 The radical fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Brookshow. All right, everybody. Sorry about this. Completed a disaster. We are, though, now on. It's working. But I don't know how far along. This is the problem. We've got a tropical storm off the coast of Puerto Rico that I think is about to turn into hurricane, or was a hurricane, and something like that. Anyway, it's not going to hit the island, but we're getting these waves of rain and wind from the storm. And whenever you get significant rain over here, and particularly when it's accompanied with wind, first we had a power outage, so the power went out about five minutes before the show started. But that's usually not a problem because the building has a generator, so everything comes back up, so everything's fine, and I've got everything here on batteries. So just the power going out would actually not stop the show. I think the power's out. Looking out the window. Yeah, I mean power's out in San Juan right now. But then, just as the show is about to start, just as I hit stream, go, let's start. The internet shut down, and then it came back, and then it shut down again, and then it's come back. And every time it does that, it drops off of YouTube, and then it comes up on a different link, and then it drops off, and it comes up. Anyway, here we are. We might get shut down any minute now because the internet might go, whoops, gone. This is the challenge of doing a live show. Remember, this is live. Most shows out there are not broadcast live. But this is the challenge of doing a live show from a Caribbean island. Granted, an American Caribbean island, but still a Caribbean island. So we lost a bunch of people. We had a bunch of people more on the different iterations that some people have given up. And gone to bed, or gone to do something else or whatever, but hopefully they'll show up. You can let them know on Twitter if you're on Twitter that we have reassembled, and we're all here, and everything's fine, and that the show goes on. But of course, I don't know for how long. Any second now, the internet could go. So let's hope it doesn't, and we can actually do a complete show without interruption. Yeah, it would be nice if Puerto Rico upgraded its system so it was not affected by storms and rain and wind, which we're going to have in Puerto Rico. That's the nature of a tropical island, the Caribbean, particularly during hurricane season, which we are in the midst of. We're very close to peak hurricane season right now, though this year has been fairly quiet. But anyway, that's where we are. It was an ugly day all day today. It was just cloudy and rainy and cloudy, and you could see from a distance that the ocean was churning, and that's all the impact of this storm that's off the coast to the north of us, but we're getting the remnants of it. So anyway, I'm not doing a show on materiality, on whatever it's called, the study of weather, so we'll skip this. All right, today we're going to talk about Labor Day. We're going to talk about, you know, in this context, the state of American workers, we hear a lot about this, what the government can do to help workers. We'll hear a little bit about that. And what is it we should be celebrating during Labor Day versus what it is that most people actually do celebrate? Free trade, thank you for the contribution. Thank you, Jonathan Honing, for getting us started two iterations ago. You know, since then we've lost that Super Chat, but it is still there, so thanks guys. And let's see, I want to remind you, you can use the Super Chat to support the show right here. You can also become a member of the show. I know I keep promising we're going to add contact to the membership. We are, we're going to do a show where the chat is only going to be for members. We're going to do a number of different things, but there will be added benefits to being a member. We're still working on it. So please become a member. There's a button on YouTube where you can become a member of a show. I think you can do it for like five bucks. That would be great. And what are the logistics? You can become a monthly donor, a monthly supporter of the show on Patreon, or newrunbrokeshow.com, so I support. All right. Before we get to labor, there was, oh look, an anonymous user just became a member. He became a member today. So that's great. I think we have like 120 members, something like that. Need to get to like a thousand members. That would be cool. So if you're not a member, become a member. It's cheap and it shows support for the show. And it's another way to get engaged and be part of what we do at the Run Book Show. I don't know if you saw the news out of Canada, horrible news out of Canada. It looks like these a couple of guys, they look like brothers based on the name and based on they look similar. They've got their photos plastered all over the news. They went on a stabbing spree, knives. I don't know if it was knives or swords or what it was, but they managed to kill 10 people, injure a whole bunch of others over a dozen other people in Saskatchewan, something like that. I know I'm probably butchering their pronunciation. They're actually now alerts to stay home if you live in Alberta and a number of other places. I know I have a lot of listeners in Canada. So please be careful out there. 15 injure, 10 dead. Wow, 10 dead. No idea what the motivation is. They don't have Muslim names. Of course that doesn't preclude that from being a possibility, but they don't have Muslim names. I don't know if this is just nihilism. It doesn't look like it was targeted or maybe the first victims were targeted and then it just became a rampage. But it does appear to be, you know, we'll see if it's political in some way or something else. But God, I mean, I guess this is always happening in human history and it happens everywhere. Canada is a little unexpected. It always surprises one when something bad happens in Canada. Canada is such a nice place. People in Canada are so nice. Anyway, except for the government and except for the prime minister. So one wonders if it has a political aspect to it. I doubt it, I guess. But denialism in the culture that we live in today, it's spooky. And you know, killing somebody with a knife is, I don't know, it strikes me as, you can shoot people from a distance. You can kill people with a gun and it seems like there's a distance there, there's a remoteness. There's less of an emotional connection. But actually getting close enough to actually kill somebody with a knife. Much harder, it requires a certain level of, I don't know, evil and just uncaring and to just relish in destruction and death and just horrible. Anyway, I hope my listeners in Canada are safe. I hope that they catch these bastards really, really, really soon and that this particular threat is