On the recordNovember 9, 2017
I just want to start out echoing what my friend, Congressman Rick Nolan, was saying: We should not be about the rich getting richer. There are different strategies to try to accomplish fairness in a free country. If it is truly free, people are going to have to have the opportunity to fail as well as succeed. The only other alternative is the government kills any incentives to be more productive and just says: We are going to flatline everybody across the board, no matter how much you produce. We have seen, over and over throughout history, that never works. Income redistribution never works. You kill the incentives. And, as I was told back in the summer of 1973, in an exchange program at the Soviet Union, by a bunch of farmers who were sitting in the shade mid- morning in the middle of the summer, I asked--and I tried to use my best Russian: When do you work out in the field? I couldn't tell what was cultivated and what wasn't. It all looked terrible. They all laughed. I thought maybe I had translated something wrong. But one of the farmers, in Russian, said: I make the same number of rubles if I am out there in the field, or in the Sun, or here in the shade, so I am here in the shade. That is why socialism doesn't work. So there have been many different strategies that have been utilized throughout this Nation's history, and throughout the history of the world, to try to create--sometimes it is not an effort to create fairness in this country.…
