 Alright, let's go back to Crystal, the Marxist, and just remember, whatever you think, whatever you believe, it's just because of your class. And what I like about the Marxists is they come online and they don't make an argument. They don't make an argument. They don't say, look, here's why work is exploited, here's what, no. They just call you names. They just use that homonym. And the reality is they don't have an argument. That's me using it homonym back at them. Even the New York Times, who gave frickin' Amy Klobuchar a half-dorseman, has come around to essentially adopting Bernie Sanders' agenda. Of course they won't name him or give... See how the left thinks the New York Times is to the right, and Amy Klobuchar is on the right according to the left. He was unmistakable. In a recent editorial they wrote, American workers need a raise, but it is not enough to... Because need a raise, need a raise. And need is a claim against what? I need lots of things. And it's your moral responsibility to provide it? Hey, if you are an American workout and you need a raise, then work harder. Raise your skill level. Get an education. Increase your productivity. Increase your value. That's how you'll get a raise. Need is not a claim on anybody. Need is just an emotion. You need something. Go get it. And a raise, a wage, are for more value. You're getting what you're worth. I'm all for workers, but if they need a raise, they should go and figure out how to get one. Not, I need it. You gotta supply it. No, let's use the government. Let's use guns. And of course, the way American workers would get a raise, the way American workers would get a raise, is if we did a way with regulations that determine how much an employer has to pay them. If you got rid of minimum wage, some workers would actually get a raise. If you got rid of required benefits by law, benefits that often employees don't want to don't need, they would get a raise. If you reduced taxes on investments, workers would get a raise. Workers started, if you saw low income workers, working class workers started to see their incomes rising in 2018 and 2019. Why? Because corporate taxes were cut. Corporate taxes are not paid by corporations, they're not paid by shareholders. They are dominantly paid by two groups, consumers and workers. You want to give workers a raise, cut corporate taxes to zero, the only legitimate rate they should have. And not only will they get a raise because they're being taxed through the corporate tax, but they would get a raise because that money would be invested. And by investing that money, productivity would go up. And when productivity goes up, guess what happens? People get raises. Indeed, it's not that a worker today, let's say who works at a factory in a pretty simple job, let's say in a car manufacturing company, and makes today 200, 300 times what they made 50, 60, 70 years ago. It's not that they're 100 times more productive. I'm sorry, it's not that they're 100 times smarter, stronger, physically more able. It's that they're 100 times more productive. And what makes them more productive? What makes them more productive is the machines they use. What makes them more productive are the computers they use. What makes them more productive is the more efficient management they have. What makes them more productive is the investments that have happened over the last 50 to 100 years that have made them more productive. You want to increase worker productivity, increase investments. You want to increase investments, stop penalizing capital, eliminate taxation and capital. Products will get better, cheaper, and workers will make more money. But the more you regulate, the more you tax, the more you control, the more you centrally plan, the more you fix prices, the lower the standard of living of the worker is going to be. Economy is not trickle up, somebody says economy is trickle up. Economy is flood down, flood down. The real creative part of any work, of any production happens at the top. The value contribution is of the entrepreneur, the CEO, the chief technology officer, the R&D. And they are the ones that accrete the jobs that provide workers with jobs, workers wouldn't have jobs without them. They would be subsistence farmers basically starving or barely surviving as human beings have been throughout all of human history. But it's not just that they provide the jobs, they increase productivity. You can see Matthews never actually had a job, CEO does nothing. I mean, that's how stupid it's funny. There are no workers without a CEO. There's no workers without management. Workers owe their job to the C-suite. They owe their job to upper management without the coordination of capital and the labor, without the coordination of business, of figuring out who should do what, how to raise capital, how to deploy that capital, which markets, where to market, where to sell, which is what a CEO is responsible for. There are no jobs, literally no jobs, never in the history of mankind. Have a bunch of workers showed up