 Hey guys, this is Stowe Bishop with Radio Rothbard and I want to let you guys know about the first Mises event of 2024. On February 17th, we will be returning to beautiful Tampa, Florida for an event dedicated to inflation, causes, consequences, and the cure. While the government tries to hide the consequences of inflation and their official statistics, Americans see and feel it every time they visit the grocery store. The state and its media lap dogs try to blame inflation on corporate greed, but the true source of inflation is the Federal Reserve and the banking system. We're going to be tackling this issue with a great lineup of speakers, including Joseph Salerno, Patrick Newman, and our new Mises president, the great Tom DeLorenzo. We have a special code for Radio Rothbard viewers for a 15% discount that's Rothbard 24. And you can find more about this event at Mises.org slash Tampa 2024. Hey guys, this is Stowe Bishop with Radio Rothbard and we've got another great offer for Radio Rothbard listeners. We have a free book that we want to send directly to your doorstep. If you are a fan of this show, you have no doubt heard us discuss Murray Rothbard's classic anatomy of the state, his dive into the mechanics of the state as we know it, what the state fears, what its greatest threats are. It is one of the all-time best Rothbard reads, a personal favorite of both myself and Ryan. You can get your free copy as a Radio Rothbard listener by visiting Mises.org slash Rothpod free. That's R-O-T-H-P-O-D free. You can also find the link in our show notes. Welcome back to Radio Rothbard. I'm Ryan McMakin, Executive Editor with the Mises Institute. My usual co-host though Bishop is under the weather today, so it will be me and my guest, Benjamin Severs. Ben is recently a Mises Institute fellow, that is he was part of our summer fellowship program. He has a bachelor's in economics from Grove City College and is presently a PhD student in economics at West Virginia University where he's just begun that program and we're glad to have him on because he just recently published an article with us on how Arkansas, the state of Arkansas, the government of Arkansas, is forcing a sale of private land that had been owned by Chinese nationals. We'll carry a link to that in the description, but it's called Arkansas's attack on Chinese-owned property is reckless and crony driven. I'm going to talk about this. I invited Ben on, even though this is a thankless topic from the perspective of being an editor at the Mises Institute and that every time we run something about free trade, about letting foreigners do things that MAGA types don't think they should be doing, we get all sorts of nasty emails. And so I fully expect that to happen with this one as well because guess what? We're going to side with free trade and freedom on this and we're going to talk about some of the reasons why the hysteria and the calls for a new Cold War with China are anti-freedom. I certainly have nothing to do with anyone who's going to claim that they're in favor of freedom and free markets. So we'll cover this topic, but we'll of course get plenty of nasty grams about that all from people who claim that they are guided only by reason and logic and never ever affected by emotion while they rage against us. But that's the sort of responses we get to these sorts of topics, but we're going to talk about it anyway. So Ben, why don't you just tell us a little bit about what the specifics are in this case and then we can get into some of the more general principles at work here. But what's going on in Arkansas and what's the deal with this Chinese-owned property? Yeah. And first off, just thank you for having me on, Ryan. It's an honor to be on here. So regarding this recent action by the Arkansas government, they ordered Sinjenta, which is a subsidiary of the Chinese government-owned company. And it's an agricultural firm in Arkansas that owns about 160 acres of land, acres of land. They were ordered to divest of these landholdings. Well, hold on. What's just only a measly 168 acres or 168,000? 160 acres. Yeah. 168? Okay. All right. Go on. Yeah. Yeah, I believe that was the number. But yeah, they were ordered to divest of these landholdings. Yeah, 160 acres of it. They ordered to divest of these landholdings. I think they're given a window of two years because they're violated a law. And now this law that they violated was reporting law. But I believe that the punishments associated with violating such a law were up to the discretion of the government. So they're ordering them to sell this land when they didn't need to. But in this article, I make the case that this is not an ethical way of looking at it. And there's a lot of economic problems with this. So we could get into that, I suppose. But there are some unintended consequences of this law. This is a company that provides a lot of services to American farmers. One such service is research. So they conduct a lot of agricultural research on their land in the United States. And that's something that benefits directly American farmers. So obviously, the