joke in israel, orthodox shawl is the one you don't go to. i am not an expert on the situation of judaism itself. we are as an inflection point, historians are going to see that they are becoming two different religions. >> thank you, steve. >> this your booktv marks the 20th year bringing the country's top nonfiction

authors and their books, find us every weekend on c-span2 or online on booktv.org. >> charles sauer, what is the profit motive and how do you define it? >> it is a way to look at the world around you. people are motivated by acts of different motivations in their life and idea that as profit and redefine it right away. profit is feeling good, giving back to the community. more time with your family. they are driven by profit. just a general fact we all understand that in the book i

take it a step down further and show that managers are driven by profit and that is different than what the company's motivations are and employees under them are driven by profit. i move from there because most of us understand business. i move that into other sectors. i look at government and show a 28-year-old bureaucrat sitting at a desk may not always have the best intentions of the country on his mind when sitting at the desk. sometimes he wants to get off work and go on a date, maybe he wants to move up in the bureaucracy himself, he has motivations and they don't go with the program he is working for and this works in media and applies to family life. it is an interesting theory when you start expounding on it. >> how do you derive benefits?

>> profit is a weird term anyway. if you look at webster's dictionary version of it, i feel it is a weird thing, not good in writing necessarily to go back to webster's dictionary but it helps because it shows profit isn't just money. is a benefit to somebody. i read a lot of fine rand, but one of her things is selfishness or greed is good. i think a lot of her ideas are right but i don't think they caught on because people don't like to consider themselves greedy. if you look at other people and show they are acting in their self-interest you can look at what other people want as a benefit. i don't know the question is how you derive it. benefits or profit are just intrinsic in our life. you don't -- driving the

benefit. it is whatever the person or the business, a lot of companies look at what their goal is and i don't agree with that. they think that is a profit, if i understand that is how does that work? >> the invisible hand, my profit motive, the opportunity to walk with my daughter to

school in the mornings. in order to do that, it works, doing the same things, that is on the individual scale. if you increase that and move it up a notch and going to businesses, if businesses make the customers matter employees mad, they aren't going to stay around long either. everyone is working for a profit and the only way to do that is work together. i have to try to make you profit more and if i make you profit more you will keep me on longer. >> you open your book, profit motive, what drives the things you do with the product -- a thought experiment.

what is that? >> guest: it is nice to open people up and get them thinking. the way i started the book, if an employee working at a company is designing a building and the company makes fasteners, what kind of building are they going to design? are they going to design a building that uses standard fasteners or metric fasteners? the fact is if they don't want to get fired they will design a building that uses metric fasteners and we see this throughout life. hospitals, if you are a doctor and don't refer to your own hospital system and you get less patients or get moved out or get a bad referral. profit motives drive what we do but i like opening with the thought experiment, gets people

thinking from the beginning and it understands the basic idea of profit motive. >> your closing thought experiment could go one of two ways. >> it can go three ways. the closing, reads the book. not mentioned in there is the question of understanding profit motive but the person who publishes the book and the bookstores, we just missed one when talking about it. i do profit from writing the book and in several ways that people who read the book are profiting from the book. hopefully as much as price. it also involves the publisher,

and i decided to write the book based on leveraging the profit motives of my publisher. writing a book, you spent a lot of hours, 3 daughters that i love, i like spending time with them and doing things with them. and take time away from my life. in order to do that i made sure the publisher picked up my book before i devoted my time to writing it. this book is valuable, we are going to invest in it. it is good to invest the rest of my time writing the book and finishing it up. >> you are president of the market institute. what is that? >> it is a 501c 4 nonprofit. i represent think tanks and do

free-market advocacy on capitol hill. i focus on healthcare and intellectual property. both issues go with this book perfectly but intellectual property or patents are what give the inventor, the government monopoly that gives the inventor the incentive, the profit motive to take an idea into the marketplace, to get -- consumer rise their invention. what i do is what i wrote about. >> when you worked on the senate finance committee staff, what was the profit motive? >> early in your career there is interesting profit motive involved. i had a friend i grew up with, my best friend, an accountant for one of the large firms.

when i was sitting at my desk in the senate i kept wondering, why is he working for an accounting firm? he needs to start his own business. that is who he and i are. while i was sitting at the desk i didn't realize i was doing the same thing. what we were both doing was building up our resumes, our networks, our knowledge base. the fact is most people i worked with today are still the people i met then. not on that desk but when i was working for governor jeb bush i worked for the chief of staff for the majority leader cornyn, majority whip cornyn in the senate and so it is interesting to see where your network go and what your profit motive is. at the time it was a paycheck and trying to move up and learn the network where i wanted which was to start my own business.

>> charles sauer, in your view to the government take into consideration our personal profit motive when they make policy? >> sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. one work that is one group i work with is john goodman, health savings accounts. that is one of the only times i have seen the government policy that does leverage the benefit of the people. it puts the patient back in the driver's seat by making them the client when they go to a doctor. hsa is a healthcare device, a savings account you put your own money in, it is tax preferred and you can use that money in conjunction with a high deductible health plan. what you are given is the incentive to shop. doctors are given the incentive to treat you like the client.

when you go into a doctor's office you are a patient and might be sick but the fact is you are not paying the doctor. you might pay 10% of what the doctor gets paid but the real doctors are the insurance companies, hospitals or the government. so the hsa puts that in place. 99% of the time government doesn't to stand the profit motive of the people in politically we don't understand the profit motive of the bureaucrats implementing it and that is one of the bigger issues. >> host: from your book, elon musk is one of the capitalists who knows he is in a war and built a company prepared to fight each and every crony battle to give his businesses every advantage possible. >> guest: he is an interesting character. i work with inventors. he is that weird peace, two inventors are well-known. everybody knows you have edison and tesla.