eliminated as quickly as possible. I assume that will happen. We will see. Alright, what was I looking at? Alright, so today, obviously this weekend is Labor Day weekend. So happy Labor Day weekend to everybody. This is a holiday celebrated both in the United States and Canada. It's a Northern American holiday. This is, it is really Labor Day is really the North American alternative to May Day during really in the rest of the world. May Day is Labor Day. May Day is the Communist Day that celebrates the Poletarian that celebrates manual labor. And in the United States in the late 19th century, there was a push by certain labor unions to establish a day that's Labor celebrates the achievements in the United States, celebrate this country which they contributed to building, obviously. And it's, they did it purposefully on a non-May Day. And I think it's been institutionalized and both by the states and then by the federal government. As in a sense, a date that celebrates it, but that also distances it from the Communist or the Socialist May 1st, which is typically where it celebrated the rest of the world. So what I thought I'd do today is ask us a question. I mean, it's easy to be pessimistic. It's easy to see things negatively. It's particularly economic times right now, pretty hard. And things, things economically are not good in some respects and other respects as we talk about and not too bad. And but what is, what's the condition of labor? And what does labor actually mean? And so what is the condition maybe more broadly of work in the United States? Is it doom and gloom? Is it horrible? As many people would like us to believe. Is there positives? Is there hope? And what is that hope if there is any hope? And then maybe the relationship between labor or workers or, you know, the whole concept of labor is misleading, I think, today. So we'll talk about that and its relationship to capitalism and freedom and what freedom can attain. All right, we got a $50 super chat. Let me just, all right, I obviously didn't get that started for some reason. Let me just see. Let's leave. Give me a second here, a piece of software that I just need to get for some reason is not working quite right. There it is, now it's working. All right, Michael says, I finally got a job. That's always good. Congratulations, Michael. I'm now making 3X. Wow. 3X what I was making before. It's been life changing. I want to make 3X what I'm making right now. Rand was right. Don't ever give up what you want in life. The struggle is worth it. Some GOP wants to amend the constitution through a convention thought, oh, this will get us off topic. Let me leave that with you. I want to congratulate you on the new job and congratulate you on the 3X salary. That is amazing. Let's deal with the question itself a little later. Once we finish the topic we're talking about. Just to remind everybody, this is how you ask questions. You can ask questions on anything. I answer the questions. I answer questions on anything. You know, I think that's part of what makes the Iran book show unique. It's ask me anything every single show. And I think the breadth and the scope and hopefully the depth too of what we cover is unusual for YouTube shows. I don't think you get quite the spectrum of the types of questions anywhere from sex relationships to economics to culture to everything. You know, to amending the constitution. All right. One other thing I wanted to cover. What was it? I can't remember. Before we got started. But yeah, let's just jump into Labor Day and in the state of the world. Oh, that's what I wanted to do, the state of the world today. So I just released my talk that I gave at Ocon this last year, this last summer. So it is available on the Android Institute YouTube channel. You can catch it there. Hopefully you enjoyed and like it. It's about how I can still be optimistic. It's why do everything going on. If you are too lazy to go over to the Android Institute website and watch it there, I will be releasing it on my channel. Probably while I'm in Asia kind of to fill in content. I try to keep a bunch of content in reserve to fill in. So that I can keep you guys entertained while I'm traveling around the world. So if you want to wait, it will be available later this month. Sometime in the middle of the month. But that is a talk I gave about why I can still be optimistic. There's already some disagreement with me on Twitter. I'm happy to get any questions, disagreements, concerns that you might have or anybody else might have. Anonymous users asking if Ocon is worth it. Beyond, I think, your wildest expectations. Yes, it is worth it, particularly for a first timer, particularly if you're young, particularly if you're new to Objectivism. But even if you're old to Objectivism, you know, if you're just once a year, you get to go to a place with 300 to 500 people who basically share your ideas and listen to lectures and, you know, you just engage with people all with the same perspective on life. It's just fabulous. It's like being in a miniature John Goldschulch. So, yes, as Catherine says, oh my God, worth it. Catherine just came back. It looks like from Rosella in New York. Oh, right. Oh, right. Did you say hello to Jeffrey? Hopefully you said hello to Jeffrey and hopefully you had a great time. I think Catherine is talking about, oh my God, worth it. She was talking about Rosella, not Ocon. I don't know. I don't know. But Rosella is definitely worth it. So, yes. Catherine says, let's raise the goal plus my food at Rosella's. So she thinks, yeah, we need to raise the goal so that I can eat Rosella's more often. Fantastic. I said hi on my receipt. Oh, you didn't. He was busy. Oh, you didn't actually introduce yourself and say hello. He would have loved to know you were there. All right. Restaurant work is hard, yes. So one thing it seems today, and really since 2016, since Trump was elected, the one thing the Republicans and Democrats seem to agree on is the fact that the American worker is struggling, that we're losing jobs, manufacturing is in decline, the American, you know, what is it? You know, we're just, it's just a disaster out there and particularly workers are struggling, we don't have jobs, jobs need to come back to America, we are told, over and over and over again. And what's interesting is not only does this seem to be broad political agreement on the fact that American workers are suffering and that there's real hardships, but there also seems to be a certain agreement on what it is required in order to solve the problem. That is, this seems to be some agreement about the fact that the solution to the problem of American workers, the extent that they exist and the extent that everybody celebrates those, well, not celebrates, highlights those problems in politics, is more government intervention. And