 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Brookshow. Alright everybody, welcome to Iran Brookshow on this Thursday, June 15th. Thanks for joining me. Sorry I didn't do a show earlier today, one of my news roundups. You know, I can't tell you what's going on right now, but it's just consuming, all consuming my time, and stuff is unpredictable, and I just, I couldn't do it today. I hope to do one tomorrow. If not in the morning, I might do one in the afternoon. But this week's just been hell, so hopefully things will settle down a little bit next week. But at this point I'm not convinced of that, so we will see. Anyway, I'm trying to get back on schedule, trying to get as many shows as possible done. We are going to see some slippage. If there's slippage, I'll add shows other days, but we're trying to make it up to you. But yeah, so I apologize for not having shown it earlier today. Today we're going to talk about economics, we're going to talk about what it is, what it studies. We're going to talk about why it's so much stupidity out there. Why is there so much bad stuff? Rafael says he's going to sleep. It's very late in Europe. I get it, Rafael. Don't worry about it. Go to sleep. You can listen to this later. Sleep is very, very, very important. I'm reading a book on longevity. Sleep, crucial. Everybody should get a lot of sleep. I still believe sleep is just such a waste of time. Think about all the productive things you could be doing instead of sleeping, but it turns out in order to do productive things, while you're awake, you have to sleep. So it's incredibly valuable, incredibly important in spite of the fact that it's infuriating and maddening, and you have to engage in it. So how do we get to sleep? Because of Rafael, Rafael's going to sleep. So we're going to talk about economics. We're going to talk about why, in a sense, broken window fallacies just continue. Broken window fallacies never seem to go away. So I'll tell you what a broken window fallacy is, and we'll go through it. Daniel says he needs his eight-hour sleep. I do too, but I never get eight hours. I need it, but I never get it. I wish. I have all these measurement instruments to measure my sleep. I never actually get eight hours of being asleep. That would be phenomenal. Just a few nights of eight hours being asleep, eight hours, too much, too much. That would be amazing. That would be amazing. So I'm all for it. I wish I could do it. When I was younger, I think I could do it. But then I forced myself to sleep less, so now I'm paying the price. Yeah, so we're going to talk broken window fallacy, and we're going to see broken window fallacies everywhere. We're going to critique conservative economics. We're going to critique leftist economics. So we're going to give a bunch of examples. And why is the field so stupid when it comes to policy in particular is what, really, we're going to talk about today. And part of it is the field doesn't know what it's really studying. So that is the theme for today. Remind everybody, Super Chat is the way with which you support the show. It's the way in which you ask questions on the show. You interact with me on the show. What is the copy function? Not functioning. There it is. Okay, now it should function. Okay, so you can use the Super Chat to ask questions. You can use the Super Chat to give a sticker and just show support. So before you go to sleep, you can just pop in and do a little bit of supporting the show. A lot of people watch, listen to you on Bookshow, on YouTube, on podcasts, on all kinds of different ways. Of all those people, only a certain percentage actually contribute value for value. So Super Chat, for those of you watching live, is a great way to make that trade. For those of you not watching live, you're on Bookshow.com slash support. And Patreon are probably the two best ways. And just recently got two, somebody came in at $250 a month and somebody else came at $500 a month. Just new people on your on Bookshow.com slash support. Thank you, thank you. I need another, I mean realistically you need another about 10 of those. 10 of those and we'll be cruising. We'll be in really, really good shape. But that's what we need. All right, let's see. Yes, economics, economics all around us. Everybody talks it constantly in the news. People have questioned about it, politicians, economists, public intellectuals, pundits, constantly talking about economic issues. So what are economic issues? What are the issues related to economics? Economics is a field study and I find the standard definitions of economics frustrating and really good people use these standard definitions and stand by them and it really kind of drives me crazy. Lionel Robbins probably has the most famous definition that many people use or many people refer to and that is economics is the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between given ends, where those ends come from, and scarce means which have alternative uses. And what you get is over and over and over again this scarce resources. So there's another definition, chapter GPT provided. Oh, this I'm reading actually part of this from Scott Linsicum's latest article for the dispatch. It's called Enough Already with Todd Lee Economics. You can see where I got my title. I'm not very original, I admit it. I got up this morning wasn't sure what program I'm going to do tonight and then I saw Scott's thing and said, huh, that's a great topic. I'm doing it a little different and I'm going to cheat different things but I'm using a lot of material here as you'll see. And so thank you Scott Linsicum for providing the material. Everybody, everybody out there should be subscribing to Scott's sub-stack on the dispatch. He is the best commentator right now in economic policy that we have is really, really, really good. So support him. Not just me, support him too. Thank you Robert for getting us going. Thank you Cook for asking the first question. Hopefully we'll get a bunch more so that we can get to our numbers. Anyway, so economics chat GDP. When asked about economics provides this answer. Economics is social science that studies our individuals, businesses, government, and societies make decisions about how to allocate their scarce resources. These resources can include labor capital, land, and natural resources and they are considered scarce because they are not enough of them to satisfy all the wants and needs of individuals in society. Oh God, I mean there's so many problems with these definitions. There's so many problems because they ignore the fundamental reality of the world in which human beings live. And that is not, the fundamental reality is not scarcity. That's what they center everything about. Now there's an element of truth in the idea of scarcity. But it's not the central concept of economics, it's not what economics is. And it's certainly not about allocate resources. One has to ask really fundamental questions before that or what is it, satisfy all wants and needs. Where do those wants and needs come from? Where do resources come from? What is a resource? I mean, a labor capital land and natural resources just lying out there and we need to just jigger them around and put them in the right place. What is labor? Where is labor from? How does capital get created? How does it get deployed? Where does it get deployed to? Yeah, land is there, but land is useless. Most land is useless. And what's a natural resource? What makes something a natural resource? There's a lot of, and behind all of this is a massive amount of knowledge. Labor needs to be deployed in particular ways, that's knowledge. Capital, how it gets allocated, where it goes, there's knowledge about that. Land, okay, finite resource but how it's used requires knowledge. Natural resources to turn some gunk, black gunk that leaks out of the ground into oil requires knowledge. So it's not labor, I mean, there are not these resources out there. Something has to be brought to the foray in order to gain these resources. And people don't just have wants and needs that need to be fulfilled by whom, by just somehow. And the government is then there for allocating stuff in order to fulfill your demands and needs. And that gives a huge role to allocation. It sounds so collectivist and centralized and everything. And then they talk about economics as the study of scarcity. No, I mean abundance. I mean, if anything, economics is a study of abundance. You know, resources are not scarce as a starting point. There's nothing as a starting point. The starting point is the human mind and its ability to take stuff in nature, stuff that nobody considered resources and turn it into resources and turn it into stuff that then people want and desire. And then quote, there's not enough of it. Guess why? Because somebody has to produce it. The whole study of economics is about abundance. It's about creating stuff that people want and then figuring out how to get it to them. Not allocated, not distributed. So economics basically studies two fundamental phenomena that have to do with abundance, not with scarcity. And the two phenomena are production, the creation of goods, values, services, things that represent values to human beings and trade. The means by which people can attain those goods. So if I define economics, it's the science that studies production and trade. Really simple. And yes, it is true that when you study production, you constantly have to make choices that you constantly face trade-offs. This is the sense in which there's scarcity, right? I can't build, I can't build, if I have a limited amount of capital, I can't build this and that. I have to choose this or that. But okay, but that's just a question of production. What is most profitable? What is most value creating? What is the best thing for me to produce? So it's about the producers, it's about producing. And in facing choices about production, we have to make choices about how to deploy our capital. And it's not that capital is scarce, it's that at any given point in time, any given person or any given project has limited capital. And it's not clear that, you know, again, human beings. But then once we have robots