at a plant and said to themselves, oh, I know what we should make. And they all together decide what to make. And then they know exactly which of them, which of the workers who are there should make the tires and which should make their, let's say they're trying to make a car, should make the engine and which one should make the body and just spontaneously it all integrates together. And who pays them while they're working? Because there's no guarantee anybody will buy their car. So they willing to take the risk of not getting paid until one of their cars sells? No, of course not. There is no such thing as labor without capital. There's no such thing as labor without an entrepreneur. There's no such thing as labor without a CEO. Because the process, and if you've ever been in a startup, you know this, the process is thus. Somebody has a great idea. Not a worker. An entrepreneur has a great idea. And once he has a great idea, he goes and convinces somebody to fund that idea. Because he knows he can't hire workers unless he has money to pay them, pay them. You know, if you go and work for a biotech company that makes no money, probably not make money for 10 years if it's a biotech startup. And there's a good likelihood, probably over 50%, it'll never make money. How many of the scientists, the workers at the biotech company, work for free? None. So where does the money come to pay them? Because they're no profits. Where does the money pay them for 10 years? Where did the first auto workers who helped build the first automobile, who paid them? Who built the factory? Who bought the equipment? Who paid them for years and years and years while there was zero profit? Well, the capitalists did. The venture capitalists, the bankers. And who organized them? Who told them what to do? Who told them what to build? Who told them who tried to sell the product that they built? Management. The least crucial people in any business are the manual workers. I mean, you need them, but they're easily replaceable. You try to replace a CEO, a good CEO. Try to get new capital. Try to get a good CTO or a good marketing person. Wow, that's hard. To pull a lever, to change your wiper, to push a button, it's easy. That's why they get paid a lot less. Because they're easily replaceable. The pyramid is not a pyramid of exploitation, as Karl Marx described it, where the top, the CEO, the capitalists exploit everybody below in the pyramid. The pyramid is in reverse. The pyramid is that all those workers stand on the shoulders of the capitalist, stand on the shoulders of the CEO of management. They don't exploit them because there's no exploitation going on. There's trade, but they stand on their shoulders. When workers have a job, when you have a job, any job, you should thank the entrepreneur who founded the business. You should thank the capitalist who pays your wages. You should thank your manager who keeps the business going towards profitability so that your wages could be paid and for your job to even exist. But no, no, no, no, no. There are paper shuffling losers who do nothing. Well, look at every economy in the world without entrepreneurs, without capitalists, without middle managers, without C-suite executives, and what do you have? Poverty, destruction, and death. Go to Venezuela, go to North Korea, go to Eastern Europe before the war came down, or travel in time back 300 years to an era before capitalism. Go see what life is like back then, and maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe when you get back, you'll appreciate the world you have, and you'll appreciate how far we are from what is really possible. And what's really possible is real capitalism, and that's, yeah, you can't even imagine how good things could be if that were the case. Somebody says that CARES Act is just a means of distributing wealth to the top. Did I deny that? Did I ever defend the CARES Act? That would be weird that I would defend the CARES Act. Never defended the CARES Act. And by the way, you got a check for 1200 bucks. I think almost everybody got a check. I didn't, but everybody else got a check for 1200 bucks. That's not the top. Small businesses got PPP loans. They really did. My restaurants that I go to, Freakinry and San Juan, Puerto Rico, to a large extent they were saved because of the PPP loans. Now, I'm against the CARES Act, but this idea that it all went to the top, yeah, the top got some of it, but you guys are just delusional. Okay, let's keep going. The New York Times, right? Thanks for wealth from the rich to the desperate. In confronting the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood that a sustainable improvement in the quality of most American lives required an overhaul of the institutions of... Quote. That is true. FDR truly believed that in order to sustain an improvement in quality of life in most American lives, it required an overhaul of the institutions of government, and yet the overhaul that FDR instituted during the New Deal did not improve the quality of life of Americans. It