that government intervention could be in the form of reduced imports. Now we can't directly reduce imports or it's difficult to directly reduce imports, but one way we can try to reduce imports by raising tariffs, a massive tax on Americans, but nonetheless, I did see, I saw statistics today, I'll see if I can find it for you, a statistic today of how much the Trump tariffs have basically, I wonder where it is. Yeah, there it is. How much they've cost Americans? So here it is, tariffs amounted to, so tariffs constituted basically $52.6 billion of tax increases in 2021. So the tariffs you paid higher taxes in the form of higher product prices by $52.6 billion. And people talk about inflation and rising prices for all of us. They forget that some of those rising prices in 2019, 2020, 2021 were a result of the tariffs. And one way to reduce prices across the board fairly quickly would be to eliminate tariffs. Well, what's interesting, of course, is Trump imposed those tariffs, Biden has not touched them. There is no move to eliminate those tariffs, because again, there's agreement among Republicans and Democrats that taxing the American people in order to reduce imports is somehow going to help American workers. It hasn't. Deficits, trade deficits are the highest they've ever been. And tariffs did nothing to reduce imports. And of course, the imports are not the problem. Never were. They can't be. Generally, tariffs reduced economic output and reduced income and reduced employment. They actually have numbers. Tariffs probably lost the U.S. economy, 173,000 jobs, reduced wages by 0.14 percent, and reduced long term GDP by 0.22 percent. So it doesn't sound like a lot, but that compounds over time. It becomes significant. So there's unanimity left and right today that American workers suffering. The government needs to help. One way to help is to reduce imports. They haven't been very successful in reducing imports, but it's great rhetoric. It's great rhetoric. We want to save American jobs by taking away jobs from the Chinese and we'll do that by increasing taxes on the Chinese. Whoops. It turns out you increase taxes on Americans. And as I told you guys would happen. And so that's one way. Another way, of course, to help the American worker is through central planning, through government involvement in the workplace. It's through trying, government creating jobs, government subsidizing, government redistributing, government building, creating, government trying to somehow create jobs. Now those of us who study economics, I think we all know that government doesn't create jobs. Jobs at the end of the day are created by the private sector. Jobs are created indeed by entrepreneurs. The government create jobs in a sense of printing money and hiring people, but those jobs are meaningless. They should live. And ultimately the only way they're sustainable over time is by entrepreneurs ultimately paying taxes. So one way or another, it is only entrepreneurs who create jobs, who make jobs possible, who pay for the jobs. But you now have unanimity among left and right that government can play a significant role in job creation. So that with the chips bill. This is a bill to bring manufacturing is chips on shore to invest in chip manufacturing. You know, what was it? $50 billion of subsidies to chip makers as part of a massive $200 billion bill to increase and to reallocate and to redistribute and to for the government in its central planning brilliance to figure out where best to allocate jobs. We have, we have now on both left and right, an entire agenda built around trying to increase, save, improve American American jobs. That's like the state of of American of American labor. Let's see. Maybe I can share the screen with you guys. That would be good because there's a graph here that I didn't think of this, but this would be good. That wouldn't be it. That wouldn't be it. No, that's not it. We'll get the right one in a second and oh yeah, that's not interesting. There it is. There it is. There it is. All right. So look at this graph, right? No, you're not going to see it. There we go. Now you see the graph. Average hourly worker. Let me just fix it. I'm going to shrink it. Whoops. There we go. All right. So average hourly earnings deflated by PC and deflating by PC gives you a correction for inflation. So what you get here is wages adjusted for inflation. Yellow is the 50th percentile. Blue is the 30th percentile. Red is the 20th. Dark blue, I guess, is the 10th. The 10th. Average hourly earnings for production are non-supervising workers. So these are blue collar workers deflated by PC at select points in the distribution, right? So from low to middle. So from 10th percent, that's the lowest distribution of earnings all the way up to the yellow, which is the median, the 50 percent. And you can see in all cases, wages were basically flat from the mid-1970s through the mid-1990s. And then they went up, and I would argue they went up primarily there because of increased efficiency and increased productivity. Increased productivity as a result of the 1980s. The 1980s, both the restructuring of American businesses, the introduction of computers, the introduction of technology in the early 90s and mid-90s, the introduction of the internet. All of that, the cumulative effect of all the progress that was made from 1980 on, really in terms of increased productivity, increased technology, increased use of technology, resulted in the fact that wages started going up again in the mid-1990s. They went up nicely through the mid-2000s, and then again stagnated for a while, at least at the lower end, and then increased significantly recently. Overall, wages today on a real basis adjusted for inflation, adjusted for inflation, are significantly higher than they were in the mid-1970s. In spite of the fact that both the left and the right constantly hulk back to a glorious past for the American labor, the way they earned a lot more money, and wages have gone down, and quality standard of living has gone down, all completed and uttered nonsense, which we've talked about before in discussing inequality. All the stats regarding inequality, wages, and so on that we've been told about now for well over 10 years are just wrong. These are hourly wages, average hourly wages for production and non-supervisory workers. So you can see up here, you can see the decline in 2020 in the 50th percentile, but all the other percentiles went up even during 2020. So what we have here is real progress, real success. And yet, we observe in the world out there both, and again both political parties, a real panic around this. And I think part of the panic is a result of something we talked about yesterday, which is the perception of people in workers, middle-class people, the perception that while their life is improving, people