Dave Ramsey and Ken Coleman are known for offering honest, heartfelt advice to radio show callers who request it. When you ask, there will be no sugarcoating.
On a recent episode of The Ramsey Show, the two took a call from Allen in Pennsylvania, who asked, “Some legislators in my state are introducing a bill to do a study on universal basic income. At this point, it’s just a proposal to do a study, but I was curious what your thoughts are on the government providing low-income people with a monthly stipend. I know other parts of the world have introduced forms of it to varying degrees of success.”
The non-sugarcoating took about two seconds.
“I’m not a fan of any type of universal basic income,” Coleman, the network’s guru on careers and jobs, began. “For a variety of reasons. I’m going to try and keep this short. First and foremost, it does not create incentive. It does not allow someone to see the value of showing up and putting in some work. And we know from human behavior, and we saw this in the United States, it’s why we’re in the inflationary period that we’re in.
“When we give out more money – and unemployment benefits were increased and extended – people spent the money. People don’t save the money. People need dignity of work to get up, go do something, get paid, and watch themselves continue to make progress.”
From Coleman’s perspective, the path from socialism’s initial seduction to its violent, painful consequences is to be noted.
“The argument for people that are pro-stipend, and I’m seeing this all over the place, in the United States, being tested in multiple cities right now, and it is a social entitlement. An entitlement, if you look at the word in the dictionary, I’ll let you do it on your own, it does not create incentive. It actually de-incentivizes people and they end up misusing it. So for that reason, I’m not a fan of it at all. And it’s also a slippery slope to a universal income across the board, which we see in socialistic countries like Venezuela, Cuba, and more. Go do your homework on how that has worked out.”
There is a reason humans from these countries risk their lives, flocking to America for the allure of its free-market economic system.
“Generally speaking, if you study history, communism has failed,” Ramsey said. “For the little man to get ahead, capitalism in its current form today, is not perfect. But it is by far — in human history, all of human history — at this moment in time in the United States of America the little man has a better chance of getting ahead and becoming somebody than he has in any other government situation, in any other economic situation, in human history. This is straight out of the Karl Marx playbook. This is not out of the Adam Smith playbook. Let me help you with that. Karl Marx, father of communism.”
Regardless of what American children are taught in government schools, the first Thanksgiving celebration was not a result of Pilgrims and Indians becoming friends.
It was because William Bradford and the early Americans had seen the death and destruction caused by communal living, and the subsequent prosperity created when they adjusted to a capitalistic system of personal freedom and incentive. Legendary radio host, Rush Limbaugh, used to deliver this true account each year before his Thanksgiving break. He then put it in writing in his children’s book, Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims.
“What Bradford and his community found was that the most creative and industrious people had no incentive to work any harder than anyone else unless they could utilize the power of personal motivation! But while most of the rest of the world has been experimenting with socialism for well over a hundred years — trying to refine it, perfect it, and re-invent it — the Pilgrims decided early on to scrap it permanently,” Limbaugh said in November of 2020, just months before passing away. “What Bradford wrote about this social experiment should be in every school child’s history lesson. If it were, we might prevent much needless suffering.”
Ramsey seemed to echo those sentiments when continuing to discuss universal basic income on his radio program.
“My friend, Art Laffer, one of the leading economists in the world, says that if you pay people to not work, please expect them to not work,” Ramsey added.
“That’s pretty deep,” Coleman retorted.
“If I thought, with my 40-plus years in the financial world, that this was hopeful to people, I would be for it. Even though I am a staunch capitalist. Just set me on fire and I burn capitalism. I believe in it to the core of my being. And if you don’t like that, that’s ok. Go start your own show. This is mine,” Ramsey said, in his immutable style.
“If I honestly thought that if you were struggling financially, if you came up in a family in a socioeconomic setting on a lower rung of the ladder, your best shot at life, of having a high-quality life, was a universal income, I would say go for it. But I don’t think it is.”