needed hampered the quality of life of Americans. It is a fact that the United States did not exit the Great Depression until 1945. Roosevelt was elected in 1932, came into office in 1933. Immediately set about restructuring, overhauling the institutions of government. And what was the consequence? Great Depression, more Great Depression, more Great Depression, World War II, stagnation, lower standard of living, and then finally when the war ended, and a lot of the New Deal stuff went away, the economy boomed. So the idea, again this is part of the problem, you have to fight on so many different fronts and notice on every 10 seconds of hers I have to talk for like 5 minutes, or 10 minutes or 20, I don't know. But the fact is that there's so many myths, this myth that FDR saved us, that FDR is a hero, that FDR made, you know, changed America for the better, and made, created the middle class, and saved us from a Great Depression. No, FDR sustained us in a Great Depression. His overhaul of institutions of government sustained us in that Great Depression. We have to fight on every front. These economic royals complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America, Roosevelt said in 1936. What they really complain of, is that we seek to take away their power. And what was interesting is that in 1937, the United States plunged into a deep recession, which was really just a continuation of the Great Depression. Into a deep recession, which was a continuation of the Great Depression, which again, we never really exited until after World War II. And yet the left and the right, I remember Newt Gingrich, one of the most shocking things I've seen, is Newt Gingrich, when he was speaking of the House in the 1990s, praising to the Hilt, the greatness of FDR, not as a wartime president, I kind of understand that. But praising FDR is a new deal. The new deal was an absolute disaster indeed. Many of the structural problems that exist in the economy today, in the American economy today, many of the structural problems today were a result of the new deal, or the result of FDR's policies. I'd say the 2008 financial crisis was a result of the financial regulations put in place by FDR, mortgage regulations put in place by FDR. We're still suffering to this day, 80 years later, from the evils of the FDR administration. All right, let's keep going for a little bit longer. The neo-liberals of the New York Times have embraced the program of FDR and... The neo-liberals of the New York Times. The New York Times is neo-liberal. What am I then? Whoa! Sanders, it's time for us to ask whether what is required is actually much more than what we were originally demanding. After all, the entire nation has stood witness as the supposed bedrock principles of our economy have been revealed as an utter sham. So note, she's advocating for... Bernie Sanders was too moderate. We need to go all out now. All out. Let's go for the full-blown socialism. Why are we holding back? How many times have we heard about the debt and the deficit? How much was modern monetary theory, which provides a new model for understanding the reality of deficits when you are a sovereign with a money printer? How much was that theory derided and treated like economic quackery? It is economic quackery. MMT is economic quackery. If you think that MMT says you can just print money with no consequences. If debt means nothing. Again, look at Zimbabwe. They had a money printing. They issued debt in their own currency. Look at Venezuela, which had a thousand percent inflation a couple of years ago. Look at pre-World War II Germany, under the Weimar Republic, where people used to go to grocery stores with barrels of cash. If you think if you don't keep printing money, you're not getting inflation. If you think debts do not have to pay back. If you think you just ramp up, borrow money with no limitations. Yes, you can print the money to pay back the debt. But you think there's no consequence to that. Money truly grows on trees. This is the economic understanding of a five-year-old. Now, there are some observations that MMT makes that happen to be true. Their conclusions are wrong. But you wouldn't even understand those. Because your economic understanding is of a five-year-old. Yeah, just print money. Just print money. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. And there are no consequences. Because the other false suit about MMT is that the government knows how to allocate that capital. Sorry, that money is not even capital at that point. It knows how to allocate that money. It misallocates it. It's a disaster when the government allocates huge quantities of money. It distorts markets. And of course, MMT right now, the practice of MMT right now is what's driving up the stock market that you are so opposed to. So it is economic quackery. Absolutely it's economic quackery. But again, you have to fight on every single thing they say is wrong. Times have political leaders and candidates looking to do something decent for the poor, the working class, or the middle and you shout it down with, but how will you pay for it? How will you pay for it? How? Just by printing the money? And then what? Where does that money go? How does money work? Do you know any of that? Or you just read an op-ed by Stephanie Kelton and you think you just get it. Money doesn't matter. She went to one too many Bernie Sanders rallies. You just get yourself into prosperity. By the way, if you're interested in a critique of Stephanie Kelton's book on MMT, then I highly recommend the grumpy economist John Cochran has an excellent review of the book. And the book is empty. It has no content. Because MMT, at the end of the day, other than a few identifications that are true, yes, a government that prints its own money never goes bankrupt. Zimbabwe never went bankrupt. Also, their currency lost all value. But okay. They have some interesting observations about the way money is created, their counting mechanisms where each government creates money. And they do, in an aggregate sense, they have some interesting things about, say, when an economy is collapsing, that you can deploy money without having monetary inflation. But then you get deficit inflation. You get distortions. You get misallocation of resources. Exactly what's happening today. Indeed, MMT is what the United States did in the 60s and 70s. And MMT is what we're doing right now under Donald Trump. We're doing MMT. And you're not happy. You're complaining. After all, if we don't balance our budget the way a household balances their checkbook, then we'll have hyperinflation and economic catastrophe. We'll get economic catastrophe. Maybe not hyperinflation, but you will get economic catastrophe. And you can make fun of that. You can pretend that that's not the case. But the more the government intervenes, the more money it just prints, the more it intervenes in the marketplace. The greater the catastrophe that's going to happen. What a load of crap. Trillions of dollars have been passed down like it was nothing. Do you see inflation? Yeah, look at the stock market. There's inflation for you. You complained about the stock market going up and everything else going down. Well, maybe that's because that's inflation. Maybe that's where the money goes given the structure of the economy. Not that I'm justifying it, I'm just saying the idea that there's no distortion is just bizarre. Hyperinflation? No. You do not. There's a lot of realistic concern around deflation as cash-strapped Americans pull back on purchases. Deflation is not caused by lack of purchases. Covered at length here, of course, the grotesque disconnect between the stock market and actual reality for most Americans. Maybe that's caused by the M.M.T. It's obvious now, but as George Stewart put it recently to Joe Rogan, the market has been used as a pole-soximeter of the entire economy as if it said something deeply meaningful to the average few. Well, your pension is probably in the stock market. The pension plans of almost all Americans in the stock market. So yes, disproportionately the wealthy are disproportionately benefiting from the stock market going up. But so is everybody who owns a pension. Everybody, whether it's your 401K or whether it's your defined benefits pension. All of them are in the stock market. And it's going up. You are benefiting from it. Trump is still out there tweeting about how great he's been for the market, clinging like a barnacle to this pathetic and absurd metric. But that's not all. We've been told that these genius investors and high-flying entrepreneurs and corporate executives were some kind of demigods with their brave risk-taking and brilliant prognostication out there in the wilds of the market. They aren't the ones taking risk. Really? Who pays your bills? Who pays your salary? They're sitting in their mansions in the Hamptons, quarantining with their household help while the American people backstop all their supposedly risky bets. How's the American people backstopping anything? The American people are sitting at home because the government has forced them to sit home. The government has forced them to be quarantined. And to the extent that essential workers are out there, well, the government shouldn't be determining who's an essential worker and who's not. Jamat Palihapatia put this part quite well back on CNBC a while ago. But are you suggesting you keep saying you're stopping up zombie companies? Are you arguing to let airlines, for example, fail? Yes! Good. I hate this guy, but he's right. How does that make sense in the broader scheme of the economy? Because when you look at what it means, this is why I'm saying, this is a lie that's been purported by Wall Street. When a company fails, it does not fire their employees. True. It goes through a passive bankruptcy. Right? If anything, what happens is the people who have the pensions inside those companies, the employees of these companies end up owning more of the company. Maybe not always. The people that get wiped out are the speculators