Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: And welcome to the 253rd episode of not the Atlas Society Asks. It's objectively speaking, as you can see, I've been feverishly at work in this remodel of my office to bring you a new podcast set. We are going to keep making improvements, so if you have any suggestions, please let us know.
I am jag. I'm the CEO of the Atlas Society. I'm very excited to have our friend John Tillman joined us today and I'm particularly appreciative of him because he is a little bit under the weather. So he is joining us despite all of that. He is CEO of the American Culture Project, Chairman of the Illinois Policy Institute. I know we always get a lot of questions about Illinois and Chicago. It is one of the most influential state based think tanks in the country and a leader in food free market public policy arena. John, thanks for joining us.
[00:00:58] Speaker B: Jag, great to be with you. And your new set looks amazing.
[00:01:02] Speaker A: Marvelous.
So this audience is always interested in our guests origin stories, where you grew up, any early influences that helped shape your future trajectory as an entrepreneur and free market champion.
[00:01:20] Speaker B: I grew up in a little town in West Michigan about an hour north of Grand Rapids. Most people know that Michigan is shaped like a mitten. So if you see that mitten in your mind's eye, the sort of upper left side just off Lake Michigan, about an hour north of Grand Rapids, a little town, Fremont. And our claim to fame was we were the where Gerber Baby Foods was founded. So the original factory was there. They have factories all over the world, but the original one was in Fremont. The corporate headquarters was there. And at the time I was growing up, Gerber's was an independent company and a Fortune 500 company. And it was a classic sort of Norman Rock Rockwell small town beginning. It was a great place to be raised.
[00:01:55] Speaker A: So in doing some research about you, I found out that you're also something of an amateur architect. You built an elaborate tree fort for your daughter that was pretty neat. Tell us about that.
[00:02:08] Speaker B: I did when my daughter turned about four. I grew up with tree houses, tree forts, and really enjoyed them very much as a kid. And I'm a little bit handy so I decided that she should have one too.
So it started out as a fairly small endeavor, but the bottom of it was 13ft off the ground. So it was quite high up in this tree. Eventually had eight foot ceilings. I had three bunk beds, two electrical outlets, two lights, a rooftop deck with a rail, a great stairway that went up into this side door that you Entered through it, had windows that opened and closed. So it was quite an extravagant undertaking and it took several years to build it and, and it was just so much fun. And then, of course, when my daughter got into middle school and then high school, I had to put a padlock on it because one worries about teenagers in a tree house away from prime. Parental eyes.
[00:03:01] Speaker A: Yes. Well, also that means you're somewhat of a renegade. Did you have to go through. Well, I don't want to out you here, but like, I mean, the regulations, at least here in California, are ridiculous. I know as somebody who had to rebuild my house after the fire, so I guess we can just don't ask, don't tell.
[00:03:23] Speaker B: Oh, no. I went with a strategy on these sorts of things that I always do, which is don't ask any questions, just start building and hope nobody notices and have it too far along before they do notice. Eventually, the. We're in a very tiny town, 450 people, 172 houses. So we all know everybody. And I am the former village president, so I knew the building commissioner, and I think he knew that he was not going to raise a finger to stop me from building this tre treehouse. I would have dropped a hammer on them.
[00:03:51] Speaker A: Well, since, you know, we often talk about revenue streams and unusual ways to raise money, you might want to consider turning that treehouse into an Airbnb. I bet it would be quite popular.
So, you know, you often talk about the American Dream just to do a level set here. What does it mean to you? And do you think it's still achievable?
[00:04:15] Speaker B: Not only is the American Dream achievable, in some ways it's more achievable than ever, despite all of the attempts by radical progressives to destroy it. And I not only call it the American Dream, I call it the American miracle, because I do think America is a miracle. It's a miracle that the people that founded this country came together when they did, had the courage to do it, and that we have survived all these years despite the natural forces of collective, collective thinking by too many people that get into government. But nevertheless, the dream is very much alive. There's no place on earth like America. No matter who you are, no matter where you come from, no matter whether you're a descendant of the Mayflower or a new, of course, legal immigrant, whether you're tall or short, fat or skinny, super bright or maybe average intelligence, this is the one place on earth everybody has a shot at pursuing their version of the American dream and doing it successfully. And I think the more important part about that is the destination of that, that pursuit. The dream itself is important. What you envision your future to be is important, but it's actually the journey every day in pursuit of it, where human fulfillment comes from. Because this is the one place where, more than anywhere else, where you have agency over your destiny. You have control of it. So many people in the world live in despair because they don't have agency. They don't have the ability to control their own environment, to influence their own environment, take control of their lives and carve out their own pathway. And that's why the American miracle is exactly that and why the dream is still alive, despite some of the things that have been negative about the evolution of statism in this country.
[00:05:51] Speaker A: So let's talk a little bit about the Illinois Policy Institute. How long have you been involved and what inspired you to take the helm?
[00:06:00] Speaker B: Well, I've spent three years early on, and I sold a business in 2004, and I got involved with a couple of guys that were involved with the Cato Institute, which I know, you know, near and dear, and the Club for growth back in 2004. And I worked with those guys for about three years, kind of learning how public policy and politics. Politics actually worked, running a couple of organizations in their portfolio. And then I parted ways with them in 2007, decided I wanted to set out on my own and build what I call a marketing centric approach to selling public policy, and in particular, selling liberty and human fulfillment through liberty. And so I approached the board and the founder of Illinois Policy Institute, which had been around for five years. And I had a bit of a strategic plan I put together because I'm a bit of a planner, and asked them if they want to be part of that plan. They said yes. Initially, I became chairman of the board, and then later on I added the title CEO and took on an operational role. And I was in that role from July 2, the day of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the actual date of 2007, up until December 31st of 2020, when I reverted back to just being chairman. So I had a great, wonderful run. We went from the previous five years when I started, they'd averaged about $86,000 in revenue. My first six months. We raised 224,000 and 645,000 the following year. Then 1.4 million, and. And the annual budget's generally somewhere around $11 million between the C3 and the C4 now. And the team there is doing a great job Continuing that success.