don't notice their improvement. What they notice is relative, and what they notice is that people who are not working, people on welfare, people who are not working anywhere as hard, anywhere as long, anywhere as intensely as the people we just saw in the graph, those people are making about the same as they are. We talked about this yesterday when we talked about inequality in the United States and the fact that in the bottom 60 percent there's immense equality because government transfers have provided significant income support to people who are not working or working part-time or working at the lowest wages. So people at the middle see themselves working hard, struggling to make a living, and other people are not working at all and they're making exactly the same living as they are, and that is upsetting to people. I think people are also realizing they're going to have to change jobs, that the old kind of jobs don't exist anymore, that they can't expect to live a static life where nothing changes, that they're actually expected to grow and to change and maybe learn new skills and maybe move to a different city or maybe move to a different job. And all of that is upsetting so the welfare state plus economic dynamism, I would call it, have always resulted in angst and people like Donald Trump and the left take advantage of that angst. They tell, yes, we know your wages have not gone up, lie. Yes, we know we're losing many factoring jobs to China, lie. Yes, the American hotline is devastated and in retreat, lie. But they use that, they use the angst, they use the concern, they use the fact that people feel like and have been told now for a decade, over a decade, that their standard of living quality of life has not gone up. And it's hard, you know, it's hard to tell. It's hard to tell when you're actually living day to day, it's hard to tell if your life is improving or not. I mean, if the improvement is dramatic, then yes, it's easier, bigger house. But even if you go into a bigger house, you very quickly get used to the big house, your standards, you get used to those standards. I mean, how many of you who are older, I'm not talking about young people, how many of you who are older, remember life without an iPhone? I mean, it's hard to even remember it. It's hard to think about it. And so now when I think about my iPhone, I don't think about it improving my life. It's always been here. My life hasn't gotten better. And yeah, and the differences between this iPhone, iPhone 13 and iPhone 10 or iPhone 5, iPhone 4, I don't remember what the differences were. It's always been this fast. It's always been this good. It's always been this cool. So it looks like my life has been static. It doesn't look like it's been improving. You actually have to think about it to realize it. I mean, and it's everywhere. What was grocery shopping like before, I don't know, Trader Joe's or Whole Food? What was little things, little innovations that happen every single day that are all over the place, constantly improving our lives incrementally. Our lives are getting better incrementally. We can't see them. We don't know them. So for us, it seems static. It seems stagnant and static and stagnant. And then we're told by our intellectuals, and this is their crime. We're told by the intellectuals, oh, yes, your earnings are down. Your standard of living is down. The world is horrible. Everything's worse than it used to be. And it's not. What was life before Amazon? Before you could go online and buy anything, anytime, anywhere, delivered to any place, sometimes in less than 24 hours. What was life like then? I don't know. I can't remember. We managed. But my life is improved because of Amazon. But I don't have, you know, most people don't have a strong sense of that. And so we think we're stagnating when we're not. We think the world is stagnant when it's not. We think the standard of living is not going up when it is. And we think wages are not budging, and yet they are, partially because we're told. And of course, these wage numbers are for a variety of reasons, not completely accurate, because they don't include things like benefits. Benefits was a very small part of wages in the 1970s. It's a very big part of wages today. Benefits benefit us. At least some of the benefits do. Some of them are wasted, but some of the benefits and so a significant portion of wages is that. It's also true that households, this might be Zali wages, but these Zali wages now fund smaller households. So they used to have households of four to six. Now the households are closer to two or three. So, you know, household size has changed dramatically. So for all kinds of reasons, the graph that I just showed you actually underestimates the progress that has actually been made. And the fact is, the reality is that right now, right now, as bad as things are, as high as inflation is, as dumb as our government is, as evil as the programs that they're instituting are, as bad as our Federal Reserve is distorting or perverting our currency and making it more and more and more difficult for entrepreneurs to do their job in spite of all that. We have more jobless things than there are people. Indeed, there's a record number, record number of job openings. We had a great resignation. People feel comfortable enough to flip jobs and switch jobs. We've got rising private sector wages. Right now, in 2022 now, granted, it's not keeping up with inflation. In some cases, it's not. And we've got labor shortages everywhere. So, in spite of all the dooms saying and the stock market go down and all the bad stuff, which I know, I know all the bad stuff. When it comes to actually getting a job and having a job, now I can't guarantee that this will be true in a year. But right now is one of the best times ever. Michael just got a job at 3X, what he was making before. Now I'm sure it wasn't easy and I'm sure he had a work hard at it and had to be patient and had an interview and struggle, but he got it. And indeed, the reason things are not a thousand times better, and there could be 20% better, 30% better, 50% better, is because our government, left and right, Democrats and Republicans, are ignoring what has actually helped labor throughout American history. Ignoring what makes America to this day a better place to work than pretty much anywhere else in the world, in terms of wages, the standard of living, in terms of quality of life. We're ignoring all that. We're ignoring what makes that possible, which is freedom, which is markets, which is let markets do the job. I mean, one of the things that America still has is a relatively, relatively dynamic workforce. We still hire and fire. We still move. We still resign and leave and change and work and move around. We still have a vibrant private sector. Again, in France, your ideal job, if