Transcripts For CSPAN2 Carol 20240706

Thank you for joining us today under webinar. My name is Wayne Winegarden and im a senior fellow at the Research Institute and im pleased to say we have a bestsellingea author carol roth the just published a new book called the war on Small Business available today on line at your favorite bookseller and having read it i cannot praise it enough. He raises some important issues why Small Businesses are so important in the assaults thats being waged before the pandemic end during a pandemic. Its a Small Business that will lead to a prosperous future. Id like to start discussing whats wrong and why are we at the heart of our economy so carol in your opinion why was this so important to get into . That when i talk to people about how many big businesses versus Small Businesses there in the country most people dont have a good sense of the scope. They think they are millions of big business is but its actually the reverse. We have somewhere between 10 and 15,000 Large Businesses in this country and before covid we had 30. 2 million Small Businesses 6 million of which have employees that accounted for half the gdp and happy employment in the country. It really is a very significant part of the economy overall and also an important path for Economic Freedom. When you think about Wealth Creation, Wealth Creation comes with ownership. Small business enables anybody in people from all over the globe who like to come here to pursue that Economic Freedom and freedom of Wealth Creation or in some cases just other kinds of freedoms flexibility to do what theyey want to pursue their passion or whatnot in preserving that opportunity and the decentralization that comes along withun Small Business. It looks more like freemarket capitalism like the big business to do that make it critically important. Ill tell you everyone says how important Small Businesses and we hear from politicians and we dont have enough people so im thrilled that you are giving this important discussion of platform. Small businesses in my view aree more important as they are 50 of the economy. Small and Large Businesses come from somebodys garage today. So we are starting the entrepreneurial path with new ideas. Its all about bureaucracy and all these other problems and the truth is the market is in the Small Business. You forget that every big business that exist today the exceptions of the 80s came up with a bigger entity and started as that Small Business as a stepping stone to big business. Unfortunately when you disrupt that whether its disrupting capitol allocation or risktaking or wholesale shutting them down, it makes it much more difficult to get the incentive to have those businesses to innovate. I wrote aa book 10 years ago about the rest to Small Business and how hard it is to run a Small Business. But never didha i think the government was going to be the number one risk to Small Business and a situation where they were just in a wholesale shutdown and yet 50 months later here we are. Id like to dive into that because the important contributions of your book id love to talk about that but the pandemic you talk about how we needed to support Small Business yet all of the policies were geared towards harming Small Businesses. Before we get into that one of the thingss you talk about in te book in one of the most important part you start with the timeline and you start with a pandemic is just as much as theli government failure as it s the biology that goes along with that. Th before we had a pandemic here what could the government have done to lessen the impact . This is fascinating to me as i was doing the research and as i told you off line there were several books that i read wrote during the pandemic that ended up as this book. Facts were mr. Porter not reported in doing the research and laying it out with such ahead scratcher. Part of it right up front which was fascinating to me is we have trade deal signed with china which i feel put the blinders on any sort ofin push back from wht we are hearing coming up with china. N its been going on for years and your sense and maybe get it when in the middle of january 2020 and the president at the time is going okay thanks so much for your efforts in helping to keep this new virus away. There wasnt sort of this pushback other than the few people i mentioned who wrote a letter saying whats going on here w folks . China is not great at telling that you than the World Health Organization is covering for them but they really downplay it in the beginning. There were travel restrictions put in place in the course those were called racist and xenophobic. We didnt really get the full extent of those. I think the biggest issues came around the area c of testing and what was done for testing. If you look at places like south they had been through the failures from a government standpoint so right away they enlisted the privatesector pulls in some cases from their Lunar New Year celebration saying you need to get here right now and we needed to get on top of this. They said testing with the privatesector helped right away. Tapo 1. 