I have with me today the international man of mystery, Kel Kelly, the author of this
book.
He blasted on the scene earlier this year with his marvelous treatise, which has been
and Selling very well because it's a fantastic introduction to the idea of capitalism. It's
got an aggressive title, the case for legalizing capitalism.
That was the idea.
What was the, yeah, tell me about the goal of writing the book.
Well the goal for the book overall was to take what I had been reading and learning
in large part through the Mises Institute for many years that was more academic oriented
and kind of consolidate all of that into one place for the average person on the street and to put it in layman's terms, because I'm not necessarily that intelligent myself, I wanted it in an easy to understand language where people can understand it and say the most important things, but consolidate it to that level where basically the goal was to have a rebuttal for all anti-capitalistic arguments.
Right. And there's thousands of them and they seem to be multiplying by the day. It's driving
you crazy. You're digging through all this scholarship because you love big books, you
love journal articles and that sort of thing. But you're frustrated that there's nothing
you could really put your fingers on. You could just hand to the average person who's
absorbed this anti-capitalist mentality and say, look, there's another point of view.
Read my book.
My mindset was kind of, I hear anti-capitalistic arguments all day from different people and
I always want to rebuttal and I think back to I read about that, I learned the details,
who wrote about that or what book was that and so I wanted a source where whatever the
topic was, I could have it as a reference, oh you're referring to Wal-Mart as evil, well
here let me flip here and let me show you, here's the arguments that are, does the reply
And you began the book really before the economic meltdown in 2008?
Yes. Well, I began it kind of as it was unfolding in earlier 2008 before the big crisis came
And well, I guess it came in March and then particularly September.
So yes, as far as that goes, it was kind of good timing, but it was unfolding as I was
writing it, which helped because every day I would read, you know, the New York Times
when the first wave hit and I read and I saw George Reisman remarked on the same article
in a paper he wrote that, you know, this is the problem with the lack of regulation, capitalism
caused this, this is why we need regulation.
And so, that was kind of inspiration, as I was writing it, to address these.
Yeah, it's remarkable, isn't it? You know, almost every day in the news, right? I mean,
once you develop an eye for these things, you recognize the anti-capitalistic mentality
everywhere.
Absolutely. It's prevalent, and it's the common notion, and everyone believes that
capitalism can't work, we need help, and so I wanted to show in as many different ways
And by capitalism, of course, you don't mean anything peculiar by the term like, oh, we
should love capitalists versus labor or whatever. You just mean the market economy. And you
have no problem using the term capitalism. It's a provocative term for people.
In the book, I use capitalism and free markets interchangeably, and I probably expand capitalism
more than it usually is to include kind of social ideas also, but really, when I say
capitalism, I'm referring to absolute complete freedom for individuals and businesses to
operate as they want, and as I said, it's also known as free markets, just letting people
be free to produce and buy and sell and trade and act, interact with each other the way
Capitalism is not capitalism at all, right? I mean, quite often you'll hear things like,
well, it's just terrible the way these bailouts, you know, rewarded rich wealthy capitalists,
that's capitalism for you. That's right. That's constantly applied to various things that we
We who know the difference between true free markets and regulated markets, if you say
to people in general, do you support free markets, most of them will say, yes, we do.
Then you start getting to the particulars, well, do you support a minimum wage?
Do you support subsidies to help our poor farmers?
Do you support X, Y, and Z?
They'll say, well, yes, of course, you have to have that.
Or we have to have an FDA because we have to have an AMA so doctors won't cut out
are explained instead of repairing our heart or whatever, but the fact is that is an absence
of free markets, that is regulation, that is government control.
And there's a point that you brought home again and again that the owners of airplanes,
airline companies don't want their planes to crash, the people who make food don't
want to kill you with their food, the doctor doesn't want to cut out your heart instead
of your spleen or whatever, right?
Businesses have all kinds of incentives to do the right thing. They do screw up sometimes, and more often than not, like the recent BP, oil spill.
That's because they had incentives to do what they were doing. In other words, it was regulation.
