865: How Progressive Policies Hurt the Poor

Unknown Speaker  0:00  
now.

Brian Nichols  0:27  
Instead of focusing on winning arguments, we're teaching the basic fundamentals of sales and marketing and how we can use them to win in the world of politics teaching you how to meet people where they're at on the issues they care about. Welcome to The Brian Nichols Show. Well, hey there folks, Brian is here on The Brian Nichols Show. And thank you for joining us on of course, another fun filled episode. I am as always your humble host joining you from our lovely audio miracle Studios here in sunny Eastern Indiana. The Brian Nichols Show is powered by our good friends over at amp America, folks, stop going to the corporate media for the news you need to know go to amp America. Instead, we have news pieces, opinion pieces, podcasts and more. All of that over at amp america.com. Also, The Brian Nichols Show and yours truly are powered and sponsored by our phenomenal studio sponsor, cardio miracle. Now, folks, I've been talking about cardio miracle well over a year now, because the results are in the cardio miracle difference. 1,000% real. Now if you want to learn more about how cardio miracle can help lower your blood pressure, lower your resting heart rate, improve your pump at the gym, improve your restless night's of sleep stick around and later in the episode, we're going to talk about all that and more. But first, we're gonna go beyond intentions, right? Because here at The Brian Nichols Show, we talked about this the danger of do good politics, the danger when people say, Well, we have a problem. Maybe we should ask the government to solve this problem. Yeah, no, there is a lot of danger there, especially when good intentions are not enough. Which is why I needed to have the author of a brand new book called Beyond intentions. Here on the show. I just finished reading it. So we're gonna discuss some of the main pillars of the book. I think you in the audience need to know. Joining us here to discuss that book and more from young voices. Ben Iranian. How're you doing my man? Welcome to The Brian Nichols Show.

Ben Ayanian  2:22  
Hey, Brian. I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on, man. Absolutely. I

Brian Nichols  2:26  
Annie and by the way, folks, we were talking before we hit the record button. I'm terrible with pronunciations of names. I said, then, how do we say your last name? And he goes, that's a question I get often asked. And then he pronounced it Iranian. And I said, Oh, it rhymes with Iranian. And that's how my brain works. So Ben, I got your name, right. Today, I'm so proud of myself. But that's not why you're here. You're not here to talk about your name. You're here to talk about your brand new book Beyond intentions, how progressive economic policy initiatives would harm society's most vulnerable, which goes, I guess, right against the idea that many of our friends on the progressive left lead with that as well. If only there was a government program then. But before we dig into your brand new book, do us a favor, introduce yourself here to The Brian Nichols Show audience without my Iranian Iranian references?

Ben Ayanian  3:15  
No, you nailed the last name pronunciation. So I appreciate that. You know, Hey, everybody. I'm Ben Iranian. I'm a contributor at an organization called young voices. It's a nonprofit that represents young pro Liberty writers and commentators like myself, as Brian has kindly intro it I just wrote a new book, you know, really critiquing the progressive economic agenda. And also in the fall, I will be entering law school.

Brian Nichols  3:43  
Oh, you're entering law school? What are you gonna be studying?

Ben Ayanian  3:47  
I'm hoping to do you know, business and corporate law,

Brian Nichols  3:51  
not just law, you actually got to specify where yeah, I'm gonna,

Ben Ayanian  3:54  
I'm going to try and concentrate in business law. Love it. Well, how

Brian Nichols  3:57  
about this today's episode, we're going to concentrate on three areas of your book, I call these the leading pillars. Now the first pillar I want to discuss here, actually, now before we discuss pillars, Ben, let's talk about this book. And just the Genesis to this book. Now, I gave my commentary we talked about here on the show all the time, the danger of do good politics, this book seems to maybe be same church, just different pew. Talk to us about what made you want to go ahead and write this book and specifically address the areas that outline we're intention just aren't good enough.

