1707 FBF: Dr. Thomas DiLorenzo - The Problem with Socialism: Why It's Failed Around the World

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Welcome listeners from around the world. This is your host, Jason hartman, episode number 707707. Thank you so much for joining me today. Our guest will be Thomas DeLorenzo. His latest book, he's got many a lot of good work out of him over the years. The latest one is called the Problem with Socialism and I think you'll enjoy that. I am being chauffeured back from Las Vegas right now and Tesla or Tesla the Tesla, that's the name, that's that, that is the car's name by the way is driving me and I am just recording as I'm talking to you on the next episode. I think it's going to be the next episode where I talk to you about some of the properties I saw here and my look at the real estate market and talk about rent to value ratios and some of that good stuff. But we need to get to our guest. One announcement I do want to make is that we are not changing, that is not, not, not changing the date of our September event. It is one week after Labor Day weekend and it will be in Phoenix just as originally planned. And it's going to be a great event. Learn how to use software to be a better real estate investor. Live use cases, demonstrations, apps, sast web based service to help you evaluate, manage your investments. Three instructors, Fernando, Michelle and myself along with four local market specialists will be there. So this is a two day event. It's like a buying event and a learning event. All combined into one. It's a new event for us. We're really excited about it. And I look forward to seeing you there and look forward to talking to you about some of this stuff where we dig more into the mechanics of being a good real estate investor.

Again.

I think you're really going to enjoy it. So be sure to go to Jason Hartman.com, that's JasonHartman.com click on the events page and register for that. And get early bird pricing while you still can. We're going to talk. I believe it's going to be on the next episode. I'm pretty sure we can cover all this about refi till you die. We had a good listener question on that, so I'll address that one on the next issue. Talk about the Las Vegas real estate market and just some other good stuff. Okay. So let's jump over to our guest, Thomas De Lorenzo, the Problem with Socialism.

It's my pleasure to welcome Dr. Thomas DeLorenzo. He is an economics professor at Loyola University Maryland, Sellinger School of Business and senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and author of the new book the Problem with Socialism, among many other books. Tom, welcome. How are you?

I'm doing just fine. Thanks for having me on today.

It's good to have you on the show. I've been following your work for many years and it's very impressive. Give our listeners a sense of geography. Where are you located?

I'm in Delray Beach, Florida, in South Florida, about a half mile, half an hour north of Fort Lauderdale.

It's fantastic sunny Florida. Well, your new book, the Problem With Socialism is just out and I'm excited to dive into it. But, you know, maybe just for for the novice in the overview sake, what is the problem with socialism?

Well, there are many problems. Of course. You know, the motivation for the book is that the millennial generation, about 69%, according to one poll of voters under 30, said they could support a socialist for president. So that's certainly. But it can destroy your economic future. If you look at Venezuela today, for example, they adopted socialism in 1999. And middle class people are literally rooting through garbage in the streets today looking for food. And they've got hyperinflation of 1,600%. A hamburger costs $170 in Venezuela today and they've ruined their economy. And anyone who can leave is leaving. And I'm not saying this is going to happen in America anytime soon, but it's just the latest example of how socialism can ruin your economic future.

It's moving in that direction. And you know what's amazing to me that people are still willing to try these crazy socialist. And the ugly big brother of socialism is communism. Of course, you know, these experiments, when they've failed every time, they've been tried at every place on earth at every time in history, and it just boggles the mind. You look at Venezuela and people are just trying to get out of the country and go to the neighboring countries and it's totally oppressive. But they, they think, you know, when, when you get someone like Bernie Sanders up there saying, hey, you know, everybody deserves a free college education. Obama saying, everybody deserves free health care. The, the millennial generation, they kind of think people that believe in capitalism are just cold hearted, don't they?