and robots scarce, well, it depends. If I have enough money and the project is good enough, I can probably get as many robots as I need. But if I spend it on robots, I can't spend it on something else. So trade-offs, absolutely. So if you want to include decisions, you know, you could say it's the science that studies the decisions that are involved in production and trade. But then this is about wealth creation, it's about producing, it's about values. It's about value creation, not allocation, not redistribution. So we're ready when we engage with the field of economics, we have immediately a challenge where immediately the definition, the whole approach to economics is an approach that is biased. It is biased towards a collectivist approach, allocating resources, allocating scarce resources, allocating by what principle? You know, who's going to allocate it? No answer, right? It doesn't say by what standard I should allocate, right? It just, we allocate. And therefore, much of economics studies government and government coercion and there's no worry about that because the standard, well, we're allocating resources and there's nothing to say the government shouldn't allocate resources, might not be the most efficient, but we're just studying allocation of resources. So there is a lot of, there's a lot of problem with the definition right off the bat. The main methodology today in economics is, you know, particularly with regard to policy and kind of policy decisions, hold on one second, I need to make it just a little colder. It's summer in Puerto Rico and what happens in summer in Puerto Rico is not that it gets really hot because it doesn't, it never goes, really almost never goes over 90. What happens in Puerto Rico is that it gets super humid and the only way to prevent that humidity from affecting everything you do inside your home is to really crank out the air conditioning. So it's not so much that it's hot right now that I need the air conditioning on. It's that it's getting humid and the only way to get rid of that humidity is to make it colder. Sorry about that. I went and lowered the temperature so that the air conditioning would kick in and we'd get, we'd get it slowly starting to work. Not sure that's actually happening, but in theory that is what is supposed to happen. Anyway, so we've got a problem with the definition and then the methodology primarily when it comes to these kind of issues is empirical. So you go collect a bunch of data, you seek some relationships, you see what's connected to what. There's no, with the exception of, I'd say, old-style Austrians, there's very little thinking that goes on in economics about, okay, you know, how does an economy get going? What is it, what is required? What are the foundations of economic growth? What's the foundations of innovation? Even when they do that, they're trying to plug stuff into an equation they create. And it's only people like Mises and Kurtzner, if you know Israel Kurtzner, the great Austrian economist, who actually look at, well, entrepreneurs and business creation and their environmental entrepreneur faces. So regulations are bad to a large extent because they were strict entrepreneurs and if you're strict entrepreneurs, then you get less economic activity, you get less job creation, you get less wealth creation, you get less production and trade. So that's not at all the approach kind of, of observing what we're coming up with with first principles, testing those principles out in reality and then extrapolating from principles and, of course, testing. Now it's, there is no hypothesis, we just test stuff. Or we randomly come up with a hypothesis, as I guess the perperians would like us to do. And then we test it. And of course how do we test it? We run regressions, we do statistical analysis. The challenge there, of course, is very few people actually know how to do statistics and actually read the data properly and actually know what to do with the data and know how to, how to, how to adjudicate and what the results actually mean. How many people actually know that correlation is our causation? Everybody says it, but how many actually knows what it means and how to do it. So, so a lot of stuff in economics today is just garbage because it's no theory, no understanding of production and trade and human action and human decision making as regards to production and trade. All you get is, well I wonder if these are related. And if they are related, all right, well that's the relationship, there's a causal thing here. I'll give an example, I mean the classical example is minimum wage you know, simple theory would tell you that if you raise the minimum wage, it's not necessarily simple theory, but theory would tell you if you raise the minimum wage that overall, yeah some people's wages go up, but overall the number of jobs will actually decrease under certain conditions that will happen. And that's supply and demand and you know you need a little bit more than that in economics, substitute products and what else is going on in the economy and so on. But generally you can say, it used to be said, raise the minimum wage, generally the poorest of the poor, the ones who suffer, they don't get jobs, they lose their jobs and they don't do well, okay. But then somebody who wants to study, in this case there was a study in New Jersey, economist by the name of Card who will go on to win the Nobel Prize and in this study under certain conditions, he finds that they raise the minimum wage in New Jersey and nobody seems to have suffered. There was no decline in employment of anybody, supposedly. And out of that, policy advocates, some economists and a lot of people came to the conclusion, which has then been perpetuated over and over and over again because it's one study but it doesn't matter, it's the most important study ever because it confirmed kind of a result that people wanted to believe in. And now you have gazillions of people believing that you can raise the minimum wage with no end and really there's, or at least you can raise this significantly, without really affecting poor people, without affecting the jobs of poor people. And as a consequence, you get really, really bad policies, you get people raising the minimum wage because of one empirical study that dominates everything else. An empirical study that you cannot generalize from, that there's so many caveats about because it's in a particular time, in a particular place when the economy was doing something particular and the problem with statistical studies is you have to control for all of that. You have to take all of that into account. You have to take the whole context into account. So, but that's what they do. You know, so they mean study after study after study after study. The show that the minimum wage, what it does is it raises wages for those who still have jobs, those are not fired, but it leads to decline in the number of jobs it needs to decline in the hours people work. So for the average worker, the average job, the higher wage and lower hours pretty much balance each other out so they're making about the same. So total earnings don't change much. But for the jobs that are closest to the minimum wage, that what economists say most exposed to the minimum wage increase, the drop in hours exceeds the rise in wages and wages decline overall. Now that's not a surprising result. It's a result consistent with theory. It's a result consistent with logic. And I don't want to say intuition because intuition can often be very wrong, but it is the right result. But how many studies are going to be done on the minimum wage? Over and over and over again and disagreements and people question this variable and that variable and this regression and that statistical methodology. The answer is simple, straightforward, and the empirics actually support the answer. They have to. Reality is consistent with good theory. It doesn't matter. The mythology, the myth that minimum wage might not be related to increases in unemployment persists. And it persists everywhere. And it dominates. And it's just unquestioned. And people keep raising. Now we're talking about $25 minimum wages all over the country. And people don't stop. Junk economics. Stupid economics. Minimal wages, stupid economics. Rent control is stupid economics. It's people looking through very narrowly. They almost always have an ends that they want to achieve. That's you remember that definition? You know what was it? It's the same with studies, human behavior, relationship between given ends. What's the hell is a given end? So they decide that the given end is, we want everybody to make quote a living wage. That's the given end. So economic studies, the relationship between that end and the means by which they have an alternative uses, which have alternative uses. What? No judging the ends, of course. No judging the means, whatever is whatever. But that makes economics a purely, purely, well, depends on your interpretation. But economics also has to assume a particular end. And that assumption is in the production of trade. It has to assume production is good and trade is good. And if production is good and trade is good, certain things flow from that. Part of what flows from that is that you don't want minimum wages because they interrupt with the ability to produce and to trade. They redistribute scarce resources. Only so much wages I can pay. And the government then decides that I should pay to these people and not to those people and those people can lose their jobs. And nobody, again, nobody seems to care about this stuff and how silly and how straightforward this is. Right? So, you know, this is where we are. But, you know, what we're seeing, but what we're seeing consistently from economists now are these empirical studies or empirical statements that just have no relationship to the truth. Again, like the minimum wage statement. Just no relationship to the truth. And they're often couched in very sophisticated terms, but they ignore trade-offs. And this is where most of them are really broken window fallacies. So, let's talk a little bit about what the broken window fallacy is. I assume you guys know the