4 million out in a short period of time and then we have this government bureaucracy and all the celebs who want to do tt bureaucracyin and because the authorizations which he erratically were supposed to shorten the process that created a new task or there was red tape and red tape and red tape so in the beginning the only entity that had the testing that could use it was the cdc so they had to ration it. They had their rules about who could be tested in the labs were desperate. They said we know how to do this but it just took so long that we did see this rationing which is not something that we could physically see in the free market. The other one which was a huge headscratcher was around the ppe personal protective equipment where we were getting all these companies to round the ppe and send it to china instead of stockpile it for ourselves thinking this isnt going to be a problem. There were all these kinds of things and people were starting to p take action. The government push back weather was the lapse or masking. They told us not to mask and they told us that masking was harmful. All these things at the media went into before they decided to take a different set of actions. Pandemics are with us. We need to learn the right lessons not just in terms of how we respond but what family do to prevent it and thats so important. There are things we can do to stop the pandemic or to give us a chance to get ahead of it. To me that was one of the lessons. When we talk about government failure and we talk about how you deal with the pandemic. There were so many private labs. We could have discovered it and self isolated and contained the virus before itndta spreads. We that opportunity and it was an important lesson is that we need to learn. I will add t to that one of e things that was frustrating is not that they didnt know aboutt this, they had run a series of exercises the year prior called crimson contagion. The federal government with 14 i think different states in this scenario that this mock trial was the same exact scenario that came out. Something came from a lab in china its almost like a little little and they ran these pandemic drills so they should have known exactly what it was in the holdups in the bottlenecks in the system and yet it speaks to this frankenstein that we created in terms of Big Government and the inability to do anything well let alone the actual things that they should haveua done. The more things you do outside of your core competency of the lessng well you will do. Toon me thats one of the Important Reasons of small government. As if you want them to do it well well. Everything else, exactly. This is important we talked about the pandemic the policies discriminated not intense with the discriminate against Small Businesses. Can you talk about that a little bit . Its up to you what conclusion you want to draw weather whether it was intentional or unintentional doesnt matter because the outcome is the same. They were in a scenario which is what the United Stateses stands for and protecting the rights of the individual. Possibly the most underreported story of the last 15 months but the government decided they were going to give you a label and you were either essential or nonessential based on their list of what was essential or nonessential. Turns out their list was based on political w connections not really science. As we talked about in the book and talked about previously i get my dogs nails and hair done at the bigbox retailer but i couldnt get my nails and hair done. Its been legal for a couple of yearse and certain jurisdictions and now deemed incredibly essential and then the issue the next level issue is picking winners and is they were not a perfectly compensated. The concept of Eminent Domain thee government wants to pay for your property for quote unquote public good which is basically what happened here. We need to shut some people found sohe looks like we are dog something or whatever. We werent together. We didnt have everybody locked out and up we would have had everybody locked out at amazon would have shut down their warehouses thats the dispensary to shut down. We probably would have had lots of loud screaming saying you cant do this to the economy. Because those connected folks were allowed to continue to be essential in some of the handful of big folks Like Airlines that were actually not directly affected. Indirectly affected by some of these mandates. They got these incredible bailouts and what Small Businesses got was this bpe which w was a fraction of the overall overall dollars put out and certainly not enough to compensate say you had this set of winners and and what that did was enable the Small Businesses that were closed close and their customers were Big Companies and those Companies Revenue is growing. The same time you have the Federal Reserve intervening at historic levels. At this point i think their Balance Sheets as is a hair shy of 8 trillion. Not only for the they revenue slightly higher but the overall valuations were increased with all the money that was flowing in the stock market. You saw last year 3. 4 trillion increase in value in seven tech companies. Seven companies in 3. 4 trillion in value. It was a record year for access to Capitol Record values and at the same time hundreds of thousands of Small Businesses have shuttered forever and millions more were hanging on by a thread. Retirees were earning zero interest and you had these two separate economic outcomes that are 100 by government mandate which is again when you think about that in the context its mindblowing. I think this is worth emphasizing. There are so many things and what you actually have is the pandemic economically a lot of it didnt make sense. First of all so much money was that it didnt have anything to do with the pandemic. Sending out checks because cktheres a pandemic and people who are not not impacted me the senseless waste of money. Or people who were dead. No matter what the keynesian multiplier is it just didnt make sense. The ppe program in the book talks about this we need to emphasize it. Ill bet spending is based on the idea thatha Small Business was it will justify everything. What the government did to Small Businesses with the comp . Plan and they can understand and semi Small Business owners they kept upping it again and again. It took months to find out if they could get their loans. Of as opposed to saying here is the money we say you cant run your business. And we said we will compensate you. You take somebodys property in the compensate them for it. If you jump through our hoops we will make that long forgivable in the bank will understand. So we created this process and Small Businesses didnt wanted after while. So much of the ppe went to the big businesses anyway. Theab whole thing was just te biggest cluster trying to do everything wrong