Yeah, well, yes, it's easy to. Politicians are always offering us something for nothing, aren't they? That's the oldest game in the world. You know, you're probably familiar with the old classic book the Law by Friedrich Bastiat. And Bastiat Bastiat was famous for his. One of his essays called what Is Seen and what Is Not Seen and what Is Not Seen is the Cost of All this. You know, even my college students, I've been an economics professor for quite a long time. And even last semester I tell them, I remind them that, you know, I don't work for free, and neither do any of the other professors here and my doctor certainly doesn't work for free. So how could it be that healthcare could be free or university education could be free. And they begin to catch on and they start looking at me as though, gee, no one has ever brought that point up before and they thought it could be free. And they slowly start to change their mind about Bernie Sanders telling them that government is really Santa Claus, that Santa Claus exists after all, and we can get stuff for free. And especially when I show them the debt clock, I put it on a screen in my classroom, the debt clock that shows the public debt, the national debt, and it's moving about 10,000 miles an hour, adding dollar after dollar to the national debt. And they understand very quickly that they are the ones that are going to be on the hook for this once they graduate and get a job. And so it doesn't take a heck of a lot of education to turn the millennial generation around.

So it is amazing to me that people with so much life experience now we're not talking about the millennial generation. I can understand a little bit why they think all this stuff is possible. But I've got a friend who's 70 years old who believes in socialism. I mean, he just must think that money falls out of the sky for free. But let's say for a moment, Tom, that someone doesn't think that. They don't think that people work for free. They have enough sense to know that stuff is not produced for free, that oil doesn't come out of the ground for free, etc. Etc. But you know, they just think, well, let's just tax the rich, let's make the rich pay. They've got too much. It needs to be redistributed. It's not fair. That would be their next argument. Right? What's wrong with that argument?

Well, yeah.

The socialist demagogues always appeal to the deadly sin of envy. And it's easy to get people behind a system of envy. It's easy to get people behind the demonization of a class. Friedrich Hayek wrote about this in his famous book the Road to Serfdom when he talked about how it was that the fascists of the 1930s were able to get such large crowds behind them. And it was appeal to some sort of common enemy. And the enemy was the capitalist class in Germany. The Jewish people were sort of the symbols of capitalism in Nazi Germany, as Hayek points out in the Road to Serfdom.

And by the way, I want to just remind people that the Nazis were the National Socialist Party. It's interesting how people equate them with conservatives. They were the socialists chapter in my.

Book.

Called the Socialist Roots of Fascism because after all, Adolf Hitler himself called himself a socialist. National Socialism is what Nazi is an acronym for, after all. And they nationalized over half of all industry in Germany. And I don't think you're going to find any conservative or libertarian who would advocate nationalizing half of the economy and then imposing thousands of regulations on the rest of the economy for de facto nationalization. But that's what happened in fascism in Germany and Italy in the 1930s and 40s.

Absolutely it did. So how can we change the tide, if you will? What do we do about this problem? As you stated early on in our discussion, 69% of the largest demographic cohort in American history, the Gen Y or millennial generation, slightly larger than the baby boomers by about 4 million people, they actually think that socialism is a good idea. What do we do to change that? How can they be convinced otherwise?

Well, that's the purpose of my book. You know, I think I do believe we can make a difference through education and learning. And that's you Know, this is my small part in this endeavor of trying to turn this around with the millennial generation. And of course, there's a big chunk of the millennial generation too, that doesn't believe this. They don't believe government should be running businesses. And a lot of my students are huge fans of the television show Shark Tank because they really love the idea of being their own boss when they get out of school, being an entrepreneur, INV something and making a lot of money. And even if they would like to share the wealth, well, that's fine. Make a lot of money and then give a lot of it away to your favorite cause. Nothing wrong with that. And a lot of them are thinking along those lines. And so these are the people that I'd like to reach out to and have them read my book and then give a copy of it to their more left wing classmates or at least engage in a conversation with them about.

The problems with socialism.

Take us through some of these examples that you cite in the book, if you would. Especially, I want to make sure we get time, Tom, to talk about the Scandinavian example, because it just amazes me how people in the US Especially think we should be more like Europe. Now, understand, I was born in Europe. I've been to 80 countries now, been to many European countries some of the many times. And the standard of living in Europe is so much lower than it is in the US yet leftist people here think Europe is the greatest thing ever. And I just can't understand why. The people in Europe live in smaller, crappier houses. They drive crappy little cars, they have bad teeth.

They don't have good health care, they die waiting in line. I mean, you know, but then they'll say, especially the Scandinavian countries, they're so perfect. Are they?

