 Elizabeth Juan, the honorable, or actually no, the dishonorable senator from the state of the great state of Massachusetts, a great state that will elect a woman like this is something else. Elizabeth Juan is, stinks out a unique, I think, position in American politics. She posits herself as a defender of capitalism. She differentiates herself from Bernie Sanders by saying she is not a socialist, but a defender of capitalism, but a humane capitalism, a proper capitalism, a capitalism of competition, a capitalism where the government plays a big role. Maybe she's a proponent of, you know, Chinese style state capitalism. I don't know, but in the election, she always says, no, no, no, I'm a capitalist. I'm not, I'm not anti-capitalism. I just want everything regulated. She doesn't say this, but I, she just wants everything regulated, everything controlled from the government. She is the fascist to Bernie Sanders as socialist. I mean, she really is definition of fascist. She wants you all to believe you have private property. She wants you all to be, you have incentives as if you have private property. She wants you all to make a lot of money so she can tax it. She wants you all to innovate so that she will take credit for it, for the economic growth to generate from that. She wants the pretense of private property, the pretense of capitalism, the pretense of markets. Well, the property, the businesses, the markets are completely controlled by the government, by who? That's Elizabeth Warren. Very popular among Democrats, particularly I'd say among, you know, the sophisticated class, the class that doesn't quite like Bernie Sanders because he's too in their face socialist. But among the policy geeks, you remember when she ran for president, she had like 555 different plans. She had a plan for everything. She was going to fix everything. She had a plan, a fascist plan to address every single issue, right, that possibly could have So one is very, very respected among, you know, the elites, the elite, the economists, the policy wonks, the people in the Democratic Party who want control and who want to control over pretty much everything. Well, Elizabeth Warren is worried about inflation because, you know, as is everybody else, inflation, as we all know, is at another more than 27 year high. I mean, I guess inflation is tracking crime. It's at a over 30 year high. We haven't seen this kind of inflation since the 1980s and, you know, arguably it could very well get worse. We'll see how much it gets worse, leave the projection about inflation to our strong Saturday. But at least for now, at least for now, you know, she is, she is worried about inflation. And we are seeing inflation seriously increased. We're seeing inflation go up across the board. Chips, automobiles, we're seeing it in the grocery stores. We're seeing it in, you know, pretty much everywhere, really. And, you know, Elizabeth Warren is, you know, is riling against this. And of course, what does Elizabeth Warren believe that the problem is? What is the issue? Why do we have inflation? Now, there are a lot of theories about this. There's the monetary theory of inflation that basically says it comes from printing money. There is the basically printing money, right, increasing the supply of money. There is the physical policy, the physical theory of inflation, which says that it comes from governed deficits and the belief in the marketplace that the government will never pay back its debt, that that's where inflation comes from. The world of inflation expectations is debated. The world, how do we measure money exactly is debated. I mean, there's a lot of economic theory. A lot of people have written a lot of people won over prizes in economics over this. This is a rich area of economics. But Elizabeth Warren will have none of that. I mean, all of those theories, all of those theories refute the popular theory of economics on the left today, which is the monetary, modern monetary theory, which suggests that the government can spend as much as it wants. The government's spending is never the problem. So they clearly do not hold the physical theory of inflation, that money printing is not the issue that government can spend it will. And that is behind the Democrats attempt to pass spending bill after spending bill after spending bill with the idea that it doesn't cause inflation. Government spending, government borrowing doesn't cause it. So what we need another explanation, and Elizabeth Warren has the perfect explanation. The explanation is a consistent with everything else she believes in. It's an explanation that serves the purpose of promoting her ideas about the economy, her ideas about quote capitalism. And that is that all of this inflation we're seeing right now is caused by monopolies, by monopolies. The problem in the world today is not the supply chain. The problem in the world today is not too much artificial demand, because we gave people checks. The problem in the world today is not supply constraints, because we lock people at home and wouldn't let them work, including in China. China, by the way, just locked down Qixion, the ancient capital of China. Qixion is an interesting city. It's got the terracotta warriors. I actually gave a terrific talk at the University of Qixion