 This is Mises Weekends with your host Jeff Dice. We're not far out from the U.S. election next Tuesday, and Donald Trump seems to be coming back from the dead with even people like Michael Moore supporting him. What's the latest betting with six days to go on who's going to win the election? It's very interesting. We talk endlessly about this, and we get endless polls about this, which are increasingly, it's important to note that polling is increasingly an inexact science. The proliferation of mobile phones has really forever changed the way polling is conducted. So we don't have households in the same way we had households in 1980, and most pollsters are still operating in that same mode. So I question polls, but the other thing to understand is that the electoral college is really a unique mechanism. Only the United States has anything like it. So national polling is pretty meaningless. The only numbers I really look at are the states that, I look at the states that Mitt Romney won in 2012, and I figure out, well, can Donald Trump hold all those states and thus win those electoral college votes, but also win about an additional 70 electoral college votes? And that would require him to first and foremost win Florida, absolutely. But it would also require him to probably win some combination of Ohio, Pennsylvania, maybe Wisconsin, Virginia, which is very unlikely because Hillary's running mate, Tim Kaine, is a Virginian. He'd have to hold Utah, which Mitt Romney won handily, but the Mormon churches issued a bit of a fatwa against Trump. So if you just look at the hard, cold math, even with these most recent developments regarding Hillary's e-mail trail, it's still very, very difficult. But he should underestimate how much of an upset it would be for Trump, and it would be an equal upset if they'd run a more garden-variety vanilla Republican. Frankly, I think Trump's probably doing better than a Ted Cruz or a Mitt Romney would do, but it's a very steep uphill battle for Trump. What we're more interested in is whether there's going to be some sort of contested result that there's going to be abnormalities in a state like Florida in the voting machines because none of us really understand how these voting machines work and are reported. You'd have to go state by state, and there's contractors, vendors involved in the electronic machines themselves. So it can be very fascinating. We could end up with one of those weird twilight zone Wednesday mornings where it's not clear who won and no one's conceded. And there's the possibility of litigation, and lawyers are gearing up on both sides, and that's what we had in 2000, which was kind of a surreal period in America. I like it. I like the idea of not having elected anybody. I'd be perfectly comfortable with leaving the position vacant going into the next year. But boy, if you stuck a gun to my head, even today, I'd probably say Hillary wins. Now we've seen actually on Google Trends as well, we've seen lots of people trying to reverse their early votes. Now I'm assuming that's trying to reverse their votes for Hillary. Now we're not going to have hanging chads, and we're going to have hanging XML messages, but could she already actually have won with all this huge kind of early voting? Yeah, early voting is a very strange thing, especially in the new internet age, because there seems to be a new scandal every day, a new WikiLeaks dump every day, a new revelation. So some people are voting up to, I think, more than a month ahead of time, voting absentee, and that's a long time. So who knows? She has huge advantages. The deep blue states are blue, and they're blue for good. Some of the deep red states are getting less red every year. They're getting more and more purple. And it won't be long before states like Texas are in play. Once Democrats control Florida, Texas, New York, and California, Republicans won't win any more national elections. We can talk all we want about, we, I shouldn't say we, I'm not a Republican. But Republicans can talk all they want about outreach to Hispanics or millennials, whatever they want to do, but the simple demographics are against them. And very soon they're going to become a minority party at the national level anyway. Well, it's always been said, hasn't it, that democracy is a kind of long term form of communism, which gradually gives you the socialist state, whether you were wanted or not. Now, I'm going to ask you the $64,000 question then. It does seem to be a race between the undead of Frankenstein and Dracula. Are you actually going to vote in this? And if you are, who are you going to vote for? Or are you going to take a more kind of pure Hoppean or George Carl in position of not voting? I'm not going to vote. I don't view voting as evil or ill-libertarian necessarily. I think it's morally and otherwise valid to vote if you believe it's in your interest to do so, if you're voting strategically as a libertarian, if you were voting defensively and viewing as a matter of self-defense. And I certainly think on state and local issues, council issues in the UK, things closer to you. There can often be a tactical reason for voting. If some new tax is going to be imposed on you and your town is small enough that your vote or you and your friends and families vote might make a difference, why not? And I think Murray Rothbard talked about this in the context of slaves being able to choose between a kinder or a cruel or master. So I'm not one of these people who denigrates voting per se. It says, oh my gosh, any voting is complicity with the system. You should never do it and you're just part of the problem. If you've, you know, I'm not sure I agree with that. And if people think that voting for Donald Trump is somehow going to create an opening for at least in a few areas, a slightly more libertarian policy, you know, knock themselves up. But personally, what it comes down to for me is at some point, the United States is going to continue to be involved militarily around