Yeah, well, you know, political demagogues like Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton will tell any lie for power. And so. And they understand that the vast majority of Americans, you know, we're pretty insulated compared to people in some other countries. We don't really pay much attention to what's going on in other countries other than hearing about the bombings and things in other countries. But we don't really know much in general about that. But in Sweden in particular, you know, they use a Scandinavian example. Well, the truth about Sweden is that Sweden had a vibrant free market capitalist economy in the late 19th, early 20th century. And as a result, they had the highest per capita income growth in the world for about 50 years beginning in 1870. They had all these great inventors like Alfred Nobel, who Invented dynamite, the people who created Saab and Volvo automobiles and so forth. And then Beginning around the 1940s and 50s, they decided to start eating up all their capital by nationalizing a lot of the industries.

Developing a huge welfare state, a heavily progressive income tax and a heavy regulatory regime. And as a result, in Sweden, according to the Swedish Economic association, there was not a single net new job created in Sweden for 55 years from 1950 until 2005. And as a result of that, the Swedish government tried to bail itself out by printing money. And they created enough inflation to have 500% interest rates at one point in Sweden. And this led to a sort of a Margaret Thatcher style revolt where they did privatize some industries. They cut marginal income tax rates, they deregulated banking and telecommunications and the airlines and other industries. And they made a bit of a comeback. But still today, the per capita income in Sweden is lower than Mississippi, which is our poorest state.

That is just amazing. And it is mind boggling to me how few people truly understand how government spending and economics and inflation and interest rates tie together. But that's maybe a complicated issue for too many people. Take us through. And that was a great example about Sweden. It's unbelievable, some of the information you just shared. That's the myth, you know, welfare harms the poor. I assume you mean it just makes them dependent, lessens their skills. Is there more to it than that? On the harming the poor argument?

Yeah. Well, it does destroy the work effort. For example, in Hawaii, which has the biggest welfare payments of any state, there was a Cato Institute study that said if you count just seven welfare programs out of 120, then the average welfare recipient in Hawaii receives about $49,000 a year in government benefits. That means for them to get a job that would just break even, they'd have to get a job that pays them maybe 70 grand. And who's going to hire someone on welfare with few skills or education for 70,000 a year? And so they're trapped. It's irrational to get off of welfare. It breaks up the families because it gets deadbeat dads off the hook. Mom gets a welfare check, whereas 50 years ago she didn't. And she can get along anyway with the kids. But dad is gone. And there's a lot of research that shows that on average, not in every single case, of course, but on average, children who grow up in a single parent family like that are much more likely to the males. The boys are more likely to get in trouble with the law and the girls are much more likely to have out of wedlock births themselves. And many of them, of course, will end up on welfare. And it also crowds out private charitable efforts. When the government does so much, people react by saying, well, I don't have to take care of the poor people in my neighborhood, or I don't have to take care of my own parents and grandparents in their retirement. Government is taking care of them. And so it destroys the civil society. That often works much better than government and taking care of people in need.

You are absolutely right. It creates this vicious cycle of dependency. And you know, just as a little aside here, and you may have seen it already, but there's a fantastic documentary I watched last week called Poverty Inc. And it just, it basically speaks to what you're saying in that it shows how a lot of these Do Gooder ideologies hurt people. And this of course is on a global scale rather than on a national scale, but it's just very true. And they picked a lot on the U2 singer Bono, whose music I love. But a lot of these goody Do Gooder celebrities are really, really hurting people and crowding out capitalist efforts that are the real long term cure for development of these countries around the world. I'd highly recommend that documentary. Poverty Inc. Most people on the left are really into the environment and they think that the solution to environmental problems is all sorts of government regulation and red tape. When you can see that one of the most regulated economies ever in history, in a sense it was certainly centrally planned, was the former Soviet Union with massive environmental destruction. How does Socialism cause Pollution?

That's the title of one of my chapters.

I know, that's why I brought it up.

You know, the standard theory of pollution, or externalities, as economists call it, is that unregulated pursuit of profit in a capitalist economy leads is the root cause of pollution. But we have an experiment, we have the Soviet Union, where it was illegal to pursue profits in the private sector for 70 years. So you would have expected the environment to be pristine in a place like that.

And it was absolutely disgusting.

