senior fellow with pacific research institute, and i'm so pleased today when a "new york times" best-selling author, caroll roth. she just produce a new book called "the war on small business" available today online at your favorite bookseller and having read it i cannot phrase it enough. it raises so many important issues, why smalle businesses ae so important in that the regulatory assault that is being waged before the pandemic, during the pandemic. it's harming small business which is going to kind of late to a less prosperous future. and i guess with that i would love of typing and start discussing what's wrong. why are we harming what is really the heart of our economy? i i guess carol come start talkg about why is this such an important topic to get into? >> it's interesting, when i talk to people but how many big businesses versus small businesses around the country most people don't have a really good sense of the scope. they think there are millions of big businesses and sort of like niche of small business but it's the reverse. we had somewhere between ten and 15,000 large businesses in this country, and before covid we had 30.2 million small businesses, 6 million of which had employees and it accounted for about half the gdp and about half the employment of the country. so it really is a very significant part of the economy overall. and also just an important half for economic freedom. if you think about the path for wealth creation, wealth creation comes with ownership and so small business enables anybody, people from all over the globe who like to kindly to try to pursue that economic freedom, pursue that wealth creation or in some cases just of the kinds of freedom, flexibility to do what they want or to pursue a passionate whatnot. and so preserving that opportunity and the decentralization the comes along with small business and good looks a lot more like free-market capitalism that a lot of the big businesses do, make it so critically important. but man, wayne, i tell you everyone says small businesses, we certainly are from politicians and we do not have enough people walking the talk. i'm thrilled that your giving this important discussion a platform. >> absolutely. small businesses at least myes view is even more important because not only 50% of the economy but it's 50% innovators. as long as large businesses will come from somebody's garage today, and so we are stopping that entrepreneurial path to come up with new ideas because large businesses are all about bureaucracy and cronyism and all these other problems, the true free market. >> you forget that, every big business that exists today with exception of maybe something that was spun off of a bigger entity, started as that small business. it is a stepping stepping stone to big business. fortunately, when you disrupt that whether it's disrupting t capital allocation or risk-taking, or just wholesale shutting them down, it makes it much more difficult to get the incentives to have those businesses continue to innovate. i wrote a book ten years ago about all the risks to smallt business and how hard it is to run a small business. it's really not for the faint of heart as a lot of them see, but never did he i think the government was going to be the number one risk to small business and we would be in a situation where they would wholesale shut them down, , yet5 months later here we are. >> i would love to dive into that because to me one of the important contributions of your book is one there's been a -- would love to talk about that as well but the pandemic, people talk about how we needed to support small business and we spent money on the idea that we need to t sport small businesse, yet all of the policies were kind of geared towards impressive harming small businesses. before we get into that one of the think chautauqua indie book, what are the most important parts companies you start with the timeline and you start to say the pandemic is just as much of a government failure in so many ways as it was kind of pandemic and all of the biology that goes on with that. i would love to dive into that. before we had a pandemic year, what could the government have done to prevent that or at least lessen the impact? as i was doing the research for this book, it ended up how many things were misreported or not reported and in doing the research and kind of laying it out was such a head scratcher. part of it right up front, which was fascinating to me as you had a trade deal that was signed with china i feel like put the blinders on any sort of pushback against what we were hearing out of china because it had been going on for years and years and finally we get a win in the middle of january, 2020 and the president at the time is going so excited thank you for your efforts in helping to keep this new virus away. so, there was a sort of pushback other than a few people i mentioned who wrote a letter saying what's going on here. in terms of telling the truth, you had the world health organization and so we really downplayed it in the beginning and there were travel restrictions put in place debate of course those were called a racist and horrible and xenophobic. so we didn't really get the full extent of those but i think that the biggest issue came around the area of testing and if you look at places like south korea they had seen the failure from the government standpoint. so, right away they enlisted the private sector and pulled the cases from the new year lunar celebration and said get here right now. we need you to get on top of this so they set up testing to help right away. there was a company in germany, tiny company with 1.4 million tests out like in a short period of time and then we had a government bureaucracy where we had these labs that wanted to do testing and because of the government