 I did want to talk a little bit more about the economy. I think we're living through really interesting economic times. I think this is a period of time to really keep your eyes open and to monitor the situation. Things can deteriorate pretty quickly. There's a lot going on right now. We've talked about it. We've talked about the supply chain issues. Generally, right now, what we're seeing across the board is supply problems. There's demand. Demand is easy, but politicians, particularly on the left, always focus on demand. I mean, not just on the left, on the right as well. This is Keynesian economics. All they care about is what they call aggregate demand. So COVID hits. All we care about is that people have money that money constitutes demand because what are people going to do with the money? You're going to buy stuff with it. And there's never any focus on supply, which is, in my view, the whole point of economics, the whole point of the field of economics is to study supply, to study production and trade, which is supply. Demand is what is easy and self-evident. Demand is people have money. They spend it. You don't have to really encourage them that much, incentivize them that much. They're going to spend it. They're not going to sit on money. So we gave people money throughout COVID. They got checks. We paid them not to go to work. Indeed, we stopped them from going to work in many cases. We prevented them from working. So demand is there. Huge amounts of demand. This demand for goods, Americans are buying at a higher rate than ever. They're buying stuff, not using services, but buying stuff at the highest rate ever. And there's massive demand for employees, but there's no supply. The goods are not there. You want to buy stuff, you can't get it. Delivery times are long. You have to wait in line. They're talking now about these new MacBook Pros. It's going to take a while until they're available. The chip shortages, the computer shortages, the shortages of everything. The cargo ship shortages, because plenty of demand, because we've thrown money at the problem. But you see, the real issue in economics is the supply. The real issue is production. Well, we stopped production. We banned production. We told production the producers they couldn't produce. We told workers not to work. And now, surprise, surprise, we've got supply issues. Thank you, Todd. Really, really appreciate that. You're on book Enemy of Socialism. That is a great title. I prefer the title of Champion of Capitalism. How about that? I like positive titles. But Todd, that's very generous. I really appreciate it. I don't know where we are today. We're way short of 600, but with Todd and Larry, I guess we're in decent shape or probably somewhere around 300, maybe a little less than 300. So there's still room for growth, guys. There's still room to ask $50 questions, $100 questions. There's still room to support the show at higher levels. Anyway, so the real interesting thing that's going on is this continued focus on the supply. This continued focus on government cares is about giving people stuff. Again, look at Biden's bills. They just want to give them more stuff. But actual stuff needs to be created, needs to be produced, needs to be supplied, needs to be delivered, needs to be exchanged, needs to be traded. Supply chains are a whole art, science. I mean, modern monetary theory. Modern monetary theory we've talked about in the past. One of the basic assumptions of MMT is that inflation would never happen even if you throw a lot of money on the demand side, even if you throw a lot of money at people. Because there is always slack in the economy. Slack is unused supply. This is Stephanie Kelton, who's one of the big advocates and somebody who I've tried to debate, but she wants $20,000 to debate me. Anyway, Stephanie Kelton keeps saying, there's always slack in the economy. Well, where is it? Where is this excess supply? Where is this excess production? It's not there unless you invest in it, unless you incentivize it, unless you leave it alone and don't shut it down. It's just not there. And even when it is there, it's not easy to ramp it up. So what happens when you have lots of demand and supplies constrain? What happens to prices? Well, the prices go up. The prices go up. Todd, wow, $200. Thank you. Now we're at $460, so we just need $140 to get our goal, but Todd has changed my title now, from enemy of socialism to advocate of capitalism. Thank you, Todd. So I'm going to go by the, I should change my title every way to advocate of capitalism, champion of capitalism. I like champion. What do you think? Champion or advocate? You guys can vote. Champion or advocate. I think champion sounds better. Champion of capitalism, enemy, mortal enemy of socialism. I like that. I'm going to change my Twitter handle to that. That problem of course is that if you give money to people not to work, guess what they're going to do? They're not going to work. Oh, so I said, if you have a lot of demand, constrain supply prices go up. That's price inflation. We're seeing price inflation across the board, across the board. And the consequence of the cross the board is lower standard of living for all of us. We're stuck with dollars that are not appreciating unless of course you have bitcoin and then you're, then you're made. Adrian says I should go by the liberator of the masses. I don't know. Sounds a little altruistic, kill socialism in a single blow. I like champion of capitalism, mortal enemy of socialism. I like that. All right. But the same thing goes for employment. If you pay people not to work, they won't work. And then there's a shortage of workers. Wages go up. Wages go up means product prices will go up to compensate for the higher wages because productivity hasn't gone up. So the wages now are not being driven by productivity increases. They're being driven by shortage of labor because we're paying people to stay home. That raises prices even more and you get more price inflation. Right now they're more than 10 million listed job openings. Three million more than before the pandemic. So there's plenty of demand for goods. They're just not enough people working to supply them. Only six million people are looking for jobs, 10 million job openings. Many people have resigned. The great resignation is on as people realize that in these circumstances wages are going to go up. I'll just wait until wages keep going up. The number of people working overall in the economy has dropped by 3 million from 63 percent of working age population to 61.6 percent of working class population. So it looked like last year writing people checks, sending checks, setting benefits, expanding unemployment insurance, all of that didn't cost anything. It looked like it was free. People were paying the cost now, slower economic growth, higher price inflation, and a mismatch of supply and demand, a bottleneck all over the world. It's amazing how every time they come and tinkers, it thinks it gets away with it. It survives for a little while under this illusion and then bam, reality slaps it in the face. No, there's no free lunch. Now if you just put money, subsidize this, you're going to distort the economy in one way or the other. Anyway, what we have today is the consequence of all the rotten policies that the government has engaged