965 – Transcript

Just Right Episode 965

Air Date: May 20, 2008

Host: Bob Metz

The views expressed in this program are those of the participants.

Clip (With Honors, 1994):

Simon Wilder: Which door do I leave from?

Professor Pitkannan: At Harvard we don’t end our sentences with prepositions.

Simon Wilder: Well in that case, which door do I leave from, asshole?

Professor Pitkannan: What democratic eloquence.

Simon Wilder: You asked the question, sir. Let me answer it. The genius of the Constitution is that it can always be changed. The genius of the Constitution is that it makes no permanent rule other than its faith in the wisdom of ordinary people to govern themselves.

Professor Pitkannan: Faith in the wisdom of the people is exactly what makes the Constitution incomplete and crude.

Simon Wilder: Crude? No, sir. Our founding parents were pompous middle-aged white farmers, but they were also great men because they knew one thing that all great men should know, that they didn’t know everything. They knew they were going to make mistakes, but they made sure to leave a way to correct them. They didn’t think of themselves as leaders. They wanted a government of citizens, not royalty. A government of listeners, not lecturers.

A government that could change, not stand still. The president isn’t an elected king, no matter how many bombs he can drop, because the crude Constitution doesn’t trust him. He’s a servant of the people. He’s a bum, okay, Mr. Pitkannan? He’s just a bum. And the only bliss that he’s searching for is freedom.

Bob Metz:

Welcome, everyone. It is Wednesday, May 20th, 2026. I’m Bob Metz, and this is Just Right, broadcasting around the world and online. Join us for an hour of discussion that’s not right-wing. It’s just right.

Sad to say, the challenge of rational governance continues to elude. But one universal thing we can confidently say about any nation’s government is that at the top of most people’s minds and concerns when voting is their economy and their economic well-being. Unfortunately, too few comprehend the critical relationship of a nation’s politics to its economy, and thus fall prey to those who count on such widespread ignorance and misinformation.

Politics and economics are two dimensions of the same social construct, but what never ceases to amaze me is how and why the left, which is wrong about everything a hundred percent of the time, how and why the left continues to be a force in a modern, supposedly educated society. And consequently, more and more Western nations are falling into what has been called third-world status, with all of the poverty symptoms associated with it. And while we can’t promise to solve that dilemma, we can certainly explain why it exists and how to solve it, but that ultimate solution requires a democratic will to carry it out with a majority of politicians on side.

But here’s the good news. It has been done before and it’s happening today, but those on the left do not want us to know about it, as we shall discover right after our reminder that you can write us at feedback@justrightmedia.org. Hear us on WBCQ and on Channel 292 Shortwave. Follow and like us on your favorite podcast platform and visit us at justrightmedia.org, where you can access all of our social media links, archive broadcasts, and the Support button that makes it easy for you to support the show, because as always, your financial support is appreciated and is what makes this show possible.

Now, believe it or not, I had no intention of discussing today’s topic when I first started working on this week’s broadcast episode. Given the historic event of Donald Trump’s recent visit to China, I had expected to be focusing on the broader philosophical and political contrasts between America and that nation, which by the way still remains an element of today’s discussion. But we ended up zeroing in on the broader global issue of what constitutes and creates a nation’s wealth and prosperity, and how so many nations have both created and squandered such wealth. So although politics and economics cannot be separated from one another, our focus today shifts to the economic side of that coin.

My change in focus was inspired in particular by two different podcasters who, much to my surprise, and one day apart from each other, were making the exact same observations and drawing the same conclusions about the nature of both prosperity and poverty. Both of their voices have been featured on our show before, and it is only from them that we’ll be hearing today. I am speaking of John Papola, host of Dad Saves America, and of Franck Zanu, host of the Zanu Project Rethink. And it’s my guess that what they have to say and how they make their arguments will enlighten you as much as it did me. And after today’s broadcast, you’ll understand economics in a way that you’ve probably never considered and will never forget.

So to kick off that conversation, here’s John Papola from his May 15 Dad Saves America podcast entitled, Understandably Enough, How Nations Actually Get Rich.

Clip (Dad Saves America, May 15 2026):

Zohran Mamdani: I’m a Democratic Socialist.

People Talking Over Each Other: You’re not a Communist. I agree with that. No, I’m not a Communist. Well, you’re like sort of like a Scandinavian type of politician. I would say right. He wants America to look more like Scandinavia.

Bernie Sanders: That’s right. That’s right. And what’s wrong with that?

John Papola: What’s wrong with that is the Scandinavian countries are now fully more capitalist than the United States. Sweden has more billionaires per person than the US. Much like China and China’s rise, the story of Scandinavia is a story of essentially free market success. People like Zohran Mamdani and Bernie Sanders are liars.

John Papola here, and I thought I would combat misunderstandings about communism, both big and small. And we got to start with the big because President Trump spent the week traveling to China.

Announcer: President Trump arriving in China to a lavish welcome. Hundreds of kids waving Chinese and American flags among the president’s entourage. Top American CEOs. You can see Elon Musk and that’s Jensen Wang, CEO of American AI chipmaker, NaVIDIA.