people in charge of decision either did not care about the effect that this might have on American farmers, or they have other interests, or they were ignorant of these effects. So it's either unintended consequences or a cronyism. Them choosing to benefit some over others. So yeah, I don't know specifically what you want to get into. But I have a few different arguments I love in this article. Well, yeah, let's get into some of those in this specific case then. And you're right, I just looked at the CNN piece. It's 160 acres, which okay, wow, gee, so much land. And so let's look at some of the assumptions behind this. Okay, first of all, a lot of the people who want to get to kick out all the foreign landholders, it's assumed that these people aren't providing any sort of actual service that the market doesn't want them there, that market participants don't benefit from this relationship in any way. And it's all downside only from foreigners owning land here. And you can see it in some of the calls from the politicians who are grandstanding about it, saying that only American citizens should own land. Of course, we'll see here in a little bit that, well, he's a little late to that show because foreigners have been owning lots of US land from the very beginning. But let's look at the specific Arkansas case. It looks like, I would say that we're facing here a bootleggers and Baptists situation. And if you're not familiar with that concept, listeners, this is an old concept where you get prohibition of alcohol, because A, on one side, you've got the moralists who just don't like alcohol for moral reason. And then on the other side, you've got the bootleggers who want booze to be illegal because they make huge profits from running illegal booze. And so there's a private cynical business interest, and then there's a moralist interest, and they join forces, people who naturally should hate each other, but they join forces in order to benefit themselves either for psychic profit or real monetary profit. And so maybe there's something like that going on here. And you do touch on that on some of that in your article. So yeah, go ahead and get into that now. Yeah. So that's an excellent point, Ryan. I don't specifically say that, but perhaps we've been great to stress that point. It's not going to be one or the other. It's not going to be crony interests or just typical conservative anti-China moralizing. It's not going to be one or the other. So what's some of the crony interests? Well, whenever you do order them to sell the land, who's going to buy it? That's a big question. Now, it could be Bill Gates, who is one of the biggest landowners in the state, who's been acquiring farmland. Could it be him? And he has certainly donated to Republicans, as I found, and looking at his open secrets profile on who he donates to, politics-wise. Now, he hasn't donated directly to Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the current governor. But of course, we know that the money when he donated to a PAC, it can go to her. It can go to other candidates in the state. Or she might realize that, well, look, this isn't the best interest of my party. This is the best interest of the Republicans. So I'm going to take this action. Or she could just realize, well, there's large landowners in the state. And I know they could donate to my campaign. So I'm going to take this action. And I know that they will like it. So there might not even be this direct relationship. But the crony interests are definitely a factor in this, or at least probable. The cronyism explanation has a lot of good explanatory power for a lot of actions in U.S. history. We have Dr. Patrick Newman, who's written an entire book on the topic. And the Public Choice School of Economics has looked into various regulations throughout history and has found that rather than moral motivations for law, crony interests have actually explained more than the typical public welfare theory of regulation. So, so, yeah, it's very, and there's other families, other other large donors, the Tyson family, they're a large landowner in Arkansas as well. So I go through those in the articles a bit. I link to all the open secrets profiles. Some of them may not be as convincing others. They've donated a lot of money to PACS. So, but overall, they come together to kind of paint a picture of, okay, there are these clear benefactors, and they have donated to these campaigns. They have donated campaigns and PACS. So why do they do that? Well, clearly to curry favor. Politicians service their donors. So why would this case be any different? Now, of course, there's this huge movement, or at least conservative movements, anti-China. They don't want foreigners buying land, as you mentioned. Whenever they hear that China is some Chinese company bought land or owns land, they get in a tizzy about it. And we discovered that when, you know, I've received emails. The tweet has, when this article is tweeted, it's received responses. And when I publish a similar article back in July, it also garnered a similar response. But in the end, a lot of