During their debate Sunday night, Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro took the opportunity to crush Cenk Uygur on a variety of issues. One of them came during a discussion of capitalism.
Shapiro prompted Uygur by stating, “You talk about the glories of a mixed economy. I’ve heard about the glories of high tax rates; I’ve heard about the glories of government-provided health care; now tell me some of the glories of actual capitalism, which is the basis of all the things you’re talking about. Tell me why it’s good.”
Uygur then extolled a higher tax rate, saying it “recirculates the money.” That prompted a few boos, triggering Uygur to insult the audience as “uneducated.” He insisted irrationally that when the middle class has more money they spend it because “they’re not living in the lap of luxury.” He then said that with supply side economics the money goes to the rich, who do “something logical, they save it, but that means it does not recirculate in the economy.” Then, defying history, he posited, “That is why when you have lower taxes, ironically, the economy does worse.”
Shapiro wholly dissected that argument, starting by asserting Uygur was preaching Keynesian economics. He began:
The problem with Keynesian economics is that it doesn’t even work in theory, because again, once you go to the logical extreme, which is remove all of the money from the rich people who are saving all of their money, and give it to the poor people who buy hamburgers, that doesn’t help the economy or spur the economy. What spurs the economy is the creation of new products and services, and that is only going to be done by people who have expendable capital to actually invest in new products and services that we all enjoy. This is what creates economic growth. It’s also worth noting that this myth that spending is inherently better for an economy than saving, that’s only true if you’re talking about somebody that’s actually taking the cash and shoving it into their mattress. Banks are in the business of lending. When they take the money in, they don’t just stick it in Al Gore’s fake lockbox, they actually lend the money back out to people to create new businesses and new products.
You had an investor; when you started TYT, you were given four million dollars by Buddy Roemer to start TYT. That’s great; that’s the way business should work. But that money didn’t come from a bunch of poor people buying hamburgers; it came from a very, very wealthy guy who gave you money to create a business a lot of people want to patronize. If you want better products and better services, you need more investment in the products and services. The basic name, “trickle down economics,” is not something that any conservative even proposed; it’s a leftist revision of what economics actually is, because you’re not giving me the money; it was my money in the first place, created through voluntary transactions that I had with others. I haven’t stolen any money from anyone; neither have you, and the money has to be forcibly taken from you and handed to somebody at the bottom end of the economic spectrum to somehow jog the economy, that may jog McDonalds, but it is not going to jog all of the creation of all the jobs and services that make all of our lives much better today than they were 30 years ago in terms of the stuff we have access to.
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