John Papola: It’s NVIDIA.

Announcer: President Trump trying to level the playing field for US companies here. Then there’s Taiwan, the democratic self-governing island that China’s communist government claims as a part of its territory. How will President Trump respond when China’s expected to push the US to soften its stance on defending Taiwan?

John Papola: We are in the middle of a great powers struggle. And President Xi, well, he laid out something that was a little ominous. And I would spare you the subtitles and instead present you with a slightly robotic Xi perfectly lip-synced, which is also creepy and kind of a deep fake.

President Xi: Honorable President Trump, it is a great pleasure to meet with you in Beijing. This is your return to China after a lapse of nine years. Our meeting is now, one could say, the focus of global attention. Currently, changes unseen in a century are accelerating. The international situation is intertwined with change in turmoil. The world has reached a new crossroads. Can China and the US transcend the so-called Thucydides trap and create a new paradigm for major country relations? Can we work together to address global challenges and inject more stability into the world?

John Papola: This moment here in the middle really kind of took off. This question of the, and the AI sort of mispronounced it, Thucydides trap. What is the Thucydides trap?

Documentarian: The year 478 BC. Athens has just allied itself with a collection of Greek city-states to project its own growing power and prestige. But a rival power, Sparta, has a formidable alliance of its own.

The two systems are wildly different, one ruled by kings, the other by democracy. But according to ancient Greek historian Thucydides, it is the fear of a rising, ever more powerful Athens that pushes Sparta to act. It makes war inevitable.

John Papola: As powers change, as great powers rise and fall, well, the current king of the hill gets worried that somebody else is climbing and turns towards war. Or perhaps war is what brings about the change.

Documentarian: It’s known as the Thucydides trap after that ancient historian who documented the Peloponnesian war. Conflict between rival great powers is likely, but it doesn’t have to be.

John Papola: A growing number of people on the far left, and not so far left, are just outright fans of China, and specifically of Mao, like New York Times favorite Hasan Piker, who took a trip to China and was just truly honored by this gift.

Speaker 1: Is that a Bible?

Speaker 2: No, that’s a little red book.

Speaker 1: The little red book?

Speaker 2: It’s the red Bible is what it is.

John Papola: This crew, the enthusiasm for mass murderer Mao Zedong, truly, truly diabolical. Let’s just take a quick way back machine into Mao.

Documentarian: Prior to the 1949 revolution, China was ruled by a US-backed dictator, Chiang Kai-shek.

Announcer: Well-known to every American is mean, keen Chiang Kai-shek, undisputed leader and idol of billions of Chinese.

Documentarian: Mao called Chiang a running dog of imperialism. He fought to depose Chiang for 22 years.

Announcer: Despite aid from America, Chiang’s forces were beaten back. The revolution was now within Mao’s grasp, and it was the start of the biggest political and economic experiment the world has ever seen.

Documentarian: Before Mao’s victory, China was among the world’s poorest nations.

John Papola: This is an important point. There were periods of time where China was the wealthiest, most technologically advanced society on planet Earth. But by this time, that was certainly not true.

Documentarian: Inspired by communist theory, Mao blamed China’s wealthy elites for the nation’s ills. Mao embraced communist propaganda like this film to rally the people against landowners.

Dunce caps, a regular feature of Mao’s China, were used to publicly humiliate landowners, intellectuals and disloyal politicians.

John Papola: Dunce caps end enormous mass graves. Let’s not forget. There was the humiliation and then there was the incredible amount of sheer murder.

Documentarian: In 1962, when Xi Jinping was just nine years old, his father became an unlikely victim of these purges.

John Papola: And this is a really interesting thing to remember. The current president was traumatized by Mao.

Documentarian: Mao accused him of being disloyal. Xi’s father was subjected to so-called struggle sessions where he was beaten and denounced. Xi’s father was sent to work in a factory and was later incarcerated for eight years. A famine, the result of Mao’s failed foreign policies, had devastated the country.

Announcer: People have come with reports of people dying in the fields, starving peasants eating some of the seed for next year’s plight.

John Papola: So Mao’s China was a disaster through and through. The country was a poor country. It remained desperately poor even as the rest of the world, or at least the West, certainly, was rising. Mao’s time is coming to an end and a somewhat Trump-like, although frankly far more sophisticated, thinker, President Nixon has his moment that will truly go down in history, going to China.

Documentarian: The Cold War was raging. In Southeast Asia, China was North Vietnam’s ally, and Richard Nixon’s credentials as an anti-communist were long-standing and impeccable. But in the fall of 1967, Nixon wrote a seminal article about Asia after Vietnam. Taking the long view, he wrote, we simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations. There’s no place on this small planet for a billion of its potentially most able people to live in angry isolation.

John Papola: I find this such a remarkable statement from an often surly President, Nixon. Nixon was one of the most capable foreign policy presidents probably we’ve ever had. And that he could do this while being a rabid, justifiably anti-communist it is really something. It’s really remarkable. It shows you how unlikely characters can change things.