years ago. Fantastic. On the morality of capitalism. Biggest posters that anybody's ever made for one of my talks. They put them all over campus, the morality of capitalism. I had 300 people there. It was great. Anyway, Qixion has just been locked down 13 million people have locked in their homes because of COVID. Anyway, it's none of that. It's not luck downs. It's not checks in the mail. It's not helicopter money. It's not any of these things. The actual problem with inflation is greedy businesses. I'm serious, guys. So you know, the problem is, for example, grocery stores. Grocery stores, according to Elizabeth Warren, are putting, quote, corporate profits over consumers and workers. So Kroger and Albertson and Publix, there are probably a few other grocery stores, right? Small ones, big ones, HEB in Texas. They're just putting corporate profits above consumers and workers. And, you know, they're just increasing prices and increasing and increasing and increasing and increasing. And there's no competition because I don't know, why is there no competition? Wait a minute. I don't know. There are many grocery stores. Now there are a few big ones. But even the big ones, there are at least three some places more than that. I lived in Orange County. There were quite a few. And this doesn't take into account the Trader Joe's, the Whole Foods. It also doesn't take into account the Walmart grocery. The Target. Target is huge in groceries. Huge in groceries. Right? At least in California. They're everywhere. Target, fresh. There's Amazon fresh. At least there was. That's some way they might be closing. I mean, how do markets work? If Kroger raises prices, particularly if it raises prices overall, what a grocery store customer is going to do? They're going to go to Albertsons. Or they're going to go to Publix. Or they're going to go to Walmart. Or they're going to go to Target. And let's say they all collude. They get together and they all raise prices. Well, one of them is going to cheat. One of them is going to cheat and lower prices. Customers are going to go there. They're going to make more money. Everybody else will have to match their prices. So no, competition drives prices down. Isn't it weird that when we keep government out of our fears, when they don't send us checks in the mail, when they don't lock us up in our homes, that when that happens, prices actually go down, not up. As productivity increases, prices go down, not up. Chip shortage is not caused by a lack of corporate competition. There's plenty of corporate competition. The cost of milk, the cost of eggs. This is what we're experiencing right is classical inflation. It is a consequence of artificial demand, chasing fewer goods, because we haven't managed to catch up with the production of goods to fit the artificial demand. Where did the artificial demand come from? From the fact that we printed checks and sent them to everybody in the mailbox. This is what traditionally has been called helicopter money and isn't interesting. Isn't it interesting that whoever gets the money first, this money that the government hands out, they're the ones who drive our prices. So for example, when financial institutions get the money first, when it's done through the Federal Reserve buying mortgage-backed securities and things like that, where does that money flow? It flows into assets. It flows into the stock market. It flows into the bond market. It flows maybe sometimes into real estate. But when we actually send that common guy checks, where does the money flow? It flows into groceries. It flows into automobiles. It flows into other things. Their prices go up. This is not rocket science. It's completely empirically observable. Apollo asked, do you go to the corner shop to buy a pint of milk and six eggs? I do not because I don't drink milk. And my wife buys most of our groceries. I sometimes go, but usually my wife is responsible for that. So I don't know what to do with eggs. I wouldn't know what an egg looked like and what to do with it. What would you do with eggs? Oh, you eat them. But then I get the finer product. I don't get the process. Inflation occurs when you have a high artificial demand across the board, across the entire economy. And that can only happen with suddenly, out of nowhere, people have more money than they had before. And that can happen when the government hands it over. But so Mises's theory of inflation, I think, is very consistent with what I just said, Alex. It is the idea that whoever touches the money first has the greatest impact on prices. That it is a monetary phenomena. It is caused by the Federal Reserve. It is caused by the central bank. John Cochran's theory of inflation is more focused on government deficits and expectations regarding the ability of the government to pay back its debt. Cochran has a book coming out on his physical theory. I think it's interesting. I don't have a final statement about who I think is right here. My guess is you could probably integrate Mises's theory with Cochran's theory and you would get closest to the truth. You like even a wider lens? I don't think we can go much wider than this. This is like an 18 millimeter, 18 millimeters. It's already ultra wide angle lens. I think wider than this, we'd start getting distortions