Exactly the opposite. There's a book that was published at the time, after the collapse of socialism in the Soviet empire. It was called Ecocide in the ussr Ecological Suicide. And in my book, you know, I write about some of these things. The steam ships on the Volga river had signs on them that said, don't throw cigarettes overboard. The river may catch on fire because there's so many chemicals in the river. And the environmental catastrophes were much worse than what we see in this country, and the main reason was everything is a commons. There's no private property to speak of in terms of land ownership. And so everything was a commons. And no one is responsible for how they treat the land or the environment.

Exactly, exactly. The best way to ensure that someone will take care of something is to let them own it because they care about what they own. And just the simple example, Tom, of anybody who's ever rented a car. Do you care more about your own car or the rental car? Of course you care more about the car you own, not the rental car.

I've been a fisherman my whole life, and I walked around the woods a lot. And I, you know, I tell, I tell students, you know, where are you more likely to find piles of tires or old toilets that people have thrown into the woods? Your own private yard or out in the public property, Public domain where nobody really owns it. And the answer is obvious.

Yeah, it is. It sure is. I remember when I went to Cuba and I just couldn't believe it. There was just litter everywhere, just trash. Nobody picked it up. You know, of course, Michael Moore thinks you should go there for healthcare, yet he doesn't do that, of course, conveniently, but he. He thinks their system is better than ours.

Yes. Well, I have, I have an old friend who actually a very interesting guy. He worked for Mikhail Gorbachev and he defected from the Soviet Union before the fall of communism. And he came to this country and became. He's an economics professor now over here. And he went to Cuba. He took some of his students to Cuba. And when he came back, he said the only real health care in Cuba is swim to Miami. He said that he couldn't even get aspirin. And there's like, ambulances are unheard of and I'll be politically connected. And the political elite in Cuba, they get pretty good health care. Oh, of course. The average citizen just does without. Like my friend Yuri said, swim to Miami if you want healthcare in Cuba.

Very, very good point, very good point. You know, there's a huge debate raging nowadays that I believe will increase unemployment, increase crime, and hasten the move and the motivation for companies to automate and use robots and so forth. And that is this ridiculous minimum wage debate. You know, the market should set the wages, of course, not the government. But, you know, one of your chapters is titled Minimum Wage Maximum Folly. Tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah, this point, if you go on the Democratic Socialists of America or the Socialist Party of America websites, they highlight this. This thing is one of their priorities. And it's always been a priority of labor unions. So one of the things that's behind this is the desire by labor unions to price out of a job, price out of the market non union labor, which is teenagers. For example, if I wanted to get my house painted, I could hire two college kids for let's say $10 an hour each. So it cost me $20 an hour. Or I could hire a unionized professional painter, one person who's faster and more experienced, for $20 an hour also. But if the government tells me I have to pay kids 15 an hour, well, now it prices them out of the job, I can get the same job done cheaper by the unionized guy and I'd hire him. And the unions have always understood this, and that's why they've always been in favor of higher minimum wages. I even talk in my book about the origins of the minimum wage law. In the 30s, what was going on is a lot of the black sharecroppers from the deep south were miserable. They were turned out the of their jobs sharecropping, and they flooded the cities looking for work. And all of a sudden there was competition for the unionized white workers in the factories. And back in those days, even some members of congress were very open about this, that the purpose of this minimum wage was to price out these black workers who were looking for jobs in the factories. Because since they did not have as much exposure experience in that kind of work, they couldn't command as high a wage as the incumbents could. But they were willing to work for maybe a dollar an hour or whatever the amount was, and then it's better than zero an hour. And so there was always this effect of keeping the non union workers out being the purpose of raising the minimum wage. And of course they get all these dupes to go along with it, like the young people who claim to be socialists or some religious organizations that think it's the right thing to do to support legislating higher wages.

So it's not just a mistake of economics. It's not just economic ignorance that causes them to support this. The unions know what they're doing and they want to throw teenagers out of work.

They absolutely do. And you know what? The American left who claims to want to help minorities, they just keep hurting them. And the higher you make the minimum wage wage, the more unemployment you will have, Youth unemployment and minority unemployment. That means you will increase the crime rate and increase the government dependency and build yourself in more democratic voters for the next generation or Two. So it is this disgusting cycle that is really, really, I think, evil. I think it's designed to hurt people. It's terrible. What were you going to say about it?