[00:07:25] Speaker A: So let me ask you a question.
When you talk about marketing, obviously it's very important to know who your market is, who your audience is. And at the Atlas Society, our market overall is young people, teenagers, young adults.
Obviously we appeal to other audiences as well with things like this podcast. Who is the market of the Illinois Policy Institute? Who are you marketing to?
[00:07:54] Speaker B: The number one market is legislators and people who influence legislators. So that includes elite influencers in the state, that includes the media, and that includes the engaged public.
We have a strategic imperative that I strategic concept that I call the political vice. It's a three sided vice. So if you think of it as a three sided vice, there's a bottom where my thumbs are and then the two sides and the output on the four side is dependent upon who is applying pressure. Pressure comes from the engaged public as one side of the vice. Pressure comes from media is the other side of the vice. And then pressure comes from influencers at the bottom of the vice. And influences are particularly important because they not only put direct pressure on political decision makers who are inside the vice, they also influence the media and they influence the engaged public. So those are our core audiences. In the end, it' political decision makers that have authority to pass or deny legislation that establishes public policy. And the other three are subservient to that because they're the ones who really apply the pressure.
[00:08:55] Speaker A: So you and the Independent and the Illinois Policy Institute were part of a coalition that defeated Governor J.B. pritzker's progressive income tax in 2020.
Is it a good sign that even in blue states they have limits on how much taxation they'll tolerate?
[00:09:12] Speaker B: It's a great sign. When that was first proposed, we knew that they were going to try this. They wanted to try to do it. They were trying putting out trial balloons as far back as 2016, 17, 18 and 19. And we worked very diligently to defeat it every time. Then finally they got it on the ballot for the 2020 cycle. And so it had to pass by a vote of the people. And we ended up defeating it by, I believe it's been a while since I looked at that number, but about eight points when we started the campaign, they were up by 30 points. It was going to pass in a landslide.
But we have a great marketing team. And you know, I have been. I built the whole organization around the concept of being marketing centric and how we go about everything. So not just audience identification, which as you point out is a crucial thing, you got to know who your audience is. But also messaging and a concept that I call taking the moral high ground. Back in the messaging wars, too many times people that are liberty focused allow ourselves to be put on defense. We're on our heels defending ourselves while the other side is on offense. And what we try to do is go on offense and put them on defense. And we did that very effectively. We have a really sophisticated marketing team, great data and analytics, and we really sliced and diced our audience and figured out which voters were locked down and going to vote with us and we didn't have to spend a lot of time other than getting them out to vote and which voters needed to be persuaded and which voters were hard nosed that we did not want to waste our time on. And then we tested dozens and dozens and dozens of messages and did proxy tests to see which ones got the greatest response of a call to action or converted people to vote no instead of yes. And we found some very surprising results from that. One of the things that were one of the messages that we did not anticipate would work well, but proved up in the testing and then became the second most likely reason people would vote no was that it made it more likely that retirement income would get taxed in the state of Illinois. And it presently is not.
So it was very fun to win that race whenever that ballot measure when everybody thought we were going to lose. Even more interestingly, Jag is in 2023, they tried, or 2024 rather, they tried to pass a mansion tax in the city of Chicago. Any transaction of a million dollars or more, you had to pay a surcharge, which would have raised taxes on people selling their homes by about $600 million in depressed property values. The city of Chicago voted 71% in 2020 for that progressive tax hike, but we defeated the mansion tax by 6 points by using the same techniques and the same approach.
[00:11:40] Speaker A: Fantastic. So also, in your work with the Liberty justice center, you fought for the public sector's workers right not to be forced into paying union fees through a case, right? Yeah. Janus versus afscme.
[00:11:57] Speaker B: Ask me. Yeah, Ask me is the way you say that acronym. American Federation of State and Municipal Workers.
[00:12:03] Speaker A: So that case went before the Supreme Court. Can you tell us about it and how it turned out?
[00:12:09] Speaker B: It was a fantastic experience. I founded the Liberty justice center in 2011 and was its chairman up through 2020. This all happened in 2018. The case actually started earlier than that, around 2015 or 16, because it takes a long time to get to the Supreme Court. There was a case ahead of this called the Friedrichs case, a teacher out of California. And it was challenging a 1977 precedent called the Abood decision, which was Detroit versus Abood. And in that ruling, the court said that if you were a union, if you were part of an employee of a government entity and you opted out of the union, you had a right to opt out of the union. That was protected, but you still had to pay what they call agency fees to that union because they do collective bargaining on your behalf, and that's part of their work as a union representing you for your pay and benefits. And so what happened is the unions just sort of shifted all the money over to, quote, unquote, agency fees and made people who'd opted out of the union still pay. So we were challenging that president. And the point we were making is that everything a government union does is political by nature. And by making them pay these agency fees, it was compelled speech. So we went through a whole process. The great Christina Rasmussen found our plaintiff, Mark Janus, out of Springfield.
It started initially with Governor Rauner filing a lawsuit. We knew he was going to get booted from the lawsuit, so we intervened in the lawsuit and then Mark became the plaintiff and we represented him. We also worked with and asked Bill messenger of the National Right to Work Legal Defense foundation to join us in this effort. But it was our case from the beginning and it didn't go all the way to the Supreme Court.
During the hearings in January in Washington, D.C. we had dueling protests with the unions on one side and myself and hundreds of other people on our side as Mark and others were going into the courtroom for the actual hearing that the court had. And then, of course, on June 27, at the end of the term, the last day of the term in 2018, we were the, the final big case that was heard that day. And I was in the courtroom with Mark Janis and Governor Rauner when the ruling by Judge Alito was read out. And it was one of the greatest moments of my life and I think Mark's life and the governor's Life. It freed 5 million government workers from having their speech rights taken away by a compelled speech by government unions. And it's been a great now freedom is not self executing. So there's been a lot of work to get unions to respect that decision. But it's really turned the tables in terms of union power. And tens and tens of millions of dollars now have come out of union coffers and stayed in the pockets of the government workers who didn't want to be part of it.