bureaucracy and these emergency authorizations that theoretically were supposed to shorten the process, it created a path where there was redtape so in the beginning, the only entity that had testing that could use it was the cdc so they had to ration it and had rules about who could be tested and they were desperate. they said we know how to do this, but it took so long we had this rationing which is and something that you typically see in the free market so you have those failures and the other one that was a huge head scratcher around the ppe. we got all these companies to round up ppe and send it to china instead of stockpiling it for ourselves thinking this isn't going to be a problem. so there are all these kind of things where people were starting to take action. the government pushback whether people don't remember, there's all these crazy things that the media went into and therefore if they really decided to take a different set of actions. >> pandemics are with us. we are going to experience and we need to learn the right lesson not just in terms of how we respond here but what can we do to prevent it and i thought that was so important that there are things we can do that would stop the pandemic or at least give us a chance to get ahead of it as opposed to being behind the curve which is one of the lessons when we talk about government failures and how we deal with the pandemic and deal with the private sector to hear that there were so many private labs that couldn't put tests out there because it was discovered and people could have been self isolated and contained the virus before it spread. it's an important lesson that we need to learn. >> i will just add onto that one of the things that is frustrating is it's not like they didn't know about it. but the period of exercises in the year prior called crimson contagion and it was a federal government that was i think 14 different states and the scenarios on the trial was almost exactly the scenario that came out into something that came from the lab. it's almost like they should have known exactly what they need to do and where the weaknesses were in the system and get they still bundled it over and over again into this monster that we have created in terms of the big government and the inability to do anything well rather than the actual things that they should be doing. >> the more things you do the less well between the competency. that is one of the important reasons they do important things and if you want them to do them well -- >> exactly. i thought this was important we talk about the small businesses and the pandemic policies in practice discriminate against small businesses. could you talk to that a little bit because i thought that was fascinating. >> it is up to you what conclusion you want to draw whether this was intentional or unintentional it doesn't matter because the outcome is the same. we are in a scenario that if you think about what the united states stands for in the government to protect the rights of the individuals, the most horrifying thing and under underreported the story the last 15 months. but the government decided that they were going to give you a label and you were either essential or nonessential based on the risk of what was essential or nonessential and it turns out there list was based on the political connections, not really any data of science and we talk about that in the book and we talked about previously i could get my dogs nails and hair done at the retailer but i couldn't get my nails and hair done. it hadn't been legal for more than a couple of years in a certain jurisdiction and they were now deemed to be incredibly essential. it was picking the winners and losers but that they were then not appropriately compensated for that. so under the constitution the eminent domain is that the government wants to take the property for the quote on quote public good which is what happened here. we need to shed some people down so it looks like we are doing something but we owe you just compensation and that didn't happen. if we had everyone locked down, if amazon had to shut down their warehouses and big-box grocery stores had shut down and the weed dispensaries had shut down, we probably would have had two to three weeks before there was a lot of screaming you can't do this to us and you can't do this to the economy. but because those were allowed to continue to be essential and some of the handful of folks like the airlines that were actually not directly affected, but indirectly affected by some of the mandates, they got this incredible direct bailout, but with a small businesses got was this ridiculous ppe program, which was a fraction of the overall dollars that were put out and certainly not enough to compensate the taking of property so you had this crazy set of winners and losers and that enabled the wealth transfer because you had the businesses that were closed and customers were patronized into big companies and the revenues were growing. and at the same time, you had the federal reserve intervening at historical levels and at this point i think the balance sheet was just hair shy of $8 trillion and so not only were the company's revenues higher the overall valuations were increased because of all of the money that was going into the stock market and so, you saw last year's $3.4 trillion increase in value in the tech companies. seven companies gained $3.4 trillion in value. it was a record year for the access to capital. record value raised by the special-purpose acquisition companies at the same time hundreds of thousands of small businesses and millions of more were hanging on by a thread. the retirees were earning zero interest on the savings and people were out of work and you had sort of these two separate economic outcomes that are 100% by government mandate which