I want to say that the increases in the minimum wage have always hurt black teenagers more than white teenagers, primarily because of the inferior educational systems in the big cities where there are larger black populations than in the suburbs. And the black teenager unemployment rate for decades has been on average about double the white teenager unemployment rate. And so it has had a very disproportionate effect because when you raise the minimum wage, the people with the least skill, least education, least experience get laid off first. And that's why you have this disproportionate effect. And it truly is an evil policy.

Oh, it really is. I mean, I don't know why that if I want to hire somebody and they want to work for whatever wage we agreed on, I don't know what business it is of the government to get in the way of that transaction. And certainly I don't know what businesses it have a union to get in the way of that transaction. In these non right to work states where you're forced to, I mean, can you imagine the concept here? You're forced to join a union to get a job. That's insane. That's just insane on its face. It really is. But I know we are running out of time and I really want you to touch on two, two more things before you go. Right. From your book, How Socialist Regulation Makes Monopolies and then the Socializing of capital.

Yeah, well, you know, big corporations have always been behind all sorts of regulation. The Food and Drug act was promoted and lobbied for by big food companies, for example, because they knew they could use regulation as a way of creating monopoly power. The Civil Aeronautics Board, for example, when it was created, it was run essentially by the airlines. And there were more airlines competing in the 1920s than there were in the 1970s when airlines were finally deregulated. And so what happened was the airlines ran the show basically and they prohibited price competition for decades and they also prohibited the entry of new airlines. The same thing happened with Interstate Commerce Commission regulation of trucking. They prohibited price cutting in trucking until that was deregulated. It was such a rotten scam that it was finally deregulated by Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy and Ralph Nader. They were the major proponents of deregulating trucking and airlines in the late 70s.

Well, that's interesting.

The same story is true of the so called natural monopolies. I've studied that extensively and there was vigorous competition in the telephone business, the electric power business, natural gas in the late 19th, early 20th centuries and how they got to be monopolies. Maryland is a good example. I ran across a book describing this very thing. How Maryland adopted a monopoly, a government franchise monopoly in electric power. It was a deal between the state legislature and the Baltimore, it was called the Baltimore gas and light company at the time. And they said you have a 25 year monopoly by law but in return we get 15% of gross revenues and we being the state legislature, so the politicians got a big pot of money to play with and give out hand out to keep their jobs, get re elected and so forth in return for granting a monopoly. And of course they do. What all monopolies do is they provide shoddy service and high prices. And that's how we got. There's nothing natural about this. It was natural. Implies it occurred on the free market, but it did not, right?

You look, it's interesting, you look at highly regulated industries like any utility, but I'll pick on the cable companies, for example. You look at another highly regulated industry like the airlines, right? And you get terrible service pretty much, you know, that's pretty much the, the expected deal is you're going to get crappy rude service. Yet you look at companies like Apple and Amazon and even if they're run by left wing people who are pretty hypocritical and a lot of times if you ask me, but you know, they do have to exist in more of a free market. They're not as regulated. Right. Of course they've got all kinds of regulations but the service is so much better. It's, it's just amazing the difference. It's just a stark difference. And you know, the, the industries that you don't get the good service, they're highly unionized or highly regulated. They've got these unnatural monopolies. You look at Wall Street, I mean Wall street, to think that's capitalist is a myth because it's highly regulated. And that's the interesting thing. You, you can't play in that market. It's so burdensome to try and take your company public that there's very few new entrants and so competition is minimized. These CEOs may go on TV and say that if the government will just ease up on the regulations when secretly they love it because it keeps their semi monopolies. So you know, and the drug, the pharmaceutical industry, my God, that's a huge FDA discussion. But yeah, it's all around us, isn't it?

It is. The big companies have also been for regulation for a long time because they understand it. They could probably pay the cost of the regulation, but their smaller competitors can't, and their potential competitors. It creates an additional big cost of getting into the business in the first place. If you have to hire lawyers and everything else to make sure that you comply with all the regulations, the cost.

Of compliance is too burdensome. That's why I'm not taking any of my companies public and most small business people aren't, because they can't play in that field. It's too expensive.

Yeah. Yeah. On the issue of a regulated company, I'll give you an anecdote. I have a friend, my friend Tom woods just moved. He moved his family from Kansas to Florida.