Documentarian: 1972, after two years of secret and delicate negotiations, the president and First Lady were on their way to China. A few hours later, the president met with Chairman Mao Tse-dung. The 79-year-old leader was in frail health, but the lively hour-long meeting included philosophy, history, and banter. Mao said, I voted for you during your last election.

John Papola: What does that mean? I voted for you during your last election.

Documentarian: Nixon said, I think the most important thing to note is that in America, at least at this time, those on the right can do what those on the left can only talk about.

John Papola: But what came next was the China shock. The integration and, ultimately, outsourcing of lots and lots of manufacturing in exchange for much more affordable goods. It goes without saying the Chinese entrance into the World Trade Organization had a huge impact on all of us and has become something that many people broadly regret.

Now, I don’t overall regret it in the sense that I think the world has gotten better because of more people creating value for other people voluntarily. And that is the actual story behind what led to China’s rise between the death of Mao and its admission into the World Trade Organization.

This is now being retconned by the radical left. We are being told that Chinese economic success is actually the success of Maoism, basically, of gigantic government central planning. This clip from Jubilee is a sort of perfect representation of the new Gen Z slash millennial retcon on China’s transformation.

Speaker: So I would argue that governments have actually lifted the most people out of poverty. If you look historically, we look at China, for instance, had the most significant poverty reduction in all of human history. They pulled 800 million people out of poverty using state-owned enterprises and state-centralized planning, redistributing the wealth.

John Papola: According to the World Bank, China pulled 964 million people out of poverty from 1999 to 2021. Now, I want to just focus on this language for a little bit. What does that mean? What is China in this sentence? And how did China, the entity, pull nearly a billion people out of poverty? This is collectivist Marxist language hiding in plain sight. It is China the society, the collective. It’s really China the government of China. Pulling, like with hands, all these people out of poverty.

That’s not what happened. That’s not what happened at all. That is a story that is a left-wing propaganda story. It is one that is also held by Bernie Sanders.

Bernie Sanders: But what we have to say about China in fairness to China and its leadership is that if I’m not mistaken, they have made more progress in addressing extreme poverty than any country in the history of civilization.

John Papola: They’ve done a lot for their people. Who’s the they? The answer is the they is the people. The reason why China suddenly stopped being a desperately poor disaster is because the boot of the state was lifted off the neck of the people.

And there is a book written by one of the most famous economists, Ronald Coase. Together with a Chinese economist Ning Wang, How China Became Capitalist, they investigated that this was a state-directed effort. That suddenly Ding Xiaoping and all these new leaders, they just became enlightened central planners for the very first time. And they knew exactly how to fine-tune this society. Somehow, the knowledge just sprung into their minds after decades of grinding terror. That doesn’t pass the sniff test, and it didn’t pass their sniff test. And so they actually looked into it a little closer.

I’ve talked about some of these examples in prior episodes, including this one small town farming town example where the farmers essentially invented the rules of capitalism under threat of death, began to keep their surplus, began to act as if they had private property, even though the Maoist governors were saying you don’t even own the teeth in your mouth. That is not state-directed reform. That is people literally reinventing capitalism in spite of being told they’ll be killed if they do so. And that was happening all across the country, partly out of desperation and out of the basic nature of humankind. We are a creature that wants to create. It is in our nature.

Ronald H. Coase: One of the marginal revolutions was the interaction of private farms. Previously, it’s been collectivist run by the government, and gradually, private farm was introduced in spite of the government.

John Papola: In spite of the government, as I said, without any change other than the incentives, the incentive of ownership, these farms, these collective farms where we own everything went from being unproductive to highly productive, and that began the transformation.

Ning Wang: The concept that’s very much derived from Professor Coase’s earlier work on the market for ideas. And I think we think that concept provided a better framework to think about the success and the failure of China’s market transformation.

John Papola: The market for ideas. The idea of private property, of keeping what you sow, of being able to earn it, to earn success. That idea turned out to be quite viral when you didn’t have actual murder squads paroling the streets. All I believe that really ultimately happened is the successive waves of murder factory came to an end and that just gave the human spirit the chance to be revived. You can’t have trust, you can’t build anything under a state of pure terror. But once the terror finally waned, the desire to truck and barter came roaring back.

There’s a lot more to the story, but at the end of the day, China got rich by letting their people have more freedom than they had. A lot more. Not by the government suddenly becoming less murderous and more enlightened. That’s not what happened.

Bob Metz:

Exactly. And we’ll be hearing more again from John Papola later in the show, as he shifts his focus from China to the Scandinavian countries. But before that, we’ll be hearing from Franck Zanu with his description of how a nation gets rich, but this time from the African perspective.

As for my part, I will be reserving the bulk of my own reactions for the final quarter of the show when I’ll be at a better vantage point to connect all the incredible information that today’s audio bites are revealing. Facts and insights of which almost no one is aware. Now, to borrow from the title of economist Henry Hazlitt’s Economics In One (easy) Lesson, what Franck Zanu does over the course of the next 10 minutes or so rivals the delivery of that lesson in a way that, as they say, once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it. This, from his May 14 podcast, entitled, The Only People Who Deserve Economic Freedom in Africa.