the moralizing, a lot of the arguments are not really rooted in what we take to be right, libertarian ethics. So it's like, they say things, they try to mask their faulty economic arguments in moral arguments. So, okay, we're a sovereign people or we're a sovereign country. They're not part of us. It lands as a birthright. Someone said land is a birthright. No, you don't gain land by being born. You gain land through homesteading. You gain land through transforming it. And that's how you bring it into your property. That's how you convert it into your property. You don't gain land by being born in a arbitrarily defined geographic region. That's not how you gain control over land. So, but the people who own this land legitimately, those who gained it through voluntary trade and homesteading, they're the ones that sold it to China, like not China, but they're the ones that sold it to Singenta, the Chinese-owned company. Yeah, let's look at that a little bit more deeply, right? So in the article, yeah, before we move on to the more sort of the deeper principle behind it, just I want to establish a little bit better what the cronious angle is. Now, you have established clearly here that there are interest groups behind this legislation, right? People giving money. There are certain political interests that are using this issue to gain this new government regulation, this government prohibition through the Arkansas State House. Okay, good. Well, why are they doing that? What is the non-moralist, you can see, right? There could be a nationalist element, right? Economic nationalism. But what sort of organizations, let's just think, could benefit from there being prohibitions on this sort of thing? And this is what was always what I found. Every time I read economics in one lesson, what I'm always reminded of is Haslitt is so good in that with taking some sort of economic regulation or attacks and people, a lot of naive people just think, oh, it's because people wanted to do good things and people were motivated by deep principle and stuff. And Haslitt generally shows that no, actually, there's just some sort of lobby here, that there's a lobby behind these labor laws. There's a lobby behind minimum wage. There's a lobby behind these restrictions on trade. These are the reasons those laws exist, not some kind wishes for mankind. And so you note here, for example, that there could be private businesses, say like Tyson Foods, who could face benefit, who would benefit from prohibitions on foreign land. And so am I right in thinking then that, okay, land speculators would benefit, right, from foreigners being able to freely purchase land here, right? You would buy a bunch of land, then sure, you would want a bunch of foreigners to buy land there. We see that happen a lot in Aspen, Colorado, for example, where it used to be a lot of Russian oligarchs, I don't know who's buying their land at the moment. But they would come in, and this was an agricultural land, of course, but they would just come in and buy huge houses and riverfront property and stuff and massively drive the prices up. And so normal color runs like me avoid Aspen like poison, because it's all just like art galleries and then sufferable rich people, we go to different ski towns, other than Aspen, but that's who's in Aspen. It's a lot of tons of foreigners. Okay, so if you're a real tour there, you're doing great if you're selling to these people. All right, so you can see why those people wouldn't want any sort of ban on, but who would? I guess it would be people who would want to, who are in the business of acquiring land and using it. And so you could see then how other agricultural interests would, would domestic agricultural interests would then benefit from prohibitions on foreign ownership. So you could see absolutely why those people would form, form interests and want to see, want to make sure that it's easier for domestic firms to acquire this land and use it for their own agricultural interests. And so, yeah, there are some big agricultural interests there like Tyson and you could certainly any domestic person who's in the business of, up to as you know, Bill Gates, who's maybe in the business, who is one of the largest owners of farmland in Arkansas, you know, all these people then, why would they want to compete with Chinese buyers? So clearly there's, you can see, you can demonstrate a monetary motivation right there then, can you not? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Now one thing this does do, like Bill Gates is a good example, because he's been up, he's been recent, in recent years have been quite, he's been, he's been progressively acquiring land in the United States, farmland. But they say like the Tyson company, well, why would they want this? They, they're not famed for acquiring land like Bill Gates is. So imagine if they try to acquire this land in a free market in the absence of government interventions, orders to divest to the land holdings, imagine if they tried to acquire it then, well, they'd probably have to pay a higher price. Now whenever you do impose from above the government telling them like, listen, you have to sell this, this makes them a much, this makes them a more eager seller than they were before. So this essentially makes it more cheaply for companies like Tyson or whatever other farmers who are in the market for buying land, it makes it more cheaply for them to integrate or I guess, I guess horizontally integrate with, with Syngenta without merging with the company, they just acquire their assets. And of course, I'm assuming Syngenta just doesn't have farms in the United States, they have headquarters in Arkansas too, like they have buildings, they have other, they have, I'm sure they have countless other assets, they have employees. So who, where are these people going to work? Where is their, what's their next best alternative? If they work for an agricultural firm, I'm sure that they might try to go into the market for, go into the labor market for other agricultural firms, try to get a job there, some other, may Tyson foods, maybe perhaps some other firm. So yeah, it's not just the land holdings that are going to be going to other farmers. It's, it's probably the labor, the capital, the buildings that they own, all the other resources that they have control over. So yeah, it's, it's, it will clearly benefit those who are in the market for acquiring land. You've noted that the article notes that now who they are, that that's a trickier issue. And the point of going through the political contributions is kind of maybe suggested these, the people who have donated the farm, the farming companies that have donated before are the ones who would benefit from this. And it would make sense that the politicians who enact these laws and regulations would be doing so to service those people who have donated to them. Well, and I'm sure it's a winning political issue too. Oh yeah, definitely. Right. I mean, just badmouth foreigners and want to keep them out. And you can just say things like foreigners shouldn't own American land and lots of people nod. And so yeah, it's an easy choice, I think from the politicians point of view. But the next step, I think before we get into the principles here is let's just cover one quick issue here. Now you know it in the article that China owns hardly any farmland in the U.S. It's 0.03, 0.03 percent of total farmland privately owned in the U.S. Now you have, you use a link there that goes to MSN.com. But I looked up a page of the Farmers Bureau. This is November 2023 data. And so who owns who owns this foreign land, right? It turns out you probably, you know, more intelligent people won't be shocked by this. Canadian investors are among the, are the foreign national zone. The most foreign held agricultural land in the U.S., they own 31 percent of all foreign held agricultural land. That's 12.8 million acres. And that's 0.97 percent of all U.S. agricultural land overall. And so okay, that's less than 1 percent for Canada. So who else owns all of this land? Let's see. We got, next up is the Netherlands, which owns 0.37 percent of all agricultural land. And then after that, what do we got? Italy, the U.K., Germany. But all this adds up to just not very much at all. Italy 0.21 percent, the U.K. 0.19 percent, and it just keeps getting smaller from there. China is not in the top 10 list here at all. That's all European countries or Canada. And so if you look at the other owners of ag land in the United States, that, all that combined is 0.85 percent. All of these other other countries, including Japan, China, Sweden, et cetera, et cetera. China, which owns less than Japan, 0.03 percent, as you note here in the Farm Bureau's data, a little less than Mexico, 0.05 percent. And wow, just what a huge amount. Let's compare to how much the U.S. government owns of land in the United States. So when we're looking at the largest land owner, that's 12.8 million acres of ag land. Federal government, 640 million acres, which as we know also is often 50 percent or more, sometimes 80 percent of all the land in certain states, like in Nevada, right? In Colorado, it's about 35 percent. And in a number of Western states, it's over 50 percent. And of course in Alaska, it's huge. And gee, who's the biggest threat to your actual freedom on a daily basis, the U.S. government or the Chinese government? How much does the Chinese government tax you every year, American citizen? How much of your life has the Chinese government controlled, regulated? How many people have been locked up in the United States by the Chinese government? I mean, it's amazing the way people get hysterical over a foreign government has virtually no control over them. And because the United States, of course, is across an ocean, has a nuclear arsenal, a huge Navy, the odds of China having any control over your daily life are about zero. And yet people get really, really worked up about it because of this 0.03 percent of land, which foreigners, of course, have owned land in America forever. The British, of course, used to own huge amounts of land. That's declined over time. Even after the war, the British hung on and the