Yeah, I just had him on the show. He's great.

He got on the airplane and he has his cat with him on a cat carrier.

And he had to get off. I know.

And he had to get off because of FAA regulations, said his cat carrier was not the right size. He had to get off the airplane and go find a hotel to stay overnight until he could go buy a proper sized cat carrier while his wife and five children flew off to Florida. And so that's the kind of service you get in a rig. You know, you fly, you know that you get an American airline and they start shouting FAA regulations at you. Oh, yeah, you know where to put your feet and where to put this and that. And, you know, I compare that to, you know, I just went to the Apple store not too long ago because my iPhone died. And they were fantastic. I went in there and they had all these smart young people that fixed my phone up right away. And they're very competitive and they have regulations, but they're not like, swimming in it like the airlines are.

Right? Exactly. And the airlines love it because it keeps new players out. That's the dirty little secret they don't want you to know. It really is. How about socializing capture, though? What's going on there? I mean, I think we kind of touched on it with, like, the Wall street example, maybe, but tell us a little bit more about what you mean and let's wrap it up. I know you gotta go.

Yeah, well, you know, my book, you know, I cite the Communist Manifesto, for example, and of course, the nationalization of the money supply was a big part of that, is one of the ten planks there. And, you know, in our version of the nationalization of the money supply is the Fed, the Central bank. And you know, what has the Fed done? I quote the economist George Seljan, who's one of the top monetary economists in the academic world anyway, and he had a study published in a prestigious economics journal, Journal of Macroeconomics, showing you know, evaluating the first hundred years of the Fed and he pretty much gave it an F. The Fed has created enormous price inflation. The value of the dollar is less than 5 cents of what it was in 1913 when the Fed came into being. Even though the purpose of the Fed is supposedly price stability, the boom and bust cycles in the economy are deeper and longer lasting than they were before the Fed. So the Fed has destabilized the economy creating this never ending cycle of boom and bust cycles and price inflation over the past century of you know, the dollar is worth less than 5 cents of what it was in 1913. And so I have a chapter called Destroying Capitalism by Socializing Capital. And that's one way in which we socialize capital. And you know, any economist worth his or her salt knows that price controls are a bad idea. But what is it that the Fed does was is other than trying to control interest rates?

That's what the Fed, that's a form of price control. Absolutely.

By holding, you know, trying to push interest rates down to is close to zero and making it impossible to earn any interest on your savings. It's really sort of a war on the elderly. The elderly that aren't willing to take too much risk in the stock market and who might have wanted to just put their money and earn 5 or 6% in a savings account somewhere like they did in the old days. Well that's an impossibility.

And not only is it a war on the elderly, making them, forcing them to into risky speculative investments and forcing many other people because they can't earn a reasonable return on their capital, but also it is a gift to the rich and it's making the concentration of wealth even more significant because the rich are in the investor class and they can buy apartment complexes with incredibly low interest rate loans that will last for a decade or to. And you know, it gives them a huge advantage. Why do we have some centralized bank regulating our money supply? That's insane. Why doesn't the market get to regulate that too? And then you'll hear the leftists say that well, you know, that's what caused the Great Depression. And well, the Fed was running things at the great during the Great Depression, okay. You know, that capital was, was too scarce and we needed more money supply and, and you know, it's just unbelievable. I mean, I can't believe these arguments still exist, but they do. It's crazy.

It's hard to believe. At some point people said, yeah, that's a good idea, let's put politicians in charge of the money supply, but let's make it a secretive organization. I know, secret. It never tells anybody what they're up to.

And if you suggest that it be audited, you literally might be shot. Quite literally. And that may have been what happened to one of our presidents for that reason. Possibly. I don't know. But yeah, it's just mind boggling. It is. Give out your website, Tom, and tell people, of course your books are all on Amazon. You've got a bunch of books, by the way, and a big, huge body of work.

Yeah, I have a page on Amazon. The latest book is the Problem with Socialism. It's sort of a companion book to my earlier book, How Capitalism Saved America. And I'm a columnist@lewrockwell.com that's Lew, a man's name. Lourockwell.com and I have I think a couple of hundred articles on there now if anyone's interested in reading those or check out my Amazon page.

Fantastic. Well, Thomas De Lorenzo, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thanks for having me on and have a great day.

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