broken window fallacy, but maybe not. Maybe there's some young people who haven't heard of it. So, here's the broken window fallacy. This was described by Bastiat in the 19th century. It was later presented, I think, to a larger audience by economics in one lesson, by, his name won't come to me in a minute, and it basically goes like this. Let's say you want to create some economic activity in your neighborhood. You want to get the engines of production going. You want to get, you know, more production. So, what you do is you give a kid a rock and you ask him to throw it through the window of the bacon. The kid throws the rock through the window of the bacon. And you go, yes. Yes. Now we're going to have some increased economic activity. Because what happens when you throw the rock, Hazlitz, thank you, Henry Hazlitz, I can't believe I forgot Henry Hazlitz's name. It's like, wait, Henry Hazlitz, yes. The kid throws the rock through the baker's window. The baker's window smashes. Well, now the baker has to replace the window. So he goes to Galatia. And he asks for the Galatia to make him a window. And the Galatia now has a job. He now has work. This is great. Because he comes out, he measures the window, and then he goes and he orders raw material. And now the company says the raw material has economic activity going on for it. So you can see there's a whole chain of economic activity created by the rock through the window. The rock through the window has created economic activity. And ultimately, the Galatia makes the window, cuts it to size and everything, and installs it, and has done the work. And that one act of breaking a window has created massive quantities of work through the entire supply chain. All the way out to getting the sand to make the glass, to make into glass. Now this theory is consistent with the idea that war is how we get out of depressions because war creates economic activity. Why? Because you break stuff. And once you break stuff, what has to happen? Well, you have to build it up again. So if you break stuff and then you build it, you've created economic activity because the building is economic activity that would not have happened if you hadn't broke it. So breaking stuff is actually good for the economy. Now, something's wrong here. Something's wrong. And the obvious thing that's wrong is, but wait a minute. I had a window before. Now I have a window. Nothing's changed. Yeah, a bunch of people did some work. But in the end of the day, I'm in the same position I was before. A lot of people did work, but we're in the same position. That is true. This cannot be wait. Something is screwy. Something is off. What's off? What has forgotten here? What is missing here? Well, it's the fact that the money you spent on the window could have been spent and indeed would have been spent on other things. That is the money you have choices in terms of how to spend it. So let's say you, the baker, were thinking of buying another oven. Well, now you can't buy the oven because you had to buy the window. So a bunch of economic activity around building the oven didn't get created. Instead, we got a window. And the important point here is the oven is new. It would have increased wealth, new production, more bread, more cakes, more whatever. The window, status quo, nothing changed. Or what if the money was just sitting in the bank and you didn't have any plans to buy a stove, a new oven? Well, what does the bank do with the money? It lends it out. It lends it out to some businessman who wants to build a new business and create a bunch of economic activity but if you withdraw that money and fund the broken window, well, then all that other economic activity can't happen because you took it out of the bank and the bank can't lend the money out. So the trade-offs, the alternative, the choices, the alternative possibilities have just evaporated. They're gone. The broken window has destroyed economic value. It's made all those other possibilities moot. All that other wealth creation, all that additional production, all that additional trade, gone. And instead you get trade, you get production that's non-additive. They basically put you back in the same place you were. Well, you as the baker are in a worse position because you have the same window, less money. Yes, the glacier now has more money. So we've allocated resources but to what end? Not to the end of wealth creation, not to the end of production and trade. Not to anything worthwhile. And a lot of problems in economic, a lot of fallacies in economic boiled down to some version of the broken window fallacy. I mean, even the idea that we should go out and stimulate the economy. We should pay a bunch of people to borrow, the government should borrow money and pay a bunch of people to dig trenches and then fill them up again. And that will pay the workers' wage and then the workers will then go and they'll buy bread and windows and rents and that will create economic activity. Create demand, right? But wait a minute. Where did you get the money to pay the workers? I sold some bonds. Well, but what were the people who bought the bonds from you, gave you the money to do all this? What would they have done with that money? Oh, let's say I raised taxes. What would the taxpayers have done with that money? Now, they have less to produce, less demand. The bondholders who bought your bonds, they have less money to go out there and build and create and invest and consume. So, you've shifted it, but all you've got to show for it is sand. Money's the same money. It's just being allocated differently. See, this is the danger of talking about economics is allocation. Yeah, oh, this is interesting. No, it's not. And it's not value neutral. Digging trenches and filling the back up, not good from any perspective. Not value creating. Not wealth creating, not production. There's no production happening. There's no trade happening. Taking some, giving to others, creating demand over here at the expense of demand over there. We haven't done anything. It's over and over and over again. You see this in analyses and economics, and it's everywhere. In the latest place, you see these, what I call stupid economics, or what Scott Linsicum calls, what do you call them, childish economics, or toddler economics. I like this, toddler economics. Toddlers, not even child, toddler, because they're so stupid. They're so obviously wrong. The latest place you're seeing this is in conservative circles. We'll get to the left in a minute, and the left we all know, crazy, Keynesian, Krugman, stimulus packages, all of that. Always been the currency of the left. It's always been, they don't know economics. But conservatives have always prided themselves on, no, no, we study economics. We have good economists. We know economics. We've read our Milton Friedman, and we know fallacies. Well, the conservative movement has changed. One of the most dynamic, new, cool think tanks, new publications have just come out, called American Compass. Aaron Cass is the CEO. It's a think tank devoted to, he calls it conservative economics. Conservative economics. Or, quote, common good economics. Common good economics, just like the common good constitutionalists, which is Vermeer's thing. Common good economics. And one of their big thesis, and one of their big pushes, is that protectionism and industrial policy are good. Are good things. And we've done them before, and they've worked. And we should go for it. So they give an example. They give lots of examples. They love examples. They're short on empirical evidence. They're certainly short on any kind of economic knowledge or theory. But they have these examples that seem to appeal to people. So in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan was, if you remember he bailed out Chrysler. And then he was worried about the big three automakers. So he basically sent his trade negotiators to Japan and got the Japanese to, what do you call it, to basically set quotas, self-imposed quotas, on how many automobiles they would export to the United States. And today, conservative economists go out there and say, see, this saved Detroit. You guys who want laissez-fait, who want freedom, you couldn't have saved Detroit. We need intervention. We need to go in there. We need to actually do stuff. We need a strict trade in a variety of different ways, with a variety of different techniques. And they say, look, we saved Detroit. We saved automakers. Maybe that's true. Maybe Detroit was saved. But what would have happened if Detroit had not been saved? Now, Jennifer might be out of a job right now. But maybe not. Maybe not. What would have happened to all that capital that Detroit sucked up to produce lousy cars during the 1980s and 1990s? They could have been deployed elsewhere. They could have created jobs that are more productive. They could have maybe spurred innovation. Created an even bigger boom in Silicon Valley than was created. Indeed, a bunch of economic analysis, and there's quite a few papers around this, show that there's almost this very weak causal connection, if any, between much of the foreign investment at issue. Right? Oh, I'm thinking of something else. Okay, so, yeah. And then, it's also described that because of these quotas, the Japanese started building factories in the United States. Well, did they? Did they build the factories because of the quotas? Or did they build the factories to be closer to the end consumer, to kind of shipping costs, to take advantage of the South, where they built their factories, which had reasonable labor costs and could produce better cars? And it turns out that there's weak causal relationship between the money invested by foreign automakers, the Japanese and the Germans, and all these quotas. And they're massive, massive costs generated by the quotas. I mean, all cars got more expensive for many years. Japan was driving costs down. Costs went up because American automakers were protected from Japanese competition. Big three automakers misallocated, they went for profits, invested in wrong places in the wrong things that ultimately led them to have to be bailed out by Obama in 2008. There's been lots of