the world. So at some point after the new president takes office, there's going to be bombings and killings and collateral damage of civilians. And that's where I personally struggle because even if I saw Trump as someone who's throwing a hand grenade into Washington, D.C., something I want to do, boy, thinking that I was at least in part complicit with his ordering a bombing and some child gets killed somewhere in the Middle East, for example, it's just a little too much for me to take. So, you know, you can call that a cop out if you will. But I don't plan on voting next week. Well, I'm with George Carlin myself on voting. If you just need to watch the George Carlin video on YouTube on voting to get that opinion. Now, speaking of the Middle East, the U.S. does seem to be fighting some kind of semi-secret proxy war with Russia in Syria at the moment, which is very confusing and the mass media just doesn't kind of get into it very well. Do you think Trump might stop this kind of proxy war if he got in? Well, I hope he would. It's really an absurdity. If it weren't so serious, it would be hilarious to see the left suddenly worried about the evil Russians. Thanks. But more importantly is this neo-conservative grip on both parties in the U.S. and they're abandoning Trump and going to Hillary now. And they're absolutely enamored of resuscitating this non-existent Cold War. Russia is no threat to anyone. If you look at the size and scope of Russia's territory, this is a country of 145 million people. They are shrinking. Their territory is getting smaller and expanding. Asian and Middle Eastern forces are going to increasingly move into what is currently Russia and change its borders and change its culture and change its ethnic makeup, its religious makeup, its linguistic makeup. 145 million Russians are shrinking. This is not a growing imperialistic threat. It is no threat to the NATO countries. It's no threat to America. And it just shows you the degree of desperation among these endless military interventionists. I mean, even the war on terror is not enough for them. Apparently it's not hot enough for them or steady enough for them. We need another boogeyman. We need to resurrect Russia. And Putin is a convenient scapegoat. So it's, again, it would be funny if it weren't so dire. But Hillary's insane if she thinks that Americans want her to be engaging us in potentially a serious conflict with Russia over Syria. Most Americans don't care about Syria. They don't realize that we're responsible in large part for cracking the egg that is now Syria and we're responsible for creating these refugees in large part. This is not what Americans are dwelling on in this election. So if she does win and if she does intensify our engagement with a no-fly zone or whatever it may be in Syria, this will be something that she's doing at the behest of her foreign policy advisers and at the behest of some people who back her. It won't be at the behest of the U.S. people who, sad to say, are pretty indifferent. Now a lot of economic problems in the past, such as the 1930s and so on, have been covered up by a major war. And some people think that maybe a war is being instituted to kind of cover up the huge crisis since 2007. Now if Hillary does win, there seems to be a pause in economics at the moment with everyone waiting for this election result, what do you think is going to happen to the economics of the United States if Hillary wins the election? Well, she's going to wish she hadn't would be my prediction. Because what we do know is that she'll keep Janet yelling. So Fed policy will remain the same. And by Fed policy, I mean basically sticking your head in the sand and kicking the can down the road three months, six months at a time while we all sit around and wait breathlessly for these latest pronouncements of whether yelling in the FOMC are going to raise interest rates a quarter point or some ridiculous amount like the world hangs in the balance of a quarter point interest rate amongst commercial banks overnight. So I think with Hillary, you will get a head in the sand hit and hope mentality. It'll be a continuation of the Obama fiscal and monetary policy, which is basically let's ride this out. Let's continue to inflate the dollar as needed. Let's continue to keep interest rates as low as needed. Let's continue to resuscitate the patient and hope that somehow the US economy and the West's economy come roaring back to life despite these depredations. This has been the policy since oh wait, we keep waiting and waiting and waiting for this real economic growth to come, real increases in GDP, real, real organic growth amongst companies, not this financialization where the share price is going up through buybacks and other financial mechanisms, but the underlying productivity of the company. It's not finding emerging markets or new customers or great new products. That's not happening. So we've got this kind of phony growth among equity prices and share value, but we don't have any real organic growth happening deep down at the company level in terms of capital expenditures or productivity. So I think Hillary will inherit a very tough situation. How much longer we can keep the dollar propped up? It could be a long, long time because currencies are relative. And as long as the currency is better in the certain sense than the euro, as long as it's more widely used than the Swiss franc, as long as the Japanese keep doing what they're doing, as long as the Chinese keep doing what they're doing, the dollar will continue to look like the fresh assert in the laundry. So in that sense, she might buy herself some time, but can we take four more years of QE or alternatively, will raising interest rates and ending QE put the economy into a tailspin that Hillary wouldn't accept politically and would go direct to Yellen to halt? Boy, the idea that that won't happen in the next four years seems awfully remote to me. Yeah, it's kind of a dug case is eye of the hurricane, isn't