is again thinking about it that in the context of the usa is just completely mind blowing. >> and i think that this is really worth emphasizing. there are so many things what you have is the response to the pandemic by the government. economically there was a lot of it that didn't make sense. so much money was spent that didn't have anything to do with the pandemic. sending out checks because there is a pandemic to people made no sense. it was a waste of money. >> or people that are dead. >> the key multiplier. the ppe in the book talks about this and i think it was incredibly important and we need to emphasize that all that spending was justified that a small businesses were moving forward so everyone loves the small businesses. what the government gave the small businesses was a program that was complex and so many small business owners who got the first tranche of money up again and again. you can't run your business and instead we said we are going to compensate you which was the right thing to do. if you take somebody's property you need to compensate them for it. we said we will give you a loan and make the loan forgivable and understand how to forgive those loans, so we created a process and a small businesses didn't want it because they didn't understand it let alone you talk about ppe. >> the whole thing was the biggest cluster. you were trying to do everything wrong. that's what came out of the act in general and then the ppe provision and you hit the nail on the head in the way that it was structured was so opaque and it's not a bailout. it's not like you did these bad things and we need to rescue you. this is eminent domain. we are giving you money to compensate about out of all of the money that was given out in the cares act to the universities who by the way got the money from the government anyway for the student lending business and to the kennedy center which was shut down and furloughed employees and had all kinds of assets and all of these other organizations that got money out right for whatever reason because the cronies were connected and then you had a struggling small business and you are not sending them directly the money. you have that information. you have to file numerous reports and with the irs. it's not like they have access to that information but you have to go to a bank and that first tranche was a fraction of the overall cares package. kanye west was named a billionaire and unveiled his collaboration and the company. they had other assets to capital and they probably were not going away because government mandates. so if you are a smaller business you are going okay. for the compensation for shutting down your business it's like if you were trying to put small businesses out of this in a way that was only 95% obvious instead of 100% obvious you try to get more people on the government conditioning them. >> i think if you would have mandated how to get them as opposed to small banks you could've made it more difficult. >> most of the money in the beginning did go to the big banks you can't blame them for the structure of the program. >> if you are trying to survive, you don't have time to go through and spend the hours that you needed to spend to get the loan. time matters. small business doesn't have the payroll sitting in the banks or maybe through a couple of months at best. it's a headache. you don't have the department or the economies of scale. putting this all into perspective the government came in and created problems with small businesses because they didn't respond in the right way. people were retracted and i was guilty of this and they go to amazon and the big retailers and not patronizing the small businesses. the pandemic response the economies are recovering and we have all these things looking good but you still have the small businesses that are suffering, particularly in restaurants and social venues that are not really coming back but you put this >> of an ongoing what you call war on small business. i would love to see some and talk about what is this ongoing war against small businesses because everybody talks about small business being a wonderful thing and get their war against them . >> it's fascinating and obviously as small businesses the bastion of free markets and decentralization and they stand as independent thinkers and if you're trying to consolidate power we've seen depending on how you want to define its number of laws, theamount of spending, the purview, the decisions, the areas they're involved in we see more of a consolidation of power at all levels of government and particularly the federal government over time . if you're trying to o f continu to consolidate that power is much easier to deal with a handful of big businesses and to try to get the support of all these interdependent smallbusinesses which by the way just want to be left alone anyway . they just want to run their businesses. so the challenge is that this was obviously this very brazen situation but you can go back decades and see everything from license requirements to regulatory capture that often are painted as we are trying to help the little guy which ends up helping the big guy and the most obvious one that happened within the last 12 to 13 years is what, under the great recession financial crisis. the dodd frank legislation that said bad banks, were going to have to rain you in was so onerous that it ended up capping a new entrance to small businesses particularly small communities . it put a lot of other small banks out of business. then as you can imagine as an aftereffect, both because of having more cost having having to go up market, lending to small businesses decreased multiple double digits. but what happened on the big side. you have no competition now from smaller guys so the big guys and up getting bigger. there are