Peter Schiff's Critiques of Socialism | Joe Rogan

The Jörgen experience. Sweden's more capitalist than we are? Yeah, you know the rich pay lower percentage of taxes in Sweden than we do. You know, they don't even have an inheritance tax. There's no estate tax in Sweden. Really? Zero. No, yeah. I would have never guessed that. Look, Sweden... Sweden became a very rich country because they were a capitalist country. And once they became very rich, they experimented with socialism. Which was an unfortunate experiment because there's no reason to experiment with socialism. Because every time it's tried, it's failed. But they decided to try it and of course it failed. And so they had to start rolling it back once they saw all the damage that the welfare state in Sweden was creating. So they started dialing it back and they've gone a long way. They haven't eradicated it completely. But, you know, and if you look at the tax proposals by Joe Biden, I mean, we're going to go so far above Sweden as far as the confiscatory levels of taxation. I mean, look what Joe Biden wants to do with the income tax, the corporate tax and the personal tax. He wants to raise the corporate tax from 21 to 28. But then he wants to raise the dividend tax from 24 where it is now to about 40 something-ish. I forget the exact amount. But corporations are taxed twice, right? They're taxed when they earn the money and then when they distribute it to the owners. So you have to add up both rates. But then he also wants to apply social security taxes to those dividends, not just the Medicare taxes. So he basically wants to take the effective corporate tax rate up from about 40% where it is now to about 60%. That's where he wants it, you know, which is a huge increase or 70%. I forget the word. It's a massive number. And it really is fascism because the government ends up owning all these businesses because if you take more than half of the income of a business, I mean, you basically own that business. I mean, it's your business. You're getting more than half the income. So the government is really nationalizing these corporations for taxation. But it's not the corporations. It's the individual shareholders, right? They're the ones that own the business. That's a very important way to look at it. The way you look at it there where half of the income is going to someone else and let me let I wanted to stop you for a second, but I wanted to hear that rant. There's a connection that people make from it's they connect socialism to empathy, socialism to kindness, socialism to people that are less greedy, socialism to people that are more interested in a community. This is coming from a person like myself who has no economic. 86% of what I know about the economic world is from you. So I'm an idiot. All right. I listen to people who are experts. But when I think of the idea of community and of helping people out, I think of the idea like what's wrong with some socialist policies. We have the fire department. That's a socialist policy. Nobody wants a fire department to be only for people who have money. We want the fire department to be for the community. It doesn't matter if you have zero dollars. If your house is on fire, we're all going to pay for the fire department to come put it out. We all have a vested interest in keeping your house from burning down and you dying in the whole community from burning, right? We have these certain agreements between that type of hope, but hold on a second. You're right. You're 100% right. But it's the idea behind it that comes from idealistic people and I'm putting myself in this category. I am often naive and idealistic, but also ruthless in my assessment of human character. It's a big contradiction because I think there's a lot of people that really could do more than they're doing and they know they could and they want to make excuses. And it's part of the reason why throughout history, they've left people behind. There's certain people that if you had a tribe and you had to make it over this mountain and Bob is fucking lazy and he's like, you got to carry me, bro. I'm like, Bob, we're both walking. Come on, man. Bob's not supposed to make it. He's not supposed to make it. We want him to make it, but we don't want our kids to die. We don't want our mom to starve. We got to keep going. Bob, you lazy fuck. Come on, bro. There's always been people like Bob and it's part of the problem with humans. So I'm a contradiction. But hold on a second. I understand, but I'm going to give you that's what attracts people to socialist ideas. It's just that they're nice that they want everybody to do better. Socialist socialist ideas are very appealing. Yes, I get that. And that's why they're very popular with young people who don't know any better. They don't have enough life experience. But this is a man Peter Schiff. This is the bridge because a guy like you who really understands economics can talk to a guy like me and we can explain it to everybody because otherwise we just have and I'm definitely not arguing with you. But your argument versus people who disagree with you is argument. You have this but there's a there's an opportunity to make this bridge and for us to understand each other. I'm hoping I think I'm here. I'm just going to make that bridge and I want to help people evolve from being socialist to be capitalist because capitalists aren't mean. Yes, they just understand the unintended consequences of these well-intentioned programs when that the left is in favor of but they don't understand that they actually backfire and make all the problems that they're trying to solve worse. It is part of the problem with your labels. Isn't the part when you have a local fire department, right? That fire department is there to put out any fire at any house, right? So everybody in the community benefits from having a fire department. It's not there just for one person. It's for everybody in the community. We're talking about where the government takes money specifically from one person and gives it to somebody else for their specific benefit because they think they need it for whatever problem. Whoever reason they need the money agree and this would be like Bob wanting money from you are lazy. Frank Bob we're talking about. I am all in favor of private charity. I'm all in favor of people voluntarily helping out their fellow man and Americans will do that. I mean we didn't do that. We did that a lot more in the past when the government didn't take so much of our income and taxes. We had a lot more money. Like I mentioned Grover Cleveland when he said that quote about the government not supporting the people there was a bill to appropriate ten thousand dollars for some farmers in Texas who had been hit by a drought and Grover Cleveland vetoed the bill because he said look there's nothing in the Constitution that allows the government to give money to people just because they need it. I mean this is not right. We can't take money from the taxpayers and just give it to somebody because we feel they're in need. And so he vetoed that bill. But after he vetoed it the farmers got more than 10 times that amount of money in private donations from individual Americans who wanted to help out. That's a that's good. That's a great give your own money at a charitable giving. That is great. That is noble. Yeah. But when you steal money from somebody else and give that money there's no nobility in that. That's theft. I don't care what you do with the money after you steal it. Stealing is wrong. I see what you're saying. I like what you're saying. Is there an opportunity where these two things can merge where people can realize like hey we need less