All right, folks, it's time to jump into the mailbag. Remember, you have to be a subscriber in order to have your question answered. So head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe. Bob says, hey, Ben. You answered a question on a previous mailbag about planned obsolescence that I thought was interesting. As a follow-up to that question, I similarly have a socialist-minded friend who claims capitalism thwarts progress rather than facilitates it. He points to the profit motive of the pharmaceutical industry, for instance, and uses an old cliche we are all familiar with. The money is in the treatment, not the cure. He claims that if there was, quote, no such thing as money, end quote, the medical and pharmaceutical industries would be incentivized to cure disease rather than treat it. What would you say to rebut this notion? Do you believe that if a cure for, say, Alzheimer's were discovered tomorrow, it would be withheld for purposes of profit? Okay, so let's start

with the, there are two basic ideas here that are wrong. One is that if you got rid of money,

that you would be therefore incentivized to cure Alzheimer's. How? With what? What would the

incentive be? Altruism? Altruism, very weak incentive structure for most

human beings, especially when you're talking about dedicating your entire life at presumably

no pay and with no remuneration for any of that sort of stuff. Okay, so you do in fact need an

incentive structure. Two, as far as the idea that if there were a cure for Alzheimer's discovered

tomorrow, that that would be hidden, the answer there is no because it would be the most lucrative drug in world history.

In world history, you could charge whatever you wanted to governments all over the world for that drug.

This happens all the time, by the way.

The reality is that, for example, the amount of money to be made in

treating, say, chicken pox is greater than the amount of money to be made in vaccination

for chicken pox. That's just a fact, because you have all sorts of palliatives and you have all

sorts of stuff that you could do to sort of mitigate the symptoms. And yet the vaccine for chickenpox was promulgated. This happens, again, all the time in medicine. It turns out that the competitive market means that if somebody is able to edge out a product with a superior product, they will do it, even if it means that the problem is cured in the long run. How many human problems have been cured over the course of capitalism a lot?

How many have ever been cured by socialism? Pretty much zero. Alexander says, I often hear you say everything is baked into the cake when it comes to Trump and his voters. I agree. Can't the same be said about Biden? I mean, he's been in office for over 50 years. No, because the perception of Biden as a genial elderly fellow, that has been shattered by his actual presidency.

He's now seen largely as mean and common. years. No, because the perception of Biden as a genial elderly fellow, that has been shattered by his

actual presidency. He's now seen largely as mean, incompetent, and senile. That is a difference from

where he was even three, four years ago, where he was largely seen as a nice guy, not all there,

but nice enough guy with basically moderate principles. When you can change everybody's opinion of a person, that means it's not baked into the cake. Has anyone had their opinion of Trump change over the past few years? Not really. Lee says, hey Ben, back in high school, I took APUS history. Unfortunately, I didn't put much efforts into the class. I never took the time to truly study and appreciate our country's history. Now, similar to the stand-up routine by Shane Gillis, you reviewed recently. I've recently found myself interested in studying World War II, the older I get. I've been watching shows like Band of Brothers, movies like Dunkirk, The Darkest Hour, Saving Private Ryan. Are there any other movies and books you think are required reading to understand the Second World War? Well, I mean, if you're into sort of required reading, there's tons of books. Rick Atkinson has a fantastic three-part series on

the war in Europe, starts in North Africa, moves on into Europe. There's a great book by

Neil Ferguson called The War of the World of the World War. It talks about everything from

World War I to the end of World War II. Great book by Victor Davis Hansen about the Second

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