But accidents can still happen. Even if they were a complete free market oriented company, oil spills will happen.
Right. So it's a reasonable book. I mean, you address people's common concerns.
I try to address every single common concern during any election cycle, whatever the issues are, I try to put them in perspective in this book.
Now, it's not just a defensive free enterprise like you might expect from the Chamber of Commerce or something like that.
You've got a particular Austrian take here, so you do take a tough line in some ways, right?
I mean, you want the end of the FDA, you want the end of the FDIC.
Do you take on the topic of the Federal Reserve and the business cycle?
I take on all the topics, and yes, I'm pretty hardcore with it.
I do state that, yeah, in the beginning I remark, you know, what a real free market would consist of,
and I state, well, okay, I know that most people I'm trying to talk to with this book
will not go for absolute, what would, what they would call anarchy and craziness,
you know, so I say, okay, well, let's assume the government runs the schools
and gives us the roads and bridges and parks and so forth. But the book therefore describes
what's left in the world of free market after that. And so, but yes, so I cover all the
topics and hit them pretty hard, but I try to support them with strong circumstantial evidence,
historical evidence, and logical cause and effect arguments.
Yeah, lots of theory too. In fact, you start the book with a lot of theory.
And not too much, right? You explained what is wealth, what makes wealth, what makes societies
wealthy, how economies grow. And why do you think that background is so important?
Well, I figured to understand, you know, later in the book, I would be saying things like,
you know, we know that this or that regulation can't help or this intervention will only cause
So I have to first start in the beginning with the basics of economics.
So the first section is just that, the basics, labor, capital, wealth.
And so I figured, well, if I'm doing this, I need to put it all in perspective.
What is an economy?
What is wealth?
What is capital?
How do we progress as an economy?
Can we be exploited?
Are profits bad?
Are they good?
Explain how it all works, from labor and investment to trade. I cover all the basics so that we
can then, with all the other topics, apply that knowledge and understand what will help
or what will harm us in terms of these other political topics.
You know what's wonderful about the book? Well, first of all, you nowhere claim originality,
but in some way your presentation is original in the sense that it's popular. You're really
trying to reach… Did you have somebody in mind you were writing it for, a typical man
I did, actually. Yes. Though this book is perfect for any Austrian or any free-market-oriented person, when I was writing it, what I had in mind, or who I had in mind, was my brother-in-law, my aunt, my cousin. I have many socialist friends and family members.
The family reunion, just sitting around the table until it's driving you crazy.
Right, and you get into that argument, or co-workers, or, you know, we run into people constantly on Facebook, especially today.
I mean, I see dialogue constantly, I try to stay out of it, but there are all these arguments.
And so, the idea was to talk to those people and address this mindset and this logic.
And so, you're concerned about XYZ issue. Here's what you think about it.
So, instead of ruining the dinner party or causing a...
Yeah, they won't talk to me about it anymore. They won't get into it. So, now I have to say, look, here's this book.
Go by yourself in private, close the door. You don't have to admit that you've read it.
But here's the book.
When you have time and you have interest, then educate yourself.
Right. But the catch is, will they really be open-minded?
I ask people in the beginning to be open-minded when you read this. At least think of an
alternative point of view. You read your leftist socialist propaganda daily. Okay, sorry, literature,
daily. Just consider a different alternative point of view and read it, be open-minded,
think about it. Do my arguments make sense? Is it logical? Do you have a counter-argument?
Can this possibly be the way the world really works? Could capitalism actually help us?
Could it solve poverty? Could it raise our real wages? Could it prevent financial crises?
Just maybe it could. Let's explore and find out. And that's what that's here to do.