thats what came out with it in general and the ppe provisions in you hit the nail on the head. The way was ruptured, its not a bailout. Its notd you did bad things and we need to rescue you. This is Eminent Domain and this is their mandate so we are giving you money to compensate but all the money that was given out through the cares act to universities who have been paid by students who by the way got the money from the government anyway that nationalized the funding business to the Kennedy Center which was shut down in it forch love employees and had all kinds of access to all of these other organizations and not money out right for whatever reason because of their cronies who are connected and you had the struggling Small Businesses. You arent sending them money and you have that information. As a business you have that file payroll reports and file with the irs. You had to go to the bank and you had to hope your credit was okay read get denied in that First Tranche was crumbs in a fraction of the overall care package. Because of the way they structured it it did go to these Big Companies. Kanye west was named the billionaire by forbes unveiled his new collaboration with the gap, his company got a p. P. P. Loan and tom brady got a ppp with loan. These entities likely had other access to capitol they probably werent going away because of the government mandates. I was exhausted and 13 or 14 daysys so if you are a smaller business you are going okay ive been turned down for it dont have it or dont trust the government. Ive heard that a lot. Im not sure they are actually going to forget this and given the fact they were 35 rule changes at a time when it was originally conceived in that first month or two its understandable. You have to keep up with 35 rule changes to what should be due compensation for shutting down your business. If you are trying to put Small Businesses out of business in a way that was only 95 obvious instead of 100 obvious you try to get more people on the governments role so the government will take care of you. Is there anything you would have done differently to help Small Businesses . It looks pretty intentional. You would have mandated it through small banks and that would have made it more difficult. Most of the money the beginning did go to the big banks and that was part of the problem. They serve their customers first because those were the people they had relationships with. It was the structure of the program. If you are a Small Business you dont have time to spend the hours you need to spend to get the long antimatters. They dont have a years worth of payroll to show them. Maybe a couple of months at best. You probably dont even understand it and the headache. You dont have a department. Its economy of scale which is why you are more vulnerable and why shutting you down and makes a big bigger difference. To put this into perspective the government created a problem for Small Businesses. They mandated shutdowns in people contracted and i did a lot more on line shopping and i got amazon. You are not Small Business so you have that illusion and what was particularly valuable was the Pandemic Response was to Small Business and that was a problem and we still see economies are recovering at the hep all this but you stilloo hae Small Businesses that are suffering. Particularly restaurants and those things that are really coming back but you put this in perspective methot this is really important ongoing what you call war on Small Business. I love howo you start off what s this ongoing work in Small Businesses . Everyone talks about Small Business being ang wonderful thing. Its fascinating. Obviously Small Businesses are this bastion ofti free markets d decentralization and they stand as independent thinkers and if you are trying to consolidate power which we have seen depending on how you want to define it, the amount of spending the purview of the decision of what you are involved in. We have seen a consolidation of power at all levels of government to protect way the federal government. If you are trying to continue to consolidate that power its t mh easier to deal with the hample of businesses than to try to get the support of all of these independent Small Businesses and by the way they just want to serve their business. The challenges this is obviously a very situation. You can go back decades to everything from license requirements to regulatory capture that often is painted as we are trying to help the little guy which ends up helping the big guy. The most obvious one that happened within the last 12 to 13 years is the Great Recession financial work quite crisis. The regulation was supposed as they bad finance institutions that did bad things and will have terrain you and and it was so onerous that it ended up capping the new entrance to Small Businesses particularly small communities and banks to put a lot of other small banks out of business and as you can imagine as an after effect all because of having to go in the market lending to Small Businesses decreased multiple double digits. But on the side you have no competition from the smaller guys with the big guys end up getting bigger and there are t more loans to big entities in fact i think i ride in the book i think 17. 