U.S. relied heavily on British investors to keep things going. And that's just been a fact of American life. And as Walter Block points out in his article, right, if you're old like us, you remember all the hysteria over Japan in the late 80s and early 1990s, when Japan was going to take over the United States. And everyone freaked out when Japanese investors bought Rockefeller Center in New York City, which, of course, where they filmed a bunch of NBC shows and it's pretty important building. And it's named after Rockefeller. Chinese nationals ended up selling that. And guess what? They didn't take over America. It didn't turn out that their owning of Rockefeller Center amounted to much of anything at all. So we've been, we've seen this before and the reaction is very similar now to what we saw with all the anti-Japan rhetoric in that time period. And one other question we have to ask, which I don't think has been really mentioned enough at all, is why does China have all these dollars that they want to invest in the United States and buy stuff? It's because Americans buy stuff from China. Americans voluntarily gave those dollars to the Chinese. And now the Chinese need to do something with those dollars. Another reason that they have so many dollars is because of the importance of U.S. Treasury. So the Chinese, they need to have dollars available. They buy a bunch of treasuries because that's low risk because they have all of those dollars. They buy U.S. debt. So no one seems to get particularly worked up about the fact that Chinese own all this debt, although you're starting to hear some people freak it out about that, which is probably a far more important issue than the fact that they own any agricultural land. And so if you're going to hand over tons of dollars to the Chinese, don't get terribly upset when they start buying American stuff. And so what's the answer to that? Oh, to tax Americans more so they don't buy Chinese stuff. Oh, that's a great pro-freedom solution, just raise taxes on imported goods. Great, so that our cost of living goes up even more. Great solution. But that's pretty much the only thing they've got in their holsters, in their toolbox for these people who tell us that that's a problem, they want the Chinese to have fewer U.S. dollars. So that's kind of the level of thinking that the economic nationalists seem to be thinking about on this. Yeah. And to their credit, the same people who are complaining about the debt issue are also the same people who are complaining about the debt issue, like China accumulating debt. But it's rational on their part. I mean, they have all these U.S. dollars, I mean, they're buying U.S. denominated assets, like debt, farmland, so on. But I think an important question to ask is, what are they trying to influence by doing so? Now, let's assume it's a Chinese conspiracy through and through that they're doing this to screw us over, basically. Let's assume that. I don't think that's true. Let's just assume that. What could they do with this land? And Xinjie, obviously, is a company that they're trying to make profits and so on. But let's assume that China is controlling them through and through. A lot of these acquisitions, a lot of the farmland acquisitions are part of their One Belt, Initiative, which is essentially to control a lot of more of their own food supply. So, who are they going to be harming by cutting off, let's say they cut off production? Who are they going to be harming? They're going to be harming their own people. Their goal is to basically take over some of their own food supply, which is coming from the United States. So, how are Americans being harmed in this? As I did it before, Americans are being benefited, especially in the Xinjie case, who they provide services to American farmers, and to the people who are selling them the land. They're not being forced. They're not having their arms, they're not having their arms behind their back doing this. So, yeah, it's completely ridiculous to say that they're doing this to garner influence over Americans by controlling our food supply, or it's not of any benefit to any Americans whatsoever. It is a benefit to a lot of Americans, and it's a hard case to make that they're doing this to control our food supply. Well, and then let's get into, yeah, these issues of the morals behind seizing property, telling Americans who they can sell their land to, because, yeah, as you noted, right? Someone sold this land to these Chinese investors. Was it an American? Probably was. Based on the statistics we just looked at, there's a very high probability that this land was owned by an American and then sold to the Chinese. Okay, so what you're saying, then, is that we need laws prohibiting Americans from selling stuff who they want to sell it to. Now, I suppose if you're a drug war person, then that makes perfect sense to you, but generally, America was founded on this idea that people should be able to buy and sell what they wanted to do, especially when we're talking about land. And so somebody sold this land to China, and what they're saying is, nope, people