[00:14:42] Speaker A: So here in California, we had some of the worst kind of interventions to the pandemic. The longest school closures in the country in Los Angeles, and very aggressive mask mandates and vaccine mandates. And I was disappointed to frankly see so many organizations who should have been on the side of liberty either taking bailout money or, you know, buying into this maximalist fear narrative.
Got a question here from Candace Morena who asks, how did the Illinois Policy Institute respond to the COVID lockdowns, especially in Chicago?
[00:15:32] Speaker B: Well, I'm very proud to say we responded extremely well, challenging Governor Pritzker and his lockdown mentality and his lockdown protocols right out of the gate. We told so many stories and one of the things we specialize in is humanizing public policy. We like to talk about public policy at the point of intersects an individual person's life. And so we were telling stories about business owners, employees and average people who. Businesses were being shut down.
Services couldn't be provided to senior citizens because they were locked out of care facilities. And we told these stories so effectively. It put tremendous pressure on Governor Pritzker that he issued a public statement saying that. I'm paraphrasing, but it was something to the effect of the. You know, the Illinois Policy Institute has had a lot of terrible ideas, but now they're, they're trying to kill people. So that, that let me know that we were over the target and doing a good job.
We came back to work right away from the moment we were able to. And going back to the beginning of your question there, what I found so stunning about this entire period is to be blunt about how many organizations in the freedom space complied just absolutely and conform with almost a whimper, not even a whimper. And I still find that really disturbing. There are many well known name institutions that are really had been some of the great stalwarts of liberty. They rolled over and the fear worked. It's a terrifying thing how easy it is to use fear to get people to submit to coercion and tyranny, which is what this was.
[00:17:04] Speaker A: Yes. And I was particularly disappointed. There is another organization that promotes objectivism that decided to take a very significant amount of government bailout money.
And since, you know, the organizations can sometimes get confused, I had to make it very, very clear that the Atlas Society did not take bailout money and we never will.
We are not a drive through. You know, we are. We were not prevented from doing our business. We were just challenged to do it more creatively. Right. We're in the business of transacting ideas, so couldn't go to conferences anymore. That's all right. That's how this podcast got started. And that also really helped to fuel our growth on social media. Now one of the things I'm really curious about is the Entrepreneur hall of Giants. Tell us a little bit about that project.
[00:17:57] Speaker B: Well, I've long had a dream to build an Entrepreneur hall of fame, if you will. But we call it the hall of Giants, celebrating America's great entrepreneurs who make our life better. And I've been entrepreneur, been an entrepreneur my whole life. You asked about my origin story. My first entrepreneurial venture was selling Christmas trees. I started somewhere around five or six years old. My dad had a side business with Christmas tree plantation and so we sold Christmas trees off his fairly significant acreage and semi trucks would come and load them up. But every Christmas my brothers and I got an allotment of trees that would go into our front yard and then we would hawk those Christmas trees to people around town. And we got to keep, keep the money and spend it on Christmas gifts and other things that we like. So I got to, I got to. Of course we worked on, you know, doing the work of planting trees, cutting limbs, cutting down trees over all those years as a little kid. So you learn the value of work. Some people are shocked that when I was somewhere around seven or eight years old, my brothers and I, my brothers were two and four years older, all three of us got an ax for Christmas. Now think about parents, how they would freak out that as you're giving a seven year old an ax. But I've been using an axe since I was 6 or 7 or probably a hatchet. But this was like a kid sized axe. It was fantastic, maroon colored handle and my God, I felt like such a man when I got that ax for Christmas. But I started selling Christmas trees and really learned how. I never thought of it this way, but it was my first little business venture. And so I've always been fascinated by entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship and in particular what I'm fascinated by and how it operates within our free enterprise and capitalist system.
And the essence of it and the beauty of it is it's the greatest force for good ever created in the human sphere to improve the human condition for everyone, but especially for the poor and disadvantaged. It's the most efficient way to help poor people rise is entrepreneurs driving innovation and creativity through free enterprise and capitalism. And the beauty, the genius of it that people have lost sight of is it's the greatest service enterprise ever when you're an entrepreneur starting a business and running a business, you're successful. Successful when you serve people well, when you serve them well at the restaurant or the manufacturing facility or the service provider, people reward you through loyalty and money and they give you those direct, immediate, candid signals that you're doing well. And so you, you learn from that and then continue to do that. And if you perform poorly, you are punished immediately by the customer. They let you know that you're not measuring up and you will go out of business, and many do, when you don't make the customer happy. And we've lost sight of the fact that it is the greatest service enterprise and it's based on persuasion and consent, where almost everything the government does is based on coercion and submission. And so the best antidote to an overly powerful government is a robust free enterprise system, a private economy.
And the engines of that are the entrepreneurs who take the risk to start those businesses. Literally every single thing in your studio, the computers we're talking on, the wires over which this information is traveling, every single person watching this right now, if you look around, the only thing that wasn't created by an entrepreneur, when you go all the way back to the genesis of it, is our physical selves. The entire world that we live in exists because entrepreneurs at one time started a business. This needs to be celebrated. And everybody loves the entrepreneur when they're struggling. Mortgage to the Hill may not make their payroll. People think of that person as a hero. But if you become Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, suddenly you're an enemy of the people and you're called names, I think that's outrageous. And one of our goals is to educate people and create respect and reverence for entrepreneurs and the benefits they create in our society.