taxes and more charitable donations and it's both possible and you would probably save money and we could figure out a way to distribute that money in an equitable way that you have control over. So if there's certain charities that you really feel strongly about like cancer research or likely the people who are likely to give the money. The most of charity are wealthier people because they have more discretionary income and if you have a lot of wealthy people who are paying 40 50 percent taxes and I was doing that I was paying about half of my money in taxes before I moved to Puerto Rico. Right. I didn't have any special tax breaks. I paid about almost half my money in taxes. So because half the money went to the government. I had a lot less money that I could be charitable with. I mean I had I had all the money I needed to take care of myself. The money that was taken away from me by government was money that I would have invested to help grow the economy or maybe I could have used it in direct charitable giving. And the other benefit of when you allow more private sector charity private sector charities are much more efficient because they really care about the people they're trying to help. Governments don't give a damn. When you have a government program that program exists to benefit the bureaucracy of the program. So they squander the money and the last thing they want to do is is end poverty because then they there's no longer a need for their program. They want to perpetuate dependency. You know if you go back to the great society in the 1960s if you look at the declining poverty rates in the 1940s 1950s 1960s leading up to the 1960s when we had the you know all the civil rights and all this big war and poverty. We were beating poverty. We were kicking poverty's butt poverty rates were really falling in this country until the government declared war on poverty and then poverty won. That is the problem. The government created poverty. They didn't eliminate it. Well, what should they have done differently? They should have allowed free market capitalism to keep lifting people out of poverty. But the reason people are poor is because they're not earning enough money. Well, how do people earn more money? They become more productive. How do you get more productive? You acquire skills and you have capital. You your employer provides you with capital that makes your labor more productive and because you're more productive you can earn more money and that lifts you out of poverty. So it's free market capitalism that lifts people out of poverty. And so the smaller the government is the more capitalism we have the more wealth we can create the more employment opportunities we can create government just gets in the way. Can I pause you for a second? So you what you're saying is there's an opportunity to be compassionate without like the demand for you being compassionate by the federal government. And if people have to spend less money on the government there's opportunities for them to donate more money to charities. And this this is a better this would be a better way of managing our money and our charity and all these things. Yes, it's much more efficient voluntary giving. Look when people give money voluntarily their own money. They don't want it to be squandered. They don't want it to be wasted. I mean whenever you give the charities you always look at the charity and you want to know. Hey if I give you a thousand dollars how much of it is used in bureaucracy and how much goes to the recipients and you can look at their books and you can say hey we're going to take 10 cents to run the charity and actually 90 cents is going to go to the people that were trying to help. Right. But is the government and see the way around. They take in a dollar and only 10 cents actually goes to the people that need the money. The rest of it is is absorbed in the bureaucracy. There's no incentive to be efficient. Charities have to be efficient or nobody will give them money. Government has no incentive to be efficient because they take your money. There's no voluntary interaction there. They take your money from you and so they can be as inefficient as possible. But then the private charity wants to help people out. So they no longer need the charity. The government wants to keep people impoverished. So they're in constant need of the charity because that way they can get their vote. The government knows if they steal money from Peter and pay Paul that they'll always get Paul's vote and that's what they're concerned about. They want to keep people entrapped in poverty so that they'll be reliable votes. Is that what they want or do they just want to maintain this system that they have control over because if they just released everything to the public sector like if they are the private sector. But if they just release everything from policing to the water purification, everything they do. If they just went instead of the government handling everything, they just allowed it to the private sector. How would we manage whether or not they were doing the good of the people overall? That's what everybody's worried about. What everybody's worried about is big business assuming this monopolistic gigantic monolith that crushes everything before it and pollutes the rivers. That's what we're worried about. So the idea of the government stepping in for business is to keep business from only growing and not growing with concern for the consequences of all the other people around it. That's where everybody gets real suspicious. Right. When you agree and they shouldn't be. And this is something that always kind of bothers me that people just attribute sinister motives to private businessmen. Yet they think politicians are angels and just there to do the Lord's work. Right. I mean, there's just as many greedy people who go into politics as who go into business. In fact, probably more. But there's a big difference. See, I have protection because if a greedy person goes into private business is greed can only help me. Right. Because the way a business grows and gets bigger is by selling more products and services. Well, why would I buy those products and services? I have to like them. I have to think they're better than the products or services that some other businesses is offering me. And I have to value those goods and services more than the money. I'm voluntarily exchanging to get them. Right. The beauty of the free market is that you have all these businesses who may be greedy competing with one another to best satisfy my desires, my needs to make me happy. And if they don't make me happy, if they can't satisfy my disease, I don't buy their products. But they have to win me over. They have to woo me and seduce me to get my business. So I don't have to be worried about a greedy businessman who wants to make money because he can only make money by making my life better. On the other hand, you take a greedy person and you give them the power of government. They can make my life miserable. They don't have to get me to voluntarily do anything. They just take my money by brute force and they just do to me whatever they want. So where you have to fear greed and power is when it's in government where it can actually harm you. Okay. Not in the private sector where it can help you. I know. I'm going to say, well, what if there's a criminal? What if somebody is stealing my money? Yes, they're violating the law and we need government to protect me from thieves. But businessmen that are honestly convincing me without fraud or deception but are being honest and I'm buying their product, you know, their greed doesn't help me. It doesn't hurt me. It only helps me.