unintended consequences. Foreign automakers have actually done better, become more competitive, done much better than US. Imagine if there weren't quotas, if the American companies would have had to compete. Maybe they would have got faster, better, leaner. Maybe they would have got better deals with the unions. Competition, I thought, I thought, conservative economists, correct me if I'm wrong, I thought competition was a good thing. Indeed, it turns out that the Japanese automakers loved the quotas. It allowed them to raise prices. Because Detroit raised prices, they could raise prices. They couldn't compete anyway. It was a huge windfall for Japan. And the quotas remained in place, because the Japanese liked it so much, the quotas remained in place for years. After the Reagan administration abandoned them, told the Japanese, no, no, you don't need to have quotas anymore. The Japanese continued them, because it was good for their companies. It took the big three decades to become competitive. I'm not sure they ever became competitive. I'm not sure they're competitive today. This is bad policy. And yet, it is hailed by conservatives. Look, you know, classic kind of Trump conservatives. Yeah, we can manipulate. We can control trade. We know what's best. We can centrally plan it. We can allocate resources. But this is exactly the kind of broken window fallacy. Because, yes, Detroit made money. The guy who made windows makes money if you go around town smashing windows. Are we wealthier because Detroit made money? No, we're actually poor. Because all that money that Detroit sucked up in its higher prices could have gone to more productive uses. All that capital that was deployed in Detroit that was producing inferior products at higher prices could have gone to producing good products that actually enhance human life. Imagine if Silicon Valley had had even a greater capital boost than what it got. Now, of course, one of the reasons the auto companies do so poorly, one of the reasons American auto companies are not competitive in the world is because of ridiculous, stupid, unbelievable regulations that they suffer from that other automakers don't suffer from. Of course, all automakers in the U.S. suffer from these. But again, in other countries, they don't have these regulations, regulations about the weight and the size of automobiles and all kinds of stuff related to fuel economy and related to safety and related to all kinds of things that actually make American cars less effective, less efficient and less productive. But they were getting better with competition. When you stop competition, the incentive to get better goes away. The whole field of economics is what if. The whole field of economics is about choices. But choices in what you produce and what you trade. And what we can say without question is when the government intervenes to force a particular allocation of resources, it's going to be less efficient, less productive, less wealth creating than if we just let the market work. The government has no economic insight, has no economic ability to plan, to manage, to decide what windows to break to create economic activity. This is, again, the broken window fallacy. And even it turns out even somebody like Scott can't see that the broken windows doesn't work. And this is why this can easily be sold because most people don't engage with economics at any kind of depth. Most people just accept it. If Alan Cass says that, look, we saved Detroit. Yay, we saved Detroit. This is great. How good news is that we saved Detroit? And it looks obvious. We were strict to Japanese competition. We sold more American cars. We're done. We're good. Everything's fabulous. But as Haslitt teaches us in economics in one lesson, if you haven't read economics in one lesson by Henry Haslitt, you should, and some of you should probably read it again if you've read it before because it looks like you've forgotten the material. Then economics is about the consequences. And sometimes those consequences are second order, third order, fourth order. And it's hard to explain that to people. It's hard to tell them that if we hadn't broken the window, economic activity would have still, would have been better. If we hadn't broken the window, that money would have gone to some other economic activity. Suddenly can't tell the glacier. The glacier is going to lobby for breaking windows. You might even pay some kids to break the windows. So it's hard to get people to understand the deeper consequences of things. Or the conservative economists like to tell us, look at Europeans. The subsidies to Airbus have created this amazing competitor to Boeing. This is amazing. Again, this is from Scott Linsicum's article. Yet, if you look at Boeing, Boeing is very government dependent. Boeing gets subsidies. There's nothing special about Airbus here. Boeing is hand in hand with the government. And one of the reasons Boeing has bought up so much of the, you know, has become so immersed in building for the military is to become even more established with the government. So Airbus doesn't have any difference here. They're massive costs. Massive costs to the subsidies that Airbus and Boeing get, both political and primarily economic, and, you know, supporting Boeing and Airbus. It's probably stifled innovation globally. There have been studies like this. It's not that hard to see it if you subsidize two big players and you don't subsidize potential competitors. They don't exist yet. It's very hard to become a potential competitor. You're competing against somebody who's being subsidized. So you get very little innovation. You get a lot of planes built, substandard. You remember the Boeing that crashed? Two fatal crashes. One in, I think, in Africa and one in Asia, I think. It was the new model of 737. And then, of course, the monstrosity, the A380, the massive Airbus two-decker plane, not productive, not efficient. A380 is mostly being decommissioned. You get massive cronyism. You get budget overruns. Again, what would have been done with the money if it hadn't gone to them? And you get real systemic risk. And you got two airplane manufacturers in the entire world. One of the failures of Chinese central planning, one of the failures of Chinese industrial policy is China's attempt to build a competitor to Boeing and an Airbus. It's hard, really, really hard, particularly if you're doing it through the government. But that doesn't stop the conservatives, the new conservatives, the new right from declaring Airbus a huge victory is more proof that subsidies work. And, of course, one of the great myths that exists out there that I heard a lot when Trump was raising tariffs, like tariffs are like the stupidest dumbest of all economic policies, it's clearly attacks on Americans, unequivocally attacks on Americans, no economist thinks otherwise, again, except with the exception of these conservative economists, tariffs are destructive, they're taxes just like any tax. I thought conservatives were against taxation or against high taxes. Well, tariffs are just a way of raising taxes. I mean, people say, look, Trump was a great president. He lowered taxes. He lowered some taxes. He raised others. What's the net effect? Not clear that you're paying less taxes. But one of the mythologies that they've created, again, that they keep harping on, the conservatives do, is the Trump conservatives, the people who want to raise tariffs, is, look, America was built on tariffs. The whole 19th century, America had tariffs. And, look, the founders wanted tariffs. And they bought tariffs as a revenue mechanism for government and as a way to protect American industries. And it, quote, worked. Look, America became rich. Here's a great example of correlation does not mean causation. Should I say that again? Correlation does not mean causation. Yes, it's true. During a period of relatively high tariffs in the United States, the United States became rich. That means they will tell you, tariffs are what made America rich, or tariffs contributed, or tariffs enhanced, or tariffs were part of what made America rich. What if it turns out, as most economists believe, and most good studies of this period will show, what if it turns out that tariffs actually paid a negative role in U.S. development in the 19th and early 20th century? What if it turns out that America would have got richer, faster if it didn't have tariffs, and maybe healthier, maybe with less cronyism? It is an awful economic policy. One of the stupidest, dumbest, because it is so well understood. The consequence, the costs are so well understood. And yes, during a period where there was no regulation and there was always no taxation, tariffs didn't hurt the economy as much. But in a world in which we tax and we regulate then whatever they hurt now really hurts. Almost everybody who's actually studied this comes to the same conclusion. The fact that they existed did not contribute. Doug Owen, who is a Dometh economist, who wrote an important paper on the subject and wrote a book on the subject, his quote is that there is a correlation between high tariffs and economic growth in the late 19th century cannot be denied. The correlation is not causation. And the causation runs the other way around. While the causation doesn't run the other way around, the causation runs in a negative sign that is ultimately tariffs restricted economic growth. Economic growth could have been significantly higher. But this is what is being pitched today as economics. This is what is being pitched today as knowledge. And of course it's not just conservatives, it's the left, and I think one of the big myths that conservatives and the left share is about China. Look, China has grown so fast because of its subsidies. China has grown so fast because of its industrial policy. China has grown so fast, look at, they dominate. They dominate EV, they dominate batteries. Why? Because the government invested in it. Well, is it a good investment? Did they make a good return on their money? Could their money be deployed to better investments and contribute more to the standard of living quality of life of Chinese? No answer. I mean, anybody who's