Will Socialism Take Over the Country?

You know, by the way, just, just a thought before I get into this really important subject with you. Massachusetts, all of my life, has stood out as particularly dumb, and I wonder if it's related to the fact that it has so many universities.

I mean, you know, in fact, that's basically— you just jumped right into— I know you're hoping to pause it— the one of the main themes of the You know, in fact, I talk a lot in the book about this guy Joseph Schumpeter, who is a famous economist you quote often, and he was a Harvard professor who saw that Harvard basically was going to destroy the country. He wrote about it almost 100 years ago, and that's almost the jumping-off point for the second half of my book where I try to think about why are we losing to socialism, who's behind it, and where does Donald Trump fit in.

Wow, I really hit pay dirt with that comment.

Yeah.

Talk to me about that for a moment then. The, the universities as the seed of the drift to socialism.

Yeah. And so what Schumpeter said back then, and it's just stunning to look at it now, is that capitalism was going to work really well, he thought, for about 50 years and the standard of living was going to go up and income inequality was going to go down. And at the same time, though, capitalism was going to sow the seeds of its own destruction because as we got wealthier and wealthier, kids wouldn't have to stay at home and work in the fields. They wouldn't have to stay and help, you know, dad in the shoe shop. Instead, we would send them to universities. And universities, he described, are basically going to be like seminaries of socialism, totalitarian socialism. And he even has this whole wonderful chapter about why professors are all socialists. But his basic idea was that we're going to send our kids to universities that are going to teach them a religious commitment to socialism, and then the smartest of them are going to control the New York Times and the CBS Evening News, and before we know it, there'll be nobody left to defend capitalism, is what Schumpeter thought. And I think the thing that he didn't see coming was Donald Trump and the internet and you. You know, the fact is that they do kind of— remember, it used to be when I was growing up, we— I'd watch Dan Rather or, you know, Cronkite. That was about it. You know, we had two channels on our TV, and they really did cure curate our lives. But because of the internet and the thousands of voices that aren't necessarily concerned about what Harvard thinks is respectable, then capitalism had a fighting chance under Donald Trump. But then the next thing that I go into is that Marshall McLuhan, who studied and wrote a lot about the internet back in the '60s, said, well, you know, the elites are going to lose their power at the beginning of the internet, uh, because there's going to be a competition for attention and the stupid socialists basically They aren't going to have a shot at winning that. But then what's going to happen is the elites are going to organize inattention. That's the way Marshall McLuhan described it. They're going to start to cancel people and shut them off the internet and make it so that people can't tune in to the voices that basically disagree with the established status quo. And so that's why, you know, I think that the drift is so important. It's not that I'm looking at what happened right now and come up with a theory of the world that we live in. It's more that, you know, as a former professor myself, you know, still a scholar at the Hoover Institution, you know, I look at what the great minds of the 20th century who are sort of free market minds and capitalist minds thought would happen. And you can see that it's exactly what's happening right now. And it's chilling. And if we're going to stop it, you know, first we need to understand it. And that's it. That's why I wrote the book. Wow.

That was powerful.

Thank you.

If, if the, uh, if this trillions of dollar bill passes, is the, is the drift to socialism concretized?

It, you know, it, it's really close. It's really close. But it's not just the, you know, trillions of dollars, uh, and we can go into the details of that, uh, but it's also the fact that they're successfully canceling voices, as Schumpeter anticipated, you know, calling them disreputable, discredited if they stand up against those things. And so if they sort of get this through, then, you know, what's to stop them from canceling not just Donald Trump, but you and me and everybody else and continuing this sort of propaganda effort to move us towards a totalitarian socialist state? But make no mistake about it, you know, they pretend to be moderate, these Democrats, But if you look at the drift, you're going to understand that, no, they're really totalitarian socialists. That's really what they are. If I go to a university, I have to worry and talk about capitalism. I have to worry about getting beat up. One thing I do, if I ever do get to a university now and then, I ask students, if the title of my talk was Capitalism is Good, then what would happen? And everybody says, oh, well, people would come and protest, they would disrupt. And I said, what if I said bestiality was good? And then people are like, no, no. Care about that, right? And so this is like how corrupt and awful our universities have become, and they're starting to cancel— they're trying to cancel us all. But the, but the bill does have a whole lot of socialist stuff in it. You know, all this money— socialism is either government control of the means of production or the government telling you how money has to be spent. And this bill is filled with all that stuff. It's got all this Green New Deal stuff, uh, and it's also got even things like Joe Biden— I don't know if you noticed, although you notice every nuance I don't know if you noticed, but they actually are having the government become your landlord. So they've got the government building houses and charging rent. And so they really want, you think about when's the last time there was a big government landlord? Well, you know, maybe East Germany, Soviet Union. They really are moving us really, really in a radical direction.

Tell me about that. I'm not familiar with it, about this housing.

Yeah, they've got a huge expenditure for millions of affordable homes. Uh, and you know, one of the things that, as you and I know—

oh, and the government will be the landlord. Interesting.

Yes, directly or indirectly, that's right. And, and so the government is— wants to control your life. You know, they want a Tony Fauci for every corner of your life. And, you know, this bill is really starting to do it. The thing about the Green New Deal is, you notice how they took away all of our rights because of COVID right? Um, well, And what was it about COVID Well, it was like a, a global health emergency. But when you hear the liberals talk, what's the bigger global health emergency? Climate change. And so all the things that they do to take away your liberty because of COVID there's gonna be a million climate vouchers. Uh, and, and Phil is again starting that. It's not too late to defeat them. We can defeat these guys. Uh, but we have to identify them and we have to, like show who they are, why they're there, and then organize to resist. And I know that's something that people on the show every day.

Well, great. Thank you. In terms of defeating them, this is my— I have an optimistic and a pessimistic side, even though I'm not interested much in optimism or pessimism. They're both excuses not to fight. You think things will turn out well, you don't fight. You think things will turn out awful, you don't fight. And I'm for fighting. But the part I most worry about is what I have claimed for many years now, that it is harder to get people off entitlements than it is off heroin. So that's why I worry about this bill in particular. It will just give more people vastly increased entitlements. And do we have any record of their ever being retracted?

Well, I guess there's been a little bit of welfare-to-work stuff over time, you know, Ronald Reagan especially, and a little bit of Bill Clinton. But I think you're exactly right. And so what we're doing is we're paying people not to work at the same time that we're giving everybody lots of cash to buy things. And so, but, you know, the way I think it ends up though, and the thing I'm very concerned about is that they're jacking up demand with all this cash and they're attacking supply by giving us the highest corporate tax in the developed world, by raising the tax on pass-through entities, you know, small business owners, to the highest in the world. And they're doing this attack on supply where they're feeding demand. So what's going to happen is inflation is going to continue to spin out of control. You know, it's easily going to go into the double digits next year. And then, you know, when we start to try to fight inflation, we're going to have a serious economic calamity. Serious economic calamities is when socialists pounce and they take away our rights. And I'm again, very, very concerned about the trajectory of the country. Joe Biden has completely turned around the Trump economy, and he's done so in a way that's more rapid than you could ever expect. And it's because he, at the same time that he's stoking demand, he's attacking supply. And if you don't have supply and you got lots of demand, then you end up with inflation and not much growth. Stagnation.

Let me just— let me remind people about your book as we have to take a break. Stay with me. The Drift: Stopping America's Slide to Socialism. Kevin Hassett was the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Donald Trump.