Another wonderful thing about the book is that it has an unrelenting zeal about it,
so it never gets tired. Sometimes when people take on these projects like this, a big project
like, I'm going to explain everything that's wrong with interventionism, and here's my
table of contents, they can get tired as they're writing. It can be too much to take on. But
There's no evidence in this book that you ever got tired. I mean, there's really page after page of,
here we go, you know. I appreciate that. And I was afraid as I was writing it that it was going to be
too big and bulky and cumbersome and people would get tired of it. But I had so much to say. And in
fact, I think what helps it is there are so many different topics that everyone talks about at one
point or another. And it's interesting. And I had so much to say about it. And none of it's repetitive
I don't go on and on with the same point. I try to keep moving, but there's so much to say that I think it stays kind of lively, and I did have somewhat of an attitude right in it, and a small bit of sarcasm or not condescension.
I want to respect others' viewpoints and so forth, but I include some normal street talk or sayings that we would say commonly, but you don't find in academic publications, just to keep it real, as they say.
You know, I did a funny thing when we were publishing that and I sent it off to Proofers.
I picked readers that I knew were not going to be sympathetic to it.
Oh really?
I don't think I mentioned this to you.
No, you didn't.
Yeah.
And three separate readers.
All three came back and said they had changed their minds.
Are you serious?
Yes.
Well, that's interesting.
And I also have, I told you, I have many socialist friends, many more than free market-oriented.
are left-wing oriented. Shockingly, these are people who, and I'm thinking of one who's a neighbor, another who I worked with in a consulting firm, well, I guess those are the main two, they have both said to me, Kel, no, there's another third one, another business colleague, surprisingly, most disproportionate amount of business people are left-wing oriented, as I mentioned in the book, but to the point, these people said, look, I may not agree with you.
But I've got to say you did a fantastic job of presenting an alternative view, and one
in particular who said, you know, many people get offended that if I call them socialist
or they don't like to point out something as being socialist, but this guy, he's from
England, calls himself socialist. He said, look, I was raised socialist, and that's what
I believe in, but I've got to say that the arguments you present are very strong and
They'll say, nah, that's not right, and not even read it, but I'm surprised at how many people are reading it, and are not taking it to heart necessarily, but are affected by it, and rethinking some particular issues.
I have one friend, a neighbor, who's doing research constantly now on the Mises website, because he knows that's kind of the end all be all source, for he'll read the New York Times, and then he'll go to the Mises website and see what we say about it.
about it. And so he's really open-minded, obviously, and he's trying to compare and
contrast and try to arrive at the truth, which is what's important. It's not an ideology.
It's how does the world really work?
And you didn't try to reinvent the wheel here. I mean, you're drawing off all the great writings
of the people you consider to be the great writers in our tradition. So you've got, of
course, Mises throughout here and Rothbard and Riesman. Trigger's very strong in here.
Was there one person you were going back to again and again to find the logic to defend the case?
I think it depends on the topic. Different topics I came across or that I started to address, I thought, who was it?
In some cases it would be de Lorenzo, that's the guy, he's addressed so much of that, or Rothbard, you have to go to Rothbard and that.
So it was really widespread, but I do disproportionately use Riesemann because it's not that I just am that in love with Riesemann, it's just that the more I read his views and his arguments and his economic cause and effect, which is even much different from a lot of the Austrian view, as I said, what I'm trying to arrive at is the truth, not an ideology or whatever, so I find that Riesemann has proven himself
on so many different points.
Especially on the subject of labor,
I noticed you drew on him a lot.
The same way, Tom Woods does the same thing in his writings.
He really finds himself going back to Reisman again and again
on the subject of labor and wages and capital
and their relationship.
And especially profits and interest and inflation.
I mean, Reisman is brilliant on inflation.
We all think we know about inflation
and the cause and effect.
and but he you listen to Riesman an hour on it and there are plenty of audio lectures that you guys have done with Riesman it turns your world upside down yeah even knowing Austrian economics and you listen to Riesman you say wow that's a whole different perspective or a whole different edition yeah and then of course on the environment too you draw on him and block is I did that's right I would say Riesman block and an outsider so to speak Bjorn
The Anti-Gore movie. It's his answer to gores. But as I state in the book, for a lot of these cases, I'm defaulting to their view. I state in the book, it's not that these aren't my ideas. I'm not that bright. I've learned this from other people and I'm simply, I've learned it and I'm incorporating it. But when I use disproportionate amount of references towards one or two people,
And the value out of here is a brother's number of points, but the fact that you're dealing with contemporary issues, always. Most of your examples are the last five years. So you're dealing with things that people have a vague memory of. You have an ability to write, obviously. Everybody tells you that, and it's perfectly clear here.