actually looked at it, anybody who's actually studied it knows the answer. The latest big study that was done in two papers in 1 in 22 and 1 in 23 and a third paper that was published this May and also 2023. It basically showed that the industrial policy in China between 2007 and 2018 was ineffectual, was destructive, lowered productivity. It turned out that government subsidized bigger, less productive companies. That money was given to prop up failing firms and that it actually was a bad allocation of resources. The same is true of Made in China 2025, which both the left and the right drool over. The same is true of the CHIP Act, of the whole slew of American policies today that are meant to take from some and to invest the government will invest. And right now the big thing, the Biden administration is very excited about this, that the right is supporting this. The Biden administration is bigger right now on. I don't know if you've seen the stats, but building industrialization in America is on the uptick. More factories are being built, more production is happening, but more factories, real, literal factories are actually being built all over America. And Biden is saying, see, this is the consequence of the Inflation Reduction Act. This is a concept which is spending a lot of money on building EVs and building all kinds of battery factories and giving subsidies and billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars of subsidies. And then of course the same thing is true of CHIPs, you know, semiconductors and factories to semiconductors, billions and billions of dollars. The whole CHIP Act, bipartisan by the way, CHIP Act that is responsible for this. And basically what's going on right now is the administration is saying, see, we told you so. All we need to do is have the government invest in American manufacturing and we could get a manufacturing boom. Nobody considers how we're going to pay for these subsidies. What happens to all this government debt that is being accumulated in order to pay for it today? What could be done with all the interest payment that we pay in order to pay off the debt if we actually invested it? Whether anybody at all is doing any kind of analysis on whether these investments are good investments? Whether we get a return on our capital, a return on investment? No considerations of what BK2050 is calling opportunity cost. That is, what could I have done with this money? No considerations about that. Will these factories actually be manned? Will they actually produce? How much will they produce? Will they be competitive given that they're being subsidized? Will the winners be good? Will they innovate? Again, evidence out of China is that when you subsidize industries like this, the winners are the losers. The winners are the least productive companies. The winners actually retract from economic growth and economic prosperity. There's nothing here about giving money to the historically marginalized. This money is flowing to areas that have nothing to do with historically marginalized. They're flowing into businesses that have nothing to do with historically marginalized. These are, quote, investments in the economy. You know, you look at the factories, you look at what kind of factories are being built. You look at where they're being built and by whom. This has nothing to do with redistribution of wealth. This has everything to do with industrial policy. And this is the kind of industrial policy that Republicans support fully. Let's say a good example, you know, that Scott uses. He says with enough subsidized water, you can grow cotton in the Arizona desert. I think they were growing rice in California. Rice. Massively water-intensive. And they still, one of the largest crops in California is almonds. Massive consumers of water. Why? Because the water is subsidized for farmers in California. I mean, there's no end to the distortions and perversions and misallocation of capital and broken window fallacies and lose, you know, government and subsidies picking winners and losers and destruction. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. So, you know, economics is in bad shape. Economics, is it applies to policy? Is it applies to politics? Is it applies to how our government functions and what its priorities are? And the sad, the really tragic thing is. And the tragic thing is that people support this and buy into this. And don't think this is a problem because, you know, tariffs, oh, that's not a big of a deal. What the hell? It doesn't matter. What matters is woke. That's what matters. You know, the reality is that the Republican Party now, the right generally has lost interest in economics. To the extent that they're interested, they basically bought into most of the ideas of the left with regard to government involvement in the economy. Government, maybe they don't want the government to own the means of production, but they certainly want the government to manipulate and to control the means of production and to, you know, subsidize the means of production and provoke the distribution of capital, labor and resources. The right and the left today share a broken window. See, it used to be, it used to be the good old days. Well, I used to criticize the right because they want free market enough. Those are the good old days. Because now they're not free market at all. They're just not free market at all. And we're not talking about the establishment. We're talking about the Trump Republicans. We're talking about the DeSantis Republicans. We're talking about the Republicans that today dominate the Republican Party. They care about woke and DEI, and yeah, they should. It's important. You can do things to reduce the impact of them culturally in the culture. That's good. But to the extent that they care about economics, they want tariffs and they want controls and they want industrial planning. They want everything the left has always wanted. But the right will deliver. The right always delivers to the left, but the left really wants. All right. All right, that is my spiel. I'm sure we'll come back to these kind of topics again. There's a lot to talk about when it comes to economic issues. I encourage you all to read Scott Linsicum and to subscribe to his sub-stack and support his work. There's still some people out there, Scott being one of them and some other people from places like Cato, who actually do good economic work, who actually challenge both Republicans and Democrats on the nonsense that they preach. Their job has only become harder because now they have to fight both left and right. It used to be that they mostly just fought the left. Now they have to fight the left and the right. Scott is amazing. If you follow him on Twitter, you should follow him on Twitter. He tweets many, many times a day and the articles he links to and his Twitter comments are always insightful and interesting. Support the good guys. It's the one thing you can do to change the world is to support the good guys, to support the people fighting the battle. Don't support people who are fundamentally opposed to your values even if in some element you share common enemies. Don't support the conservatives just because they hate woke. Support somebody like Scott who hates woke and is good. Support people who hate the woke and are good on other things and the alternative to woke is actually a positive alternative. And those of you who are not sure what I'm talking about listened to this show from two days ago about Christianity and woke. What should I choose? Christianity or I know how some of you will choose but what should a rational person out there actually choose? Not woke and not Christianity is the answer. Choose reason. Choose rationality and find the people who represent reason and rationality in the world out there and provide your support moral, financial, philosophical to them. Don't waste your time on the desantuses of the world. Don't waste your time on people who are going to ruin the world but just, you know, it won't be woke. All right, we've got a bunch of questions. Thank you. We've got a lot of questions. So let's limit questions from now on to $20 and above. We also, in spite of this, we have a lot of questions because a lot of them are $5 to $10 questions. So if we had this many questions or $20 questions, we'd make our goal. Our goal is 650. We're about 390 short. So we're not even halfway. So we need some $20 questions to get to closer to the goal. Of course, some of you can do 50, 100 as no one has done. So Louis, Philip Noel, and the rest of you, $20 questions from now on, please. I've got enough $5 to $10, so it'll be hard for me to get through and then Ed goes and does a $10 question. Just when I ask not to do $10 questions, you know, I've got a ton of those and it's going to be hard for me to get through all of those questions in the allocated time for the show and, of course, if it goes longer, then you should, again, value for value. So $20 questions, guys. All right, no one for $50, not 50 euro, better than $50. I've been enjoying the last few shows. I am starting to read your book on inequality. Wonderful. Thank you. You introduced a bunch of new ways of thinking about the world and people to me. Thank you very much for that. I don't know if you've had Iron Rand yet. So, Ed, you could have kept the question. You didn't have to retract the question. I was giving you a bit of a hard time, but I didn't mean for you to delete the question. So, no one, I hope you're reading Iron Rand. I hope on your list is to read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountain Head and Capitalism Not Known Ideal and The Virtue of Selfishness and Other Books because that's where the most value you're going to get. So, thank you for reading my book to all of you. Read Iron Rand, read Iron Rand, read Iron Rand. Over and over and over again. Thank you, no one. Very generous and appreciate that I've had an impact. Ian says, did you see Michael Knowles, what Michael Knowles said he wants, quote, our civilization to be a socially conservative, we were in the 1220s. These are the people Scott wants to support. Our civilization to be as socially conservative as