just over 30 minutes. >> well, you have a new addition of wealth and poverty out. how has the country changed since the original wealth and poverty can out? >> it has not changed at all. we have a new car and office. president obama. most of the themes of wealth and poverty that stem from the awful doldrums of the u.s. economy under jimmy carter apply more strongly today. >> how so? >> well, obama is the same kind of anti business president and anti enterprise president, the same kind of managerial, interfering, strangling, suppressing president that jimmy carter was. >> you right in here about

president obama. want to get to the right page socking quoted correctly. under the obama administration the u.s. experienced a more bit subversion of the infrastructures of its economy, the public sector has become and manipulative force, aggressively intervening in the venture and financial sectors with guarantees in some tensions that attract talented. >> the worst of this is the dream cast of obama administration. the epa now has gained control over our breathing. you know, co2 has been deemed a pollutant, dangerous to the environment. co2 is, of course, what these plants -- feeds plants and keeps us alive. is the breath of life. to attempt to suppress co2

epitomizes the kind of in time nature, anti enterprise spirit of this the minister mission. and it is the reason we need another supply-side revival of the same kind that we had under ronald reagan. >> would you change anything that you wrote in the original wealth and poverty? >> i would have changed quite a lot. to try to change one thing would be to change everything. some you get into a morass of editorial worked. so instead of changing it, essentially you retain the old and add 40,000 words at the beginning and end. and revision of monetary policy in the middle. so it is a new book, but it

contains the old book. >> when you say a revision of our monetary policy, what do you mean? >> i fail to make clear in the original version of wealth and poverty that i believe stable currency. i don't believe inflated currency. i believe that growth currency, the standard of value by which every bond for panera has to get investment in decision is like floating the hour so that people would not have to work so much. one month you have the our worth 50 minutes and the next 70 minutes. the fall swaps and insurance policies to guide the economy. one of the things that has happened over the next decade is that we have had a high purchase

the of finance and and entropy of enterprise the reason for the excess of finance, the reason why some much of wealth and the economy has migrated to finance is because the currency is so unstable that so much money can be made in betting on the ups and downs of our currency. this is a big danger today. a lot of people attack the chinese through manipulating the currency. the chinese just want to keep their currencies stable. that's all the chinese want to do. they want to maintain the dollar as the standard of value. it is us that is debauching the currency. the threat to the american dollar does not come in beijing. they defend the dollar.

the threat comes from washington and wall street. i make that, as that new argument in the new addition of wealth and poverty. >> and you write in the new prologue, the united states over the last decade has witnessed a classic confrontation between the forces of on to pinero platt capitalism and those of established institutions crammie expertise and political standing. one side subsists, unforced profits of enterprise. the other on rant and toll and privileges at the treasury, the federal reserve command the white house. >> and that is exactly what we have had. you know, when lewis wrote that book the big short he was writing about all the gaggle of hedge funds that bet against the big banks who are all supporting these sub prime mortgage

concoctions and confections and scams. and it was all the most prestigious forces in both the u.s. and the world economy that backed the blind side, as i call it, the people who were investing in these crazy concoctions, mortgage securities in which the value was totally unknown by the people who were investing in it. and the people who were shorting these with these hedge funds and venture funds and private equity funds. all these are entrepreneurs who are not seeking special government favors. the big banks, goldman of the world, there are all intimate with government. the government itself was mandating the purchase of these

credit defaults wops and other devices which ended up bringing down the economy. it is not pro capitalist to support goldman. there in cement embrace with the department of the treasury. >> is supply-side economics dead? >> supply-side economics is true economics. i actually am quite excited to have mitt romney running for president because dana and company world was one of the providers of the foundations of supply-side economics. they applied it to business. they showed how the most effective way for businesses to gain market share was to cut their prices.

you could cut prices if your business gaining market share because costs dropped by about 20-30 percent with each doubling of total units sold. the cost in general. the economy, scope and scale and learning. it's called the learning curve. this is really the foundation of supply-side economics. why when you cut taxes which are just like a price you reduce costs across the economy. a lot of the united states expand its global share of the market for enterprise and wealth it is not merely by balancing the budget or overcoming that or one of these accounting gimmicks that are often treated as

conservative economics. it is opening the horizons of the economy to human creativity. creativity always comes as is applied to by surprise. you cannot planet. if he planted you would not need it. >> can mitt romney use the phrase politically supply-side economics for a talk? >> i think he could if he says that, you know, he is reviving the reagan inspiration. that book was quoted more by -- made president reagan's most quoted. he quoted that book regularly throughout his administration. and reagan did not balance the budget.