[00:21:28] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm actually reading now a book called the Founders by Jimmy Somi. He's a guest that we're going to have on in I think a couple of weeks. And it's about the so called PayPal mafia. But right now I'm early on in the book and I'm looking at the early struggles that these men, largely men who would go on to become the titans of Silicon Valley. And it's, it's really quite inspiring because, you know, one of the things is that I, I was giving a speech about putting the capital back in capitalism, talking about the role of finance, and I got a lot of this was at a University of Mercer in Macon, Georgia, and I was getting pushback from the, the audience saying, well, you know, Elon Musk came from a wealthy family. He got money from his father. And I was like, well then why did he and all of his siblings graduate with more than a hundred thousand dollar in college debt in student loans that they had to pay back over many, many years?
And so the role of finance in helping to seed these industries and these startups I think is something which I hope your museum will acknowledge.
[00:22:49] Speaker B: Yeah, this is one of my favorite subjects, is capital formation and how small businesses get their start. I wrote a column about this recently, an op ed recently about my own experience. When I started my first business in the late 80s, early 90s, I decided to start a retail business in a franchise system. And I needed to save the working capital.
I was making very good money and I was single and I was living a good life. I was having a very, very good time and I hadn't saved a ton of money because I was just sort of in an interesting mindset. But then I decided to start a business and I knew I needed to save some money. So this was back when the marginal tax rates were 28% with the 1986 tax reform, and then eventually I think they went to 31%, but still pretty low during this period of time. So I was able to save several hundred thousand dollars in 1990s dollars, which would be about $450,000 today, to start my first business. And I was able to do that in about two years.
And that's how most small businesses that become big businesses start, is the individual saving money, putting it into the pot like a Texas hold' em game and making a bet on themselves and their idea. Sometimes you raise additional capital through a loan or through friends and family. But this is how capital formation starts. And this is the story needs to be told so people understand that's how it starts. But also this is why progressive tax rates, where the government takes more of your money as you go up the income ladder, is so evil and immoral. First of all, taxing labor is a form of slavery. It's a form of servitude. It's in conflict with the 13th Amendment. We should, we should repeal the income tax amendment because it is a form of servitude to the governments forced labor. But beyond that, by having progressive taxes, we make it harder and harder for people to do capital formation when they're in their 30s and 40s and thinking about starting a business. And we're definitely going to tell that story well.
[00:24:39] Speaker A: So if we were to repeal the income tax, I would personally like to see the progressive income tax replaced with a flat tax. How would we finance military and police justice? The very basic necessities of a government?
[00:24:55] Speaker B: That's a great question. Well, first of all, the government should do less. So if you look at the income tax today, it's a fairly significant portion of the total revenue. It's about seven or eight trillion dollars.
Let me get the numbers right. That's not quite right. I think it's about three or four trillion dollars. I forget the exact number. The payroll tax for Social Security I think is about $2.1 trillion.
What we have to do is reform the entitlements and make entitlements unnecessary. And the way to do that.
I just had a column out in Fortune magazine. If you search my name and go to Fortune right now, you can find this column. What I have proposed as an interim step before we get rid of the income tax is that people from the 8th, when they begin working up through the 8 for 25 years, up to roughly 45 years old, shouldn't pay any taxes so long as they're putting money up to 15% in a retirement account. If you did that, that degeneration would have financial independence by the time they come to retirement age. And it would be a way to replace Social Security and Medicare. That would be one way to do it. There are a number of numerous ways to do it. And frankly, the government should just do less. There's too much appetite for government to do too many things that should really reduce its scope of work. Return most of the things that need to be done to the states rather than have the federal government doing it.
[00:26:09] Speaker A: So getting back to the Entrepreneur hall of Giants, who are some of the either historic or modern day giants or atlases that you most admire personally?
[00:26:20] Speaker B: Well, we actually have a traveling exhibit that we hope to launch later this year that we're in the middle of planning and raising funding for. Called From Franklin to Musk. Standing on the shoulders of giants. Ben Franklin was a tremendous entrepreneur and everybody knows sort of history and the founding, but he was actually a very successful entrepreneur in multiple businesses, including a publisher and a printer.
And then of course, Sam Adams was an entrepreneur in the beer business. Less successful, but nevertheless an entrepreneur. So I love those stories. I love the story of Eli Whitney. I think he's an amazing entrepreneur who made the cotton gin and really began the concept of interchangeable parts.
Another interesting entrepreneur, although this is a little bit more. You have to have sort of a, a good sense of the word liberal view of these things because the 1800s very much were a mercantilist time. And the government did work with business people to create protected monopolies.
And Cornelius Vanderbilt certainly did very well within that framework by building his teamship business. But I thought the really amazing thing about Cornelius Vanderbilt is at the peak of his steamship business, he sold all of it and made a gigantic bet on railroads which paid off massive and became the wealthiest person. There's an African American woman named Madam Walker, one of the most successful first millionaire African Americans. She started a cosmetics company catering to African Americans and their unique needs in the cosmetics arena for hair care, skin care and all the rest of it. Those are some of them. And of course I think Elon Musk is one of the great giants of our time. He is the greatest entrepreneur of the 21st century. And despite all the criticisms he's taken, we should not lose sight of what what he's done. His repeated successes are extraordinary. I'm a big admirer of Jeff Bezos. I think the way he built Amazon, starting out with books, transitioning into be the world's greatest general store and all that has become that is Amazon is truly a remarkable story. I followed that story from the very beginning. I was involved in an Internet related startup at the time. So it was very interesting to watch the success path he took. And one must remember there were many Jeff Bezos and many Amazons at the beginning of the Internet and many of them went by the way, from pets.com to many others who failed, who had even better funding than he did. So his entrepreneurship and leadership and strategy is why he is in the chair.
[00:28:35] Speaker A: He is so in popular culture, in literature and television shows, the businessman is invariably cast as the villain. Why do you think that is?
[00:28:49] Speaker B: I think there's several reasons for that. Because first of all, every conflict needs a villain, right? You're going to have a villain. So villains are going to do something. They're either going to be in the private sector, the government sector, military, whatever. So I think by just the nature of our society and the ubiquitous nature of business people, they're going to get some of those roles just by that, for that reason. But I think the larger reason and I think going to the core of your question is because people don't understand.