you're a young person, is to go work for the government. That's not true in America. And in America, we don't like the job you resign. You move. That entrepreneurial sense of trying to improve one's own life, one's own work, doesn't exist as much in Europe. Doesn't exist as much in Europe. So the real weakness of our labor market today are the things that prevent that dynamism. It is the, you know, the forced benefits, right? We get all these benefits from an employer, many of which we don't want. We don't need, we didn't ask for, but the government forces the employer to give it to us. Which distorts, I'll take home pay, which distorts. We don't get what we want. We get kind of the health insurance that the employer provides instead of health insurance customized to ourselves. We get all these other benefits that are clear that are really benefits for us. Would we buy them in a marketplace if our employer didn't provide them to us? Instead of that, we could get a higher wage. I think most of us would prefer that. It's hard to fire people in California. It's hard to hire people. We've got affirmative action. We've got a million different constraints in licensing laws, regulations, up the Brazil, which limit entrepreneurship, therefore limit job creation. Just imagine what this country would be like. Just imagine what this country would be like. If we actually had free markets in labor, if we actually got rid of regulations, it's hard to imagine. It's hard to contemplate because we'd be so rich. We'd be so successful. Life would be so much better. Life is pretty good. And that's why it's hard to imagine what it would be so much better in the future. And of course, government could do a lot to liberate labor markets and to make them more flexible by getting out of the way, by doing away with licensing laws. For example, a lot of us today are working from home post COVID. But entrepreneurs can't start businesses at home because the home is not zoned for business. But imagine if governments loosened up on the zoning requirements and allowed home businesses to start. Imagine we get rid of all the restrictions, all the regulations, all the constraints on opening up a little store, opening up a restaurant. I mean, you would see massive amounts of entrepreneurship, and much of that would happen, by the way, in the poorest places in the country, among the poor. Who are often the ones who suffer the most from these kind of regulations and restrictions. I mean, we would, it's hard to believe how richer we would be. So yes, there are pockets of distress with workers. You see that primarily with, you know, less educated, significantly less educated working age men. Too many of them are dependent on government programs. Too many of them have given up. Too many of them had certain expectations about life and about their work life that have not been met. Too many of them are on drugs, alcohol. Too many of them are committing suicide. There's real angst. And one should ask and one should talk about and one should try to figure out what the cause of that is. But the cause of it is not, this I can guarantee you, the cause of it is not China. The cause of it is not technology. The cause of it is not capitalism. I think government plays a big role in causing it. And I think a lack of education. I think a lack of values. I think a certain alienation from the world in which they live caused by really lack of values. Lack of connection to other people and lack of ambition. Lack of ambition. Because if you're ambitious, there's still opportunities in this world. There's still opportunities in this economy. You can still do amazing things even without any education. And of course what we know for sure is that the solution is not government. If you look at the laundry list of federal, state, local policies that's supposed to be pro worker, all they are is pro powerful interest groups. And workers, American workers as a whole are harmed by this. And what's amazing, what's amazing about the American economy is that in spite of all these restrictions, the American worker and the American economy still does okay. I mean, the Democrats and some Republicans want to increase occupationalizing, you know, regulate housing even more. You know, provide all kinds of goodies from childcare and healthcare and welfare and gig work, protecting gig workers as if they can't protect themselves. Tariffs. I mean all these things do the exact opposite. They all destroy. A privatized robust healthcare system with private insurance would be a lot better for all of us. A welfare system, a diminished welfare system would actually increase the amount of work that people do, increase productivity. And take away some of the resentment I think exists in America against those who don't work yet still get money. And of course tariffs just destroy jobs, just pure destruction. No benefit, zero. And they destroy jobs, they destroy many, many more jobs than they supposedly protect. The thing that, anyway, so, by the way, I think the best kind of economics, I'd say policy blog, economic policy blog, the best economic policy content is being produced today by, and that's where I showed you the graph, and this is the, you know, a lot of this stuff is from the article, by Scott Linsicum, who wrote an article a few days ago about Labor Day, better policies for all American workers, which is very good. But Scott Linsicum from the Cato Institute, and he writes at the dispatch, I think he's my favorite economics writer right now. I mean not deep economics, not theoretical economics, we're talking about policy economics. I think he's elevated the work at that Cato Institute, I think he's done a fantastic job and I encourage you all to sign up for his sub-stack, sub-stack. The capitalists, the capitalists, the capital, tallest instead of capitalist, he's very, very good on these things. By the way, you know, a lot of left and right people on left and right people out there in the mainstream constantly are considered about manufacturing jobs. We've talked about this before, I mean manufacturing jobs, who cares? Manufacturing jobs, the number of jobs, certainly the percentage of jobs that are dedicated to manufacturing is declined significantly, because we have robots to replace them. Indeed, the number of manufacturing jobs in China is declining significantly, because of robots and machines and some jobs are moving to Vietnam or Bangladesh or Africa, who knows where. But what's so interesting or exciting about manufacturing? Indeed, manufacturing in the United States at least, manufacturing jobs require today, require education. Most significant majority of manufacturing jobs today require some kind of diploma, significant training, significant expense on education. It is not true anymore that you could just throw somebody at a factory who