You write well, and you can speak in a language that everybody understands. You have void jargon,
which is nice. And for those people who want to do more in-depth research, you have all the
bibliography there and all the footnotes that you'd ever need. I do. Well, part of that is
because I was very concerned about using others' materials. I'm not a writer, and I wanted to make
sure to assign credit where it was due. So I wanted to make sure I documented where every single thing
came from. But yes, that leaves you with a lot of sources and a lot of references, which is
extremely important in the war chapter. The war and patriotism chapter, which some have said is
really the most intriguing in the whole book. Well, it is because you don't expect it, I think.
You don't expect it. Very few, even Austrians probably focus the least on historical events
and so forth. But the point is, when you read about these and you learn it, you read Ralph
And so as I state, I know this will be very shocking to people. I don't have the space to really defend and justify it here in the book. But reference the sources. Go and check them out for yourself. See where this information came from.
here in the book, but reference the sources, go and check them out for yourself, see where
this information came from.
Part of the problem too is we tend to separate, I think, economics from foreign policy as
if they're hermetically sealed categories, but it's crazy.
It's all interlinked.
Right.
That's right.
Except for take out the religion aspect of it, the rest is left interlinked.
Yeah.
Well, you've got World War I led to a massive planned society, planned economy in the United
in the United States and the leftovers of that got rolled into the Great Depression and all
the catastrophes of the Great Depression in many ways led to World War II and certainly
in Europe, all the mistakes of the post-World War I planning and you go through all of this.
I do go through it in detail.
I didn't know that I would, but once I get into it, there are so many details that are
important that really reveal the whole story and support it.
So I did go and I made it a full-length chapter on the history of war and covering particularly
the Civil War, World War I, World War II, because as I learned that information and
learned how things really went down, or at least that argument of how it went down if
you don't buy what we're saying, it's very compelling and I thought that story needed
to be told, but the devil is in the details.
You have to understand the different details and the different causes that led up to that.
Right. It's also what makes the book especially compelling. It comes from an independent mind.
The vision you're laying out here is not one of the options given to us by the official political
culture in which you're supposed to favor free markets, but then defend huge military budgets
Free markets are not what you think they are.
You all state that we need free markets, but you don't really support that.
If we had free markets, the world would look very differently.
Your life would be much different.
It would be in much better shape.
You wouldn't have the wars.
You wouldn't have the poverty.
And then, of course, I have to go and explain most people's response to that, which is,
oh, that's just being ideologic and utopian.
That would never exist.
And so I have to go then explain, well, it's not existing because you're preventing it.
It used to exist.
Some parts of this exist in different industries or different countries, but you actively vote
every year to prevent this from existing, and it's not utopian. This is realistic. It has
existed, it worked, but this is what you prevent every time you go and vote, and here's what
would happen if you didn't do that.
Now, in the course of this, you clearly probably gained some insight into the mindset of those
What did you learn about the anti-capitalistic mentality in the course of writing this book
that you might not have known before.
That's a great question.
I think sadly that it's worse than we thought it was
because I remember reading,
when I first got hooked up with the Mises Institute
and was reading different articles and so forth,
I thought at that point, some of the claims were extreme.
I thought, well, okay, I get you're against that,
but I think you're really overdoing it.
I think you're, you're kind of stating that it's more extreme than it is. Well, I've learned that it's not. I've learned that it really is much worse than we realize. And part of it is understanding the difference between free markets and not having free markets, because then you understand that things you thought were free markets are regulation and intervention. And that's all brought about by that anti-capitalistic mentality. And behind that, if you look at the history of how the laws went into
In fact, what the groups were that put them there, you see that they were very anti-capitalistic.
They wanted to prevent that. And those laws and regulations and so forth were put in place
just for their ideology. And so the whole mindset is even worse than I thought it would be.