more alone. the big entities in fact i got a great chart in the book. i think it's like $17.7 trillion in corporate financial debt right now t taking down finance so you're supposed to be raining in the big banks making sure that the little guys are taking care of and it's given the banks free reign. and we see this all the etime with every piece of legislation or regulation that's proposed is so, we want to make sure it's a fair playing field. we want to make sure we look out for the little guy. that's all it is, it's just a the crony guys are less competition and that enables more cronyism to end up further away from capitalism. like, these beautiful nice sounding labels they want to put on top . >> i remember one of our first conversations and i use the term capitalism and you they know, that's wrong. capitalism has nothing to do with cronyism. and we have that conversation we use the term cronyism and it had nothing to do with capitalism. >> it tainted and that's part of the problem that we contend with is that even right now with what's happened with small businesses people are going if you can't make it as a small business you shouldn't be in business . that's not free-market competition. that's like the ultimate in central planning making decisions so we can start having this relation of language which i believe is essential to move us awayfrom the free market . we usually do start getting ny this conflation between cronyism and capitalism and a whole bunch of other concepts as well. where i know you and i talked about this before is kind of is lost the branding about what this free-market capitalismmeans . and it's just kind of conflated with quote and quote private enterprise. which is our current situation given the fact that this playfield has been so tilted by this cozy relationship between big business and government and specialinterests to some extent . like, it's not capitalism at all. i appreciate you adopting the cronyism moniker. >> either is capitalism or cronyism but it can be both. and i think that's one thing i love about don frank your example there because that is exactly kind of where we see the economy going. regulations in the name of small businesses put on more burdens. so we put on more burdens, small businesses can't hire these teams of lawyers to comply and so .frank is such a perfect nkexample where there was issues that went on and i think people misunderstood but. >> that's a whole other webinar we can have about that . >> are going to put out new regulations that control the big banks and help the small banks. and like ronald reagan said. the mysterious words in the government are on the government and i'm here to help you what happened is thisregulation, the expansion of government . it's advantaged to large corporations. that's what you said, corporations have these combinations that can work together. they understand one another. they have to parents that can dip off one another each day. if you're a small business woman you don't have time to talk to the government allday . >> think about the costs involved . even something as simple as insurance requirements. i'm based in illinois which is headquarters or cronyism and government intervention and anything they can do to hurt small business. one of the things that i want to put my head through a wall every single year is that i have to pay my employees who work from home on their computer extensive amounts of workers compensation insurance. like, we're talking thousands of dollars because they're sitting at home and they're going to injure themselves typing. in its the service economy, where not running huge factories and whatnot but why am i doing this? that's just the administration but the cost. the one that drives me crazy and i talk about in the book and there's been national pushback against that as well is hair braiding. you have these women and men who braid hair, the same thing mom and dad do for their kids. they're not using chemicals. they're not even picking up a scissor and they have to spend thousands of dollars to go get trained which by the way usually has nothing to do with hair braiding and continuing education requirements . as you can imagine it impacts particularly minority communities and disadvantaged communities and women and people you really want to get into the situation where they're taking control of their economic freedom and creating these wealth opportunities and from the get-go you're saying sorry , you can't do it. you have this cash grab and it's completely discriminatory against the small guy. >> we see that over and over again. more consumer protection, loss in places like hair braiding. if you're a stylist do you really need the government training added to cut hair well? perhaps if i don't hair well people won't patronize my store. >> i'll put it on facebook and everybody will see my botched haircut. the pandemic really brought to light many of these things were silly because they had to remove a lot of these regulations to meet demands whether it was for certain health care professionals to get more people who could across state lines or whatnot . to the ultimate handsanitizer debacle . the big manufacturer ran out of hand sanitizer so they removed regulations so more people could createhand sanitizer and guess what happened . we had or hand sanitizer's. like go figure, the market figure that out. so it just goes to show that these are completely restrictive and obviously were completely insane. the question is whether or not there's an effort to go back and say eight, but now that things are back to normal you can't do hand sanitizer, you can't deliver atalcohol or whatever it is that they now took away to try to help during the pandemic that was just this sustained law and regulation . >> this is one of the big problems with big government where