has no education and this is going to become less true in the future. It takes skill, some skill to operate a robot, fix a robot, because that's where the jobs are going to be. The jobs are not going to be twisting things, manipulating things, carrying things. The job is going to be fixing robots, fixing machinery. The jobs are going to be transportation jobs, moving stuff. There are not going to be jobs that just require human muscle. Human muscle is out, human muscle is finished. There is no wolf or very little wolf or human muscle in today's economy. So even if you're uneducated, don't have a degree, you better develop some skills on how to operate some kind of machine or how to fix some kind of machine or how to transport something. Otherwise, you will have nothing. So modern economy is not anti-manufacturing, it's problem manufacturing. We manufacture more stuff today than we ever have. But it requires a different type of job. It requires workers with different types of skills. And indeed the manual labor type of work that doesn't require any skills. Yes, maybe working in a restaurant. It's going to be a service job, it's not going to be an anti-manufacturing job. And indeed even service jobs, I mean service jobs, what is a service job? We used to think of service jobs as McDonald's, but service jobs are programming, service jobs are driving trucks, installation and repair, construction, building maintenance, those are service jobs. And many of those need real skills. People out there, what they need today is the incentive to go and constantly train and constantly retrain. And what does it mean to even talk about labor anymore? Right, who are we celebrating in labor today? Is labor just blue collar labor? Why? What's so special about blue collar labor? I mean, nothing much, I mean it's the least value added form of labor. Why don't we talk about the amazing labor that our software programmers and our builders who build robots and the engineers who figure out how to put them together and is that not labor? I mean, there's generally a significant shunning and putting aside and depreciating the value of the mind, of what actually produces stuff, what actually creates jobs and creates economic growth and that is the human mind. We value muscle, in that sense we value labor, but does the engineer not labor? Is there no work involved? I mean that is such a Marxist like myth. And so unbelievably destructive, is it noble to lay bricks, but not noble to design the brick laying, to design the building, the skyscraper for which the bricks belong? There is no nobility in muscle. There's nobility in work, but any type of work. Again, we're so influenced by, I think two things coming out of this little spiel. One is by pessimism, things are terrible, things are awful, nobody can succeed, nobody can move, nobody can achieve. And by a Marxist view of work, you need to do it with your hands. No you don't. No you don't, but even the people who do still work with their hands. Well, they need to upgrade. This is a big upgrade for manual labor and your job, you should upgrade. You should constantly be thinking about upgrading. I mean the best thing I can think of for Labor Day, for you, for every one of us, is how are we going to upgrade? How are we going to be better at our jobs? How are we going to be advanced in our careers? How are we going to achieve more? How can we take our labor, the labor of our mind, the labor of our muscle, the labor of our time? How are we going to take all that labor and achieve great things with it? Advance our cause, the cause of our life. Labor Day is a great day to reflect on your career, how you can make that career better, how you can grow that career, how you can improve that career, how you can expand that career, how you can make it more fulfilling. More interesting, because at the end of the day, the purpose of labor is not to grow GDP. The purpose of your labor is to grow you, is to improve your life, materially and spiritually. So take Labor Day as an opportunity to think, am I doing the most rewarding work I could be doing? Rewarding materially and rewarding intellectually and rewarding spiritually. Is this a career I really want? Am I pursuing it aggressively? Am I thinking it through? Am I looking at all my options? Am I willing to take risk, enough risk, too little risk, too much risk, and go for it? I like that Michael got us started with the 3x raise from his previous job. I mean that's great. But it's what we should all aspire to. We should all aspire to during Labor Day and every day to maximize our lives. And Labor Day is a good opportunity. We should call it career day. We should call it wealth creation day. It's the day we should celebrate wealth creators. And yes, there is wealth creation done by manual labor, but there's wealth creation done by great entrepreneurs. And indeed, without the entrepreneur, without the businessman, without the engineer, there is no manual labor. There is no manual labor. We're all just farmers, barely surviving. So if we're going to celebrate anybody, really, we should celebrate anybody who creates wealth, but disproportionately, we should celebrate the entrepreneur. We should celebrate the businessman. Would it be great if we had the businessman day, the entrepreneur day, the wealth creator day? I like wealth creator day. I like career day, too. Looking at the same thing from two different perspectives. And it's okay. We can have a labor day. That's good. Although it's going to be, over time, less labor and less labor and less labor, because manual labor is slowly going to go out of existence. There will still be some, but we should focus now on careers and on wealth creation. So those are two days I would promote as new holidays. That would be cool. All right. Now people say, no, they shouldn't get holidays because they're already rich. First of all, not entrepreneurs are rich. But we should celebrate the rich ones because they're the ones who created more wealth than others. But why shouldn't we celebrate rich people? They don't need a pattern on the back. They don't need to be celebrated because money replaces all that because they have money. They don't need to be told how valuable they are and how valuable they've contributed. That's unjust. So yeah, we should celebrate wealth creators. We should celebrate them, even though they have a lot of money. That's altruism. It's an impact of altruism. It says only celebrate people who have a poor. Only celebrate the hard, the work that's physically hard. Mentally doesn't count. All right. Let's see. We've got a few Super Chat questions. Let's take those. You can join in the Super Chat by just by clicking on the button below and asking a question, contributing some money, putting some money on your question. You can also contribute to the show just directly