Clip (Franck Zanu, May 14 2026):

Franck Zanu: South Africa elections are coming pretty soon. And you might think this is for only one country, but the thing about Africa is whatever happens, one plays, this kind of ripples through the continent. So it is important that I bring some reminder to those who are planning to vote in the coming election. I don’t know any other parties. I’m not being swung by any, except one, ANC, and I will talk about them shortly.

But what has happened in my comment section, repeatedly, by many people, is when I spoke about South Africa, everyone is reminding me in the comment section that no apartheid did not end. And according to them, the whites only gave the blacks political power and not economic power. It’s a dangerous belief, I must tell you. Every time, it’s about give us. And that is what I want to talk about.

Think about those words. There is nowhere in this world, no country, economic power is never given to you the way a gift is given. It is impossible. No one can give any citizenry of any country economic power. Take it.

Number two, they didn’t give you political power. They gave you administrative authority over the country. So when you got the authority in 1994 first under Mandela, the citizen was supposed to hold those who got into power responsible by saying, explain to me, show us what have you offered to be the future of South Africa. I want to see it.

So the ANC government that took power or received power inherited the country from the apartheid regime, the white apartheid regime. They said, now you have it and you and your people can then author what you want as your destiny. But now here we are. They did not give us.

And then they went on to inform me. Did the economy of the country lies or it’s in the hands of only 2% of the people. Therefore they didn’t give it to us.

And I want you to take a second and think. In 1994 when they were handing over the administration of the country to black people, how would they have handed over the political, sorry, their economic opportunities or the power you’re talking about. Open the banks, make you guys become the central bank president, sack all the white CEOs of all the big companies and make you become CEO? How is economic power given to a people? Where has it ever happened? Point to me so I can read about it.

What is economics by the way? Economic is simply a social science made for the studying of how individuals, businesses and government allocate limited resources to satisfy the ever increasingly unlimited wants of a people. It is not a tangible thing anybody can give to anyone.

So if this is what is in the head of people, then you can see where you claim that the ANC administration has failed the country. It hasn’t.

Number two, the 2% white population, they are not controlling the economies. They created it. They created the economic opportunities. They don’t have economic power. They created economic opportunities. And you know what? Those who have the ability, the skills to plug into that opportunity automatically you are recognized.

You can plug into it. It’s a simple thing, right? An ecosystem. Let’s say I created a football park. Somebody comes and say give me a space. I know how to put a food stand here. Drinks, snacks. So when people come to watch the game, they can eat from my stand and I pay you rent and I make profit.

Somebody says, oh, I can put a wash basin stand here. So when people eat and they want to wash their hands and clean their hands, they can come to this, pay me some money, I pay you rent, I make money.

Somebody will say, okay, I have a photo stand. I know people like to, occasion slide, they used to take photos. I’ll put my photo stand here. I’ll pay you rent because you build a stadium, right? So I put my photo stand, I pay you the rent, I make money. People come and take pictures with their loved ones and family and friends when they come here to watch games.

Do you see how people are plugging into that economy?

What have you created? No, you wait. Asking always. The government should do for you. Because we think that in government’s job is to give people economic power.

Government never helps the people. Government is a group of people elected by the citizenry as referees. Because the citizens know they can do and they are doing. Those who are producing, those who are distributing, those who are thinking, those who are consuming, they all want a fair playing ground so the government becomes a referee. Makes rules, policies, laws and guidelines for everyone. It’s like a football field for soccer players. The referee doesn’t do for anyone. He just makes sure the rules are enforced and he checks to see if everybody is playing fair.

Any society in any place that has been told to believe that a government can do for a people, that place is doomed forever.

It’s because we don’t understand the relationship between citizens and government. We don’t understand the fundamentals of what is called economic systems. We don’t.

You got to have capital. You got to have land. You got to have labor. You create economic opportunities. Land, labor and capital. Three things. You have it.

Capital is not money. Because if it was money, it would be money. Then countries like the United States 250 years ago, countries like Rome, almost a thousand who can remind me. Countries like Japan, they are now about, almost close to 3,500 years old. China and many Russia, for example, money did not start with them, not even the English Empire. Capital is simply tools. Tools. Land. Labor. No one gives anybody economic power. Nobody. It never happens.

Demand and supply. Then there are people who just can produce, invent, innovate, build, create. It’s just built into their system, into their nerve, into their system. And then there are those with the same skills in service production. You need each other.

Build a bridge and stop waiting for government or the 2% who give you economic power. People, people are laughing at us when they hear these things from Africans. Oh, it is here also in America. Why do you think it’s so popular? So common. After every election, 4 years, the government is out of office. Don’t vote for him next time. What did Obama do for black people?

Because they think government can do anything for a people. Please start educating your children to understand this. Otherwise you are killing the next generation already. If you make them believe that a government is responsible for making your economic life good. It’s not.

So one, let me repeat myself. For those of you who believe in the year of slogan, economic freedom, we are fighting for. I’m fighting for economic freedom. Do you know who wants to fight for economic freedom?