it? Now, just to be even handed, some have predicted that if Trump does win his first act as president in January, it will be to sack Janet Yellen. But just before that, just to kind of spite him and using her kind of Keynesian thinking, she will increase interest rates deliberately to cause a problem. Now, do you think that this raising of interest rates to a more natural level, whatever the market decides the natural level would be, is actually something that should be done to sort of take the pain now, that's built up over the last 20 years, and then to grow the US economy and then hopefully the global economy in two or three years time when the huge recession that that will probably cause is then worked through and then all the malinvestments are cleared out? Well, absolutely. I think that's something that should be done. I think it's something that has to be done. The recession is the cure. It's not the problem to be solved. It's the cure to the problem to be solved. And that involves some pain for a few years. And that's why it's politically a dead end. No politician wants to run on a platform of saying vote for me. And I'm going to rip the Band-Aid off and employment's going to spike. And there's going to be massive layoffs. But you know what? We'll be setting the stage for some real economic growth three to five years down the road, not a winning platform. And that's that goes to Hoppe's point that this is what democracy creates. It creates high time preference even amongst voters in the political class where we just want everything now for free. And we want to pay for everything somewhere down the road. Hopefully after we're dead or for politicians after they've gotten the votes and they're out of office. This is a feature, not a bug of democracy. It's one of the great problems with democracy. And it's especially acute in a multicultural welfare state like the U.S. where you've got so many competing interests and so many ugly social divisions. People don't even have the sort of unity of goals that they once had in a small homogenous country like Norway, for instance. So it's very, very tough. And I think that I don't care what the Fed does in a sense because I don't think the Fed ought to be in the business of providing money or setting interest rates. But for the time being for the very near future anyway, we're going to continue to have central banks and they're going to continue to control our currency. So the least bad thing the Fed could do would be, yes, to allow interest rates to rise and to start getting back to an economy that is actually based on saving and capital accumulation instead of consumption and debt. This is how human history has evolved. People consumed less than they made and they put money away for a rainy day, whether that's for their family and kids or whether that's in a corporate environment. The fact that we've upended that forever and ever, if you talk to Larry Summers or even to Ben Bernanke, who now says we shouldn't even unwind, the QE purchases that the Fed has made since 08, that's more than just technical monetary policy mechanisms at work. That's an actual ideological sea change in how we live our lives as humans, whether we want to consume or whether we want to save. It's an existential question, not just a technical question. Now, we are seeing these ideological things changing around the world. We saw Brexit a few months ago in the UK and the rise of Trump is being said to be a part of the Brexit global movement. Trump has a huge ego. Do you think he could actually be a politician who isn't affected by politics and who could actually let natural interest rates come back into the marketplace? Yeah, it's an interesting question, isn't it? I think he does have a deep-seated psychological need to be liked or loved or admired. I guess that's universal, but in him it seems amped up 100-fold. The question would be whether he wants to be loved and liked and admired by the political donor class and his political consultants or whether he wants to be loved, liked and admired by the American people, two different things. But at this point, we're so far beyond any sort of political consensus in this country that this myth of democratic consensus is going to be laid bare. And if Trump wins, the left is going to be apoplectic. We're going to have a period of division, probably like we've never seen before. There are going to be some very deep-rooted interests that don't want to see Donald Trump as a healing force in American politics. They want to see quite the opposite if they don't get what they want, which is, at this point, I guess, Hillary. So, boy, will Trump be able to do the right thing? Very, very unlikely. He's going to be pressured from all sides. And this is a guy that we don't know. We don't know how he would respond to that kind of pressure. We know how Hillary would. And I think that's that's what people who like Trump argue in the US. At least with Trump, we don't know. With Hillary, we know. It'd be nice if he appointed Ron Paul to be his financial advisor. Now, we've seen all these banks around the world, the Japanese banks, the UK banks, the European banks, the US banks all printing money, buying their own debt from their own governments that own them. The traditional barometer on this has been gold. And we have seen a rise in the gold price over the last few months. But it's paused for a little while, waiting for this US election probably. Do you think gold could be the canary in the coal mine, which starts to signal the end of this endless Keynesian quantitative easing immediately after the US election, let's say, if Hillary wins? Well, it certainly could be. Gold goes up and down for some mysterious reasons sometime. But gold never goes to zero, that much we know. So, I don't consider gold an investment. I consider it a form of money, a base form of money. So, really, when you're buying gold, you're engaged in forex, in a certain sense. You're saying to yourself that I think gold is going to