Ben Ayanian  4:27  
Wanted to write this book because progressives are often painted as the group of individuals who care about the forgotten man and woman, you know, the working class, the working poor, and people who are struggling to get by progressives tried to position themselves as champions of those individuals. And I think that a lot of policy debates devolve into arguments about who is more moral than the other, which, you know, there's definitely a moral component to Paul See debates, but I think that those conversations start to deteriorate pretty quickly. So I wanted to write a book that acknowledged the good intentions of progressive voters, at least, you know, we can debate whether or not progressive politicians or progressive bureaucrats who really ought to know better about the effects of the policies they champion, we can debate whether or not they have true genuine good intentions. But I think voters who support progressive economic policies, I think they come from a good place. And I think that the way to reach out to those individuals is to acknowledge that, you know, libertarians, progressives, conservatives, even so, you know, socialists, a lot of us, we want the same thing. The question is, how do we get there, and I, as a libertarian, have spent a lot of my free time reading and writing about economic policy. So I wanted to put together this short book about the most hotly debated economic policy proposals, I wanted to talk about, you know, are progressives actually diagnosing a real issue? Oftentimes, the answer is yes. But then the question is, how did the issue arise, and we're where progressives often go wrong, is they don't understand that the problem they're trying to fix has often, you know, come to be because of government intervention. And so they prescribe more government intervention, whereas I argue that actually the answer to a lot of the problems they want to tackle is removing government involvement from the economy. It's almost

Brian Nichols  6:33  
like incentive structures matter or something, then I don't know.

Ben Ayanian  6:38  
Exactly, incentives are everything. And you know, it's important to not just espouse our positive intentions or our desire to help, you know, the little guys so to speak, it's important to actually understand what are we advocating for? And unfortunately, I think politics, you know, as you say, you know, incentives matter, right. So that's a pretty simple point for people to digest that we all have different incentive structures, and they can shape behavior in certain ways. Unfortunately, economics, generally speaking, is spoken about in these esoteric terms, with with all kinds of equations and numbers that people really, you know, your everyday American is not going to want to spend the time really to try to understand all these things, because everybody has lives, right? They have jobs, they have family, they have friends, I think one of the biggest misconceptions about economics is that it's this overly complicated area that's off limits to everyday Americans, and is only accessible to the people with master's degrees. Other people with PhDs are on TV talking about GDP growth and unemployment rate. It's really the in terms of actual economic policy debates, you don't have to understand any of that, you have to understand incentives, you have to understand basic economic principles like supply and demand. And if if you can really get a good grounding, then you can block out a lot of the noise in these policy debates and judge them for yourself. And so I wanted to equip readers with the with the ability to do that in a in an accessible way. That's why the book is only a little over 100 pages. I wanted it to be to be welcoming to people who really haven't delved into economics too much, which

Brian Nichols  8:30  
I mean, that is sometimes the hardest part is getting people who need to be interested in this stuff actually interested. And that is why my show, come on everybody say it with me, what's my slogan, meet people where they're at on the issues they care about, right? Because at the end of the day, people don't really care about our issues. They care about what matters to them. So let's meet them on those issues and bring solutions to the table, but also articulate where solutions from the past went wrong. And as a sales guy, that is literally my job is to sit down with somebody, figure out where they are today. What are those pain points? What are those problems? How did you get here, and let's start unwinding. And with this, you know, you have a lot here that you dig into with all the facts and figures outline all the stuff is is the links are not links, my goodness, the the source notes are all there in the book as well. So folks, if you want to go ahead and check out beyond intention, please links are in the show notes, go check it out. But there are three areas. And I'm gonna call it the three pillars for this book that I want to focus on today. The first of which is the minimum wage. Now, Ben, we hear this all the time, the minimum wage is what's helping keep the poorest among us from at least having enough money to put food on the table. Come on, Ben, what person wouldn't have it the goodness in their heart to at the very least have a livable minimum wage for your average? You know, mom, dad, little kid who's grown up and starting their own job and trying to just earn their stripes in the world. What's wrong with that,