It should be the white people. Because the economic opportunities they have created, they need to have the economic freedom to protect it. Because you don’t do anything with it, whether it’s in Ghana, in Nigeria, in Cameroon, anywhere.

When they put it in your hands, you run it down to the ground. So in fact, it is the 2% white South Africans who need to cry for economic freedom. So they can protect what they have created.

Number two, any South African who also believe he or she can create with your own elite or family members or friends, you need the economic freedom to protect what you have created. And I’m saying elections are never going to do it. Democracy as a political system is never going to do it.

Bob Metz:

You are listening to Just Right, broadcasting around the world and online.

Powerful words, very urgently delivered. If I didn’t know any better, that sounded a lot like an admonishment directed towards the African people. No, politics and government are not capable of creating or producing wealth, only of protecting it through the use of force objectively applied towards that end. From enforcing contracts to validating private property ownership, these are legitimate functions of a referee government.

And what a brilliant yet obvious observation that economics is simply a social science. It is not a tangible thing that anybody can give anyone through the alchemy of economic power.

Economists in my experience have more often been wrong than right when it comes to economic predictions, but can be very good at explaining and describing past economic events in terms of history or given economic relationships. But the problem of unpredictability arises because of one single fundamental economic principle that is even more basic than the law of supply and demand. The principle that human beings have a free will, from which all economic quote-unquote power emanates. The exercise of human free will is the exercise of economic power. The long and the short of it is that the left thinks of power in terms of power over others.

The right thinks of power in terms of the power you choose. And with that thought in mind, once again, John Papola of Dad Saves America enlightens us all, not only about the political and economic realities of the Scandinavian countries, but about the outright lies being told about them by the left.

Clip (Dad Saves America, May 15 2026):

John Papola: There’s a less communist, but still fundamentally communist, lie. And that is that our movements toward democratic socialism are really just a desire to become more like Scandinavia. That Scandinavia has democratic socialism, and that that’s all that our current democratic socialists really want. But before I get to that, let’s just recap how much love our progressive left has for the so-called Scandinavian model.

Announcer: Is it really possible for someone who calls himself a socialist to be elected president of the United States?

Bernie Sanders: Well, so long as we know what democratic socialism is. And if we know that in countries in Scandinavia, like Denmark, Norway, Sweden, they are very democratic countries, obviously. The voter turnout is a lot higher than it is in the United States. In those countries, healthcare is the right of all people. In those countries, college education, graduate school is free.

John Papola: Healthcare is not a right at all. Healthcare is a service provided. And there is no system that guarantees it is always given to every citizen. There is always scarcity. And nothing is free. And there’s no such thing as a right to other people’s work. So that’s all talk. They have different approaches, but neither of those things as presented are correct.

Bernie Sanders: In those countries, retirement benefits, childcare are stronger than in the United States of America. And in those countries, by and large, government works for ordinary people in the middle class, rather than, as is the case right now in our country, for the billionaire.

Announcer: I can hear the Republican attack ad right now. He wants America to look more like Scandinavia.

Bernie Sanders: That’s right. And what’s wrong with that?

John Papola: What’s wrong with that is that that’s not actually true. But let’s keep going before I get to why.

Moderator: So you call yourself a democratic socialist. How can any kind of socialist win a general election in the United States?

Bernie Sanders: Well, we’re going to win because first we’re going to explain what democratic socialism is. And what democratic socialism is about is saying that it is immoral and wrong that the top one-tenth of one percent in this country own almost 90%, almost as much wealth as the bottom 90%. And I think we should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway and learn from what they have accomplished for their working people.

Zohran Mamdani: I’m a democratic socialist. That means I believe in dignity for all people.

John Papola: I believe in dignity for all people. Okay. Does dignity mean you get to have property and contracts that are honored? You know, like a man is only worth his word. Is that dignity? That’s not dignity. Dignity is free stuff that you take from others, right? That’s what dignity means. Okay, let’s keep going.

Interviewer: It means, more than that.

Zohran Mamdani: Yeah.

Interviewer: I think you’re not a communist. I agree with that.

Zohran Mamdani: No, I’m not a communist. I think, you know, a lot of New Yorkers have asked me, what does it mean that you’re a democratic socialist? And I tell them to think about the words of Dr. King from decades ago. He said, call it democracy or call it democratic socialism. There has to be a better distribution of wealth for all of God’s children in this country. And that’s the hard part.

Interviewer: Okay, but you’re like sort of like a Scandinavian type of politician, I would say, right?

Zohran Mamdani: A little more brown, but yes.

Interviewer: Okay.

Zohran Mamdani: But yes.

John Papola: But yes. But no. But no, that is not at all what he is.

Shultz: The history of America’s relationship with government is a very antagonistic one, right? Like the inception of America is F government, F people telling us what to do. The reason why I hope you can succeed is because I would love us to have more faith in government. If you’ve spent time abroad, like, you know, you live in Europe and it’s like, yeah, they’re annoyed at their government. But at the same time, they’re kind of like, that’s cool. I get health care. There’s a little bit more faith and trust. And then you go to like Scandinavia and they’re like, the government can do no wrong. You know, they could literally just, they could kill like four hundred people and the government would be like, the people would be like, I probably did something bad. Like there’s just so trusting of the government. I think Americans need to see government working for them. Yeah. And if that actually works, I think it would be a really beautiful thing where we can start believing instead of being skeptical of every single thing.