people like to think of elon musk as tesla, wild haired inventor going out and doing crazy things. the fact is he is edison. most people hold edison high. i'm a tesla fan. edison built a business. he bought other people's patents. he was inventive himself, but he was ruthless in growing that business. he attacked tesla for many years on ac/dc. elon musk does much the same. he is innovative but he is running a business. if you look -- building tesla in nevada where we are right now. the fact is he is going to shop, push them and he pushes them for tax rebates and everything he can because that is the bottom line.

is that innovative? does that sound like the creative type that he is? don't think it does but it is interesting to look at somebody i hold in high regard advocate the profit motive of how they are running their business and how it translates. he is not just inventing for america's greatness but inventing for himself and his business and that is how he is running. >> host: lots of profit motives being inaugurated in the amazon hq search. >> guest: that is interesting to watch. kind of scramble for it and some states opt out. to get on the amazon hq 2 search companies are giving out tax breaks, giving out areas of land, building out their infrastructure.

we are seeing the profit motive. if you dig down deep or as an economist all those tax breaks are bad. all of those promises are bad. a lot of those are bad profit motives. they are looking at what they are doing, just going after it is hard as they can. if you understand and look at the world with the profit motive lens, you can see it and point it out but you can look at it and see if there profit motive is correct. i don't know if we want to talk about it but the trade war would be one of those. i think donald trump comes from the right place in his heart. he said we aren't being treated fairly in trade and he is trying to do something about it. it is a profit motive, trying to make america great again but if we look at the economics

behind what a trade war causes, if you look at what that does to us then i would say the policies he is pursuing, while profit driven, will not bring us the end result he is looking for promoting small innovators instead. >> host: is there a different speaking of the amazon and trade policies, between long-term goals and short-term profit motive? >> guest: i don't see a difference. don't think any economist would see a difference between the short-term profit motive and long-term profit motive. if you are short-term profit motive doesn't serve the long one it is not doing what it is supposed to do even in the short term. there is a fight on this about ceos trying to get quarterly returns for their investors.

it is open for debate. i think this is one of those things, if the company is working in the self-interest of their company, the long run profit motive they need to be driving for which is why i support capitalism at its fullest. >> host: in your book you ask should we all be scared the media is going to brainwash us into supporting a certain group just to make more money? >> guest: we should not be worried about that. the media is not going to brainwash us into supporting something. the media -- >> host: give an example, supporting what? >> guest: i am a libertarian. that means i am right-leaning. i'm often in republican circles, sitting in conservative rooms and there is

always the leftist media coming to get us, the leftist media is selling a story that isn't true and they are against that but the fact is the country is 50/50, not too far off on liberal conservative. if you look at the profit motive of the media company they want to deliver media in the right way, they want to deliver news the way it is happening because if they continue not to deliver news the weight is happening, if an organization continues to deliver fake news they will lose market share, they will lose advertising revenue, they will lose lodgers. it is one of the reasons fox has taken off, they lean in the direction but they always lean in that direction. it is easy to know each story what you are hearing so you can edit it back to the middle without doing it.

without needing much work. the media is not going to brainwash us. i wanted to pose it in there. i do a lot of media with the far left. they have me on because their listeners find it interesting to hear both sides. >> host: one of the endorsements, profit motive is a must read for someone on a political right and left, on the left we need to understand how a radical like charles sauer views the world and on the right, you all can do what you want. >> guest: tom sent me that endorsement. i have done a lot of things with tom including one saturday i was sitting at home. if you don't know tom hartman he has the number one radio show, is a top-ranked liberal radio show. he is an amazing guy but is

slightly left of bernie sanders. he is pretty far on the left but he called me up on saturday and said i have an idea for next week's show. do you want to switch sides? we got on radio and switched sides and argued each other's points of view. when you read that, it makes me happy because you need -- if you're on the left you need to know how a radical like charles sauer thinks and when somebody as far left as tom calls you a radical it is a term of endearment. it is interesting to me because of the difference between how it reads and what he meant by it. >> host: greed is good, true or false? >> guest: i think greed is true. greed is everywhere.

i answered your question in a way that might not have been expected but greed is everywhere. it is omnipresent. i don't know if greed is good necessarily. we talked about several instances where greed, amazon hq 2, the greed of trying to get that is a detriment of the state economy. is greed good? i don't know. but greed is true. greed is omnipresent and not necessarily greed, i think it is profit-seeking. someone serving their church is being greedy but for their church. they might not be looking for growth themselves but growth of their church. i think these -- profit is a word most people think money right away. greed is a word people think selfishness. if we look at the words differently, greed for your

church or profit as a benefit. >> host: anything in our lives or world that should not be driven by the profit motive? >> guest: i don't know. i talk about my relationship with my wife and i think if i was to go someplace, if you were to ask me that question and i wasn't thinking i might say your family life or your friendships, but honestly when you look at your friendships and you look at your good friendships or you look at your good marriages they are give and take so you kind of go back and forth. i am always taking from my wife. she is never getting any profit from our relationship, then that is not a good relationship for her. i have to find ways to give her profit. i have to find ways to give her what she wants out of the relationship.

i come with quirks. i am a writer that works with inventors. i am a weird person. my wife deals with that. i have to give her things she wants to deal with that and that doesn't mean money. that means sitting and listening, making sure that i make sure i present because she needs that. .. i will take that as a benefit. >> here is the book, profit motive is the name. charles sauer is the author.

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