should not be allowed to sell to whomever they want, and no foreigners, if you believe some of these politicians, no foreigners at all, can you sell land to? Okay, well, what do I want to sell that land to foreigners? This is the question I was asked to anti-free trade people is, they're like, wow, yeah, you got to control trade or else you lose jobs in America and so on. Well, no law means anything unless you enforce it. So the question always is, how big should the fines be and how long do you want to lock people in cages for trying to import goods from a country that you don't think they should import goods from? So how long will we lock Americans in cages for selling land to the Chinese? That's a question you need to ask, what are the penalties for trying to sell land to a Chinese national or any foreign national if you think that should be illegal and verboten? What are the penalties you propose for that? And what you're telling me is you're in favor of locking people up for engaging in a totally peaceful behavior. And that's the end game of all protectionism. And I haven't heard an answer on that, of course, because they never look at the side of how this controls Americans and what they can do in terms of sales and investment. Yeah, their argument is basically that, okay, we can't have free trade with a country that's fundamentally socialist. Well, I counter that by saying, well, if you're going to put restrictions, you can't put restrictions on a country that's, on trading with a country that's socialist and call that free trade, because that's definitely not free trade. As Rothbard notes that free trade should be unilateral. I mean, who cares what they do? I mean, of course it'd be better if they privatized all their companies, if Sinjento was completely privatized, like all the shares the government owns were sold off or given to some private actor. Of course, it'd be better if that were the case, but that's not the reality we're dealing with. It's like the same people that say, oh, if you're a libertarian, why are you driving the road, the government road? Well, we've been deprived of the private alternative. If you're a libertarian, why are you sending your kid to public schools? That's even worse, because we're being forced to pay it, and we're being deprived of the private alternative, essentially. So in this case, we're being deprived of private Chinese companies, and plus the Chinese taxpayer, the Chinese, or I guess I don't know if they pay taxes, because the government probably controls a lot of the income, but the Chinese taxpayer, they're the ones that are being also being deprived of a private exporter, somebody who they can work for, who they export and they get US dollars in return or whatever, they're being deprived of a private exporter. So read to say, okay, we need to just completely stop trading with these people, stop trading with these public entities, because we don't have the completely private alternative. That doesn't exist. This doesn't exist in the United States. Countless companies receive privileges either through monetary payments from the government or regulations that benefit them in some way, or they perhaps receive loans that were made possible through Federal Reserve intervention in the economy. So there's plenty of companies in the United States that receive benefits similar to that of Chinese companies. So should we stop trading with those? No, we're being deprived of the private alternative. So I think that the argument that since they're a partially public or a majority public share company that we need to have the government intervene to prevent us from trading with them, that's completely absurd. Any person who believes in the free market should reject that argument. And furthermore, as a libertarian, there's a lot of people who listen to our arguments for privatizing police, privatizing security, who are all on board. But when it comes to the national securities of concerns of China, they believe in government intervention. Why not privatize the response to that as well? If you think that it's insecure to trade with China, don't buy Chinese. But given that so many people do, it's obviously the cost outweigh the benefits of doing so, of cutting off trade for these petty national security concerns. That should either indicate that the national security benefits are very small compared to the detriments of cutting off trade, or they're not existing entirely. So people like Zachary Yost and others, Joseph Mullins, the libertarians, who just published a book on a fake China threat. I haven't got that book yet, but I've seen that he's making the rounds on the podcast circuit. So there's plenty of criticism of this idea that China is a huge threat. And what I see most in conservatives, and you see this a lot of foreign conflicts, especially recently, is that they like to point to the words of our adversaries and say, that's evidence that they're trying to go against us. You see how the way U.S. politicians talk? People, rhetoric's the name of the game. Why should we take words seriously? Shouldn't actions