7 billion in financial debt right now taken on by companies. T we are supposed to be reigning in the big banks and making sure that the little guys are taking care of in its giving the banks free reign. We see this all the time with every piece of legislation or regulation that is proposed is oh we want to make sure theres a fair Playing Field we want to make sure we look out for local guy and all it is is guys for less competition thats enabled more cronyism to mark us further away from capitalism despite the beautiful nicesounding label but they look like to put on it. One of our first conversations they use the term crony capitalism and you said no, thats fraud. Capitalism has nothing to do with cronyism. Since we have had that conversation ive only used the word cronyism because it has nothing to do with capitalism. And it tainted thats part of the problem we contend with is even right now with what has happened to Small Businesses see the people going well if you cant make it in a the Small Business you shouldnt be in small bigness Small Business. Thats the opposite of Central Planning making decisions so when you have this language which i believe is intentional move you away from the premarket you start getting legislation between cronyism and capitalism. You and i talked about this before which with this freemarket capitalism and freedom of choice means and its conflated with private enterprise which is our Current Situation with the Playing Field being pelted with this relationship between big business and Government Special interest is not capitalism at all. I appreciate you adopting the cronyism mantra. Its either capitalism or not but it cant be both. Thats one thing i love about it because thats where we see the economy going. Percolation in the name of Small Businesses when you put on more burdens Small Businesses cant hire a team of lawyers to comply so doddfrank is a perfect example where there were issues that went on and people misunderstood. Thats a whole other webinar we can have about that. You want to control the big banks and help the small banks. Ronald reagan said there are words in the english language we are the government and we are here help you could whats happened is the expansion of government gives an advantage to large corporations. Corporations in combination with the government can Work Together and understand each other large brick received if youre a Small Business owner you dont have time to talk to the government all day. Think about the cost involved and even something as simple as insurance requirements. Im based in illinois which is headquarters for cronyism and Government Intervention in anything they can do to hurt Small Business. The things i had to pay my employees who work from home on their computer extensive amount of Worker Compensation insurance. Hundreds of thousands ofng dolls because we are sitting at home and they will injure themselves typing quick 70 were not running huge factories and whatnot. Its like why my doing this . The one that drives me talk from the book this National Pushback against that as well is hair braiding. You have these women and men who braid hair the same things that mom and dads do for their kids before they send them off to school all across the country but they arent using chemicals and arent even picking up a pair scissors and a they had to spend thousands of dollars to get trained which by the way usually has nothing to do with hair braiding. Its a continuing education requirement and this impact particularly on the Minority Community and indigenous communities and women and people who want to get into the situation where they can create these wealth opportunities and from the getgo youre saying cant do it. Its a cash grab and its completely discriminatory. And we see that over and ovover. Well have occupational laws in places for hair braiding. If your stylist you really need the Government Training . Perhaps if i dont cut hair well people wont patronize my store. Everybody will see my haircut its interesting because the pandemic really brought to light they had to remove a lot of these regulations to meet demand and Health Care Professionals who go across state lines to the ultimate Hand Sanitizer debacle. The manufacture ran out if Hand Sanitizer so they removed regulations or more people could create Hand Sanitizers and guess what happened . We had more handpp sanitizer. Go figure that a market figure that out. S it shows these are completely restricted and obviously were completely and the question is whether or not they will go back and say well okay its time to get back to normal. R you cant deliver alcohol on sundays or d whatever does that they now took away that was just an law andnd regulation. One of the is Big Government. With all the spending that tampering measures that President Biden wants to make permanent the temporary spending becomes permanent the temporary deregulation that thats the scary part. Certainly things like tax breaks get changed on chains around a lot. Hhow do you plan these things whether you are investing in your business. The fact that we have to navigate around that is insane. But there are so many things they are talking about now that they have appealed once they put in place raising the image in minimum wage. I could spend the whole webinar and why thats. You raise the minimum wage and then you havent economic downturn and you lower it back nddown again. It only moves in one direction. Like benefits you never cut those back so those are the kinds of things structurally that arear concerning and once t dont affect it was difficult to roll them back. Talking about the war in Small Business minimum wage arm Small Businesses and we have this ongoing government and we talk about the importance of Small Business. The disadvantages them. You are saying amazon, they want to see a 15dollar minimum wage. Of course they do because they know it will shutter a whole slew of Small Businesses in that business will come to them so thats where you get the regulatory capture in the cronyism comes into play. The other thing we had coming from the pandemic and Central Planning a lot of these issues they tried to push. The fact that they compensated people not just your traditional unemployment which your employer depending on which you certainly should have accessin to. The fact that they didnt enhance unemployment bonuses and 600 to begin with and they continue with 300 obviously too but thats the way to push the minimum wage increase. We are seeing the effects of her right now. We have 9. 