all the increased spending, the temporary measures of spending now president pebiden wants to make permanent. there's this temporary spending becomespermanent but temporary deregulation . >> that's the scary part is certainly the tax rate gets changed around a lot. but it's frankly is annoying as well because of how you plan as an individual or business owner these things like whether you're exiting your business or investing in your business and you don't know what the taxpayers are. to suspect even have to navigate around that is insane but there's so many things they're talking about now that are difficult to repeal once you put into place. like raising the minimum wage on a national basis which again i could spend the whole webinar on why that's insane but once that goes, you never reach this point where you raise the minimum wage and you have an economic downturn and you lower it . if that's the case it only moves in one direction. same thing with benefits. you never goes back so those are the kinds of things structurally that are concerning because once they go into effect it is so much more difficult to roll that back. >> again talking about the war on small business. you pushed through an increase in minimum wage it's an arms small businesses to make small businesses less competitive. so we have just this part of that ongoing government growing. and we talk about the importance of small business but we keep passing laws to disadvantage them in the marketplace. >> you'reseeing the amazon jumping into the fight for 15 . they want to see a $15 minimum wage. of course they do because they know it's going to shutter a whole slew of small businesses. so that's where you get this regulatory and cronyism coming into play. the other thing that we had coming out of the pandemic is in central planning is a lot of these issues a try to push under the de facto basis and the fact that they compensated people not just your traditional employer or depending on the states you may also pay into it certainly to have access, the fact that they did this s enhanced unemployment bonus and that there were $600 to begin with and they continue $300. the states opt out but that is a de facto way to push the minimum wage increase and we are seeing the effects of it right now. we have 10.3 billion jobs that are still unfilled and we're still down about 8 million workers in the workforce where we stood in february 2020 before all this disruption happened. soclearly , there's specific actions are if not a legislative way to do it but it's a very sneaky way to go in and try to compete with the small business. by offering this enhanced bonus and not work. and obviously some of the days have gotten life for that but that's a really big t issue because either way the damage is done and people are going to start having to offer more money and then we see and in many cases for small businesses they are offering more money and offering signing bonuses. >> and their becoming less and less competitive and beyond there are any entrepreneurs who have to start by making minimum wage. >> and they're taking all the risk. >> again, why would you do that? that's the sad thing of the vitality and then coming up with a new idea. when you say i can make $15 an hour without having to work hard, without having to do all the rest i had to take in effect when you raise the minimum wage, they're going atto look for an increase as well so what you're doing that's really pervasive is your pushing up the entire wage field. >> your pushing up prices on the consumer to pay for it. then you wonder why you're making $15 an hour but now it's $23 for a slice of pizza because you have nomore purchasing power . how could that possibly happen? it's a really challenging tuition obviously for small businesses . >> something you mentioned earlier and you said a couple times in the book talking about the federal reserve b. this is complicated and it's very confusing because it's very cryptic and monetary policy is one of those things where your eyes start to glaze over because you just don't, it's so complicated but i think it's so important because prior to the financial crisis you might have said that you only short-term government debt as a means of policy and then you had eight or $900 billion with other assets. now went from 1 trillion, to be trillion dollars so the federal reserve has increased its ways for the government to control. it increased its footprint eight times and it's not just buying short-term government debt. now it's security so it's influencing mortgage markets. mowning corporate debt and its owning long-term government debt and on top of it, it's allowing the government but people keep trying to say the market isn't expecting inflation but of course not because the federal reserve e is the largest buyer now because they are the government debt market and we are monetizing smaller participating and there's also macroeconomic implications but you talk about how it hurts small businesses the worst. or the most i should say so i want to talk about that in terms of why our small businesses the most disadvantaged? >> it's small businesses and it's also the little guy,the savior or the retiree . i think that's the biggest thing. if you think about when you get interest on your money or you go out and you make an investment and you require a rate of her turn, that's compensation for rrisk. and it used to be that we have some understanding of okay, i'm taking on this sort of certain amount of risk t it's it's more risky and want to make more money and if it's not very risky i still make something but i'm taking a little bit of risk on . and by intervening in the market the way they have with buying all these securities and suppressing the interest rate being disrupted the notion of risk in the market so now you've got