he was winning the cold war. but the private sector creates assets by some $17 trillion. under carter we had pretty much a balanced budget and a balanced tre, but the people, the private economy was all in the red. what really matters is not just the accounts. that is -- altman too much debt is unfortunate. but what matters is not so much the liability of the economy as the assets. under reagan's supply-side movement the private assets of

the american economy boomed. the liability became more significant. the economy thrived throughout this. >> a lot of your fellow travelers from the past on the supply side have let go of that. >> a lot of them have become embroiled in analysis of what happened after clinton raised his tax rate. clinton drastically lower the capital gains tax. that was where most of the new revenues came. but in general 50 nations around the world have reduced their tax rates since wealth and poverty was published. drastically reduced their tax rate. most of eastern europe now has flat taxes. and in all these countries,

revenues have boomed. there has not been a big crisis of spending in estonia. there has been a vast boom in estonia with their 12 percent flat tax. and the fact is, supply side economics is building around the world. it's only in the united states that some souls are shrinking from this economic of enterprise >> what is your analysis of what is happening and what donald rumsfeld would call old europe? >> of your falling from the indulgence collusions of the welfare state. they have all accepted dependence on centralized government. that is -- that has destroyed

the value of assets. the human beings who would make the economy go. investments in creations and work effort. when you depreciate those assets and liabilities become impossible. the assets of your economy, allow the stock market to boom and realistic to thrive again. of a sudden these liabilities that seem impossible. >> when you see the fight in congress, what would you like to see congress? how important is raising the debt ceiling?

>> that is all just a kind of theater of the absurd. what we need to do is to the flat and our tax rate and to regulate. in this book i tell this story. new zealand, is real, a number of countries which have faced crises far exceed our current predicament. new zealand is one of my favorites. it was the pen richest country in the world in the 1930's. by the 1980's it was the third world country. it cannot even feed itself. the 45 percent of all agricultural revenues came from the government. it essentially was a socialist country. they find out all the government

spending, eliminated all agricultural subsidy. new zealand started not only feeding itself, but became one of the great sources of food around the world and actually competed in dairy products in wisconsin. so aggressively that the wisconsin dairy man accused them of unfair trading practices all the way from new zealand. is a great vanity of bureaucrats that somehow their jobs are awfully important. after the second world war we eliminated 150,000 bureaucrats, millions of federal workers. the same economists i there for bears declared that this would cause a new great depression after the war, that it would be

those -- the worst dislocation in the economy have ever faced. instead the growth rate doubled 7 million new jobs were created. we entered the 1950's, which to a great extent, created a boom in the u.s. economy. this is a reduction of government spending equivalent to eliminating the entire government today. and the same thing happened in new zealand, canada. whenever you are reaching a crisis and really drastically retrench government interference and regulation and tax rates, the economy takes off. everybody is stunned. particularly demand side economists are stunned because they can understand the

creativity that always comes as a surprise to us. the heart of capitalist economics. >> one of the solutions to government spending that is often discussed is a balanced budget amendment, something you discuss in wealth and poverty. >> i think a balanced budget amendment is stupid. it is a gimmick. and since it is a gimmick it can be countermanded. special regulations. it's almost meaningless. it gives politicians the sense that they're doing something to address the problem. they aren't doing anything to address the problem when they attempt to balance the budget. >> will we need is not a -- not accounting gimmicks. we need to unleash america's entrepreneurs on the frontiers of the world economy.

we need to unleash america's energy entrepreneurs as well. the u.s. can actually overcome the energy crisis merely by unleashing natural gas and oil technologies that have transformed the petroleum industry in the last five years. horizontal fracking in other developments that have made it possible to live a much -- leave a much smaller footprint on the surface and reach much larger troves of fuel than in the past. the most valuable part of the global environment is the surface of the year. parcel along the surface of the earth. you have solar cells and then

mills, biofuels all the systems waste which is -- which was important which is the surface of the earth will ignoring almost infinite to have an open intros of energy below the surface of the earth that can be reached with a very small footprint on the earth's of usable land. >> what is altruism and have is that fit into capitalism? >> altruism is an orientation toward the needs of others. i believe capitalism is intrinsically altruistic. capitalism is based on making investments without any

assurance that others will respond to them. capital investments only work if they're respond imaginatively to the needs of others, and that's why i think capitalism is intrinsically altruistic. socialism, believe, is intensively based on greed. as by an invisible hand to an ever growing welfare state because the truly greedy person, then get a washington to get guarantees for the investments. guaranteed investments of the definition of socialism. the socialists and tries to guarantee the worth of things rather than the rights to the things. the property rights, capitalist rights.