I suppose in some ways, this is another unique contribution of the book, is that you do understand
And this Misesian idea of the interrelationship between interventions. You have one intervention
one year that creates new problems that leads to another intervention and so on and these
all pile on together. You kind of patiently go through this in sector after sector.
I tried to remind myself to hammer that point in at different places because it's so important.
And going back to the financial crisis taking place during this book, I hit on that, that
Everyone says, oh, this is an example of why we need regulation. Look what's happening out there.
I saw a movie on Friday night called Insider Job that explains the 2008 financial crisis
from the traditional point of view. And of course, the bottom line is we need regulation.
This happened because we didn't have it.
If it's like all the others, it gets some things right, but...
Right. There's some truth. And that's where you say, yeah, that's right. Tell them. But
it really mischaracterizes, misses the point and the rest of its outright propaganda.
Did you see Wall Street?
Yes. The original is one of my favorite movies, actually.
That's a wonderful movie. I mean, the new one.
Yes, I did see the new one.
It does have some of those problems, right? I mean, it captures some truth, but misdiagnoses
things in some way.
Completely. Much more egregiously than the first one. Now, the first one made normal
business practices evil, kind of the equivalent of saying, oh, short selling. You're selling
In the second movie, they turn it into the people that do these kinds of things are so
terrible and evil that they would steal the money from their daughter, leave the country
and never see her again.
And that's kind of what they did in this movie I saw on Friday night.
They have a whole different section on the lives Wall Streeters live.
Their nights are filled with prostitution.
They have prostitutes, they're on drugs. This is who we're dealing with. How that is relevant,
I'm not really sure, to the movie, but they try to make it.
Just to encourage hatred, really. Don't stick, yeah.
But to your original point, the moral of that movie was, we need government to come in and
control this, whereas the problem is, that's what started it to begin with. Having the
The Central Bank having any interaction between the government and the banks, that is regulation.
Controlling the rate of interest, controlling the supply of money, altering that, that is
regulation, whether you call it that or not.
So yes, when that causes the natural problems that it will cause and has caused for 300
years, then we have people saying, as they did leaving the movie, well that just shows
we need more regulation.
But of course, the new regulation creates more problems and bigger crisis and the usual
story we're used to hearing.
Health care is a classic example and you cover that in here.
Right. It gets worse and worse and worse and the next thing is it'll be fully nationalized
and then we'll go to the other industries and do the same thing.
Right. That's right. What's your favorite chapter apart from the war in here? That's
the one that I think probably you've gotten the most comment about, but what's the one
you think is the one that's most rigorously argued or maybe the one that was most difficult
for you?
Well, of course, the most difficult one was the environmentalism, because I'm not a scientist, and I don't claim to be. And so I had to write that in a way where, you know, I'm writing facts and figures and the results of research, but that I haven't done them, but to show that this is at least a counter-argument, this is logical.
But of course it was easy for me to say after that, no matter what the facts and figures, no matter whether there's global warming, no matter whether it's man-made, we should do nothing about it. Here's why.
Because at that point it becomes an economic argument. It becomes about our ability to produce and create goods and services and sustain ourselves, as they say.
and so that was a somewhat of a tough chapter probably the regulation chapter
was in a way my favorite because that's what anti-capitalists default to they
think it all comes down to regulation and regulation only and I was able to
give myriad examples of how regulation does not work and it actually causes the
The industry never says anything about what's behind it. Of course, they were involved half the time in bringing about their regulation, but that was the point of that chapter, to say, look, all these things around you that you complain about, the healthcare is a problem, airlines, the hurricane Katrina, everything, that all came about because of regulation. Regulation doesn't help it, it harms it.
Right, there's a hidden hand in the background and you're going to reveal who it is. That's what you do throughout.
I really enjoyed the last chapter a lot. This is the chapter where you take on various political headlines.
I almost left that out because I was afraid I didn't make it too long.
What was cool about it is that, you know, every day, a person with economic knowledge, and by now you've gotten through ten chapters,
and the reader's pretty boned up on things, if you know economics, you understand the logic of capitalism.