And it's one of the reasons I focused on the hall of Giants to celebrate entrepreneurship. People don't understand the beneficial nature of entrepreneurship and business. They just take it for granted. It's amazing to me how much people take this miracle of our American free enterprise system and all the businesses that operate within it. People take it for granted. They don't understand how delicate it really is, how much trust has been built up in this country. Country. The amount of trust people have in the business down the street. Think about the trust you have when you walk in to a restaurant. You have complete trust that they're going to serve you tasty food at a reasonable price that won't make you sick. It's kind of an incredible thought. And we do this every day. The food that shows up, manufactured food that shows up on the grocery shelves, that comes into our home from which we make meals.
The amount of trust that the free enterprise system creates is lost on people. They don't understand it. And it's so funny because so many people work in the private sector, in businesses, but they have lost the fundamental equation of how it all works. You have gross revenue, you have cost of goods sold or services, you get a gross profit. That means the money left over after you pay for delivering the cost of the goods or the services to pay for everything else, including your taxes. And then you have some profit left over, hopefully to share with your employees and with the ownership. People don't understand that equation and how it works and why it matters to them and how it creates the miracle of their everyday life. We take everything for granted from the chair we're sitting in, to the phone that we're making phone calls from, to this amazing electronic communication we're doing right now for this conversation.
[00:30:50] Speaker A: So part of what makes Atlas Shrugged so revolutionary was the way in which Ayn Rand portrayed entrepreneurs, business people like Dagny Taggart and Hank Reardon, in a heroic light. Is that part of the vision for this project?
[00:31:07] Speaker B: Oh, that is absolutely not just part of the vision. That is the core of the vision. We are going to absolutely turn entrepreneurs into heroes and tell their stories in a personal way that is really going to change the whole way people see entrepreneurs. When we're done and we achieve our market penetration nationwide, we're going to have a big, large, physical, 200,000 square foot facility, but we will create a marketing machine around it, and we're going to penetrate every crevice of this society. And the reverence and respect for entrepreneurs and the role they play in our society in creating the miracles of our everyday life are going to be known to everyone. And we're going to change the narrative on this.
[00:31:43] Speaker A: So speaking of Ayn Rand, she delivered a speech in 1961 at the Ford Hall Forum in Boston entitled America's Persecuted Minority, Big Business. And it contains this Striking passage, quote, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship needs some minority group as a scapegoat. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie. In Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people. In America, it is the businessman.
Why do you believe the.
What do you believe is the motive behind this kind of scapegoating?
[00:32:21] Speaker B: I think they scapegoat because you get power by scapegoating what politicians want. And it's not just businessmen, but what politicians want to do.
I would say group identity politics is closely aligned with this.
What they. So to gain political power, if you're of the mindset that you like government power and you want to wield ever more government power and make decisions over how individual people use live their lives and make their choices, you want to be in the command and control of how people live their lives. You see government as a worthy cause. And in order to gain political power, you have to shape public opinion in such a way that the public begins to see you as the government is the proper authority figure to put your foot on the scale, to create fairness and equity, to use that term, which I hate.
And so the real message that they're doing when they attack businessmen is that whatever calamity you have in your life, everybody has calamities in their life. We all have good days and bad days. We all have tragedies that happen sometimes. We didn't get the promotion we thought, we didn't get the raise we thought we should. Our child didn't get into the school we wanted to get into. We all have calamities in our everyday life. And part of the human experience is how you overcome those and forge ahead with resilience. And that has been part of the American character for a very long time. It's built in because we are a nation of immigrants who left a place to come and find forge ahead in a challenging environment. But what the left says to you and what the people who want to build five business people say to you is the reason that they have all the money and you are only making an average income, the reason you didn't get that particular promotion or that terrible thing happened to you is because of rapacious capitals, capitalism and capitalist. And they're taking advantage of the system. They're manipulating the system. They're exploiting you. But will you give me power? I'm going to come in and right those wrongs and I'm going to make it fair for you because I'm an objective observer and I'm going to make it better. And that's how they accrue power, and that's why they do it. And it's outrageous, it's immoral, and we have to fight it every step of the way. And the part that's really sad about it is what they're really doing is telling people, you have no agency, you are a victim. You are in a canoe, floating down a river with no paddle, and you just have to follow the current, and only we can come and give you a sense of direction and guide you where you should go. It's a terrible message. Message, but that's what. But people are susceptible to it because sometimes we, we feel better when we're told that we've been victimized and we get that sympathy that appeals to the opposite side of our ambition, our hopes, our dreams, and our aspirations.
[00:34:48] Speaker A: So there's the victimhood. What about the role of envy, which Ayn Rand called the hatred of the good for being good?
[00:34:56] Speaker B: Yeah, I think envy is a huge part of it. And they use envy. Envy is a great role card for them to play in that effort I just described, because envy is, you know, going back to biblical times, envy is one of those things that lives within all of us. It's very easy to flip the switch and go to the dark side and be envious of your friend who did better than you economically. One of the things I think is so sad about this, though, is that point about economics. The left always sees all of this within the framework of economics and income. And the human fulfillment is not just about how much money you make. There are many people living completely fulfilling lives as an artist or a coach or a priest or a pastor. People find fulfillment in all kinds of ways and are not driven by economics. But the left always pits us against one another in terms of income inequality and in terms of the difference between the haves and the have nots. And they try to divide us by that. Again, try to get political power.
[00:36:00] Speaker A: So while not blaming the victim in that same speech, Ayn Rand does take businessmen to task for failing to defend themselves on moral grounds. She said, quote, the disgraceful and horrifying part of it is that is the fact that the victims of this injustice, businessmen, did not make any organized effort to defend their rights or to fight for their economic, political and intellectual freedom. End quote. First, do you think that's true? And second, why might it be. Could it be that too many businessmen themselves buy into the premises of anti capitalism?
[00:36:40] Speaker B: Yes, I think there's a real problem here, and I think it's become even more exacerbated. Since that was stated. The problem is that Fortune 1000, let's say corporate America, but this applies to almost any business. The number one issue is that they want.