go up relative to other currencies. Not that it has, not that it's going to go up like an investment goes up. It's not an investment. It's money. The thing holding gold back, ultimately, is the fact that in most Western countries, it's not used as legal tender, which it could very easily be used as such. We could come up with electronic gold where you have a store of physical gold somewhere in account, and then you simply use a debit card that can shave off tiny fractions of it. So, we don't have any problems with actually handling physical gold at a cash register or point of sale. And the fact that this is illegal, you basically can't do business in the US or remit taxes in the US using gold. That's considered a form of barter or a capital gain or capital loss transaction. The fact that it's effectively banned skews the gold market. It skews its value as a currency. I don't think gold is going to go to $5,000 or $10,000 because there's another looming crisis. I think if it was going to do that, it would have done that in 2008. But I do think gold will very soon be at $2,000. I don't think that's a stretch. And I'll just say this. There's never been a time in history where Grandpa died with a bunch of physical gold and left it to his grandkids, and everyone was sad about it. It's always been a good thing. It's always been happy. But there's been plenty of times when Grandpa died with a bunch of worthless stock certificates in an old musty drawer somewhere for a company that doesn't exist anymore. So I'll just say that. Okay. Now, getting away from the Republicans and Democrats because we spent a long time on them, let's have a look at the libertarians. Now, Gary Johnson is a candidate in this election, and he's been a big disappointment to a lot of people. Would you have preferred to see somebody like John McAfee to disrupt things and shake things up? Or is Gary Johnson just fighting an impossible battle? No, I would definitely rather have seen a more engaging candidate, someone who is really going to shake things up and to ask the hard questions and to campaign vigorously and also to campaign honestly and to talk about libertarianism as an ideology and as a political theory and give it a little bit of intellectual heft and weight and not just try to be a retail politician because by trying to divorce libertarianism of any ideological or intellectual basis and just having this kind of hippie-dippy approach which says, well, low-tax liberals, we like social inclusion and we just think liberty works better. Well, frankly, that has worked far less than having Ron Paul give a purist message. I mean, the Ron Paul campaign was a much bigger deal than the Gary Johnson campaign, even though Gary Johnson's had the advantage of four more years of the huge social media environment and all these other ways. He's had a lot of media exposure, but he just hasn't captured anyone's imagination because he says unimaginative things. So I don't understand what he's doing. I don't really understand his motivations. He doesn't seem to be self-motivated, self-interested. He seems like a nice enough guy. I wouldn't say he's using the LP as some sort of platform for his own benefit if he is doing a very poor job of it. But for your listeners in the UK, it's really been a sideshow at most and Gary Johnson 2016 does not have the feel here of a revolution like Ron Paul 2012 did, not at all. Yeah, that was a fabulous campaign. I still remember the blimp in earlier year, which was brilliant. Now, you were heavily associated with Ron Paul doing a lot of work with him and for him. I'm short of cloning him in a singularity. Are there any future kind of Ron Pauls on the horizon out there? Well, I wouldn't clone Ron because he'll tell you himself that he's not the greatest public speaker, but part of that was also there was an upside to that because people always knew his responses weren't canned. They weren't polished. They weren't tested like Mitt Romney. It sounded like everything that came out of his mouth was his actual honest thoughts. So his lack of polish was balanced by sort of a home spun likability. It's interesting the Rand Paul phenomenon. Rand didn't get the traction he thought he was going to get and he had to ultimately go home and work to make sure he wins his Kentucky Senate seat. We have to sort of step back and ask ourselves, look, the Republicans have had three chances to vote for a libertarian Republican. They had 28 with Ron and John McCain. They had 2012 with Ron Paul and Mitt Romney and they had 2016 with Rand Paul and a slate of other candidates. In all three instances, they declined. So at some point, they declined overwhelmingly. So at some point we have to say there is no libertarian wing of the GOP. There's no working within the party to get it to be more libertarian. There's been some mild success with that at the state and local level. But at the national level, this is not a libertarian Republican party. This is a statist, corporatist, militarist, globalist Republican party. So if the Republicans go away or cease to be a force on the national scene, I say good riddance. They're not doing anything. They're not conserving anything. They're certainly not the party of liberty and capitalism and markets and opportunity. No one would say that about them. So having, we ought to just treat the Republican party as sort of a wing of the Democratic party and get on with it. Is there another Ron Paul and the wings? I think Rand is very seriously considering running in 2020 and there are some other good younger people in Congress like Justin Amash. But boy, you know, it just seems like if by now a libertarian was going to get some traction within the two party system, they would have gotten it and they haven't. So I think we should roll up our sleeves, not put our faith in the white knights, but rather just look in the mirror and say whatever we're going to do, we're going to do it ourselves. Do you stitcher and SoundCloud or listen on Mises.org and YouTube?