When the weather outside is frightful. The hunt Santa Fe is what's the word delightful because it's got available h track all wheel drive to make being out together better. Enter for your chance to win the newly redesigned Santa Fe packed with all the jingle bells and whistles you need to go dashing through the snow together to winter. Visit Amazon dot com slash Hunting, or scan the QR code on specially marked bread and green Amazon boxes. No
purchase necessary. Called five six two three one four four six zero three for complete details. The Armstrong and Getty Show, Andy, they we're talking with Tim and the lawyer Tim Sanderfer, who is joining us on the Armstrong and Getty Show as he has for thirteen years, he claims, which is a long time. Started as a caller fact check back when you used to have calls. Of course, that was also because they hadn't yet invented text messaging. So you
consider yourself a libertarian? Yes, and um, so I wanted to ask you this. We were talking about this leer. There was an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal about the way we've um calculate income inequality, which ends up being the talking points for a lot of programs for wealth redistribution, and they use um, I don't know if you heard us talking about, but that's what the argument was. You take somebody who makes a million dollars and you say, Okay, that person has a million dollars.
You don't say, well, they actually have five hundred thousand dollars after taxes. And then you take someone he makes four thousand dollars a year and you say they've got four thousand dollars. You don't actually say, well, they've got sixty dollars, because that's how much they have after they get all the programs they qualify for. And so we
were not comparing the actual realities. And I was just wondering, um, from the libertarian sort of point of view, or for just from a freedom point of view, what the Founding fathers would have wanted how much wealth risk redistributions read spreading money around should we be willing to accept? Oh, in principle none? Uh? In reality, well, I don't know,
would you say, would you say none? So the Founding Fathers were quite clear that, as the Federalist Papers says that the equal protection of unequal ability is the first rule of government. And the problem is that if you have a redistributionary state, it will not be the equal protection of unequal abilities. It will be the unequal protection. It will be the It will be taking from some who have justly earned those things or justly own those things,
and giving them to people who don't. And that is inherently a violent act. Confiscation by the state is an inherently violent act, whether it's done politely through the form of bureaucracy or not. In the end, what you're talking about is government forcibly taking things that rightly belong to people and giving them to those things to other people in the service of some vision of the ideal state.
And you're right about this, this problem of calculating inequality, and it goes further than that, by the way, because a lot of the time we don't measure where individuals go from those categories. We act as if these people stay in these categories their whole lives, and they don't.
People move from one category to another. They go from modern an income to high income over the course of their lives, and these measurements of equality or of income inequality fail to account for that, and so it acts as though these are permanent things. When they're not, people move from one category to another, and that's how it should be. Freedom is going to end up in unequal results.
That's what freedom does. But if you prioritize freedom, then that is not as much a concern, Whereas if you prioritize equality, you're going to sacrifice freedom and in the end not really get equality because people just aren't fundamentally equal in ever respect. So you're gonna have to go back and redistribute and redistribute and redistribute. For example, imagine that you have a marathon and everybody starts out at exactly the same spot. They're not going to end up
at the same spot. Some people are gonna come in for a second, third and so forth. Okay, so now you have to shift the ratios in order to equalize them. Right, Make some people start way in the in the back, and some people wear leg weights and so forth, and then you run your next race once again they come out unequal. So now you have to go and shift
them again. And that's why redistribution never ends. It's just he has to keep owing and going and going and going in order to try and equalize things that are inherently unequal, and each step of that redistribution is a step of coercion and inherently a step of violence, and a commitment of a committing of an injustice against people
who have not done any unjust thing. Taking away my earnings and giving them to some other person because he's poor, when I'm not at fault for his being poor, means violating my rights, committing an injustice against me. Well, we won't even get to white privilege, which is a whole different conversation, because you'd make that argument that, of course you are. Now Here's another thing is that inequalities will increase as wealth increases. So let's say that I have
one dollar and you have fifty cents. The inequality is fifty cents. Right now, let's double both of our incomes. Now I have two dollars and you have one dollar. Well, the inequality has doubled also, right because now the inequality is a whole dollar instead of fifty cents. And yet you are twice as as well off now as you were before. Both of us are vastly wealthier than we were to begin with. Now, where what does a humane
person worry about? A humane person worries about the absolute wealth, worries about lifting poor people from the bottom by by ensuring that they have more wealth. It's the inhumane person who says, oh, no, we can't have that because the inequality has doubled. We don't like that inequality, so we've got to make sure to prevent the inequality. No, your focus is on the wrong thing. You should be on the You should be focusing on increasing the wealth, not
on making sure everybody is equal. And as Margaret Thatcher famously said, socialists would prefer that people have less in order to ensure that they are more equal, Whereas what what I'm saying is, yeah, they're gonna have inequalities, but when people are wealthier, they are better off, even if they aren't as wealthy as Bill Gates or something like that. So many avidues we could discuss on that topic, and I would like to, but we're run a little short
of time. And I did promise to change people's lives, which is a hell of a thing to promise on a radio show. So one of my favorite aspects of talking to you through the years, Tim is that the scales have flown from my eyes. On a couple of topics to quote the Good Book Um for instance, the idea that a government permit. Why is the government even being asked to permit me to do something? I'm just
going to do it unless I'm hurting someone else. So a lot of our ideas of liberty or upside down right now, What broad principle of liberty do you think has gotten turned on its head in modern America that people ought to be reminded of. Oh boy, that's a no, you've said, a very good one, which is this idea that whether you're presumptively free unless there's some good reason to prevent you from being free, versus the idea that you are not free unless the government says you are.