John Papola: Now, Schultz is right that we are as a people historically skeptical of centralized power. It would be lovely to have a government worthy of more trust than we have. We do not have that. And maybe one of the reasons why we don’t is because politicians just lie, like this little lie from Bernie about, you know, the joke, the joke here of what he believes.

Bernie Sanders: So the next time that you hear me attacked as a socialist, remember this. I don’t believe government should take over, you know, the grocery store down the street or own the means of production.

John Papola: I don’t believe the government should own the grocery store down the street. And yet here he is swearing in the mayor who said exactly those two things.

Zohran Mamdani: Thank you to the man whose leadership I seek most to emulate, who I am so grateful to be sworn in by today, Senator Bernie Sanders. I was elected as a democratic socialist and I will govern as a democratic socialist. I will not abandon my principles for fear of being deemed radical.

John Papola: We should maybe have not abandoned our immigration law, which doesn’t allow communists to enter the country because he is indeed a communist and we have it on tape.

Zohran Mamdani: We have to continue to elect more socialists and we have to ensure that we are unapologetic about our socialism. There are also other issues that we firmly believe in, whether it’s the end goal of seizing the means of production. And with every battle that we fight as socialists, we need to remember what the stakes are and ground ourselves in them and why those stakes are important and critical to us as individuals.

John Papola: So he wants to seize the means of production. He claims he’s a Scandinavian and none of this is coherent or true because the Scandinavian countries are now fully more capitalist than the United States, particularly Sweden. So this article I want to read from a little bit, you need to know this, you need to tell your kids this.

So what’s really going on here? Much like China and China’s rise, the story of Scandinavia is a story of essentially free market success. So here we have it. The world’s most surprising capitalist makeover is underway in Sweden. The shakeup of cradle to grave care is lowering government spending, spurring innovation and stirring fears about those left behind. Now, there are just so unbelievable things that have taken place in Sweden of all places. “For decades, Sweden was shorthand for the brand of high tax, high spend government that managed people’s lives from cradle to grave through state run hospitals, schools and care homes.”

In other words, it was California as a country, but no longer. With little fanfare, this Nordic country of 11 million has embraced capitalism and of course it had capitalism all along, with a very narrow window of exception, which we’ll come back to later. Today, nearly half of private health care clinics are privately owned, many by private equity firms. One in three public high schools is privately run. Up from 20% in 2011, see Sweden actually has universal school choice across the whole country and you can send your kid to a private school of your choice with a voucher. They have Milton Friedman schooling in Sweden.

The capitalist makeover has allowed Sweden to do what few industrialized countries have managed in recent years. Shrink the size of the state. That has enabled the government to sharply lower taxes and economists say sparked a surge in entrepreneurship and economic growth. Its total public social spending bill, which includes health care, education and all welfare payments, has fallen to 24% of gross domestic product, similar to the United States. And well below the over 30% for nations like France and my beloved Italy, who’s an economic basket case.

Sweden is perhaps the most extreme example of hardcore free enterprise in Scandinavia. While many European countries are raising taxes, Sweden has cut them three years in a row. Sweden’s top income tax rate has fallen close to 50%, down from 90% in the 1980s. And remember, the US had 90% top marginal tax rates in the 1940s and 50s. So even that’s not especially socialist, although it’s just stupid. It’s just stupid and ineffective.

Look at Sweden. Sweden is still technically spending more as a share of their economy than the US. But they have been declining since 1990. If you look here, 1993 was their peak. 70% of the dollars spent in the Swedish economy were spent by the government. That is pretty crazy. And the reason why this collapsed is because they went through a horrendous financial crisis. None of it worked.

This is the Sweden that is pitched to us by academics and dishonest politicians on the left, like Bernie Sanders and Zoran Mamdani. And frankly, Zoran Mamdani barely will put on the smile and say, yeah, I’m a Scandinavian. He knows he’s not. He knows he’s a Maoist.

One other thing, the interest paid on public debt is really something. Sweden’s debt to GDP is a mere 36% compared to 129% for the US, which should be alarming, but it is not. Most Americans don’t care. We won’t care until there’s a crisis. I’m not going to waste too much energy trying to convince you to care. You should care.

I know you don’t. That’s a bummer. That’s a bummer for us and for our kids. We’re acting like children in this society.

Sweden, the country saw more than 500 initial public offerings over the 10 years through 2024, more than Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Spain combined. According to a landmark 2024 report on Europe’s economy by former ECB president, that’s the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, It now has moved ahead of the US in the number of billionaires per capita, thanks to a thriving tech sector and video game industry that has produced hits like Minecraft and Candy Crush. Let that sink in. Sweden has more billionaires per person than the US. The vaunted 1% is doing better in Scandinavia than they are here.