in my face and stuff. So pay attention to this, guys, because what is Elizabeth Warren really trying to do here? What she's trying to do is provide more justification for much more robust antitrust. Agenda. She's going to argue that anytime we see prices go up, that is a sign of monopoly power and that is a sign that we should seek the antitrust division on those companies. This is a trial balloon to see if we can expand the definition of antitrust, if we can expand the role of the antitrust authorities, if we can go off the businesses in a much more systematic, much greater way. And this is again, who fascists like attempts to expand the role of government, control businesses more, break them up. She's, remember, she's pro-capitalist. She wants more competition, not less. She took those classes about perfect competition, those bogus economic classes on perfect competition seriously. And what she wants to do is take away any kind of market power, any kind of size. She wants to destroy the winners in competition so that we constantly get every business of size broken up into tiny little bit of pieces so that we can get as close as we can to perfect competition. If you remember, perfect competition is the theory that the capitalist ideal, this is again why she's capitalist. This is the distortion, that the capitalist ideal is lots of companies competing perfectly, all having the same information, all having the same knowledge, all having the same productivity level, all innovating at the same rate, all exactly the same. The world isn't like that. There's nothing in the world like that. Nobody has perfect information, perfect knowledge. Nobody wants to be the same. Why do you start a business? Not because you want to be the same. You want to be better. You want to be different. So this is part of this broad agenda of control, control, control, and using antitrust, which your Democrats have, using antitrust to control our businesses, to break them up. They're getting more and more supported, unfortunately, from Republicans. Whoever is in control of the Senate, Republicans and Democrats, antitrust is on the rise. It's likely that a Republican president in the future is going to support antitrust, increase use of antitrust to go after his favorite enemies, let's say it's big tech or something like that. Thank you, John. Really appreciate that. Really appreciate the support. John gave $25 and says, he always enjoys the show. He thanks me. And Alex just rounded all his questions up to 100 bucks for the holidays. Thank you, Alex. But that wasn't, I mean, Elizabeth was busy. She's trying to raise her profile. I think she's sensing that maybe just maybe Biden won't be in a position to run for president in two years, and maybe there'll be a primary in the Democratic Party. And given how old she is, this will be her last shot at trying to go for the presidency. And I think she's trying to raise her profile, because not only is she advocating for robust antitrust in order to cure us from inflation, but she is going after the richest man in the world, Elon Musk. And in particular, she's doing that in the context of advocating for wealth tax and advocating for increased wealth taxes. So what's going on with Elizabeth Warren and Elon Musk? Well, I think it all started when a pro-publica reports in November came out saying that Elon Musk paid no taxes in 2018, and that indeed, I can't remember the exact number. Musk's wealth went from 2014 to 2018 from $14 billion to $455 billion. It increased by $14 billion, but he only paid $455 million in taxes. And in 2018, he paid no taxes. And what Elizabeth Warren is saying, yeah, I mean, he didn't pay taxes because he had no income. So my solution to that is let's tax wealth. And when people like Elon Musk, their wealth increases, they'd have to pay a lot of taxes. So she tweeted, according to the support, Elon Musk didn't pay any federal tax in 2018. Neither did Jeff Bezos in 2007. From 2014 to 18, the 25 richest Americans got $401 billion richer, but only paid 3.4% of that in federal income taxes. Yeah, because they didn't, that wasn't their income. That was their wealth increase. Now, you know, this guy, Rick Macron, Taco, I guess, wrote for US citizens opposed to the unrealized capital gains tax, which is a form of a wealth tax that Elizabeth Warren was supporting. Here's an example of a tax file and diplomatic letter template I made. You can use it and send it to your elected officials. And what it said was, I'm just opening this thing up, what the letter said was, I expect you to oppose the widened proposal to tax unrealized capital gains, although the proposal targets billionaires and not myself, the government of elected representatives have a track record of scope creep when writing new taxes. I anticipate that any new unrealized capital gains tax will slowly make its way down to middle-class retirement investments over the next several years. It will start with billionaires, then eventually millionaires, then the modest investments will get hit possibly within a decade. Although principals, although principal residences and holding in 401k plans apparently will be excluded, the widened proposal takes new tax sites a further a step closer to opposing unrealized capital gains tax on the average investor. So he