You pick up the newspaper, it drives you crazy. So you read the headline and think, oh, here we go again.
Read the story and you want to write like an op-ed against the bias of the story. Well,
that's more or less what you did. You have like one-page criticisms of these headline
news stories. Well, that idea came from the fact that, well, two reasons, I guess. One,
as I read these headlines day after day after day for years now, I see knowing economics
and knowing economic cause and effect, I see the ridiculousness in it that the average
The average person will not see. The average person will see a headline that says, as happened last year, the US is imposing tariffs or quotas or whatever on Chinese tires.
We've got too many tires coming in at too low prices to help consumers, so we need to stop that.
Most people, because they're stuck in the same kind of mindset that the New York Times feeds them, will say, yes, that's right, we do,
Because those tires, they could hurt our workers. That's it. That's the problem. So we need to stop that.
And so I see how that raises prices for consumers and eventually puts workers out of work, actually. It does the opposite.
So I wanted to take that kind of example and take a lot of those examples.
Now that we've gone through the book, we've learned economic cause and effect.
We've seen circumstantial evidence of how it doesn't work.
Let's take real-world things. Let's just take random headlines. And it was just that. I just pulled random headlines that were around me and say, let's look at this. Let's analyze what it really means now that we understand how the world truly works economically.
Well, it's very satisfying for the reader, you know, because it's all the stuff that I think when I'm reading the newspaper. I'm thinking, oh, I'd love to see somebody address this while you've done it.
It is nice. I just hope that the anti-capitalist who read it will actually get it.
One of the articles in that chapter are one where a German city imposes solar panels on its citizens.
It makes all citizens purchase solar panels.
Yeah, for their own good, right?
For their own good. Lo and behold, it was too expensive for most citizens.
They didn't want to pay that cost, so they complained.
But what they said was, we don't mind you doing this to businesses. We just don't want you to do it to us.
But they don't get that if you do it to business, it harms them, regardless of the morality of it, how unfair it is.
But so, my hope is that people will see something like that after reading the rest of the cause and effect and see,
well, the world doesn't work quite the way I previously thought, but I don't know if they're going to get it or not.
Well, you drive home the point again and again that wealth is not something you should ever
take for granted. It's not somehow given to you by the heavens. In a state of nature, we'd all be
scrounging around eating nuts as they fall from the trees or whatever. So everything you see around
you, everything you love is in a way born of the capitalistic process. And it's created every day
that wealth and that's one thing I try to hammer home when we get into this wealth redistribution
argument which I was engaged in with someone just a couple of days ago and I said what do you think
there's a there's a constant set amount of wealth in the world and it's just a matter of how
how we all grab for it and who can get it and somehow the wealthy always can grab the most
and I said no wealth is created every year when the first caveman picked up the first
The first rock and beat it against another rock or whatever, forged a tool or did something with a wood to create a stick, that was the first wealth we've been producing ever since in the same way basically and so we produce more wealth each year and it's mainly the wealthy that create this stuff for us, these capital goods, these consumer goods and people are paid in accordance with their incomes and so that's why they're wealthy and that helps us in the process, it helps the poorest of the poor
People are born into the world and they take it all for granted because it all seems to be around them, it's given unto them, and find no compelling reason to investigate where it all comes from.
That's right. I could make an argument, well, you know, economics is complicated, it takes time to learn all of this stuff, and you know, I don't take time to learn how my car works, you know, via physics.
But at the same time, you might think that people would, when they're voting on these issues, they're interested in them, they're talking about them, and they're going to take action and vote so that something changes, they should know which way it's going to change.
I suppose that's the irony, isn't it? I mean, if we had a purely free market and a free economy and
not such a heavily politicized society, it probably wouldn't matter in some ways whether the average
person learned economics, right? Or maybe... And that's what I state in the book. I state that
economics is really worthless. If we had a free market, it's worthless because we don't need to
know how businessmen do what they're doing. Look at them. They're out there creating goods and
services for us. They're giving us jobs. They're giving us capital. They're financing our homes.