through the Super Chat. It's part of what makes these shows, I think, valuable is the fact that I cover so many topics. And we can talk about so many... I don't think you should protest the holiday. I'm not for protesting the holiday. I'm for taking advantage of the holiday to think about what labor really means, to view it in the broadest sense of all of us are laborers, right? All of us work. This is a holiday celebrate work. And to contemplate your own career. So you can internalize labor day as career day. Just think of it as a day to celebrate your career, to contemplate your career, to plan your career, to improve your career, to think about your plan for the future. All right. So Michael asks, Michael asks, some GPU want to amend the Constitution through convention thoughts. I think it's a horrible idea. I think it's a horrible idea because the people today would amend the Constitution in the most horrible ways. We don't have a Madison, a Washington, a Franklin. We don't have a Thomas Jefferson, a John Adams. These people don't exist today. The people particularly right or left, it doesn't matter. They have no clue what the Constitution means. They don't know what the provisions of the Constitution today actually mean because they don't understand what individual rights are. So first of all, if you had a convention like that, you would have to have a test. Only people who can answer a question properly in terms of what individual rights are should be allowed to participate. But imagine, imagine if they all got together and they decided to write, you know, to amend the Constitution right now. It would be a frigging mess. It would be a complete and utter disaster because they don't know. They don't understand. And they're way more religious and statist than the funny fathers were. And therefore we'd get a Constitution that was worse than the Constitution we have today, much worse. So I'm all for amending the Constitution. But not are these guys, not by the GOP, not by conservatives today, not by the people advocating for Constitution or convention. Amending the Constitution is going to have to wait. It's going to have to wait until we educate, until we get another crop of Madison's and Jefferson's and Adams. We need another revolution. Maybe it won't be armed this time. Maybe it will be an intellectual revolution. We need another enlightenment and a revolution. Only when we have those kind of people would I want to amend a document that is about as good as you can get, given the context of when they wrote it. And there's nobody today who could write a Constitution as good as that. Nobody today. So why would I let them touch it, amend it? I mean, if they want a particular provision, a particular thing, even then I'd be terrified of what it would actually say. So no. Let me see. Okay, Fender Harper says, I normally work nine hours a day. Labor Day is paid off, valued at eight hours. Holiday pay doesn't add to my work hours that factoring to overtime. Labor Day has cost me. I don't make my sweet, sweet overtime money now. Sorry, you know, I get it. I don't know why we need so many federal holidays anyway. I mean, you should probably negotiate with your boss about holidays. So, you know, while I don't have anything particular against Labor Day, I have something particular against a lot of these federal holidays. It's not the particular holiday that I don't like. It's the holiday. It's the fact that we're taking time off. It's the fact that the government is telling us when we can and cannot work. The government is telling our employer to pay us eight hours a day and not more or not less or whatever. You know, that should just be something that the market works around, right, works around. Sure, Labor Day has a liberal bias, but it doesn't mean you have to treat it that way. It doesn't mean you have to internalize that liberal bias. You make it a holiday for you. And today it doesn't because today the Republican Party has embraced the workers of the world, I mean, as well. So today it has just a statist bias. Jennifer says, I feel bad when I see litter in the road. I know little litter is made up of things that were very useful, but I am bothered by the callousness and bad aesthetics of it. Is my reaction understandable? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there is definitely value and cleanliness. There's definitely beauty and cleanliness in things being the way they're supposed to be, not full of trash. You know, there's a place for trash. It's called a trash can or dump or places where you put trash. It's not pretty. It can stink. It can be destructive. If there's stuff on the highway, it can even be dangerous. But absolutely, you know, we all have a sense of aesthetic. And I think that people who just put litter everywhere are disrespecting the world in which we live. I wanted to say environment, but I don't want that to be misunderstood. I mean, our environment, our human environment, the environment in which we live, the world in which we live. So yes, I think there's every reason to be upset. And of course, if roads are private, and if generally we had just greater self-respect, I think we live in a cleaner world. And communism was much filthier than capitalism because it was more public property. All right. Landfills, thank you, instead of dumps, landfills, there are all kinds of good words for all that stuff, right? It's not an accident. The collectivism results in dut. You know, people don't have the respect and don't care as much, and they don't respect other people. Collectivism diminishes the respect one has for your fellow man because collectivism breeds a zero-sum mentality. Their gain is your loss. So it becomes doggy dog, and you don't care. I'm never going to drive in the street. Who cares if I dirty it? Roosevelt, thank you. I really appreciate it. Let's see. Robert says, say what you want about Trump-backed candidates. I'll take them over the Republican establishment that a crony is a big-governed constitution screwing over the middle class. And Trump candidates are not. I argue that Trump screwed over the middle class as much as Democrats. Less, Trump screwed over the middle class more than establishment of Republicans. Trump candidates are going to screw the middle class more than establishment of Republicans. Trump candidates have less understanding of the Constitution than Trump Republicans, than Trump did. Trump was big-government, and Trump was the ultimate crony. He was crony as a businessman, and he was crony as president. He tried to manipulate business. He tried to involve government and business at, you know, one much closer hand-in-hand with Trump than in any other Republican administration. No, I think you've got it exactly the other way around. As much as I despise the Republican establishment, the Republican establishment