Ben Ayanian  10:00  
that well, there's all kinds of problems as far as you know about. Yeah, in regard to the manner, you're putting me on the spots big, you know, I have to defend my morality here now after that charge. You know, it's a huge misconception that the federal minimum wage decides how much low wage or hourly wage workers earn, how much they make, you know, in 2021 98%, of the 76 million wage based workers over the age of 16, made more than 725 an hour, which is the federal minimum wage, and as some people will say, Well, you know, around 30 states have higher minimum wage. So that might be a reason well, sure, but I mean, 98%, across the country, that you you can explain that by pointing to the fact that some states have a higher minimum wage than the federal minimum wage. So it's a huge misconception that the minimum wage determines how much people make our wages are decided by supply and demand, you know, these two pillars of economics, if there is more demand for labor than there is work than wages will rise. It's that simple. And that's why you see wage based workers making way more than the federal minimum wage. And so people need to understand that raising the minimum wage is only gonna hurt the people that they wish to help, you know, the less skilled you are, the lower your wage probably is. And if your wage is close, let's say to the federal minimum wage right now. And then the federal minimum wage jumps to 15 $20 an hour, well, if your productivity is not worth that new federally mandated amount, you're probably not going to have a job, at the very least your hours might get caught, you might become, you know, ineligible for benefits. There's all kinds of ways for businesses to try and offset these costs, whether it is you know, harming low wage workers or is harming consumers by increasing their prices. And so again, this is a prime example of progressives having good intentions, they want to see people make more money. And unfortunately, the solution that they try to put forth, is actually going to hurt the very people that they wish to help.

Brian Nichols  12:26  
You're literally making it illegal to hire somebody less than a certain dollar per hour wage.

Ben Ayanian  12:32  
Yeah, it's a legal mandate, it's using coercion through the state of the state is obviously a course of being it's backed by the implicit threat of you know, fines, imprisonment, or violence at the hands of the state, that that's how the state works. It's actually making it an illegal declaration that businesses have to pay a certain amount. And there's all kinds of case studies that I point to in the book, you know, the state of Washington, LOL is actually the University of Washington studied the minimum wage increases in Seattle specifically, and that all kinds of damaging effects for low wage workers. There's a great article, I'm sure, almost everyone in your audience knows who's who Thomas Sol is. Thomas Sol, right, wrote a great article years ago for the New York Post titled Why, you know, racists love minimum wage laws actually a great illustration as to the effects of minimum wage laws. So he went through all these different examples from the 20th century about how people supported raising the minimum wage as a way to basically protect the wages of majority races and to block out minority races because they understood that if the cost of labor rose, you know, because of a government law, then unpopular minority groups would be the first ones to get fired, because it costs more money to, you know, pay individuals. Now, yes, if you're an employer, you know, the profit motive is a good counterbalance to prejudice, right? Because if you want to make money, you shouldn't make hiring judgments based on race. But, but it is true that there's also other, let's say, factors that, you know, employers will consider whether or not they like, you know, a certain employee might factor into whether or not they fire them versus another one. And so back when there was rampant racism in labor markets in various countries, there's huge there's great examples of majority races trying to promote minimum wage laws as a way to to price out minority workers from the labor market. And so it's very ironic that the early proponents of minimum wage laws were racists trying to harm minorities, but now progressives are The ones who are championing these policies as a way to help, you know, the most vulnerable in society. But I think that the article Thomas Sol wrote is a great and really powerful illustrator as to, you know, the long standing negative effects of minimum wage laws, man

Brian Nichols  15:19  
oh, man, it just sounds like Woodrow Wilson's in his grave somewhere smiling at the the the prospects that minimum wage can help keep certain people he didn't like out of certain jobs because Woodrow Wilson was a devout racist. And he was also a devout progressive. But I digress. Let's dig into number number two here, then because number two is an issue that a lot of folks in this audience in particular, I'm sure there's going to hammer home and really registered and where they are right now. And that is the idea of college tuition. Now, if you are in college right now, God bless you, I will be thinking of you as you're going through the next blank number of years. And once you graduate, look at that big balance that's sitting in your your student loan portal, you know, 100,000 125 $5,000 and above for certain folks I know of in my circle. Yeah. It's not fun. So a lot of folks hear that and they go, why are we paying for this can can college to which shouldn't be free? Ben, can college tuition be free? Oh, it