3 million jobs that are still unsettled and we are still down about 8 million workers in the workforce spanberger said that every 2020 before this disruption happened. Clearly their specific actions, its not a legislative way to do it but its a very sneaky way to go in to tryry to compete with e Small Business by offering this enhanced bonus to not work. Obviously some of the states have been wise to that. Thats a really big issue because either way the damage is done and people will start to offer more money. In many cases and Small Businesses they are offering more money and offering signing bonuses. And becoming less and less competitive. There are many entrepreneurs who at the start were making minimum wage after all the hours they put into it. Again why would she do that. Coming up with a new idea on how to serveit People Better when yu think i can make 15 an hour without having to work hard and having to take all the risk that i have to take. When you raise the minimum wage somebody that was making a lot what you are really doing if it becomes pervasive is your. Youre pushing s up the prics on the consumer to pay for because it happening as well and then you wonder why you are making 15 now but now cost 20 to have them no more purchasing power. How did that possibly happened . As it challenging situation obviously. Something you mentioned earlier and a couple chapters in the book talking about the Federal Reserve. This is complicated people get confused because Monetary Policy is one of those things where if your eyes glaze over because its so complicated. I think its so important because prior to the financial crisis shortterm Government Debt was bought as a term of Monetary Policy. They spend eight or 900 billion. Now went from a trillion to 8 billion. The Federal Reserve increased its footprint. It increased its footprint eight times and its not just buying shortterm Government Debt. Mortgage back securities and people in the Mortgage Market and longterm Government Debt and on top l of it its allowing the government to issue debt. People say the market isnt expecting inflation. Of course not because the federall reserve they are the largest fire now so they are the Government Debt market and we are monetizing all the spending in its macroeconomic implications but can you talk about how it hurts Small Businesses tax and love to talk about thato and why are Small Businesses most disadvantaged from transformation from the Federal Reserve. At Small Businesses and the little guy the retiree. I think the biggest thing is to think about when you get interest on your money where you go out and you make an investment in our choirs are great if returned that compensation it used to be we would have some understanding of okay im taking on a certain amount of risk and if its more risky im going to make more money and if its not risky ill still make something and if its a little bit of risk and by intervening in the market in the way that they have in buying all the securities and pressing the interestrate they have disrupted the notion of riffs in the market so that you have more people toward taking more risk than you have Bigger Companies were able to take down more capitol at almost no cost. Think about it go to the bank and you have your money in there you hoping to get Something Back to the phone and they arent giving you anything but they are loaning out to these companies with very little interest costs and they are able to go out and expand. Owhat it does is it props up companies who shouldnt be there and won the things i talk about her Zombie Companies which are these companies that dont make enough profit to be able to Serve Service the interest on their debt. Because of the disruption the market they are hanging out and taking up capitol that otherwise would be used for more innovative endeavors but by the way they have 2 million jobs attached to them so that the potential crisis barrel for obviously a lot of people need to hire workers those not as much as one would have thought otherwise. He creates an advantage in terms of the amountta of capitol that these big guys are able to little guys and Little People having to take on more risk in order to get any and thats where you see it looped back around into the housing market. Theyve been outraged lately because black rock is buying up singlefamily homes and taking those opportunities to way or compete with the average vote fire and in some cases not adding a lot of guys in process. You are funding the guy who is building the house which is a middleman collecting and basically being done with taxpayer money. So if you think about this it this is part of this huge wealth transfer thats happening both on thea fiscal level with the Small Business being closed and money going to these businesses but on the Monetary Policy level where they are inflating the value in getting more capitol to the big guys think giving them the southern advantage in the market its just unprecedented. We have never seen anything like this. In terms of how this is all and, there are all sorts of scenarios many of which are not really pleasant but its just so hard to say based on whats happening here in the u. S. And around the world but thats why you have this huge crypto question so many people who are looking at bitcoin or the other assets because they feel like they cant trust the government and the fed who is cause i government. We are independent. Do not devalue our dollar and do things he said the whole enabling of the governments behavior to contain to spend because they standing by ready to purchase that debt so its intentionally okay and complicated to understand by design. Atpeople are spending a lot of time saying we need to know that this is a bad thing for the economy and the biggest facilitator of wealth transfer. I think wealth transfer so important in the idea that Bank Interest rates are so low. Bankers are funding for low cost that are going to these large corporations. You also have retirees who are looking for interest extending their risk and risk and return is equally linked. If you need a certain amount of income to live you need to go on a risk profile of 15 or 20 years ago and no financial at pfizer would say you should be taking risk. T type of if you dont now you arent getting enough to live. There are all these Capital Market distortions that we dont know how its going to end that there are scary possibilities in the scary possibilities are out there. It does not end where the central planner mathematical model saying that im not sure they have mathematical models at this point or that they are either following a mandate because their mandate is supposed to be stable prices which we no they are not. And supposed to be full employment and i would argue when you have 9. 