In his groundbreaking hit book Who Really Cares, author Arthur Brooks details how individuals, rather than powerful, controlling government rulers, have the most profound impact in helping their fellow neighbor. And this stems from personal responsibility, incentive, and achievement.
“As a matter of fact, all of my experience and all of the data we have at Ramsey indicates that your best quality of life is when your character is increased with grit, discipline, and calluses. The ability to overcome obstacles gives you much more joy than the dull hum of communism. It puts you to sleep,” Ramsey noted.
Those who side with Ramsey’s opinion on the matter know that offering people freebies not to work is nothing new. Humans have succumbed to these enticing powers – greed, envy and jealousy – since their first days on earth. How dare someone have more than me! We need to “spread the wealth around” to make it fair, a recent Democratic president blurted.
But the results from centuries of human experiments prove that socialism – whether well intended or not – leads to the prosperity of the rulers and only misery for the vast majority of the people.
“If the welfare system worked, people would be sprinting out of these government-funded ghettos into a wonderful life. Instead, they’ve set up camp there, generationally,” Ramsey said.
Many believe liberals and Democrats purposefully keep the poor in squalor, creating in them a perpetual need for someone to “help” them. In other words, they want the poor to remain poor and dependent on them. This is where they derive their power. What other reason would they have not to celebrate conservative policies, specifically those recently implemented by President Donald Trump, which helped such a wide swath of the nation’s most impoverished citizens.
And this issue need not be drawn in partisan terms, Republican versus Democrat. In fact, Democratic presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., recently pointed out that America has devolved into “a cushy socialism for the rich and this kind of brutal, merciless capitalism for the poor.”
All the while, proponents of basic government handouts say it is a matter of compassion.
“I have more compassion than you do if you believe in this crap,” Ramsey said. “Because it’s not good for you. It’s not good for someone. The people that think capitalism doesn’t work are the ones that grew up here and were trained by a tenured professor who believes in Karl Marx more than he does in Adam Smith. And they were taught by some idiot college professor that this stuff actually works.”
Some in favor of similar socialistic schemes, such as taking from high-income earners to give handouts to lower-income citizens, highlight the “success” of such programs in other countries across the world.
“Let’s just keep in mind here, Sweden, the entire population of Sweden, the entire gross domestic product output of Sweden is way smaller than Dallas. Ok? So you can’t really extrapolate that size of an economy to the size of an economy like ours and say something works. So that’s just bonehead, asinine analysis. That’s just crap,” Ramsey said. “What does work is this — incentive. What does work is a belief. That if I leave the cave, kill something, and drag it home, I get to keep it and the government won’t take it from me.”
Coleman and Ramsey then recounted some of the many stories they had personally heard, both at their company in Nashville and from callers to the show, about everyday people turning a little initiative and hard work into unimagined prosperity.
“That is individualism, which by the way is the opposite of communism. Community. Communal is the root word and they twist it,” Coleman said. “America works because it allows people the freedom to be who they want to be.”
And for the example that hits closest to home, Ramsey concluded the segment by pointing to his own life and entrepreneurial journey.
“I know a guy that’s so stupid that he filed bankruptcy. Because he was so bad at handling money. And he’s made millions of dollars teaching people how to live on less than they make. What a country!”
Rick Schultz is a former Sports Director for WFUV Radio at Fordham University. He has coached and mentored hundreds of Sports Broadcasting students at the Connecticut School of Broadcasting, Marist College and privately. His media career experiences include working for the Hudson Valley Renegades, Army Sports at West Point, The Norwich Navigators, 1340/1390 ESPN Radio in Poughkeepsie, NY, Time Warner Cable TV, Scorephone NY, Metro Networks, NBC Sports, ABC Sports, Cumulus Media, Pamal Broadcasting and WATR. He has also authored a number of books including “A Renegade Championship Summer” and “Untold Tales From The Bush Leagues”. To get in touch, find him on Twitter @RickSchultzNY.