Ben Ayanian  16:21  
can? Should it be? Definitely not, in my opinion, as you know. So a lot of people are supporting this idea of there's first their student loan debt forgiveness, then there's, you know, tuition free colleges and universities and other policy that progressives are championing these days. And this is, this is a really good example of progressives identifying a real issue, right? It the cost of higher education is a problem. Like I think it is far too expensive. I graduated from undergrad in 2022. And, you know, all my friends, obviously graduated at the same time, or, you know, maybe a year after a year before. And the cost of college is out of control these days. And so progressives are right to identify that issue. But the question is why why is it so expensive? And it seems again, progressives, have not thought too deeply about that second step. I mean, if they have, maybe they have, but but but they're missing the reason? If their answer is free college, then they really can't, I have to believe they don't understand why it's expensive today. And so the best explanation as to why college is so expensive, is because the government is deeply involved in funding higher education. Now, they're around 50% of students obtain, you know, government loans to go to college. Well, 50% of students obtain loans to go to college, 92% of those loans originate from the government, as the there are some there's some private lending going on, but the vast majority of it comes comes from the federal government. And so because the government, you know, year decades ago now, got deeply involved in funding higher education, higher education is extremely expensive, because universities know, they're going to get paid, because the government has shown an increasing role and willingness to dole out larger and larger student loans. So if you're a university, why not raise tuition prices? Right? I mean, you're gonna get paid anyway, you might as well get paid more. And so, Secretary, the Secretary of Education, William Bennett, wrote an op ed in the 80s, arguing that the cost of college was going to increase far faster than it otherwise would have, because the government was becoming so involved in handing out

Brian Nichols  18:53  
what was his name Nostradamus.

Ben Ayanian  18:57  
Oh, well, William J. Bennett, highly recommend looking up his New York Times op ed, about this, he hit it on the head, he was it was a very prescient piece. So he was right up Professor Vader's professor of economics at the University of Ohio. He's written about this issue. He's also written a book called I think it's called restoring higher education. You guys can fact check me on that it is cited in my book. But so he's written books about this issue. And the fact of the matter, even the branches of the federal reserve have have acknowledged that tuition rises as a result of government lending for students and they they've shown this unending willingness to continue to fund higher education pursuits at greater and greater tuition costs. And again, I implore the audience you guys to think if you're a college, or a university, why wouldn't you raise tuition prices that

Brian Nichols  19:59  
you I'm waiting for the audience to respond. nobody's answering. Okay, gotcha. No, you're you're spot on then. And this speaks to, I think, again, back to the title of your book Beyond intentions, right? Because so many folks, they just get this emotional feeling, right? There's this do good feeling. But they really don't think through the consequences of that do good action, especially when it's done through government force, right? Because when you remove and as you talked about earlier, when you remove the traditional incentive structures that are present in a true free market, now you're not only helping create a situation where the good stuff isn't really focused on and actually incentivize properly. But the bad stuff on the other side, right is also not incentivized properly, in the negative sense. So if I know going to real life, I had an SDR For those playing on all along in the home game. And SDR is a sales development rep in the world of business. If I had an SDR and they were booking like maybe one appointment a month. And they're not doing a lot of calls, and they're just kind of floating to get by. Does it make sense for me to give them a $5,000? Raise? No, no, because they're failing. And yet, that's exactly what we do with our failing schools. We're like, oh, they didn't hit the test scores we want them to hit. Should we give them more money? And that's an exercise backwards, right? It's a backwards mentality. Because if you're in business, nobody would do it that way. Because it doesn't make sense. So this is just again, speaking to how people have this knee jerk you good reaction, and inevitably will lead to unintended consequences. Or maybe my conspiracy hat will go on sometimes they are intended, but they pretend they're unintended, which actually leads us to the third and final pillar, which by the way, this is not the third and final pillar of the book, but rather, what we're covering on today's episode, there's a lot more pillars to discuss in beyond intentions, link in the show notes. But for today, we're going to talk as we wrap things up here, Ben about universal health care, because Ben healthcare is a right. It's a human right. Everybody deserves to have health care. Right? Yeah,

