banks. They've just changed this, but previously it was if you deposited, for instance, $1 million into your bank account, banks then could go create out of thin air, create $16 million, 16 times what you deposit, $16 million of loans they can deploy. So when you think about it, money is essentially being created and a lot of concerns. We might have a different episode about currency and the value of it and inflation, all this kind of stuff. At least right now, money really doesn't have a lot of worth to it. Essentially, banks create and move how much money we have in our economy. The Fed is not a government agency; it's ran by the the twelve largest banks on the planet. They all come there. Yes, the chairman of the Fed is appointed by the president, but it's a private entity. It's individual. A lot of these misconceptions about money is there's a finite amount. It's Jeff Bezos is hoarding it all. Why can't I have some? There is so much money in this world, and it's created every day. There is so much out there. It's not a zero-sum game. And finally, if you do have money and you want to change the economy, change. your own life first. Change your own economy first. And guess what? You can hire someone to mow your lawn and hire someone to clean your house and hire someone to do your taxes. Guess what? You get to allocate money where you decide, where you think is appropriate. So if you're all about certain causes, organizations, you can allocate money there or do it yourself, right? Go give money back to the different homeless shelters. Whatever you want to build is, I think, an incredible way to live life. And that's why I'm a pure capitalist. You've seen my shows before. I love capitalism. I think capitalism is one of the greatest things to ever hit the face of the earth, and it's the reason why America has done so well is because of capitalism, is because we incentivize the producers. Wait, we incentivize them to keep producing. When you take away the incentives for producers, they stop producing, and guess what happens? Jobs are gone, value's gone from the economy, everyone stops. All the looters, they think, oh, producers will produce no matter what. No, they won't. You take incentives away from them, they will stop producing. Why would I wake up 6 days a week and crank 10 to 12 hours a day on my businesses if I didn't have some kind of incentive or reward later. And guess what? Because of those businesses, we've hired 7 people in the last month. 7 new jobs created from me producing, and I know businesses are doing a lot more than that. This is my small business getting started, right? 7 new people have jobs because I went out and produced, and I think you guys have that same model, and I can talk about this for an hour. We'll end it here, but if you guys like this podcast, click the link below, subscribe, whatever you guys— whatever it is, you know, for your platform. Let me know what comments you have on this, and I'll probably make a follow-up video when I finish the book. See you guys later. Peace.