we were in the 1220s. Not 2012 or the 1950s. At least these people are being honest about their ambitions. Yes, and they're being more honest and it's coming out and they're revealing what they really are. They're revealing their true identity. And what they really are in their true identity is they have a middle ages mentality. They have a dark ages mentality. And the reality is that the social conservatism of 1220 cannot produce the material wealth of 2023. So when he says our civilization to be socially conservative as we were in the 1220, he also wants to be as poor as he was in the 1220. He also wants to be as disease-ridden as he was in the 1220. He also wants to live only to the age of 30. I mean, these people are despicable, disgusting, low. They are the worst. They are just as bad as the worst environmentalists who want to destroy everything we have and return us to the cave. The idea that they represent the good guys in any rational sense is absurd and bizarre. He wants our civilization to be socially conservative as we were in the 1220. They were burning witches. I mean, it's hard for me to express how disgusting I think this is. It makes me feel... And these are supposed to be the right individual rights, freedom, liberty, 1220. Yeah, in 1220, they knew what a woman was and they kept her in their place. They kept her in their place. She could own property. She did what her husband told her. She had, but she always had dinner ready when he came home. Otherwise, she got beaten up and, you know, she beat up your wife and happened to kill her. No big deal. Don't worry. Just remarry. That's 1220. 1220. I pull out my hair, but I don't want to cause myself injury because of an idiot. I mean, an evil idiot like Michael knows. This is evil. This is evil. And to the extent that the daily wire buys into this, it's evil. All right. Is it after the Magna Cotta? When was the Magna Cotta? What's the year of the Magna Cotta? 1150 or something? Yeah, but he didn't say England. Maybe he wants socially conservative France or Italy. England was a backwater in 2020. Oh, 1215, only five, okay, five years earlier. I mean, no, this is what they believe. This is completely consistent with Matt Walsh's barbaric views about the place of women and the slavery and a bunch of other things. This is consistent with, you know, I doubt that you'd hear Ben Shapiro say this. Ben Shapiro knows, I think this is, you know, knows what was going on with Jews in 1220. So I don't know that he would support this. It's just so despicable. And Scott is continuing to defend this guy. Is it likely that minimum wage laws are favored by politicians to increase their support among people who become unemployable because of the minimum wage laws and come to depend on the state for their welfare checks? I don't think that that's sophisticated. I really don't think politicians play 3D chess. I think that politicians want to increase the minimum wage because most people, more people benefit from it than are hurt by it. So they gain the votes of the people who got the raise and the people who fall into unemployment usually it's a smaller number and they can go to those people and say, see those evil capitalists, they laid you off. They could have increased prices. They could have cut corporate profits. They could have done all these other things. They laid you off. And they're not even buying union votes because unions are so small today. Again, particularly in private industry, only 6% of people working in private industry are unionized. They're buying the votes of the people who get a raise and they know they can blame the capitalists for any people who get fired. I don't think politicians want people to be in unemployment because then they become more dependent on them. I don't think that that's sophisticated. Andrew says, enlightened men agree that girls should be encouraged to be ambitious. But does that mean boys should be taught to sit down and be quiet? Does a society of thriving women require a society of anxious differential men? No, of course not. That is absurd and ridiculous. That is unfortunately what we're getting today. But no, men should be encouraged to be just as ambitious as women and to manifest their ambition in what they value, which is surprisingly might be a little different than what girls do, particularly when they're young. I mean, even in countries that have almost no discrimination between men and women and they raise them the same and men and women choose different professions. Scandinavia is a good example of Scandinavia. They make a huge effort when their children not to treat girls and boys differently. And yet girls and boys are different. And they develop different interests, different values, and they go to different professions. Not all boys, not all girls, but generally overall. So men should be encouraged to be ambitious. But ambition is not at somebody else's expense. Ambition is not a zero-sum game. A girl's ambition does not detract from a man's ambition. It just increases competition. Competition is a good thing. So, no, men need to be, boys need to be boys. They need to pursue their ambition and things that they love and the things that they're engaged in. You notice they should be discouraged forcefully from using force. There's certain things that boys do, I think because of hormones, that can manifest themselves in violence and can manifest herself in bad behavior. Well, that needs to be challenged. That needs to be explained to them why that's wrong. But that's not the same as telling boys to sit down in the corner and be differential. It's just a matter of channeling that energy, that excitement, that passion, that testosterone, if you will, into productive avenues. Andrew says, Alan Greenspan gloats about inventing FedSpeak, pradding on with economic terms that altogether mean little. And not little mean nothing. When I hear a Fed chair, it sounds like self-importance and elemental assertion. As an expert, what do you hear? Well, I think most Fed chairman, other than Alan Greenspan, are a lot more intelligible. But Alan Greenspan mastered the skill of not saying anything. His basic hypothesis, which is true, was when I give a speech, the people listening don't understand anything about economics. They don't really understand how the Fed works. And he's talking here about Congress. They don't understand how the Fed works. They don't understand anything about what's going on. And if I give them actual facts and information, they'll do stupid things. So what I need to do is sound. Super sophisticated, super smart, super like I know what I'm doing. And feed off of the fact that they have no clue anyway. So keep them at that level. Keep them at the point of no clue. And he literally writes this in his autobiography that that's what he was aiming for. He was aiming to provide them with no information because they could add no value to him anyway. Now, I mean, I think that corrupted him. It corrupted the institution. It corrupted the ability of Congress to monitor the Fed. It corrupted everything. And it comes from a point of arrogance. And it comes from as if Greenspan understood what he was doing. Greenspan, the smartest central plan of all time. He understood what he was doing. Nobody else did. But when I hear Yellen or what's his name now? Powell. Yeah, what they make, what they say makes sense. It doesn't mean it's it makes sense economically, but I understand what they're saying. I understand why they're saying it. Literally what Alan Greenspan used to say is gibberish. Gibberish. All right. I got a few $50 here. Wes, thank you for the $50. Really, really appreciate that. Wes did a sticker for $50. All right. So we're $250 short of our goal. We got about 100 people watching. Three bucks from everybody watching. We'd get our goal. You can use the sticker to make a contribution. Value for value. You're listening right now. Is this worth a latte or cappuccino at Starbucks? I think it is. So just do a do a do a sticker for what it would cost you a latte cappuccino. Pretend you're drinking coffee and enjoy the show. Enjoy the show. And that way you contribute to the show and we can make our goal. So just do a sticker for something. Depending on how valuable you think this is. Three bucks, five bucks, thousand bucks, whatever you think. David, for $50. Thank you, David. What are your thoughts on Bitcoin as a financial asset? I'm not a fan. I don't hold Bitcoin. I guess if you've got a well-diversified portfolio, you want to put a little bit in Bitcoin just in case it goes to a million dollars. Not a lot. But I wouldn't put a lot. I put a little. It's super volatile. It's not clear what drives its price. The government is clearly in a campaign to destroy crypto. And that means to me that the government will not let Bitcoin replace the dollar. And it can't replace the dollar. I believe unless the government lets it. So I'm not a huge Bitcoin fan. I'm not an opponent. I wish crypto and Bitcoin could come up with the killer app, the application that everybody would want to use and require to use. But I don't think the government's going to allow them to do that either. I mean, the government is basically shutting down crypto. They're doing everything they can. They're going after the exchanges. They're going after banks that deal with crypto. They'll go after crypto companies directly. They'll make it very, very difficult. Indeed, the venture capitalists who invest in crypto are moving their capital overseas. But overseas, also, governments, they will stop coming down. And in addition, overseas, you just don't have the talent pool you have in the United States. You don't have the scale. If the US Fed and the government decides they want to kill crypto, they'll get other governments to do the same thing. So I'm not a big fan, although there is a possibility I'm wrong. And that might justify putting, I don't know, 2, 3, 4, 5% of your investable funds into Bitcoin or Ethereum. Ethereum is another one that might be worthwhile looking at as a hedge against Iran being wrong. It doesn't happen often, but it does sometimes. Adam says the life expectancy in 1220 was 12 to 20. Approximately, yeah. That's why