people who are seeking more risk, you have bigger companies who are able to take down more capital at almost no cost. think about if you go to the bank if you're a retiree you have your money in there. you get something back to live on and they're not giving you anything there loading up these companies very little interest. they're able to go out and expand. and what it does is net is a profit of companies who shouldn't be there. one of the parts i talk about our zombie companies are these companies that don't make enough profit to be able to service the interests on their debt let alone principle but because of this disruption of the market there hanging out and they're sucking up capital that otherwise would be used for more innovative endeavors. but by the way they also have 2 million jobs attached to them so that they potential crisis there although obviously we can see a lot of people who need to hire workers or as much as one would have thought otherwise and it creates an advantage in terms of the amount of capital these big guys are able to deploy versus the little guys and little people having to take on more risk in order to get any yield and that's where you seeing it back around into housing markets. there's been a big outrage lately because blackrock is going and buying up single-family homes and taking those opportunities away or competing with the average home buyer and in some cases not having a lot of value. your funding the guys who are building the house. you're just kind of a middleman flexing a soul it's basically being done with taxpayer money. so if you think about it, this is part of this wealth transfer that happening both on the fiscal level with small business being closed and the money going to big businesses but on a monetary policy level where there's inflating the assets and inflating the value. they're getting more capital to the guys and giving them thisother advantage to the market . and it's just unprecedented. people have never seen anything like this and so o in terms of how this all ends, there are tons of scenarios, many of which are not pleasant but it's so hard to say based on what's happening here in the us and around the world but when you have this huge crypto currency market and so many people who are looking to make one or. for these other assets because they feel like they can't trust the government and the fed which is quasi-government. we're independent. >> less and less so every day. let's not devalue our dollar and not use these crazy things that as you said the whole enabling the bad behavior to continue in the fed because their standing by ready for just that bad debt. so it's a horrible cycle because it's so intentionally okay and complicated to understand by design. people are spending enough time say we need to rain this in. like this is a bad thing for the economy. this is the biggest efacilitator of the wealth relief. >> i think that wealth friend is so important. the idea that the banking is so low that they are in perfect funding the low-cost that are kind of going to large corporations and you also have retirees who are looking for interest extending their risk. risk in return is also if you need a certain amount of income to live you need to go on a risk file that ends 15 or 20 years ago.no financial advisor would say you should be taking onthat type of risk . but if you don't now you're just not getting enough income so there's all these capital market distortions that we don't know how it's going to end but there's certainly some very scary possibilities locally if you put that in. the scary possibility out there is does not end with the central planners mathematical model say that it should end. >> i'm not even sure they have mathematical models at this point. for if they're even following their mandate because their mandate is supposed to be stable priceswhich we know they are not stabilized . they're supposed to be more employment and i would argue with 3.9 million jobs available, you probably have employment is not going to be t moved by monetary policy. let's call it like it is so what are they really doing? they're canceling wealth, propping up the stock market and enabling government spending. that's not their mandate. that's not what they're set up to do and it's actually one of the challenges, i talk about one chapter about the fed in other places that i've gotten one of the few chapters that sat in the most positive feedback because many people don't really understand it. a lot of times i spent time breaking it down in a way that you can understand it. dartmoor are more important implications about what's going to come out and always that they're facilitating wealth transfer and reckless behavior in the financial sector. >> we're beginning to run out of time and i love to be able to have questions butbefore we open it up . i'd love to talk about we have a growth of cronyism, capitalism leading to all these adverse outcomes. you didn't just bring upthese problems. you talked about where do we go from here ? how do we halt the growth of cronyism and allow capitalism toflourish ? >> the easiest thing you could do is support small business . my ongoing joke is why does jeff bezos have so much money? obviously if you spend more money with amazon they're going to have more power so be thoughtful about where it is that you're spending your dollars and how you want to support small business and you can't not support them and then wonder why it is they don't exist anymore. you have a responsibility in capitalism to allocate dollars. i think we need to push that very heavily on regulation and certainly anything new that comes up whether it's a proactive, $18 minimum wage, whatever it is and think through those unintended consequences. even now they're talking about this t. let's bring up facebook. i'm not sure