Ben Ayanian  22:05  
I mean, so health care. So this chapter is the longest of the seven chapters in the book. And that's for a reason this is a really calm, this is a rather complicated area of my book that I simplified it for readers, but the cost of health care is a huge problem. Whether or not healthcare is a right I mean, it's it's kind of an absurd talking point. If you're, you know, as a libertarian, right, as I'm sure many of the individuals in your audience are, as a libertarian, I only really believe in negative rights, which means I believe in rights of non interference, I believe in rights that protect me from you know, the interference of others, you can't take my life can't say my property can take my liberty. Positive rights, on the other hand, are really things that progressives believe in positive rights and where the government bestows a right on you. And that is not a natural right. It's also a right that the government could then abuse the government could take away, it's not a sturdy, right? We don't have positive rights. In my view, as a libertarian, we only have negative ones. So no, I do not think that healthcare is necessarily a right. But I do you think progressives, again, are right and die are correct, I should say, in diagnosing an issue. Healthcare is incredibly expensive. It is a tragedy that individuals forego medical treatment that they need to every year, because of the high cost that is something American politicians and voters ought to care about whether or not they struggle with their medical bills, it is a tragic idea that someone would not go seek medical attention when they need it because they can't afford it. So progressives, again, want to make things free. And they create all kinds of that creates all kinds of poor incentive structures. One again, it shows an inability to, to understand not an inability to understand but it shows that they have not correctly diagnose the cause of high, high health care costs. I recommend people read the book. I'm not going to go through every reason today as to why health care is so expensive. I will name a couple here. So for example, the third party payer system is a huge reason right? When you go see a doctor, you're normally not the party that's paying you your insurance company pays at least most of the bill, you probably have a copay, depending on where you're going, but more than likely you do. And and so your third party covers the rest. We have, we're an over insured society. Our insurance is normally provided through our employer, for which they pay a lot of the premiums for where we Pay some on the plan as workers. And as a result, there's tons of money flowing into the medical industry that otherwise could have been given as a, you know, income, you know, just straight cash payments to workers. And what this does is creates this cycle of over insurance where there's more money flowing in into these areas. And now you have prices rising because of it, which necessitates the need for more insurance. So people get more insurance, which raises prices even more. And you kind of have this this this downward, you know, cycle. Now, the government also contributes to this in all kinds of ways through various regulations, but also Medicare and Medicaid, again, that just adds to the third party payer system. You know, as a doctor, if you're going to get paid, you might as well get paid some more, right that that's a big, a big problem here. Now, there's other reasons why health care is incredibly expensive. We restrict supply through, you know, various regulations that are part of Obamacare, Obamacare, really incentivizes consolidation by paying more money to large health systems for the same services than they would for outpatient facilities. So now you see outpatient outpatient facilities of various kinds, er, Doctor owned practices, merging with large health systems, which reduces supply that increases costs, you see certificate of need laws, where if you want to build a hospital in numerous dozens of states, if you want to build a hospital, you have to go to a board a state board, to prove that there is a need for your services, who's going to lobby the board to reject your application to expand health services, it's going to be current players. And so you see this, you know, constrained supply, which ultimately increases costs. And so there's all there's plenty of more reasons and the third party payer system I could go on for for, you know, half an hour, we could spend the whole time talking about it really recommend, again, people check out the book to really understand the nuances and the specifics of that. But free healthcare is not the solution. Thank you for pointing to the book, free healthcare is not the solution, it would rapidly increase debt. First off, it would increase taxes on you. Secondly, wait times would skyrocket, you would not be able to get in to see doctors that you need to in a timely manner. That's why you see patients from Canada coming over the border and coming to United States often or even patients from England, you know, from the UK, coming, you know, to other countries to seek medical care, because there's super long wait times in these societies that have government provided health care. Additionally, one one issue I want to add, we would if we don't fund it through massive taxes, we're going to blow out the national debt at even faster rates than we are now. And people tend to only want to worry about the national debt in terms of like a crisis where everything falls off a cliff at once. Every time people have people take their and their dollars for investment, and buy government bonds with them, that's hurting Americans every single time that that happens, we don't need this crater to fall off a cliff for everyone to look around and say the national debt is an issue. Right now the national debt is an issue because dollars that would be invested in private, innovative productive activities instead are being funneled towards the government and being basically squashed because the government is not an efficient being it's not you no one that's going to actually increase our standard of living, we increase our standard of living through innovation through better cheaper goods and services through private businesses. But if government bonds for for weak, you know, government notes or bills, treasuries, whatever you want to buy, are paying, you know, 5.2% you know, private businesses now have to compete with that to attract investment. And that is, at the end of the day of harms the most vulnerable because their living standards don't rise in the way that they should. And then obviously, when we're talking about health care, the most vulnerable is the sick. And if we want to make everything free, and delay their treatment, we're obviously harming the most vulnerable when we're increasing wait times exponentially.