Nobody knows this. Nobody you talk to on social media knows this, but this is the facts. This is reality.

And the article goes on to explain that they have privatized their hospitals and are delivering AI-powered solutions and fast turnaround. Their doctors are going home on time because they’ve gotten so good at delivering their services because they’re privatized. The reason why private markets work is because you would have an incentive to do better when you get to keep the proceeds of doing better. The Soviet Union used to say, they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. That’s what happens when everyone owns everything. Nobody washes rental cars for a reason. Incentives matter. This is the reality of what’s going on.

And you don’t just take my word for it or the Wall Street Journal. Here’s the Danish president back in 2015, responding to good old Bernie Sanders saying he thinks we should have democratic socialism like Denmark.

Lars Løkke Rasmussen: I know that some people in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore, I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy. The Nordic model is an expanded welfare state which provides a high level of security for its citizens. But it is also a successful market economy with much freedom to pursue your dreams and live your life as you wish.

Johan Norberg: It’s important to recognize that while Sweden balanced its budget, government spending was still high compared to most other western countries and that spending has to be financed some way. But contrary to popular perception, Sweden’s high tax burden is widely shared amongst average Swedes. It’s not about taking from the rich and giving to the poor.

John Papola: So Sweden’s sales tax, for instance, is the second highest in the industrialized world at 25% and is one of two main sources used to finance higher government spending in Sweden. So this is what’s called regressive taxes. Everybody pays the sales tax. It’s a tax on everybody.

Johan Norberg: The other tax used to finance higher spending is the personal income tax. But unlike countries like Canada, the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, where personal income tax rates are steeply progressive, Sweden’s high personal income tax are largely levied on the middle class. Sweden’s high top personal income tax rate, for instance, kicks in at fairly low levels of income. This means that many ordinary Swedes pay the top tax rate of a little over 52%.

John Papola: People like Zaran Mamdani and Bernie Sanders are liars. When they say, I want America to be more like Sweden and that’s why we want to have high minimum wages, which places like Denmark don’t have. Denmark doesn’t have a minimum wage. They have negotiations. They have high wages. They don’t have a minimum wage.

Speaker 1: We don’t have a government regulated minimum wages in Denmark. If you want to work for less than $15 as Bernie Sanders suggests, you can easily do that in Denmark.

Speaker 2: In the United States, McDonald’s is used in the debate over minimum wage. In Denmark, there is no minimum wage. But because of union negotiations, people who work at McDonald’s here make almost $20 an hour. And even though things are very costly in Denmark, this Big Mac costs less than in the United States when compared to the nation’s purchasing power. Go figure.

John Papola: Nothing you’ve heard about these countries is true. Nothing you’ve heard about the reasons China got more wealthy, more rapidly is true. This is my lesson for you today. Just look up the facts. Free markets is the facts. It’s the way the world actually gets richer. It’s the way the countries that are richer have gotten richer.

There is plenty to criticize in every society, including our own. We don’t have a perfectly free market economy. We’ve got all kinds of crazy government schemes and crooked crony bailouts. But the direction towards progress, as in material progress, human flourishing, all that stuff, our kids living better than we do, is actually towards copying places like Sweden, getting freer markets. That’s what we need.

And we need to teach our kids the reality of history. How wealthy countries got wealthy in the first place. How countries that were wealthy impoverished themselves by embracing socialism. And why we need to relegate that idea to the dustbin of history.

And no matter what adjectives you use, socialism, democratic socialism, they’re all the same thing. And every flavor of socialism is just slow communism. So we need to reject all of that.

Bob Metz:

When John Papola undertook his effort to address misunderstandings about communism, he correctly identified the source of those misunderstandings as being, in his own words, collectivist Marxist language. Or as we like to say on the show, the Marxist language of fools, where words are meaningless floating abstractions used to lure an unsuspecting public to their political and economic doom.

And just as Popola challenged the term pull, as in China pulling nearly a billion people out of poverty, so too. Franck Zanu challenged the term give, as in giving people political and economic power. Pulling and giving. Go figure. Pull the wealth from Peter and give the wealth to Paul. There is the whole socialist agenda in a nutshell.

Call it democracy or call it democratic socialism, there has to be a better distribution of wealth for all gods children socialists say. Well I call it stealing, plain and simple.

And for Mamdani to declare that it is immoral and wrong that the top one tenth of one percent in this country own almost as much wealth as the bottom ninety percent, is to announce his own immorality and to demonstrate why the left is evil. We must be unapologetic about our socialism, the end goal of seizing the means of production. Unbelievable to hear those words in America.

And as Franck Zanu applied this slide to Africa, the two percent white population are not controlling the economy, they created it. And the same principle applies to Mamdani, where the top one tenth of one percent own the wealth in their possession because they created it.

Thieves and socialists do not create, they steal and confiscate what others have created. It is their wealth that is unjustly possessed, not the wealth of those who created it. But everywhere you see the same pattern, when the left isn’t hiding it from us, the less state intervention in the economy, the wealthier that economy becomes. And by economy we mean the individuals and businesses producing and trading with one another.