if you separated facebook and instagram and whatsapp that they're going to have any less power or control but what do those regulations look like, who you keep out of the market to compete with them, those are the things we need to think through and we've got to figure out a way to break up this duopoly. and the biggest duopoly we have in the country in our two-party system and the fact of the matter is that facebook is meant as a nonpartisan book. it's political but it's not about tipolitical parties. the system is broken so we need to figure out a way to get rid of that stranglehold because government has gotten out of control under the purview of both parties. we need less to be done in that arena and more to be done elsewhere. i know if you're somebody who likes freedom and liberty and you just want to be left alone but unfortunately freedom is something we have ha to actively preserve and we've done a poor job in a lot of areas. we've done a good job in lots of areas like second amendment in other areas we've done a poor job so we need to push back there and i also feel like we need to use the legal system more.a lot of people who donate spent a lot of time trying to put somebody into congress. we need to challenge those things that are on the books already because i think it was a 50 year training they looked at over 1 million new laws at the state level and then at the national level are like 12 or 15,000 laws were like 20,000 regulations over a smaller period. hundreds of those at most were challenged in court and a lot of them are not constitutional or infringements on our rights so we need to spend more time calendaring those because if we challenge those laws and say you can't do that, you can't do these things it's an infringement on our rights then i think thepoliticians will be a lot less likely . so those are some of the things that and more. >> i'd love to emphasize again your new book is fantastic is called the war on small business available today. finally online. it's online or in stores. even in small bookstores. it's a great place to support small businesses and. >> if i can throw an idea out there to. i would like to have you buy wherever you want but if you want to take that to heart there's a store hook shot.org online their entire reason is to support local businesses so if you buy from them fulfilling from a local small business retailer. so hook shot.org is just as easy as any other site and they actually supportsmall business on the back and . >> with that i guess i asked you if there's any questions from our listeners. >> that was only one way to buythe book . that's perfect. >> so excellent. i was waiting to see if anyone comes up with any other questions or thoughts. i guess i would love to just talk about the idea of cronyism and talk about the dangers of cronyism kind of large. if we're saying that we don't have branding of capitalism. to me one thing we haven't discussed yet is the answerto cronyism is less of it . we need government to place the role that has an important role stick within those bounds. with capitalism, then the answer is big government. and so that gets to that kind of branding and to me i think it's very important and i love to have your take on this. we want to kind of iproperly brand capitalism then we need to do one of these things. the idea that capitalism doesn't actively pursue a problem. something big government always has is a problem and here's a solution . in capitalism the idea isnot that we won't do something . it's that we're going to empower millions of people to dosomething . and when you empower more people, more ideas all these things are mistakes but capitalism allows us to learn from mistakes cronyism you never learn from mistakes. the government you don't learn from your mistakes, you double down because that's the only way they operate and that's bureaucracy and i think that idea of branding capitalism as it's not just letting some obscure market take care of things capitalism empowers people . millions and tens of millions of people to address the problem because no one person has enough knowledge and understanding and is brilliant enough to have all the answers to all of our problems and i think we're talking about branding. that becomes an essential component. >> it's interesting. i think esthe word capital in capitalism or the concept that's been bastardized. like that you're capitalizing on something which sounds bad iinstead of good is you talk more about freedom and choice and power to the people. your freedom, your choice. whatever it is. transparency, all the same sentence on. and how you can brand that even to certain governments institutions and entities and ideas and problems. one of the things i didn't talk about in the book because we wanted to try and they focus but i had in the previous draft was talking about something like social security and how you hicould bring free-market tenants to social security because obviously people who are stripped free markets, if you agree okay, we should have a safety net that lets empower people so instead of me paying my money to the government, having then send it, putting in an iou which by the way is just like other people, they don't produce anything in the government. what if we paid our employers paid on our behalf. we had a promise. even if it was mandated by governments and working control of the money, we were in control and instead of investing in government ious we could invest in the markets and in administration opportunities.assuming it wasn't distorted by the fact this time maybe you take a portion of the employer peace and use that to fund people who aren't working. so we have that little bit of social safety but they still own itand they have that low creation opportunity . then you just taken a big chunk of government power and