Brian Nichols  29:23  
Then we could go on and on and on. But alas, we are already hard pressed for time, which means beyond going towards our final thoughts. I need to direct people towards beyond intentions because this book is exactly where all your questions from today's episode, and more will be answered because as I mentioned, this is just three of the pillars that Ben outlines in this very detailed yet very concise book and look at how thin it is. It's able to be read in probably a weekend or so that's what I did. So please go ahead, check out beyond intention. Links are going to be in the show notes and for final thoughts. Just want to go back to something we talked about earlier. And that is the idea of incentive structures. Now, I'm going to tell a little story, Ben, and I'm going to turn things over to you, Google. Anybody ever heard of Google? All the folks in the audience should be raising their hand, or collectively nodding, I hope. So Google has their big, ginormous campus out in the west coast. And this campus, I mean, it literally is like a home away from home. If you work at Google. It's an oasis. Right? So you go to this, this, this, this Google Campus, and Google was having issues. One of their issues they were having was health care costs, they realized that their employees, maybe you know, they were smart up top, but maybe not smart when it comes to their diets. So Google started trying to think they're like, What can we do to help lower health care costs, and Google was very, very creative, then they did something that was was sneaky, but it actually worked. So Google at this campus also had a ginormous cafeteria, kind of like in the style of a like a, what are those things called? Bogota, Chow, there we go. Kinda like if I go to chow, like you have all these different stations all over the place, you could walk all around and get all the food you want. And what they realized was they had this dessert bar, like right next to the main food area. And they realized that a lot of folks were going to that dessert bar, like right away, and they were filling the plate up. And Google was like, we think that might be part of the problem. So what did they do? Now they could have just taken it and gotten rid of it. But that would have created resentment, people would have been pissed off. So what they do, they just move the bar a little bit further away from where the main area was. And they're like, Okay, let's just let this run for a few weeks. Okay, they do that. And then they're like, You know what, let's move it a little bit further away. And they do this time and again, for about six months. Where's the dessert bar, at the end of those six months, literally, on the opposite side of the cafeteria. Now, it was still there, people could still make the choice. But Google put incentive structures in place to incentivize not going towards the dessert tray, but you know, they did they started putting healthier options, like fruits, vegetables, and things that people maybe wouldn't normally just be like, oh, yeah, I just had a great meal. You know, I could really use that make this meal better. And Apple, woohoo, not the chocolate cake, right? Everybody wants a chocolate cake. But they're like, hey, maybe the apple is a better choice. So what happened? They find out more and more people are going towards that fresh fruit more and more people are bypassing the dessert table to the point now that their health care costs started to improve. So I say all that despite all of us looking at Google and saying, Ooh, gross, yuck, Google, you're like a big corporation, mini government. True. But they are a great case study for us to look at in terms of how incentive structures do change behavior, both good and bad. And I can guarantee this story is old, I guarantee that there were some unintended consequences that Google had to deal with behind the scenes that weren't advertised because of their decisions. And I think that the end of the day is also something we could take away that no singular action or reaction is in its own isolated engagement, right, something down the road inevitably will come from our actions or inactions, we might not see it right away. time preference. What I know it might take some time, like when you're trying to lose weight, folks, it is not an overnight thing. I used to weigh 385 pounds, right? I remember the two years it took for me to lose 180 pounds versus where we are today. Everybody's like, I need to lose a couple pounds. Can I have some ozempic? No, because what's gonna happen, oh, maybe your stomach is gonna have holes warm in it, because those aren't exactly the safest drug out there. So again, time preference, incentive structures, all these things matter. You got to pay attention to them. And folks, you got to move beyond intentions. That's my final thought for today. Ben, what do you have on your end? Yeah,