It used to be that what they wanted from the government was to be left alone. They wanted the government to go do what they're going to do, but just leave my parochial business interests alone. And so businesses would get involved in politics, public policy, political campaigns, in order to try to protect their particular interest. So if you're in finance, you're worried about financial regulations. If you're in manufacturing, you're worried about various manufacturing and OSHA regulations and that sort of thing. And every business has some interest. And so businesses got involved initially that way. But then when the political left really went with DEI and group identity politics, they really started trying to make moral arguments and try to force businesses to take proactive actions within those arenas. And many of these people that are running businesses are of the left, even though they work in a capitalist society. And many of them, I know some people of the left who are highly educated, highly successful, they begin to believe their own sort of notes. You know, they see themselves as elites. I'm elite because I become the CEO of a Fortune 100 company. I'm smarter than most people. And the people that are in government are smarter than most people. We actually know how you should live your life. And they begin to buy into the concept of centralized control over our individual lives. And it's very dangerous. And we need more business people who come out believing in the essence of the founding principles, the concept of individual sovereignty, and of course, free enterprise and capitalism. But unfortunately, too many CEOs and public companies are the other way around. And the final reason I think they do this is because they're all shortsighted in terms of their own self interest.
They want to make sure their quarterly reports are good. They want to make sure their stock options and bonuses are good. And they're not going to rock the boat against what they think is the political winds of the day.
[00:38:36] Speaker A: Speaking of dei, we've got a question here from my modern Gaultier. He asks, how do you think the policies of DEI and the Green New Deal have hampered entrepreneurial pursuits?
[00:38:49] Speaker B: Oh, well, first thing is there's been a massive misallocation of capital. The government has taken money from taxpayers out of the private sector and borrowed money with debt to allocate it to absolutely useless business enterprises that largely underperform or fail.
Of course, the most famous one during the Obama administration was the failure of Solyndra I think that was a half a billion dollars and there's been many others. So that's one aspect of what happens, is the misallocation of capital. There's a lot of things that don't get funding because the government has sucked up the funding and given it to unworthy projects. The second thing is just the regulatory environment. The number of regulations under the Green New Deal that the Biden administration put out are absolute choke points of in businesses. And it happens in all kinds of ways. I'm going to give you a little micro example that's not related to the Green New Deal, but there's a lot of this going on in the details of the Green New Deal. I owned a retail business in the City of Chicago. I got to compare what its regulatory environment was versus the Village of Skokie. The Village of skokie. I paid $50 for the business license. Never heard from again, Never had any other demands from the Village of Skokie. When I opened my location in the City of Chicago, I paid $1,200 for my licenses.
And then I had inspectors come to inspect my business for H Vac Electrical System, the sign inspectors, the driveway inspectors, and when I was in violation of their codes. So they said it would all go away if I make a donation to the local alderman, which I did. I paid the bribe because it was going to cost me tens of thousands of dollars of scarce working capital right when I was opening my second location and had all my capital invested in, invested in the business to do these repairs they said I needed. Once I paid that alderman, all the fines went away and it all disappeared. And of course there were no violations. They made that up. But even that I later learned is they charged me for those inspectors. I got a bill for the inspection fee for the electrical inspector, the H Vac inspector, the driveway inspector. All that takes money and time out of the entrepreneur's life. Instead of investing in his business and building it to serve people well, he's complying with a government mandate. And that's what the Green New Deal has done to many businesses.
[00:40:58] Speaker A: So getting back to Illinois and Chicago, my college classmate Ken Griffin is one of the many Illinois atlases that have shrugged in recent years, leaving the state's hostile business climate behind for more hospitable climates for Citadel, in his case, other companies that have left include Caterpillar and Boeing. How do you feel about such moves and have you ever been tempted to join them?
[00:41:28] Speaker B: Temptation every single day, Jag. It is very tempting to join them and perhaps one day I will. But the, you know, I know Ken a bit, and a great businessman, a great philanthropic entrepreneur, and he gave notice to the state of Illinois and the city that if they didn't get their act together, he was going to leave. For years, he gave notice and said that he was going to leave if they didn't get their act together. And they ignored him. And so he picked up and left. And it's not so much that, remember, it's not about Ken Griffin can afford to pay the state's 4.95 income tax. That wasn't the issue. The issue was the disrespect for that money. The issue was a disrespect for public safety. He had workers getting mugged on the streets in the heart of Chicago's business district when they were walking to and from his building to go to work. He was having trouble recruiting talent to come to the city of Chicago because the wives and families of the executives, husbands, were all worried about the safety of their spouse who was going to work at Citadel in the central business district. When you can't, you know, the fundamental deliverable of a government, in a sense, is at the local level, is public safety, great options on education and economic opportunity. And the city of Chicago in particular is failing on all three of those. And that's why people leave. So I don't blame them. It makes me very sad because Chicago was and still is a great city and still can once again be a thriving, growing city. But right now we're shrinking because too many people have done the shrug.
[00:42:59] Speaker A: So you talked about having to pay off the aldermen. Has corruption gotten better in Chicago? What about crime?
[00:43:09] Speaker B: Crime is terrible. And I had the great pleasure last March of going down to the pound where my daughter's Jeep Grand Cherokee was towed at 159th in the Dan Ryan and going through the horrific, apocalyptic, like process of getting it out of that pound so it could get towed to a place to have it repaired.
I learned standing in a line with about 30 or 40 people, I was the only Caucasian there. Everybody else was African American or Hispanic.
Families, young children, people pulled out of school and their jobs.
Almost everybody in that line had had their car stolen. There's somewhere between 30 and 40 cars stolen every day in the city of Chicago because of a lack of civility and good policing, because the police have been attacked and the political powers here are attacking the police.
And it really is an outrageous evolution, but it can be turned around. Rudy Giuliani proved that you can govern well and safely and Respect civil liberties in the turnaround in New York City. And I think that's going to take that kind of leadership here in Chicago.