3 million Jobs Available and no one is going backno to public know it wont e moved by Monetary Policy. What are they really doing taxpayer transferring wealth in propping up the stock market and enabling Government Spending and thats not a good mandate. Thats not what they were set up to do and its one of the chapters and i talk about it in other places. One of the chapters i get into that because so many people like you said to understand that so breaking it down in a way that you can understand it and the implications for what could potentially come out and all the ways they are facilitating wealth w transfer and behavior n the financial sector. We are beginning and before we open up to questions i want to talk about we have a group of cronyism and its crowding out capitalism which is leading to all these adverse outcomes. You talk about where do we go from here and how do we allow capitalism too fleurs . From an individual standpoint the easiest thing you can do is to support smallou business. My ongoing joke is why it is jeff bezos have so much money . You are spending all your money withou amazon trying to be bettr now have more power. So be thoughtful about where it is you are spending your dollars and how you want to support Small Business. You cant not support them andpp then wonder why it is they dont exist anymore so we have a responsibility in capitalism to allocate dollars. I think we need to push back very heavily on regulation and certainly anything new that comes up whether or the 15dollar minimum wage. Whatever does to really think through those unintended consequences but even now they are talking about breaking up facebook. Im not sure if they separated arfacebook and its agreement. Sapp. Like but have any less power or control over you but what of those regulations like and who do they keepat by the market to compete with them. Those are the things we need to think through. And with that they away toto brk up this duopoly here. The biggest duopoly we have this between our two party system and the fact of the matter is the book is meant as a nonpartisan book. Its political but its not about Political Parties for. About a system thats broke in. We need to figure a way to get rid of that stranglehold under the purview of the party. We need less to be done in that arena and more to be done elsewhere. Youre somebody who likes freedom and liberty and if you were Small Business he does want to be left alone. Unfortunately freedom is something that the actively preserve the actively preserved the actively preserve and we have done a poor job in lotteries that we have done a good job in a dislike the 2nd amendment. Other areas we have done a poor job so i feel like we need to push back their and they feel like we need to use the legal system more. Love people who a lot of time trying to put someone into who creates more laws and those atthings. We need to challenge the things that are on the book are ready. I think there is a 50 year period they looked at in and over 1 million new laws at the state level at the National Level it was 12 or 15,000 laws and 20,000 regulations over the smaller period. Hundreds of those that most are challenged in courts and a lot of them are not constitutional. I think we need to spend more time challenging those because if we challenge those lost and say no you cant do that and he can infringe on our rights that eventually will be less likely to try it. So those are some of the things and more. [laughter] enough without id love to talk about your book which is fantastic called the war on Small Businesshic available tody to purchase on line. There it is. On line or in stores. Small bookstores to support Small Businesses. If i can draw an idea out there, if you o want to take ito heart theres a store called book shop. Org on line in their entire ideas to support local businesses so if you buy from them they will fill it through a local business. Its just as easy as any other site and they support Small Business. Thats fantastic. I would ask you are there any questions quick. Thats perfect. Excellent. We will see if anyone comes up with any other questions. I would love to get more into the idea of cronyismti and talk about the dangers of cronyism and writ large. To meet one of the things we havent discussed yet is anticronyism is less government. We need government to play its role because it does have a a p role. With capitalism is a problem in the answers to government. Thats branding and to me its very important and id love to get your i. D. On this if we want to properly bring capitalism we need to do a couple of things and one thing is the idea that capitalism wont actively pursue a problem. We have a problem and heres the solution. In capitalism is the idea that we are going to empower millions of people to do something and when you empower more people with more ideas we all make mistakes and we need to learn from mistakes. With cronyism we never learn from our mistakes. You double down because its the only i would operate in that bureaucracy and that idea of bringing capitalism and is not just letting some obscure market capitalism empowers people. Tens of millions of people. No one person and no one is brilliant enough to have answers to all of our problems any talk about branding. That becomes an essential component to it. I think the word capitol and capitalism in the concept