Christianity leads us. That's why the choice cannot be between... I mean, the choice might land up being between woke and Christianity, but it's not a choice we want to embrace. Both lead to 1220. Both lead away from life with a capital L. All right, we're still about $250 short. As I said, use a sticker, whatever, do whatever you want. But let's see if we can get the numbers up. I'm going to answer the $5 to $10 questions. But if you want to ask a new question, please do it for $20. But you can do a sticker. Catherine just did a sticker for $2. Thank you, Catherine. If everybody did a sticker for $2 who's listening now, we would make a massive dent towards the goal. We would make a big step forward towards the goal. All right, Cook. You say sleep is unproductive, but what about all the jobs that sleep being creates? Mattress makers, pillar manufacturers, sleep aids companies. Imagine if all the, you know, this is the, again, a broken window fallacy. Sleep is unproductive. So imagine if we didn't have to sleep and therefore didn't have to have mattresses and pillows and all that stuff. All the capital would go into other things. Plus, we could work much longer hours. We could be more productive, more hours in a day. And as a consequence, have even more wealth to buy even more things. So tell what the mattress makers and the pillar manufacturers and so on. Sleep reminds me that I'm getting tired. All right, I spend a lot of energy doing these. That's good. Let's see. Scott says, are you giving to blanket a pass to tech companies on censorship as if it can't be their fault even if they showed varying degrees of compliance? No, I have no problem with tech companies because tech companies have every right to decide what speech is not on their platform. They have every right including to comply with what the government wants, or not to comply with what the government wants, it's their property they get to decide. The fault here is 100% with government. If the government didn't intervene, if the government never went to Twitter and Facebook, Twitter and Facebook would limit what you could say on their platforms in some way or another conforming with government and not conforming with government. That would not be censorship. You might disagree with their standards. You might not like what they're doing, but it wouldn't be censorship. So when it comes to censorship, when it comes to censorship, only government can censor. What private companies do, private companies do, and you don't like it, start your own. I mean, what I love about what Elon Musk did at Twitter is he didn't like what Twitter did, so he bought it. That's capitalism. One eats in the government. Oh, regulate them. They're not allowing me to speak. Oh, God, like Ted Cruz, whining Ted Cruz. Oh, you're discriminating against conservatives. Well, start a conservative Twitter. If Twitter wants to be woke, they can be woke. If Twitter wants to be conservative, they can be conservative. It's Twitter. It's a private company. They can do what they want. Now, if government gives them instructions, then government needs to stop. Government is violating the First Amendment. Government is censoring. And that is absolutely wrong. Absolutely wrong. You know, when I forget the name, the guy in Atlas Short comes to Reardon and says, give me your medal or I'll do X, right? Hort Dagny. Reardon gives him the medal. Does that make Reardon or an borrow? Does that make Reardon or an borrow? The government threatens companies, and in order to survive, they succumb to those threats. That doesn't make them or an borrow. Some of these companies are Oren Boyle. Some of them are not. And if you can't differentiate, you've got a problem. And I don't think Zuckerberg is Oren Boyle. And I doubt Twitter is Oren Boyle. All right. Shelly, first time live in a long time. Thank you for what you do. Thank you, Shelly. Really appreciate the support. Thank you. Thank you, Gail. Thank you, Jeff. Doing stickers. That's great. Chipping away. Chipping away at the number. We still have a way to go. Let's see. Andrew says, we tech doomers, complaints that AI will have a leftist bias in defining and explaining things. Is that different from any other mainstream source? No. What AI will do is it'll look at everything that's on the Internet. If there's more leftist stuff on the Internet, if the leftist stuff is on more authoritative websites, then it will be influenced by that more than anything else. And the answer to that is people on the right, produce more content. Be more intellectual. Produce more content. Create an AI based on your liking. There are going to be lots of AIs. Lots of AIs. Lots of chat GPT versions. Create versions that are more responsive to your ideas. Stop complaining. Everybody's complaining. And do something about it. Too many startups in Silicon Valley are leftists. Okay, so leftist companies. What do Republicans do? Sit at home and complain. And eat potato chips. I don't know. So why aren't they more... I mean, isn't a major question that the right should ask itself is, why are there more people in the right starting companies? Why are leftists better educated, more intellectual? Why do leftists read more? There's lots of empirical evidence to show that leftists read more than people on the right. Why do people on the right listen to country music? I mean, there's a lot of questions that need to be asked. And if you want to do something about it, then do something about it. But sitting there and complaining doesn't count as doing something about it. Jennifer says, if you remembered your dreams, you might enjoy sleeping more. That is a possibility, but I don't remember my dreams. So sleeping is just literally a waste of time. And I get up in the middle of the night and part of it, I find it very difficult to fall back to sleep and I'm tired and I want to sleep and I can't sleep. The whole sleeping experience is not a particularly pleasant one for me. Andrew says, minimal wage laws rob the ambitious poor of opportunities. Absolutely. All regulations do. Licensing laws do. There's so much that a Republican governor that you could do at the state level, you could get rid of many wage laws. You could get rid of licensing laws. You could get rid of so many regulations if you cared about the ambitious poor. But nobody does it. Left, right, center, doesn't matter. Let's go after those woke. It's all that matters. What is more detrimental to our current society? Keynesian economics or Marxist economic ideas? Oh, God. I mean, it's hard to imagine. Economics is basically mainstream. It's everybody. Marxist ideas quam Marxism as Marxism. I mean, they've influenced a lot of people's thinking about the world, but they don't influence economists. Economists are mainly Keynesian. I'd have to say Keynesian right now, but it says about culture. Maybe society is Marxism. Economics is Keynes. Maybe something like that. Do you think the professors that teach Keynesian economics in college actually believe the nonsense they're teaching? Yes. I think they've convinced themselves. They convinced themselves that's the science. That's what they're doing science. And people are very good at rationalizing. People are very good at making excuses for themselves to hold and believe in the nonsense they believe. Tom says, I wonder how John Mackey feels about profits now that he had to move. One of his stories due to theft, he claimed businesses was not about profit alone. Well, I mean, two things. One, John Mackey is no longer the CEO of Whole Foods. I think you're tired. So he didn't actually close that store. But John always said, no, no, I believe in profits. It's not only about profits. Of course you need profits, but it's not only about profits. That was his big deal. So let's not straw man John Mackey's position. He's not anti-profit. He certainly wouldn't say that ever. And he understands economics. He understands the role of profit and the importance of profit. He just wants it to be more. It's like the egoist. But we should also care about other people. It's egoistic to care about other people. No, but we should put other people as really, really important, not just in your frame, you know, and you see the same kind of difficulty to escape the clutches of altruism. Frank says, some car companies are not including AM radio anymore. We need AM for emergency. Should the government force Ford and Tesla, et cetera, to put AM into the cars? No, no, no, no. The government can switch the emergency frequencies to something else. It can use FM for that. It can use texting for that. As many, many places are now using texting for emergencies. Text on your phone. No, the government should not have any business in telling car manufacturers what they can and cannot put in the cars. And you know who's the big advocate? A big advocate for forcing companies to carry AM radio in the cars? Ted Cruz. Ted Cruz. The right. Why? Well, because talk radio is AM and talk radio is primarily conservative radio. And they, you know, how dare car companies decide what radio is in their car? I mean, it's ridiculous. Of course, Ted Cruz should decide for them. This is our conservatives. Your conservatives, not mine. Michael says, maybe few market intellectuals are overreacting in terms of immenancy. Perhaps Western mixed economies have another hundred years left in them, and the sense of urgency is unfounded. Maybe. Maybe. I have no, I mean, my sense of urgency is not that we're going to collapse. My sense of urgency is think of all the lost opportunities you have. Think of all the wealth that could exist. Think of all the jobs that could exist. Think of all the opportunities that could exist. Think of all the lives that could be flourishing. That's the urgency. The choice is not literal death. I have to save you from literal death. I want to save you from the slow death of stagnation. That's urgent. Michael says, an objective is to promote viewing manners of war wicked. Amazing. But I have a very, very low opinion of most people today. That may not be the case 300 years from now, but this is my honest evaluation. That's fine. You have to view man potential as heroic and amazing. Not every man is a working