[00:44:16] Speaker A: Well, it's not the kind of leadership you currently have. According to news reports last month, Mayor Johnson's reparations task force will start meeting this summer for a year to make recommendations.
Is that likely to be the beginning of a reparations plan for the city?
[00:44:34] Speaker B: We've had pretty good success. The Illinois Policy Institute team and particularly Austin Berg have done a phenomenal job on educating Chicago citizens and voters about the absolute abject failures of Mayor Johnson. He has the lowest approval rating that anybody has ever recorded, about under 8%. And he won with 52% in the spring of 2023. And so he is really, really on his way down. And he will be a one termer because he is unpopular with his own party. He has a fractured city council.
And the reparations idea is just another great example of just terrible judgment. It's terrible judgment in a couple of ways. One is it sends the wrong signal to people who might be considering investing in the city and growing their business in. It tells you that you are not welcome here, that you are going to be treated as a villain. And further, it distorts the actual truth about opportunity for all people in this city and African Americans in particular.
Reparations are one of the most divisive things you could ever foist upon a voting public. And it really is a separatist point of view rather than a unifying point of view. I think it will fail because I think that the public will see that it's not helpful to the cause of rebuilding the city of Chicago and creating unity among the people.
[00:45:55] Speaker A: So there's been some pushback on ICE arrests in places like Newark, with the mayor recently getting arrested there. Border czar Tom Holman has already warned Mayor Johnson not to interfere with ICE raids. Could he end up being the next mayor arrested?
[00:46:14] Speaker B: It would not surprise me because I think Mayor Johnson likes doing that sort of thing. And he wants to portray himself and position himself in the hero role and of course, to his constituents that he cares about, which is the Chicago Teachers Union and the radical socialists within it and communists within the Chicago Teachers Union. This would be a heroic gesture to get arrested by Tom Homan. And I say this as a very. I'm a very pro immigration person. I've written extensively about the need for this country to grow to a million people, billion people, rather, primarily by the end of the century, primarily through immigration.
Immigration has been one of the great entrepreneurial engines that have built this country. But the idea that we would have an open border without controlling it in this era and the dangers that exist in this era is just ridiculous. I have some quibbles with how the Trump administration is going about this, to put it mildly. But I think that you really do have to have the rule of law, and it will be interesting to see how that that conflict plays out. I think Mayor Johnson is playing a dicey game there.
I would like to go and visit him in jail. That would be fun.
[00:47:17] Speaker A: There you go. Always thinking about the marketing angle.
Well, given those quibbles and you say they're considerable, is that why you gave Trump a grade of B?
What is he doing right? What does he do deserve that grade? And what is he not doing to deserve an A, in your view?
[00:47:38] Speaker B: I'm a huge fan of the entire Doge experience.
I think it's been the critics of it fascinate me. It's much ado about nothing going in there and causing chaos within the administrative, within the executive branch, agencies holding them to account, searching and rooting out wasteful spending, stupid spending, corrupt spending. The USAID debacle alone has been worth the joy. He almost got to a just for that. I think all of that has been really fantastic. We can always quibble about the methodology and how they went about it, but I assure you that if this had been Barack Obama that implemented DOGE during his time, he would be hailed as one of the greatest reformers and presidents ever. It's only because it's Donald Trump doing it that the left is criticizing it. I mean, they're on the side of government bureaucrats and bureaucrats and wasteful spending. It really is quite a So I think that is a huge success.
I am a free trader. I'm not a fan of tariffs, but I am also not a fan of other countries imposing tariffs on us and us doing nothing about it. So I have no problem with Trump using the tariffs as negotiating leverage as part of his tools.
Not just tools for the economics of tariffs, but he's also using the tariffs as diplomacy tools. Tariffs are a lot less expensive than war making, and he is trying to accomplish some things in the international arena, in bilateral relations with some of the people that are adversaries of ours and some of them competitive allies that are a lot cheaper to do through tariffs. So I think the tariffs issue is too early to decide what's good or bad. I do think that the rollout and how they've gone about it, my main Criticisms in terms of the B are primarily not policy, but rather methodology. And the way they promoted it and rolled it out, I think they could have done a much better job of that. I've been very pleasantly surprised by the competence and the articulation, articulate nature of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. I think that's been quite extraordinary. I think people are completely missing the boat on the Qatar jumbo jet that has been offered to the United States. I think Trump's entire comments, when you go back and dissect them, you'll realize what he's really trying to do is apply pressure to Boeing to deliver the jets that they have promised and are running way behind on and over budget. On he shamed the Boeing company during that whole episode. And I think that's what it's really about. It's not about the jet, it's about putting pressure on Boeing in a very political and public way.
So all of that is good. It'll be interesting to see how the big beautiful bill comes out and whether he gets tax cuts on tipped wages and overtime. A lot of people on the right have criticized that. I have not. I've been a big fan of it, not because I think I do understand the criticisms that it's not holistic tax reform, but it's directionally correct.
Not taxing tipped wages and not taxing overtime is reducing marginal taxation on middle class and working class people. This is a beautiful idea and should be embraced, pocketed and then built on to expand.
[00:50:29] Speaker A: So you mentioned Obama before, that if he had done doge, he would be celebrated. Assuming that you must have crossed paths with Obama, you've been on the political scene in Illinois for a while, so any anecdotes or insider stories of people that you've interacted with daily.
Blagojevich, Emmanuel Pritzker, Durbin.
[00:50:52] Speaker B: I've met Barack Obama. I once put together and hosted an event with the late, great Senator Tom Coburn and then Senator Obama here in Chicago, right across the street from where I'm sitting now in the old US Post Office Building.
And the purpose of them coming together here was to do an event where they were working together to ironically cut out waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government. And the the point of the story was that Cockburn wanted to do it to return reduce the deficit and save taxpayer money. Obama wanted to do it to identify it so he could redeploy it to higher, better uses of government spending. So they shared this interest in doing that. And I got to spend a little time with both of them. I had known Tom Coburn well and for many years and I was a great admirer of him.