in since the beginning of COVID. Just in terms of this Biden proposal, just to give you one aspect of it, in terms of childcare, they want to subsidize childcare because there's a crisis. Childcare costs are going up, supposedly, and there's a crisis, and we want to build back better so in order to build back better, we're going to give you an entitlement. Every family, every family who applies for assistance with childcare will be offered childcare assistance no matter the cost. It stipulates, the bill stipulates that childcare workers will be paid as much as elementary school teachers, which is 69,930 bucks a year, even though current average childcare worker gets 25,510 dollars a year. So basically the bill is going to raise the cost of childcare by two and a half times and who's going to pay for it? The government, which means all of us, through taxes, through more debt, through lower economic growth, nobody cares. I mean, the fact is, even you guys don't care, I mean, I don't know, you guys, some of you guys don't care because, you know, Republicans don't care, Trump didn't care, economics, that's boring, we're much more interested, much more interested in talking about bathrooms for transgender. If I did a show on something related to bathrooms and transgender people, there'd be many more people watching. I could pan that, I could talk about CRT all day, all night, but talk about actual economic stuff. That's a snoozer, that's uninteresting, that's boring, unbelievable, unbelievable the world in which we live. Anyway, we're going to be a lot poorer because we don't take these things seriously. Think about what's happening in climate change. While all of us are focused on CRT, the world is turning against fossil fuels in a way that it hasn't in past decades. Even though they made a lot of noise, they haven't done anything. They're starting to do stuff. It's starting to happen. And where we worried about the transgenders, I mean, we're killing fossil fuels with disincentivizing oil production. There are massive quantities of natural gas all over the world in the Mediterranean, in the UK itself. Of course, in the United States, many places from Pennsylvania down to Texas all the way to California. Huge, massive, untapped reservoirs of natural gas. And yet there was a shortage, supply shortage, plenty of demand. But another supply shortage, why? Because we haven't invested in infrastructure. We haven't invested in fossil fuels. Why? Because we were told that it's bad and it's evil because Exxon had three board members elected who are board members to Exxon who are anti-fossile fuels. Three board members were elected. Why is Exxon going to invest in more production of gas when its shareholders are electing climate change advocates, this board of directors? I mean, we're going to have a nasty winter this winter. Europe is going to have shortages of natural gas, shortages of heating. Some people in Europe, particularly the poor, are going to be very cold, very cold. Some places that are not going to have an electricity are going to be super cold. But nobody will learn the lesson. Let's build more windbills. How about some of those solar panels in your home in London where the sun never shines? If we want to get this economy going, what we need is to unshackle the supply, unshackle the producers. It's easy. How about a bill that bans government for intervening in housing is being built that allows developers to build anyway they can buy land? How about getting rid of occupational licensing? That would increase supply, occupational licenses, reduce supply, reduce production, reduce availability of labor. How about reducing all the labor laws that make it so difficult to hire and fire people? What about the labor laws that require Uber drivers to be categorized as employees instead of contractors? These are the things that make infrastructure expensive. You don't need an infrastructure bill. You just need to get people off the producer's backs. This now costs $1 billion per mile. Not because subways need to cost $1 billion per mile, but because of the regulations, the unions, the contracting laws, the stupid, immoral buy American provisions that Trump and Biden and all of these idiots have put together, the environmental regulations. There's no labor shortage in the world. You're wired about labor shortages. How about opening up our borders to immigrants? The immigrants desperate to come to America. They pay to come to America. Thousands of dollars. That could be your tax, you know, make it anybody who pays the US government $5,000 can immigrate to the US. You could raise a lot of money that way, make it $10,000. It's stunning how easy it is to solve the economic challenges that we face right now. And how nobody, nobody in the entire political spectrum, nobody is proposing any of this. It's a joke of politics today. Status of the right, status of the left, collectivist of the right, collectivist of the left, socialist of the right, socialist of the left. There's no opposition. At least the Republican Party used to be an opposition party. They used to propose things that, okay, we're not ideal, not as good as I. You want to stop sounding bottlenecks in Los Angeles? How about getting rid of some of the zoning laws in LA that prevent containers from being stacked higher than two containers, one on top of the other? You know, the port of LA has such a restriction, or maybe it's Long Beach? Now I think they've actually done away with that just for now as an emergency measure. But one of the reasons for the backlog and the fact that ships can't get into the port of Los Angeles is because there's no way to put the containers, because the containers are stacked one on top of the other, two at a time, instead of four, six, eight at a time. And you could go on and on and on about the absurdity and ridiculous nature of this. The vaccine mandates, the masks, can you imagine? I don't know if this is true, but can you imagine working on the port of Los Angeles with heavy machinery and having to wear a mask? Yeah, productivity would decrease. I mean, the stupidity is in the lack of any kind of thinking about what the real, again, economics is about supply. This is about production. If I had to define the topic of economics, it would be the study, the field that studies production and trade. Not consumption. Consumption is easy. Not demand. Supply. All right. By the way, I got a lot of that from the grumpy economist, one of my favorite economists, John Cochran. You can find him at John. Just put grumpy economist in Google and you'll find him. Great read. I certainly recommend reading his blog on a regular basis. All right. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening. You get value from watching. Show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbrookshow.com slash support by going to Patreon, subscribe star, locals, and just making an appropriate contribution on any one of those, any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see the Iran Book Show grow, please consider sharing our content and of course, subscribe. Press that little bell button right down there on YouTube so that you get an announcement when we go live. And for those of you who are ready subscribers and those of you who are ready supporters of the show, thank you. I very much appreciate it.