And this brings us to the Scandinavian situation. Here again the democratic socialists, the robbers, are saying that we should look to the countries like Sweden and Denmark and Norway and learn from what they’ve accomplished for their working people.

“I’m a democratic socialist, I think Americans need to see government working for them.” Well there again we see that their mindset is in the fantasy land of government working for anybody, as Franck Zanu warned. Any society in any place that has been told the government can do for the people, that place is doomed forever.

Meanwhile as we heard from the Danish president in 2015, Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy, it is a market economy. The Nordic model is an expanded welfare state which provides a high level of security for its citizens. But it’s also a successful market economy with much freedom to pursue your dreams and live your life as you wish.

And while there can be no doubt that the Scandinavian countries are economically moving in the right direction, for example with Sweden’s 90% tax rate dropping to 52%, it is still very much a socialist country in the greater scheme of things. The Danish president referred to an expanded welfare state which provides a high level of security for its citizens.

And while no one would argue with having a high level of security for the citizens, the term welfare state would suggest that the force of the state is still the thing being applied to provide that security. Anyway you look at it, socialism is still socialism, no matter how quote unquote free its markets may appear to be.

So okay you’ve got a free economy with a 52% income tax rate and a 25% sales tax rate. A quick calculation would show us that $100 tax at 52% leaves $48, then when spending that remaining $48 at a 25% sales tax rate, that eventually leaves you with $36 of purchasing power for each $100 earned.

You know it could have been that we’ve been short changing the definition of socialism as being state ownership and control of the means of production. But maybe we should change that definition to include state control of the means of consumption.

And once again, we have just scratched the tip of the iceberg on all of this, but the good news is that things can be turned around even though it may not provide ideal conditions during that change.

Now more evidence of state control of economics is the mandatory government census. Here in Canada I just received my own snail mailed notice, already passed the due date that it was supposed to be filled out. Recently, Jim McMurtry, a 1BC candidate for Delta South and the British Columbia, posted a satirical video which we’ll be hearing as our ender today. And he was urging Canadians to reconsider answering the 2026 census long form questions on skin color, sexual orientation, and similar personal traits.

Apparently this year’s census marks the first inclusion of sexual orientation questions on the long form version, building on prior gender identity and race data to address reported gaps for policy and equity analysis. The socialist madness never ends. Equity instead of equality.

And so to close with the real bottom line to the secret of creating wealth and prosperity within any country, I cite Franck Zanu when he says that to accomplish this, the government must act only as the referee, because the referee doesn’t do for anyone, he just checks to see if the rules are enforced. And as referee of today’s broadcast of Just Right, I’ll be checking to see if you are obeying our rule, demanding that you join us again next week when we will continue our journey in the right direction. And until then, be right, stay right, do right, act right, think right, and be right back here. We’ll see you then.

Clip (Saturday Night Live, May 8, 2010 with Betty White):

Census Taker: Hello ma’am, I am a census taker with the U.S. Census Bureau.

Betty White: Oh terrific, good for you, bye.

Census Taker: Oh no wait, hang on, you never returned your 2010 census form so if I could just ask you a few questions.

Betty White: Absolutely dear, will I need a calculator?

Census Taker: No ma’am.

Betty White: Because I have one, but I took the batteries out to use them in a crotch massager.

Census Taker: No, you will not need a calculator. First question, how many people live at this residence?

Betty White: Zero.

Census Taker: You don’t live here?

Betty White: Oh, including me? Three.

Census Taker: Okay, well I’m going to put you down as the primary resident.

Betty White: Terrific.

Census Taker: Now how would you describe your race or ethnic origin?

Betty White: Well, superior to Asians, but not as intelligent as blacks.

Census Taker: Okay, let me clarify, which of the following describes you? White, Asian, Hispanic, Pacific Islander?

Betty White: Oh, Pacific Islander, let’s try that. And don’t skimp on the rum.

Census Taker: What is your last name ma’am?

Betty White: Blarffingar.

Census Taker: Can you spell that for me?

Betty White: S M I T H.

Census Taker: And that’s pronounced?

Betty White: Blarffingar.

Census Taker: Not Smith?

Betty White: They changed it at Ellis Island when I was there two weeks ago on a bingo cruise.

Census Taker: Okay, and your first name?

Betty White: Blarffingar.

Census Taker: And that’s spelled?

Betty White: L E E.

Census Taker: So your name is Blarffingar Blarffingar spelled Lee Smith.

Betty White: Back in school they had to call me Blarffingar B because there was another girl in the class named Lee Jarvis.

Census Taker: Okay, sure. Are there any people living in this residence part-time?

Betty White: Oh, goodness, yes. There’s Fluffy, Princess, Tigger, Socks.

Census Taker: Oh, and these are people we’re talking about and not cats, right?

Betty White: There’s really no way of knowing. Sometimes when I see their big eyes looking up from my lap, I think, that’s definitely a homeless guy in a fur coat.

Census Taker: Okay. Honestly, Ms. Blarffingar, the government is just trying to ascertain…

Betty White: Ah, ascertain. That used to be my stripper name. I recently changed it to Blarffingar.