So it was good to see him again and very sad that he died a couple of years ago now. But Obama lived up to his billing. He was an arrogant, a condescending, patronizing U.S. senator, and that was his reputation. And he delivered on every count. He really does think that he is walking on water.
[00:51:58] Speaker A: All right, so Pritzker, he's being talked up as a possible 2028 presidential contender. Sounds hard to believe. On what, what priorities might a Pritzker administration focus?
[00:52:12] Speaker B: He's going to run on the traditional Democrat agenda, which is of course abortion and complete and open access to abortion in every sense of it. He's going to run on taxing millionaires and billionaires and raising marginal rates.
He's going to run on an anti school choice agenda and try to increase the power of the teachers union.
He, he is very much going to run on the entire group, identity politics and DEI thinking.
And he is also a very condescending person who, amusingly, a CEO of a Fortune 100 company headquartered here in Chicago once said to me about Governor Pritzker, before he was Governor Pritzker and was clearly thinking about running for governor. Pritzker running for governor rather. He said, well, he's as intelligent as a warm egg sandwich. But I gotta say, you gotta give Pritzker credit. He's the governor two times elected. But if you actually go back and look at his 2018 victory against an unpopular Bruce Rauner, and if you look at his 2022 reelect spending, I think he spent nearly $100 million the first go around and he spent somewhere around $60 million the second go round. He really underperformed relative to that financial advantage in a blue state. So I don't think he's going to be as good or formidable as his people think. I think he will not wear well. I think in much the same way Kamala Harris did not wear well, I think Governor Pritzker will not wear well. His approval rating, he's like at 49, 48, he should be massively popular in this state, given all the things that theoretically are going for him and he's not. And in fact, I think he's ripe to have that approval rating come down over the next 18 months.
[00:53:52] Speaker A: So Locke stock and barrel has a question which kind of dovetails or mirrors one of mine. He asks, do you think places like Chicago will continue to crumble or do you think things are starting to turn around My question was, you know, you're clearly invested in Chicago building a museum there and, you know, have yet to shrug and join those and various Galt sculges and other parts of the country.
What are some reasons for optimism? Do you see any green shift shoots?
[00:54:25] Speaker B: Well, to be very clear, I'm not building the museum in Chicago, and Chicago is not on my top five list. I have other locations that we're looking at that have to do with donor interest as well as some geographic flexibility. So we've looked at Miami, Nashville, Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta and a few other places, but definitely not going to build it in Chicago. For all these reasons. I don't think Chicago's earned it. A lot would have to change here for me to want to build it in Chicago. Chicago is a great museum city. It has fantastic civic institutions that this city should be very proud of. The business community that has funded these institutions should be very proud of what they've done. It truly they're crown jewels among the best in the entire world do exist here in Chicago. I remain optimistic because Illinois is not California or New York or even Massachusetts. The people, when you poll the people, they are fairly moderate. Even Democrats are fairly moderate. The number one problem in Illinois is not that the electorate has completely abandoned common sense and become radically leftist. That's not true. Remember Bush Rauner won in 2014, and his predecessor nominee almost won in 2010. Bill Brady, a conservative Republican from downstate Illinois, came within 30,000 votes of winning in 2010. And then Ronner did not have a good term. And then, of course, you had the Pritzker effect. So the state is not completely gone. The problem is that the Democrats are excellent cartographers.
And so they have drawn maps both for the state House and Senate, as well as congressional districts that are very tough to overcome. They're really well done to protect Democrat seats. That's a problem that has to be addressed. And then secondly, the biggest problem is frankly, funding disparity. A lot of people given up. A lot of the donor class in Illinois has given up on putting political money into the state, and people like Ken have left. And Ken was putting huge amounts of money into politics in the state of Illinois. So until the political side of the equation starts to build some stacks and wins and demonstrate that it can compete and win in a material way, the number one problem is going to be belief and faith and thus investing.
But with investment, we could be competitive.
[00:56:30] Speaker A: You've managed to get through nearly an entire hour without sneezing. So I don't want to put that thought into your head. Any final, any final thoughts or any questions that I should have asked but didn't?
[00:56:43] Speaker B: Well, let me first say, Jack, it's been great to be on here with you and I really enjoyed our budding friendship. It was so fun to be at the X Prizes with you and get to know you better. And I've become a fan of Atlas Society and I see why it has done so well under your leadership. You really have turned it into a juggernaut of the philosophy and you've made it a lot of fun. So thank you for that, for what you're doing for the cause, as well as having me on.
I think the number one question I often get from people who are in the liberty space is what can I do? How can I help?
And I would encourage people to get involved. You can get involved, obviously, with your organization. That's one way to be involved and get to help. But, you know, show up at a local school board meeting, show up at a city council meeting, write some notes about it and post it in your community social media pages. Let people know what's going on. Become an American course for the cause of liberty in some form or fashion. It doesn't take a lot of time. And you'll find that the engagement can be interesting, exasperating, but also in the end, very rewarding.
[00:57:44] Speaker A: Well, thank you for that and I think that's great advice. So thank you, John, and thanks to all of you who showed up and asked great questions for any of you in the Illinois environ, keep in mind that this year, for the first time in nine years, years, we're bringing our annual fundraising gala to Chicago. We are going to be honoring Richard Stevenson, founder of the Cancer Treatment Centers of America, and Michael Shellenberger, previous guest on this show, is going to be our keynote. And of course, best of all, apparently you'll have the chance to meet John Tillman in person. So be great.
[00:58:24] Speaker B: I can't wait to be there.
[00:58:26] Speaker A: Be great to see you there.
Please be sure to join us next. Next week I will be off, but Atlas Society senior scholars David Kelly and Richard Salzman will host a special webinar on capitalism and equality. Why these words so often get misconstrued and can invoke kind of mixed messages and what we can do to think and communicate more clearly. See you then.