if you don't have any right to guarantee that the actual -- your actual investments, and that's why all these green guarantees are so destructive. they've blue or orange banners away from the creative benefits of capitalism toward lobbying government for special privileges at the trough. >> how often the get to washington? >> oh, now and again. i'm not a very frequent visitor, but five for six times a year. >> what do you think of it? >> at think it's too rich. today washington and its environs contain all the richest counties in america. does that make sense? the people who are supposed to be serving as are, in fact

telling -- growing obese the power and privilege? attendants a symbol of the decadent. >> how did you get your start studying these topics? >> oh, i began when i was a young man writing about sex, of all things. ever the book called sexual suicide in which i came to understand. essentially civilization depends on amelie live. the ties of family that ultimately connect men and the future. that is command's connection to the future passes to the will of

women. this was the man in a marriage. i believe that the breakdown of family way back in the early 1970's would lead to the a welfare state for the women children and a police state for the boys because a female had a family braces bohlen's. today we have the welfare state from 70 programs taking care of women and children. we have a police state for the boys, young black man in jail or on the lamb or on probation. it's a tragedy that we have inflicted on the black family. the black family could indoor. [indiscernible] better than it could endure lbj.

that was -- so when i started studying poverty it became evident to me that you could not literally understand poverty unless you understand of. after writing a book about the welfare state, wealth and poverty. ron reagan, one of the first people to read key parts of the. he wrote me. we were off. the roaring 80's. we want the roaring millennial or whenever it yesterday. >> how do you defend well? >> a store of value. a store of worth and a foundation relief efforts of human creativity. it's really the fruits of

surprise. my next book after this is called knowledge and power. and it's about how all enterprise is ultimately based on surprise. if you could predicted the planet and you wouldn't need entrepreneur orioles. the fact that it is unexpected means that it is dependent on freedom. that's why this obama program like solyndra and all that based on controlling and governing the decisions of the entrepreneurs always fail. because they're based on the past. they're propping up the past. they are in the -- the future will come as a surprise to us. >> in your wealth and poverty book in the chapter, the nature

of poverty you're right, the refusal of american leaders to tell the truth about blacks is more important when it comes to black poverty. the prevailing expressed opinion is that racism and discrimination still explain the low incomes of blacks. this proposition is at once false and insidious. not only does this slender white americans, it deceives and demoralizes blacks. not only does it obstruct the truth, it encourages by its essential in credibility of the alternate falsehood held in private by many blacks and whites that blacks can now not -- cannot now make it in america without vast federal assistance, without, indeed, the very government programs that, in fact, account for the worst aspects of black poverty and promised to perpetuate it. >> and i said that back under the carter administration. you know, 40 percent of kids

were born. i guess 28 -- it was below 40%. no it's above 70%. born out of wedlock. and this is a white problem as much as a black problem. it's -- all the welfare states focused on the inner-city, and that's why the problem of poverty is so much worse in the inner city. that is where all these government programs focus their attention. when people become dependent on the state they become dependence . they lose the ability to launch the surprises of the enterprise. they're saying that in europe today. we are increasingly seeing in the united states. i think this is a pivotal moment

i think the u.s. can return to its entrepreneurial inspiration. >> so are you making a moral argument? you talked about altruism and capitalism. the birthrate, etc. >> i think that ultimately economics have to have a moral foundation. capitalism knows not -- is not based on doggy dog competition. winners donate the losers. the winners conduct experiments and expand knowledge that benefits everyone. that is why capitalism is not a zero sum gain. it's a positive spiral of gains. it's ultimately opposing the golden rule of judeo-christian

morality. the good fortune of others is also your around. it's just the image of capitalism, some vicious predatory system is the opposite of the truth. socialism, when you cut off the future through socialism, block off the horizons of change and creativity. the image of your creator, then you really do have a zero sum gain. everybody fights in the lobbies of washington that is another facet of the welfare state. >> are you working and all with the romney campaign? >> i'm not working with it. i work for george romney who is in its father.