that own the unsecured tronches of debt or the folks that own the equity. And by the way, those are the rules of the game. That's right, because these are the people that purport to be the most sophisticated investors in the world. They deserve to get wiped out. So I agree with that. Shockingly, I completely agree with that. Bankruptcy serves an important purpose. And it penalizes people for taking risks, but it also just penalizes people because a virus came around and the business model doesn't work anymore, and it creates that creative destruction that is necessary. And do people lose their jobs? Yeah, some people do lose their jobs. This idea that in bankruptcy, nobody loses their jobs is bizarre and absurd. But bankruptcy is a healthy process. And this is again why I keep saying we have to fight on all fronts. Here's a leftist saying bankruptcy is good because most people in places like CNBC and Fox Business and pretty much everybody in mainstream is arguing that no, no, no, no, you can't let the airlines fail. Why not? Why shouldn't the airlines fail? Why shouldn't they go bankrupt? Now, you could argue because the government shut down the economy, but hey, we all suffer when the government does that. Why should the government bail them out? Why not go bankrupt? Restructure your business? Shareholders should be wiped out. You know, one of the things that airlines and a lot of other companies did is they ran on very thin margins. Not margins of profit, margins of cash. They made a lot of money and they used that cash either to expand and to grow and to buy new airplanes. They grew very fast in the last few years. Or they used the cash to buy back their stock and I'm a big fan of stock buybacks. But you know, they didn't keep anything on reserve. They didn't keep anything for a rainy day. They didn't buy insurance and maybe there isn't insurance to buy, but they could have self-insured. They might have had enough cash and now something bad has happened and then they should go bankrupt. And that should be anybody who believes in even a little bit of capitalism should be advocate for them. But then, if that's true, auto companies should also be allowed to go bankrupt and not go bankrupt so that the unions own more but go bankrupt and have real bankruptcy court in which the various claims are adjudicated and maybe some companies are liquidated, liquidated, sold off. No more cars. No more jobs. Maybe bondholders land up having more of the equity. Maybe employees have some of the equity. Who knows? That's what you have bankruptcy proceedings for. You look at the contracts. You look at how they're structured. You don't do it politically like Obama did with GM where it was all politics and to hell with contracts, to hell with the bankruptcy law, to hell with the rule of law. I'll determine who's going to own what. But you let we have a fantastic process in this country of taking companies that no longer can make a profit, can no longer pay their debts and allowing them to restructure themselves so they can come out on the other side of bankruptcy healthy and invest and we don't let that happen. We stop it from happening by bailing them out. Ronald Reagan bailed out Chrysler in early 1980s. George Bush and then George Bush bailed out the airline industry after 9-11. Why? George Bush then bailed out the auto industry. Then it was again bailed out by Obama. They bailed out the banks. Why not let them all fail? Set up bankruptcy courts. Let's say there's a huge economic crisis. Hundreds of banks are failing. Set up bankruptcy courts that work 24 hours a day. And instead of spending the money and the bailout, spend the money and hiring judges and go through and restructure them, the banks was Bush. Bush bailed out the banks. That was top. Paulson, Bush, and Bernanke. Obama just bailed out the car industry and of course Obama then spent $900 billion which seems like small change right now on a stimulus package. Now remember when Obama did the stimulus package, Republicans flipped out. They went berserk. But now, when Trump is president, we just spent $2.7 trillion that is three times more than Obama did. And Republicans love it. They love it. They think it's fantastic. So the problem is we're fighting everybody. Those of us who believe in capitalism we're fighting the left. We're fighting the status quo. We're fighting the nationalists. We're fighting the Trumpists. We're fighting the mainstream. And we have to educate them all because they're also ignorant about how markets work. They're also ignorant about the status quo. They're also ignorant about what's going on in the world and they're so ignorant about how markets actually work. It's a constant battle. Constant reeducation. Constant battling here and battling there. It's rough. And nobody, nobody who has actually a public stage nobody has any kind of influence out there is actually making the case. Is actually using the stage to engage with millions of people on the truth. On what's really going on in the world. What capitalism really