Ben Ayanian  33:53  
I want to just kind of piggyback off of what you just said, I think everything is really relevant. And there's really well stated incentives are super important. And another thing that I just want to add on, on top of, you know, this thought of incentives mattering is also this cognitive bias that that we often are victim to, you know, without realizing it. So Daniel Kahneman wrote a book called Thinking Fast and Slow. And in that book, he described the cognitive bias the I won't say the acronym I'll just describe it. It's what you see is all there is right? You can look up the letters you can figure it out yourself, but the letters of that acronym are but it's what you see is all there is. So oftentimes our brains we make judgments about what's in front of us, what information do we have, we're not great at stopping and thinking, Well, what other information do I need? What have I not considered right? I actually think that the desert example could probably fall into this you know, if all you see Is the dessert right in front of you, and you know, you love dessert while you're gonna go ahead and eat it. But if the dessert is off in the corner, you got all this fresh fruit right in front of me, you don't have to walk as far to get that dessert, maybe you don't even know the dessert is there, if you just started at Google, after they've moved it into the corner, you might not even know it's there yet, you'll probably reach for the fresh fruit. It's the same thing in policy, what you see is all there is progressive see a problem. They don't often know much of anything about basic economic principles. I'm not even saying that to look down on them. I didn't know anything about basic economic principles until I decided to start reading about it until I really got invested in it at some point during my undergrad years. But if it weren't for my interest, I would have never gotten super involved in this this sort of stuff. What you see is all there is if you see a problem, you don't understand some of the possible solutions, right? All you know, is the state right? Progressives think the state is here to provide us goodies, the state is here to make our lives better, and to run everything. Okay? They don't know much about basic economic principles or the benefits of private markets. So for them, it's what you see is all there is they see of the problem, they see the government, that's their solution. It's really important, even for, you know, non progressives, obviously, for libertarians, conservatives, wherever you fall on the political spectrum, right, left in between, it's important to question your beliefs and to question what are you not seeing in the news, just as important as what they're showing you is what they aren't. Again, the idea of what you see is all there as I'm really promoting Daniel Kahneman ZZ book right now, I it's a really profound, you know, cognitive bias to, to consider when we're trying to parse through the noise of all of these important policy discussions. Ben,

Brian Nichols  37:03  
you're from wrote his book, I'm gonna promote your book Beyond intentions. Here it is on the screen, folks, how progressive economic policy initiatives would harm society's most vulnerable now, for the audio listener? Ben, where can folks go ahead and get their copy?

Ben Ayanian  37:18  
As go to amazon.com. You can get a hardcopy, you can also get an ebook, both priced very cheaply on purpose because I just want people to read the book. That's all it's about. This is not a cash machine, I will say, not even close. I just I hope you guys enjoy it. Please, please give it a read. Follow me on Twitter at Benjamin Iranian and if you could leave a review on Amazon, I'd greatly appreciate it. And

Brian Nichols  37:45  
anybody in the audience who's like Iranian, how do I begin to spell that don't worry, links and spelling's are all going to be in the show notes. Ben, it's been an absolute pleasure, my man, thank you for joining. Thank you for sharing this book with me. I got a lot of value. I know the audience got a lot of value. And heck, folks, if you are hanging around here right now, and you're saying yeah, I really enjoyed this episode, well, go give it a share. And when you do, please tag yours truly at B. Nicholas, liberty, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, wherever it is, you are you're enjoying your social media time, please go ahead and share over there. Also for The Brian Nichols Show, you can find the program wherever it is you enjoy your your podcasts or video content. So please go ahead and give us some love over on those different platforms. Like if you're listening to the podcast, Apple podcast, Spotify, YouTube Music, please hit that subscribe button. Also, for the video version of the show. Yes, YouTube rumble, but also Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, we are uploading the video version of the program in its entirety on those different platforms. So go ahead and check those out. And when you do, please hit that little subscribe button, hit that little notification bell and head down below into the comments. We want to hear what you have to say because yes, we value your opinion here at The Brian Nichols Show. And with that I want to hear a conversation take place. You know, if you're in the progressive left and you think that we're completely out to lunch, let us know why. Or heck if you're on the more let's say libertarian, right? You're like Good gracious. Where's this book? Ben? All my life? Yes. Now go ahead and let us know how great the book actually is. All that in the show are on the show notes all that down below in the comments. And yes, if you are trying to find any links we talked about here on today's show, all those are found in the show notes. So head over to the Brian Nichols show.com or if you're in your favorite podcast catcher, you should see all the notes right there or in the description here on the video version of the platform. One final ask Ben you know what it is it is for folks to please support the folks who support us here The Brian Nichols Show are phenomenal sponsors like cardio miracle equals CBD, liquid freedom, energy, tea, and of course our good friends over at amp. America. Ben, that's all we have for the audience today. Any final words or thoughts as we wrap things up?

Ben Ayanian  39:56  
No, Brian, thanks for having me on was a great discussion and I hope everybody enjoyed it

Brian Nichols  40:01  
oh I'm sure they did so with that being said Brian Nichols signing off you're on The Brian Nichols Show for Ben Nyan Ian we'll see you next time

Transcribed by https://otter.ai