wrote that. Musk, Elon Musk, that response to that, he says exactly, eventually they run out of other people's money and then they come for you. So the argument here is not a moral argument against taxing billionaires, not an argument about how productive they are and how much, in a sense, they have already given to all of us to quote society. It's not an argument about it's their property. It's an argument about don't tax them. If you tax them, they're ultimately going to go after you. Now then Musk gets named person of the year, and of course, it lives with one, doesn't like that. So she writes in Twitter, let's change the weak tax code so the person of the year will eventually pay taxes and stop freeloading off of everyone else. And what is Musk's response? He says, you know, stop projecting. And he attaches an article with the title of Elizabeth Juan is a fraud, her lies about being a Native American or whatever. And then he says, you remind me of when I was a kid and my friend's angry mom would just randomly yell at everyone for no reason. And then he says, please don't call the manager on me, Senator Karen. And then he goes back to the original thread, and he posts. And if you open your eyes for two seconds, you would realize I will pay more taxes than any American in history this year. Now everybody went wild. He called Senator Karen. The internet was hugely supportive of Elon Musk. They got excited. Musk is this amazing person. Wow, this is incredible. This is returning fire. As Scott says, this is amazing. But who won that exchange? Who won that short exchange? Well, Elizabeth Juan won it by a mile by a mile. No argument was made against the wealth tax. Musk almost did was go straight to ad hominem. All he did was troll her. There was no argument other than what's his argument? This year, I'm going to pay more taxes than any American has ever paid in history. And you know why he's doing that? Because on a Twitter poll, more people wrote that he should sell stocks so he could pay taxes that people said don't sell stock. Say sold stock so he could pay taxes less legitimizing her claim. Legitimizing the idea that he should be paying taxes on his wealth. So what he did was he turned his wealth into income so he could pay taxes. He basically completely fell into Elizabeth Juan's trap and has for months. He accepts the idea that it's legitimate for them to take our money. He says things like I allocate capital better than they do, which is true. But that's what he should be pushing. It's my money. But instead, you see to win on Twitter is to insult the other side. If you insult the other side, you win. But that's not who wins in life. It's not who wins in politics. You win if you can capture the moral high ground. And Musk did not capture the moral high ground. He gave in to the moral high ground. Oh, I do pay my taxes. Oh, I'll pay more taxes this year than anybody has ever paid in American history. Oh, so it's legitimate to demand that you pay a lot of taxes. Yeah, he should have refused to pay. He should have not sold this stock unless he wanted to sell it for other reasons. He should have not sold this stock and he should not have paid. He should have said I follow the law. The law does not demand me paying taxes when I have no income. In 2018 I had no income, paid no taxes. This year I had X income, I'll pay my taxes. By the way, he should have said, I pay way too much taxes. You should leave the money in my hands because I'm actually productive when you send it to Elizabeth Wan. She's unproductive. She squanders it. She wastes it. She destroys it. And by the way, I have, look how I've changed the world. What has Elizabeth Wan done? What is the last thing she invented? Who was the last person she employed? What part of the world did she make a better place to live? Where, where, where are all the values that Elizabeth Wan has brought to the world? I can point to the values I brought to the world. I can show you the wealth I created for others and for myself. And my wealth is in my stock. And that stock, as he says sometimes in interviews, is not determined by me its value, it's determined by the market. The market says this is what I'm, this is the value I created. I don't know Elizabeth Wan or anything and I don't know the American government anything. And I don't know in society anything. I produced, could I enjoy producing, I produced the values I believed were good. And the only reason they're valuable is because you guys buy them because it makes your life better. That is a moral defense. Not, oh stop bitching and complaining Elizabeth Wan, stop being such a bitch, stop being this, stop being that. And by the way, I pay all the taxes, I pay 11 billion in taxes this year more than anybody's ever paid into. Okay, who cares? Why is any of that relevant? But you see, we're conditioned by Twitter to view any exchange, the winner of an exchange is the one who insults the most, the one who trolls the most. That's the winner. 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 iranbookshow.com slash support by going to Patreon, subscribe star locals and just making a 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 already subscribers and those of you who are already supporters of the show, thank you. I very much appreciate it.