amazing. There are some people who are working amazing. And what Objectivism holds is everybody has the potential to be heroic and amazing. And that's what you admire. That's the view we have. Michael says, authority is only as real as the number of people playing along with it to a large extent. But you need a lot of people not playing along with it to destroy it. A lot. Michael says, why do conservatives only care about energy deregulation and not about deregulating anything else? What's special about energy? It's anti-left. Because with regard to energy, the left has this agenda called climate change and anti-fossile fuels. And so the right has a clear target. Go after the left. Oh, climate change. Well, that's a hoax. Or that can be true because the left advocates it for. So let's, you know, let's attack that. You know, let's challenge that. Let's go after that. I think that's a big part of it. The other part is many conservatives come from the South or many conservatives are in the energy industry. But I think, I think a lot of it is just the fact that that's a topic that the left has made a big deal out of. And the right identifies itself and almost defines itself in as opposition to whatever the left holds. Thank you, Jennifer. She says money towards goal and hopefully help you sleep. I appreciate that. That was $20. And we are at 178 at this point. $2 from everybody online would get us to the target. And show me you value me as much as a, not even a, not even a cappuccino, just a, just a black, regular, you know, coffee drip. Michael is objectivism something that can't be ignored or are we a decade or two away from that point? What depends by whom for what it shouldn't be ignored by you. It can't be ignored by. I don't think it should be ignored by anybody. But is it culturally a phenomena that people believe can't be ignored? No, not yet. And I don't know how long it will take. Michael always wants me to give a date. Lewis, what are the best think tanks that are still sane on Liberty economics issues? What are your thoughts on Reason Foundation Independence Institute? So the best I think on economic issues are economic issues are Cato. Some of the people at the American Enterprise Institute, Heritage has gone down the tube. Heritage is completely lost. It used to have good people. Most of the good people at Heritage left because Heritage has become a bastion of national conservatism and central planning and so on. So a lot of the good people at Heritage left. American Enterprise Institute. Reason is good on economic issues and on social issues. Reason on many issues is good and interesting. Independent Institute, again, now all the economic issues, mostly good. Although it seems to have these conservative paleo elements seem to be creeping into the independent Institute, I think. So beware. It used to be, it used to publish some of the best books in economics. I'm not sure it does anymore. I'm not sure. I'd say Cato, primarily, Elements of AEI and Reason is good. It does a lot of cultural issues and it's fairly good on those. Ed, could you talk about Fed Chairman Powell destroying banks by moving interest rates so much, so fast? We have a couple of largest bank failures in history in the last 12 months. Well, because I have talked about that. So I've done whole shows on that. But let me just say, I don't think that that's true what you're saying. I don't think that Powell has destroyed banks by moving interest rates so much so fast. I think Powell and Yellen and what's his name? God, the guy after Greenspan. They destroyed banks by lowering interest rates to zero for so long. I mean, what choice did Powell have given inflation? But he created inflation. So what destroyed the banks was the fact that he created inflation. What destroyed the banks was what these Fed Chairman, what the Fed has been doing since the financial crisis in creating this zero interest rate environment. Ben Anki, thank you. Ben Anki, Powell and Yellen. What they did in creating this zero interest rate environment. That is the destructive action. The destructive action is the inflation. Raising interest rates, that's just an inevitable consequence of everything that came before that. But listen to my shows about the Anki crisis that I did in March, I think. Friend Harper, hey friend Harper. Don't listen to Iran. I have heard him say the word I eat in America previously on his shows. Don't trust the guy who said he would eat America. I don't listen to him if he says he can't take his words out of context. We can't take his words out of context. There you go. Friend Harper has nailed it. You can't listen to me because I've definitely said words that if you put them together in sound often strange and bewildering and many times wrong. And yeah, can't trust me. Thanks friend Harper for making me smile. Apollo Zeus, thank you. Apollo Zeus did two dollars or two pounds. Let's see who have I missed. I've got everybody there. I think I got Gail and Jeff. All right, we are $155 short. So it would be great if somebody stepped in and got us closer to the goal. But we will keep plugging along and we're almost done with the show. A demon says Gary Gasler's SEC when crypto participants say they lacked fair notice that they conduct could be illegal. Don't buy it. They made a calculated economic decision to risk enforcement to risk enforcement enforcement of what there were no rules. I mean, these guys are nasty and Gary guest was particularly nasty. And part of the problem with Gary guest is he was chummy with the with the guy who used to run FTC with and he almost got caught and got into trouble. So now he's taking out his hatred of the fdc fdx circumstances on every other company that has crypto. But yes, the government basically said refused to actually have rules. They said we're regulating this industry. We're not going to tell you what the regulations are. We're going to tell you what is a security and what is not. We're going to tell you what you're allowed to do and what you're not. After the fact, we're going to evaluate it and we're just going to decide that what you did was wrong and take it all away from you. I mean, what the SEC and what generally is being done to crypto right now is unconscionable. It is horrible. It is evil. It is disgusting. No one says value for value. Thank you. No one. Andrew says any update on Adam Campbell's sponsored show? No. That's my fault. I have just the last week has been. Sorry. At some point, I'll tell you what's been going on, but it'll be a while before I tell you. And it's been discombobulating. Is that a word? Anyway, and as a consequence, I'm way behind on so many things like I've got. I've got to prepare my lecture for Ocon. I'm teaching clues to classes at the Ironman Institute starting right after Ocon. I need to prepare those classes and I've got to get Adam. And with Adam, there's real dollars attached to it. So I've got to get Adam on board on what show he's sponsoring. There's another show Adam wants to sponsor that we should talk about. Anyway, a lot for me to do. A lot for me to do. And the number of hours in my day shrinks. And a big reason why the number of hours in my day shrinks is because I have to sleep. So there's another reason why I really, really dislike sleep. All right. Thanks everybody. We a little short of where we should be. But so be it. It happens once in a while. Save up for next time. So we don't make this a habit. And the Fox front call went really well and maybe you'll see me on Fox or on something related to Fox sometime soon. We'll see. I'm waiting to hear back from them actually. Mike says, thank you. 50 bucks. Thank you, Mike. Getting us very much closer to our goal. Hi, Iran. I greatly appreciate your shows. I was wondering if AI has an in-house expert on health care and defending free markets in medicine. If not, if you know of any good work done on this from an objective point of view, I know the answer is no to both of those. But there is there are a couple of come up a God speak up and coming young intellectuals that are going to make that they focus the evil of the FDA and the evil of of socialized health care and American healthcare system. You will have that expertise in house at the institute in the years to come. And you know, it's again, I'm I'm a big believer in specializations and I'm specialization and I'm encouraging. I'm encouraging some of our intellectuals to specialize in that in in healthcare because I think it's an incredibly, incredibly important, important one. It's hard to think of an institution that does more harm to our lives than the FDA and the entire social medicine institutions that are built inside America. So no, unfortunately, we don't have anybody yet. But stay tuned. Coming coming soon. Lori. Oh, friend Harper. Thank you. Tessa. Thank you. Each $10. So only $60 short now. Lori says if you had $50,000 of hard gold and silver and was 30% of your portfolio, what would you do? I would sell some of it so that I would only have about 10% in gold. And unless, you know, look, you have to decide it's based on your risk assessment. So you have to you have to decide what the probability of kind of the end of the world scenario is the destruction of civilization because that's when gold is really valuable. Gold is really valuable. If you think things are going to help, really, we're going to collapse, not the slow stagnation, but a true collapse. And then you want to have a lot of gold. And in that scenario, 30% is not too much. But if you believe we still had years before we fall off a cliff and most likely scenario is some kind of stagnation or slow decline, then I would say 10% in gold, something like that. That's I think what I have something like that. I have less than 10%. But 10% in gold is probably, you know, where I'd go. I need to do a personal finance thing. Another personal finance. I've done them before, but I need to do another one. I will do that soon. All right, everybody. Thank you. I will see you all tomorrow. I will do a show tomorrow. Again, not sure what time might be at 11 a.m. East Coast time might be more like three or four p.m. East Coast time. We'll see it's one of those. All right. See you tomorrow.