control out of the equation. there's no reason why they should be managing that money you're just trying to publish a social safety they can still manage it but we can still have that ownership and empowerment so to me that's a great example of a place where you can bring free-market principles to something that we like it's important from a social standpoint. and have that objective next in a better way. >> one question that's arisen and i don't know if you have a a good answer is kind of you learn more about, especially in california where it's okay your located, we can learn more about these types of issues? >> which issue? obviously economic issues, you can go on your database do those. coded issues, which database? >> small business closure, the health of the small business economy . >> projects that's sponsored by harvard in conjunction with the hamilton project. it's all open something. i don't remember. if you type into your search engine the small business closure to this project pretty quickly by harvard that shows that the only thing i will tell you about the data and this is a small business expert, one of the things that drives me crazy is people don't understand what constitutes small business so i'mskeptical that their numbers are high . like their showing nationally the house somewhere between 85 and 40 percent of all small businesses close. i told you at the top of the hour that we have 30.2 million small businesses. i don't think 10 million of them have closed. i think that's either employer owned businesses which would make it around 2 million which feels a little bit more accurate or maybe it's consumer facing businesses. i'm still trying to get in contact with them . what where are these numbers coming from but it's definitely not somebody with an agenda that's trying to push that big number. i think it's a fundamental misunderstanding so i think we need to look at those big numbers and look at it with a grain of salt. there are organizations like this are tracking just remember because we have employers businesses . we have gate work a lot of times that gets conflated but you can reach out to me. i'm entrepreneur and i spent a lot of time on there. if you have questions i'm happy. i've done research to put you in the right direction orlet you know . >> have you ever used the yelp data closure. >> i useactually in the book in a couple of places . that's interesting but it's that not specific to the yelp platform it's a profit for a subset obviously not every small business is on yet so it's an interesting process of their group to show what that looks like.the same thing a line all is another great group. they've got about 5 to 6 million small business owners on the platform and they do multiple surveys so they usually gather around 3500 or 4000 respondents but again, it's bias in what kinds of small businesses those are and whatnot but thefindings are correct . like 30 percent of small businesses don't think they can pay their tax right now. >> across this is the fact that they are also resistant in terms of the number might be. they're all grim. >> providing white house can come up with more than 400,000 small businesses. i know that's low but even if it were only that like 400,000. that's like 40 times the number of bigbusinesses that exist in this country . that's staggering. we've never had anything like that. >> we've used up the whole hour so one last time we want to push, you did a fantastic job. it's a wonderful book, the war on small business purchase online at small business stores today and i'd love to also emphasize you can visit pacific research.org to register for our next webinar is tuesday, july 20. it's with former california state court associate justice and retired us circuit judge janice rogers brown and former california associate justice daniel coffee. we're going to have a wonderful webinar and you can sign up tuesday, july 20. again, thank you so much for coming for a fantastic conversation on an important topic . >> thank you so much and thanksfor the platform for small business advocacy . this is important, it's not my story. it's happy economy and more broadly the little guy and it's not getting enough attention so we need to make sure these stories stay front of mind or we're going to end up with that legislation that takes away economic freedom and moves us further towards central planning which none of us want to have so i appreciate the platform and thank you for a great conversation . >> thank you join us all this week for book tv tuesday events from recent book festivals. it will hear from author marcia chapman on her book franchise from the road let fast and former tennessee governor bill hassell at the southern festival of books on his release and from the national book festival death and love left: a cold country fight against the drug companies that delivered the opioid epidemic. that starts at the eastern on c-span2. access our programs online at booktv.org. >> weekends on c-span2 are an intellectual feast. every saturday you'll find events that explore our nations passed on american history tv. on sunday book tv bringsyou the latest in nonfictionbooks and authors . it's television for serious readers . learn, read, discover, explore weekends on c-span2. >>. >> student can competition or $100,000 in total cash prizes and you have a shot at winning the grand prize of $5000 . entries must be received before january 20 2022. the competition rules tips for just how to get started is at our website@studentcams.org. >> welcome to get the live, i'm brad graham tobler of politics and prose.we have a very informative program for you this evening. featuring two washington post journalists, yasmine, and damien coletta. here to talk about their new book, nightmare scenario.

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