that it makesal it sound like youre capitalizing on on something which sounds bad instead of good. We talked more about freedom of choice and power to the people and whatever does transparency in all the main tenets of it. And how you can bring that to certain government institutions ntand entities in one of the things i didnt talk about in these book because i wanted to y to stay focused is a previous draft was talking about Something Like Social Security and how you could bring freemarket tenets into social o security. Obviously people who are strict freemarket dont. If you agree we should have a safety net. Lets empower people so instead of me paying my money to the government having them spend it putting in an iou which byby the way is just like other people paying for it and they dont anything in the government. What if we paid in and our employers paid and can we earn that money. We have a providence. They warn that control the money we were in control and status investing in a government iou which is invested in the market and Wealth Creation opportunities. Its not distorted by the fed at that point in time and maybe take a portion of the peace and use that to fund people who arent working. So we have a little bit of a social safety net but they still own it and hate have that Wealth Creation opportunity that they can pass on to their heirs and he just took a huge chunk of government power and control out the question because theres no reason they should be managing that money. If t youre trying to accomplish the social safety net they can mandate of the wicked have that ownership and empowerment. To me thats a great example of place we could bring freemarket principals to something that they feel is important from a social standpoint and have that objective met in a better way. One question and i dont know if you have an answer. Is there at a data source and california which is where we are located a place to learn more about these issues . Which issues . Obviously the Economic Issues you can go into the databases and to cope with issues there are databases for those. The health of the Small Business economy. Theres a project sponsored by harvard in conjunction with the hamilton project thats called open something. If you type in your engine Small Business closures to get to this private pretty quickly it shows yet. Is one of the things that kind of drives me crazy people will understand what constitutes the Small Business, the numbers are high. They somewhat skeptical their numbers are hybrid they are showing national routewi hitting 35 or 40 of all Small Businesses close. I told you at the top of the hour before curve it dont think tenant million of them have closed. I think that either employer ownedr businesses, which would make it around 2 million which is a little bit more accurate or maybe its consumer businesses im still trying to get in contact with them to let go like where are these numbers coming from . Its definitely not an agenda trying to push that big number. I think its a fundamental misunderstanding. In time you look at those numbers, look at it with a grain of salt. But there are organizations like this that are tracking and just remember because we have entrepreneurs we have a gig at work a lot of time. You can reach out to me im on twitter. I spend a lot of time on there. If you have questions im doing research on this all the time to try to point shoot in the right direction or let you know if i ipulled out new data resources. And the yelp data . I did. He is at the book and a couple of places. Thats interesting but its specific to the yelp platform it is a proxy or a subset of all of the Small Businesses. Not every Small Business is on yelp. Its interesting to show their group what that looks like. The same thing, alignable is another great group five 6 million on their platform. They do a multiple poles and the service they get around 3,504,000 respondents. But again it is biased to what kinds of Small Businesses and whatnot. But 35 ofs Small Businesses dont think they can pay. Across the sources they are also consistent in terms of whatever the number it might be they are all grandma. The Biden White House has come out and said more than 40000 Small Businesses are closed. I know that is low. Even if for only that lets 400,000 like oh my god that is a huge number of big businesses that exist in this country. That is staggering. Weve never had anything like that. Effectually used up all hour. Our. Just one last j time you did a fantastic job it is a wonderful book. The war on Small Business Purchase Online as small bookstores today. I would love to emphasize if you could visit specific research. Org to register for our next webinar which is tuesday, july 20 for california Supreme Courts of social justice. On the Supreme Court associate justice so lets have a wonderful webinar for any july 20 atif the specific research. Org. Thank you so much for coming for a fantastic conversation on a really important topic. Thank you so much and thanks for the platform for Small Business advocacy. I have said before this book is important. T. It is not my story. Its the economy and the little guy. We need to make sure the state frontth of a mind or we are goig to end up with that legislature to take away Economic Freedom and move further toward Central Planning question of us want to have. I push at the platform and thank you guys for great conversation for. Thank you for great conversation. Weakens on cspan2 are an intellectual feast. Every saturday American History tv documents americas stories and onunday, book tv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. Funding for cspan2 companies Television Companies and more. Including comcast. Are you thinking this just a Committee Center . It is by more than that. Comcast is part of 1000 Committee Centers to create wifi enabled so students from lowincome families can get the tools they need to be ready for anything. 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