And what what we have done is we're increasingly transformed into what I call a permission society, where you are not presumptively free unless you first get permission to do the thing that you want to do. And there are all sorts of problems with that. One is that we can't really imagine the benefits of any new innovation before somebody introduces and tries that experiment. And the idea of of having to get a government permit assumes that government
bureaucracy somehow knows the right answer to something. I mean, I've done lawsuits where I did a case in Kentucky a few years ago where the question was that there's a law that says you're not allowed to run a moving company until you first get permit from the government, and in order to get to permit, you have to prove that there needs to be a new moving company in the state. Well, how do you prove that there
needs to be a movement? You can't prove that there's no and and the idea that the government knows how many moving companies there ought to be in the state of Kentucky. Of course they don't know the answer to that question, and they can't possibly. So it's very dangerous that we've shifted our society from one where you are presumed to be free unless there's some good reason to to limit what you do into a society where increasingly you are not free unless you get some form of
government permission. And think of all the different things you have to get permission for, everything from building a house to owning a gun, to owning to possessing medicine. That's what a prescription is is for. Is a government permission slip for you to have a medicine. So I think that is that overall is is a very good example of how we had a really important principle and and I think most Americans still hold it. But gradually we're sliding into a society where you are not free unless
some bureaucrat approves of what you're doing well. And the other aspect of our conversations through the years that have really crystallized in my head that I wish I could convey to other people is this idea that that the government is in general wise and benevolent, and the more government the better um as opposed to the concept of rent seeking, for instance, that the more powerful and rich a government gets, the more awful behavior you're going to
get because it becomes it becomes economically valuable for me to get the government to do my bidding. So I'm going to invest my time and money to get the government to do that do what I want them too.
So that's why you have these repeat players of powerful private interests that use the government to profit themselves, whereas newcomers who don't have that kind of political influence, they can't obtain that, And so everybody talks about what government wealth redistribution as if it's going to cure problems, when all that does is it that power is going to fall into the hands of the politically effective, the politically powerful, and and it's not going to be exercised to benefit
those who are most needy or most deserving. And this presumption that government is made up of angels, it's just amazing. There's this a new story I was reading this this morning about this guy named Ibram Kendy who published a book called How to Be An Anti Racist. All the talk about this this is a big deal and one
of the most dangerous things that's happened in decades. And his big proposally is we have a government bureaucracy that he in his words, literally governs absolutely everything to ensure that it's anti racist, whatever that means, wellist or anti racist. There's no such thing as I'm not a racist, and the government bureaucracy is going to ensure that everything is
anti racist. Now, leaven aside from the vagueness of the definitions and all those sorts of problems, he just seems to assume that government is going to act in an anti racist fashion as if government is staffed by angels, which, if anything is there has there ever been an example of it doing that? I mean, if anything, it's been exactly the reverse throughout all of recorded history. And yet
we assume that. And Jefferson in his first inagur Justice has this great line where he says, sometimes we are told that government that people cannot be trusted to govern their own lives. Have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern us? Of course we haven't. So if you're if we haven't found angels in the forms of kings to govern us, then why would we trust
the government with more power. If people can't be trusted to run their own lives and make their own decisions, then they certainly can't be given power to govern other people and run their lives and make decisions for them. If I'm not we're if I'm not smart enough or or moral enough to run my own life, then why in the world should I have power to run your life?
It should be just the opposite. And yet this, this presumption, the leftist presumption typically, although you also find it among conservatives quite a lot, This presumption that people cannot be left to run their own lives is then wedded to this sort of mystical notion that somehow government bureaucracy is going to be staffed by perfect people, who aren't biased, who aren't looking out for their own private interests, and who aren't going to do the bidding of their cronies
and their friends and other than all of human history. They have an argument. I mean, the most racist societies in the world, the most polluted societies in the world, the poorest societies in the world, the most oppressive societies in the world, the most discriminatory these are all collectivist societies. Environmentalists think that government is going to act in some in some fashion to protect the earth against evil, greedy capitalism.
Well that's true. Why are the dirtiest places on the planet the places with the weakest property rights and the biggest government the Soviet the former Soviet Union is a toxic waste land. China is a toxic waste land, and the government is in charge of everything there. So, if government is going to to protect the earth against the evils of the profit motive, it hasn't worked there. Why
would we assume that it would work here? When in fact, even in the United States, the government was responsible for everything from the extinction of the buffalo to the extinction of the oh bird of Hawaii. These are things were all done by government authorities who had didn't have to answer for profit motives, didn't have to answer for the safety of private property. As Aristotle said two thousand years ago, that which is owned by nobody has the least amount
of carabis ode upon it. Well, said Tim sand for Vice president of Litigation for the Goldwater Institute. You will have a link to all of his books and that sort of thing if you want to rate them, and you probably should. Tim, It's always a pleasure. Thanks. Go to Tim the Lawyer dot com for more. Tim the Lawyer dot com. You're headed over to Berkeley to lecture those people speaking at u C Berkeley in a few hours. God, I hope you don't get pelted with rocks and garbage.
I might stop at the cathedral on the way and say, if you couldn't hurt right, what's the downside? When the weather outside is frightful? The hunt Santa fe is what's the word delightful? Because it's got available h track all wheel drive to make being out together better. Enter for your chance to win the newly redesigned Santa Fe packed with all the jingle bells and whistles you need to go dashing through the snow together to winter. Visit amazon dot com slash hunting, or scan the QR code on
specially marked bread and green Amazon boxes. No perch necessary. Called five six two three one four four six zero three for complete details