speak louder? Of course, every country has their expansionist measures. Every country engages in unjust actions, acquiring property that shouldn't be theirs. But at the end of the day, what does all this say? I mean, a lot of conservatives point, oh, China has tough words. The Soviet Union did too. One of the things they like to cite over the Soviet Union specifically was, oh, that we'll bury you in our output. We're going to bury the United States, but we're really referring to their production, how much they produce. So obviously, these words can be taken out of context very easily and become like the cornerstone of foreign policy. So we have the arguments. We're applying economics to understanding foreign affairs. That is way better than having some romantic view of it that holds the intentions of foreign policymakers above any other consideration. Well, and it's just amazing too to see the asymmetry between U.S. power and Chinese power also when you look at the fact that the U.S. has multiple colonies, bases, basically surrounding eastern China. But we're supposed to be deeply, deeply worried about them owning a few dozen acres of farmland in Arkansas. So I just assume most people just have no idea what the reality is. The U.S. is sailing the Navy through the Taiwan Strait right off the coast of China. I mean, just imagine the hysteria of China were to sail some of their Navy into the Gulf of Mexico, which they never do. And why? Because the U.S. has such a complete total control of the Western Hemisphere. And then the most China can hope for is friendly trade relations and some minor military exercises in Latin America, which pose no real threat to anybody in North America. So it's really quite remarkable just how worked up people get about these. And so we've shown then, of course, that on a practical level, right, China hardly owns any land. China has no rival, no naval power that could even remotely pose any threat to the American mainland. So on a pragmatic level, it's just it's like it's like a nothing issue. But then on a moral level too, it's just you're telling Americans what they can do with their own property as Walter who does not idealize the U.S. Constitution nevertheless asks, hey, where in the text does it say the federal government can control who can or cannot own land? It doesn't. It's not in the enumerated powers. So we certainly can't have any federal regulation on that. Now this would be Arkansas law. So that would be a little bit different. But on a moral level, why should Arkansas be in the business of telling Americans who they can sell their land to? Suddenly, they're all suddenly your state legislator, who's probably never read a book in his life on foreign policy suddenly is an expert on why national security requires a ban on foreign nationals owning land in Arkansas. So that just seems to be where we are. But as we noted, politically, it's they'll be fine. And I can't imagine anyone be punished at the ballot box for this position. The people will be punished will be, you know, usual market participants, anyone who benefits from Syngenta, anyone who might have benefited from these land sales. And yeah, just domestic landowners who could participate in that market and people who might actually like these services from China. But just remember, the reason they have all of these dollars is because Americans gave them to them, and Americans chose to dominate the international currency trade by just pumping so much debt into the international economy through just trillions of dollars in bonds that they keep putting out. And that greatly is what motivates the Chinese to have access to lots of dollars as on top of the trade where they just get flooded with dollars in general. And so that's just that's just the reality of what's going on there. And so you would need to really overhaul the situation in order to change this demand for American goods, but that's just not what's going on right now. Yeah, you hit the nail right on the head with all of that. The situation right now is that you have you have the choice between government intervention, which requires aggression against private property owners and domestically, or just allowing freedom to reign and allowing freedom to reign may allow some publicly owned company to come in. But we're in favor of private property. And if we're in favor of private property, we should be against intervention, regardless whether it's a private Republic actor. Now, some people will take it to the extreme. I saw one person comment. This is why we this is why states should prevent other people in other states from buying land in their own state. But that's completely ridiculous. It's it's it's it's putting authority in the hands of the state in the hands of the governments that preside over us that they should never have had in the first place. And yeah, we there's no libertarian argument for this action. All right. Well, with that, we better wrap up this episode of Radio Ross Barn. Thank you, Benjamin Severs, for being my guest today. And thank you everyone for listening and we'll see you next time.