 I still believe the economy should be opened up and I agree with Elon Musk. The economy should be opened up yesterday, the day before yesterday, certainly everywhere other than New York City, should have been opened up a long time ago, should have never been shut down, never been shut down. But so Elon Musk is for the opening up and he's actually, because his plant in Fremont, they won't let him, they won't let him start a production. He wants to send his employees in there and he wants to have them work under, you know, safe conditions and he's got a whole plan around it. And he, the city of Fremont won't let him do it, won't let him do it. I just cited, I just say the data, I gave you actual numbers, I gave you percentage increases, I gave you anything. I mean, I told you a long time ago, intellectual, Trumpster, you're not an intellectual, you are a Trumpster and that Trumpster part has basically lobotomized your brain. You've stopped being able to think for yourself. So they won't, so he is suing, he is suing, he is suing the state of California, suing Fremont in order to get his plant closed. And he actually said that he would, he would move to Texas or to Nevada if they refused to let him open up, open up. So good for him. Good for him. A lot of people said this is out, shrugging this as elements of that leaving California, if you're going to behave so rationally, you're going to leave California. We're going to leave California. All right. But what I found more interesting is his economic analysis. He is for getting back to work from an economic perspective. And so let's listen to what Elon Musk says. And this is a short bit, I'm going to play through. It's really good. So pay attention. It's simple. And it's absolutely true. And we'll go from this to talk about the primacy of production. Oh, wait, you can't hear anything. That's not good. Let me unmute that. All right. That's unmuted. Let's take it back a little bit. Okay, here we go. Not true, obviously. Some people have this absurd view that the economy is like some magic horn of plenty. Like, it just makes stuff, stuff, you know, whatever. It just does a magic water plenty. And the goods and services, they just come from this magic horn of plenty. And then if I mean, that's, that's a really nice way of putting it. There's this, there's this sort of plenty people think and people suddenly on the left think there's been sort of people on the right, everybody voted for the stimulus package believes this nonsense. There's a lot of plenty and you just take stuff and it just, it's distributed the stuff in the world, the values in the world, all the things that we consume are just out there. And it's just a matter of distributing them. And that's a really nice way of thinking about this horn of plenty and just divvying stuff, divvying stuff out. And even, even talks about this, he, one sentence here is, relates to the Holy shit of inequality. Like if somebody has more stuff than somebody else, it's because they took more from this magic horn of plenty. This is, if you remember from my talks, this is the idea of a pie. There's a pie. It just exists. It's just there. And then it's just a question of how we divvy it up, right? Let me just break it to you. The fool's out there. If you don't make stuff, there's no stuff. That's beautiful, right? It's so obvious. It's so, you know, true. If you don't make stuff, there ain't no stuff. For the human beings to have stuff, human beings have to make stuff, which is truly terrific. Simple language. And notice what he says for those of you, you know, for the, for the, basically the ignorant people out there, he says, this is the truth. Yeah. So if you don't make the food, if you don't process the food, you know, transport the food, and the medical treatment, getting teeth fixed, there's no stuff. I would become detached from reality. You can't just legislate money and solve these things. If you don't make stuff, there is no stuff. Obviously, we'll run out of the stores, run out of the, you know, the hold, the machine just grinds to a halt. What's the way out of it? So yeah, that's, that's the whole clip. Because once you get into the way out of it, Elon Musk goes in a completely different direction and loses it all. But on this, I mean, that's just straightforward, brilliance, right? I mean, it shouldn't be because it's so straightforward. It's simple. It's so obvious that you wouldn't, you shouldn't have to be a productive genius in order to be able to say that everybody should get it. Everybody should understand it. But they don't. They don't. There is no stuff unless you produce stuff. In other words, production is always the starting point in economics. You cannot consume unless you produce. And, and, and I've said this before, but it's worth repeating the two aspects of this. You can't get the money to consume unless you have produced other, in other words, unless you have gone to work. And you can't spend the money on anything. There's nothing to spend the money on unless somebody has produced stuff for you to buy. So for every act of consumption, there are two acts of production. Production is what an economy is. You know, you hear all the time politicians and everybody else saying, ooh, economists, Nobel Prize winning economists sometimes, 66% of the economy is consumption. I mean, that just doesn't make any sense. What are you consuming if 66% of the economy is consumption? And how did you get that money to consume? You don't go to work, you don't produce, you don't go to work. So every dollar you consume had to come from somewhere. You had to earn it. You had to create a value equivalent to that dollar. So then you could consume it. Now, yes, you could borrow that money, but you can't borrow to such an extent that 66% of the economy forever is consumption. It just doesn't make mathematical, never mind economic sense. But this is, of course, what we're facing today. The government doesn't want to open up the economy, wants to keep us hunkered down, keep us away from our jobs. And what does it do to compensate us for that? It sends us a check, a check that it manufactures out of thin air, a check that is just created out of nowhere and it hands us a check. Now what are we supposed to do with this money? What we're supposed to go consume. But at some point it has to dawn on people that if nobody's working, what are we going to buy? What are we going to buy? And yes, right now, enough people are working in the United States and elsewhere. So we're partially benefiting from importation so that we can keep consuming certain things, essential services. There's a headline in New York Times today. I just saw this, just came across today. It's, oops, where is this? Pork chops versus people. Battling coronavirus and an Iowa meat plant, right? So President Trump did an executive order, forcing meat plants to reopen. So overriding states and overriding some meat plant owners who decided to shut them down. And now you've got workers going there and the reason they did this was because a lot of the meat, the people in the meat plants were getting coronavirus are getting sick. So they closed the plants in order to protect those workers and now Trump has opened up those plants. And in New York Times it's of course saying, well, people versus pork chops. But there are no people without pork chops. We're all dead without pork chops. I mean, because if this is true of pork chops, what about everything else? As Elon Musk said, somebody has to plant and grow the food. Somebody has to harvest it. Somebody has to turn that raw food into food. Somebody has to process, as in other words, that's the meat plants. Somebody has to transport it. Somebody has to put it on the shelf in the supermarket. Somebody has to work at the counter at the supermarket. They have to be productive activity so that we can live. There is no food without food being produced. Food doesn't come as manna from heaven. Food doesn't come as manna from heaven. And that's true of everything we need. The gasoline we need to pump our cars so we can go to get the food needs to come so people are going to have to work. Every value that we have in the world, in our world, the electricity, somebody's working in some electricity plant in order to make this electricity possible. And yeah, some of them might get sick because they have to go to work. That's a risk you take. The internet that we're now using, somebody is working, somebody is making it happen. It doesn't just happen. It's not magic. But our politicians and our intellectuals and even our economists believe in magic, believe things just happen. Products just exist. Products just get to the shelves by magic. As Elon Musk said in the video, they are completely detached from reality, completely detached from reality. It's just mind-boggling. Now, this identification about production, by the way, was made by an economist in, I think it was 1803, by an economist by the name of Sey. He's a French economist. So he's about 30 years after Adam Smith. He published his book. And he is one of the great economists of all of history, probably the greatest economist before the Austrian economist came around. And his whole argument is that what drives an economy is production, not consumption, and not money. So the mercantilist believed that money was wealth, that money was what important. And if you hoarded money, that represented well-being. And as a consequence, they were anti-trade and they were for, you know, trade barriers and protecting homegrown industries and so on. Jean-Baptiste comes along and he says, absolutely not. What matters is production. Today's production makes possible tomorrow's consumption, which then makes possible production, which makes possible consumption. And in a sense, the two aspects of the same thing. But it has to be production driving the process. What we need today, what are called a new intellectual, would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning, any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, wins, or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism, and impotence, and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist roads. 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