Who cares how it happens? And really writing the book was a waste of my time. In a bigger picture, it was a waste. I should have been out doing something else instead of spending time doing that. I should have been producing. I did this because we need something like this, I believe. But the point is focusing on economics is who cares.
But when you're living into a dicey situation like we are today, and it is dicey.
Well, that's why I said what economics is today is the study of the effects of intervention in the free market because the government's intervening every day and it has an effect and we need to know what it is and that's what the study of economics is and no academic professor will claim that but if you go and listen to what academic professors are telling you and what they're explaining the fact is they're remarking on intervention that took place where the results are or how the government should intervene in a different way to give different
I would love to see this book assigned in a college class. I could easily see it enlightening most of the students at Auburn University, for example. If you take a class on, I don't know, one of those civics overview classes that everybody has to take, if this were assigned, wouldn't that be something?
I think it could make a big difference if that book or similar ones, if that kind of thinking and that kind of logic was explained in the world, then it would make a big difference.
I was given a lecture at Florida State University one time on inflation and money and the central bank and so forth, and these kids were just in shock of what I was saying.
The Central Bank creates inflation? No, no, no, Mr. Kelly. It's there to stop inflation. That's what its goal is. It wants to stop it.
No one teaches them how it came about to begin with, except to say that workers could ask for higher wages or businesses could raise profits and create inflation, which is impossible.
But not only do they not teach how the world works, they hide how the world really works. So it's terrible.
And that leads me actually to answer a question I really didn't answer of yours. What's my favorite chapter, and I just realized it talking about that, is the morality of capitalism, because separate from what you think economic cause or effect is, you have to look at what the morality is of your actions, and especially considering that that's what the socialists are so big on. All the leftists are about morality. We have to help someone. We have to do the right thing.
is the opposite. Because theft, taking someone's property, giving it to someone else, separate
from the fact that it doesn't even help them economically, it's morally wrong. To have
someone who started a company and go and regulate them and force them to produce this but not
that and penalize them for making too big of a profit in one particular year and threaten
And to nationalize them as our own government has done, that's completely immoral.
You have this nice section here on giving back to society, that every business is somehow
under the obligation to give back, which implies that they've been doing nothing but living
parasitically off everybody.
That's right.
I try to address all these common things I hear through time.
I was encouraged through a work thing, I forget what it's called, teaching school kids economics
and all that. And my CEO said, we have to give back. And I thought right then, that's not giving back, that's giving. And so I addressed this. And I refer to the fact that, you know, when we say we have to give back to society, society is really, who is society? Well, society is supposed to be all of us, but it's really the way you actually use it. Society are those that are net receivers of transfer payments. So we're supposed to give back to them, which
What strikes me actually is that a prime target audience for this book would be capitalists
themselves because they need to develop a greater consciousness of the contribution
that they make to society.
Yes, they have no idea.
It's funny, people always say to me, what about this?
What about that?
I say, read the book.
It's in the book.
Everything's in there, but this is a prime example.
I address that topic.
I explain how Bill Gates and, I can't think of his first name, Bloomberg, they want to
give their money away.
And, you know, Bloomberg is an outright socialist.
Bill Gates is trying to do the right thing with medicine in Africa and all that.
But the point is, I was trying to make the point not that we shouldn't give and help
people, we should, but that businessmen don't understand that keeping that capital and not
It's not just giving it away. It does much more good than doing that. It's just giving
it away. It funds repetitively projects and creates more and more wealth. Once it's given
away, it's gone, it's consumed. So yes, businessmen should understand.
They should read this book. We've always been in need of a book to explain to capitalists
themselves what it is that they're doing good for society because so many of them doubt.
They listen to the news media. They have instincts toward entrepreneurship and never quite understand
understand the rationale and that's okay but when they're under attack like they
are today we need books like this so I'm grateful to you for writing this book
thank you for letting the Mises Institute have the opportunity to publish it and
thank you thank you so much Kelly for visiting with me today it's been a
It's a pleasure, nice to be here.