is. Tragic. Sad. Even Ben Shapiro. Has he really gone out of his way to slam the $2.7 billion trillion dollar stimulus? Has he really gone out of the way to describe, to encourage the government to let airlines and auto companies go out of business and stop the fed from bailing out every company that wants to issue debt. Yeah, Peter Schiff talks about this, but Peter is not listened to by millions. As popular as he is he's not listened to by millions. So it just, yeah it's just and there's no politicians because there's nobody out there who wish there was and nobody does it on principle with moral fervor. I mean the amount of economic BS that you hear every day from everybody from the president to everybody on television Fox and CNN and MSNBC and CNBC and Fox Business and then to every newspaper out there including the Wall Street Journal the economic illiteracy is truly unbelievable truly unbelievable and nobody seems to care. Nobody seems to care. We're just drifting towards socialism or fascism or whatever. Statism in one form or another. Drifting towards that and you think Joe Jogensen is going to make any iota of a difference the right wing you know, Limbao is pathetic. Limbao said he said, I heard this a few months ago or maybe a year ago he said yes when we were in our position we opposed government debt but now that we were the majority party yeah, government debt doesn't matter that much we always knew government debt didn't matter Limbao makes me sick he's a complete sellout and a compromiser Lou Dobbs makes me sick Tucker Carlson makes me sick these are all compromises who know nothing about economics who understand nothing you know Rush Limbao used to be pro-trade now that Trump is not pro-trade he's anti-pro-trade somebody says I should run for president if I ran for president I wouldn't get into the debates nobody would have me on their talk shows who would I be talking to? Myself, you guys the 20,000 subscribers I have you think running for president is like that and you just get all the publicity nobody's going to take me seriously I have no support you need half a billion dollars to run for presidency who's going to give me 500 million dollars to run for president Tucker Carlson doesn't care about the middle class Tucker Carlson doesn't know what the middle class is Tucker Carlson doesn't care about anything, he's a complete populist he sticks his finger out into the wind and he figures out where his listeners are moving and that's where he goes and on economic issues it's way to the left America's going to impoverish the middle class if you destroy private equity which is what Tucker Carlson wants to do and has talked about doing the middle class will suffer American jobs will suffer whatever the hell that means I mean my American jobs the jobs of Americans will suffer private equity creates jobs private equity creates middle class, private equity creates wealth private equity increases the productivity of labor increases wages these people don't understand economics they certainly don't understand finance they don't understand the way the world works they are populists Tucker Carlson used to be a libertarian and he sold out he sold out completely he sold out to Bernie Sanders well really he sold out to Trump to populism which is a combination of left economics some left economics a little bit of dribble of raw meat of kind of right way you know kind of pro markets little bit and then complete kind of fascism when it comes to social issues that's the combination you go right on social issues and left on economic issues that is what Tucker Carlson has done and that's what the Republican party is doing all right before we go on reminder please like the show we've got 163 live listeners right now 30 likes that should be at least 100 I figure at least 100 of you actually like the show maybe they're like 60 of the Matthews out there who hate it but at least the people who are liking it you know I want to see a thumbs up there you go start liking it I want to see that go to 100 all it takes is a click of a thing whether you're looking at this and you know the likes matter it's not an issue of my ego it's an issue of the algorithm the more you like something the more the algorithm likes it and if you don't like the show give it a thumbs down let's see your actual views being reflected in the likes but if you like it don't just sit there help get the show promoted of course you should also share and you can support the show at your own book show dot com slash support or on Patreon or subscribe star or locals and show your support for the work for the value hopefully you're receiving from this and of course don't forget if you're not a subscriber even if you just come here to troll or even if you're here like Matthew to defend Marx then you should subscribe because that way you'll know when to show up you'll know what shows are on when they're on you'll get notified so yes like share subscribe support like share subscribe support there you go easy do one or all of those please