is less crony, less big-government, and has a better understanding of the Constitution than Trump-backed candidates. You think Dr. Oz has any understanding of the American Constitution? Is Dr. Oz against big-government? Is Masters in Arizona against big-government, or does he want government to subsidize and to have industrial policy and to have rules about importation and export, and wants to quote, Well, what are we even talking about, right? I mean, these Trump-backed candidates, I can't think of anybody worse other than Democrats. Other than Democrats, I can't think of anybody worse than Trump-backed candidates when it comes to cronyism becoming unconstitutional. You think that advocating and perpetuating the mythology of denying a legitimate election is constitutional? Is pro-constitution? I mean, everything about the Trump candidacy and Trump candidates, I mean, when does Trump ever mention the Constitution? When does he have any understanding of the Constitution? What is any of these politicians who even talk about the Constitution? So, sorry, no. And screwing the middle class? Who's screwing the middle class? Exactly. Trump's screwing the middle class? Who paid for his tariffs? The middle class. Whose jobs were destroyed by tariffs? The middle class. So, no, I don't know where this even comes from. Constitutional. So, Robert, I don't know. You can give me some examples. I'd love to hear some examples of Trump-backed candidates who are pro-constitution, anti-big-government, and anti-cronism. I'd just like to hear some of those. Give me some examples of candidates who support that. There's Marjorie Taylor Greene. Is she a supporter of the Constitution? Does she have a clue what the Constitution means? She in an interview recently said that what this country is, is it's a fundamentally Christian country. And the law should be guided by Christianity. That's an understanding of the Constitution. Matt Gaetz is pro-constitution, pro-limited government, and anti-cronism. Really? Where do you guys live? So, no, they're exactly the opposite. All of them. Fred Harper says, we're listening to the Fountainhead. Yeah, which you're doing because you got the day off because of Labor Day, so you should be thankful. Listening to the Fountainhead. Jessica, to where Rourke goes on the yacht, being vague to avoid spoilers. I will probably finish it tomorrow. Can we replace Labor Day with a day celebrating Rourke, his viewer in Labor and Rourke? Sure. But that's what Korea Day would be, your wealth creation day, entrepreneur day, any of those. And, you know, we can add them on. We can have the whole week off, right? No, I mean, we should celebrate Rourke every day. And the main way to celebrate Rourke is in your own life, in your own career, in your own pursuit of values. In your own pursuit of values. Alright, so we are way behind on the Super Chat, and Catherine's here, so I'm a little surprised because Catherine usually gets you guys going. Maybe she's had too much fun at the restaurant and is, I don't know, doesn't have the magic with her. She just doesn't have the magic today because we're way behind. I've only got four Super Chat questions when I get those through those we are done. So you've got a little bit of time to step in and ask questions or just support the show. That would be great. But yeah, Super Chat has been down recently. I don't know. Should I take it personally? I'm not sure what's going on. So maybe I know the storm definitely reduced the number of people watching because a lot of people didn't come back after they got dropped. Still. I mean, anyway. So, oh, my economic forecast have made people more frugal. I see. So you guys are going to make me pay for my economic forecasts. Maybe it's the Fed. The Fed has made you more conscious of what you spend indeed. You know, I'm trying to not be inflationary by keeping the target the same and not raising the target. I mean, based on inflation, we should be at like 750 now. Yeah, don't make Catherine sad. She's visiting New York City. She had a great evening. She had a great meal and you're now going to make her sad. Well, all right. Philosophical zombie hunter. Have you heard of the new term cost disease socialism from Nick Niskay's and sent? And if so, what do you think about it? I have not heard about cost disease socialism. I'm really curious what that means. I have no idea. I can't tell from the cut disease socialism. I mean, then this case is that it's very mixed. This case is centers like this bleeding heart libertarians kind of left wing libertarians. They want government intervention. They want some of the welfare state. Yeah, I mean, I'm very mixed on Niskay's and sent stuff. I follow them a little bit and I find myself disagreeing with much of what they produce. So something like cost disease socialism sounds spooky and wrong and something I would hate. But I'd have to research to figure out what it actually means. Let me copy paste this into one of my files so I actually look it up and see if I can discover what it is. Cost disease socialism. Wow. All right. Let's see. Frank says I'm still thinking about witch doctors. Okay, we know about Rasputin and Sheik Avara. Who do you think are the witch doctors of Trump, Putin, Obama, Biden? Oh, well, I mean, look, you can generally say the intellectuals, right? There doesn't have to be a particular witch doctor, particularly not in an open and relatively free society as ours is. Certainly Obama and Biden's witch doctors are standard leftist academic intellectuals. So it's really everybody out there who writes and publishes from the New York Times to the universities to a variety of different publications all over the country. Putin's witch doctor we talked about. It's people like Dugan, whether it's Dugan specifically or people inspired, but I've talked about explicitly about Dugan and his role. And that kind of nationalism mixed in with Russian mysticism is there are a number of intellectuals in Russia that serve that role and serve as Putin's witch doctors. Trump's witch doctor, people like Bannon, people like many of the national conservatives, whether they have direct impact or direct links, or whether they have the direct ear of Trump doesn't really matter. They determine the culture on the right, which, since I think Trump is a complete second hand, I don't think he invents anything. He just responds to stuff. You know, Trump picks up from the people around him and that culture, that intellectual culture is being set by right wing intellectuals. And, you know, there's certainly plenty of them that play right into this. I mean, Trump had evangelical advisors and he promotes the evangelicals all the time, but he doesn't really care about evangelism or anything else. But it's, again, in an open free society, it's not one person. It's not one thing. It's the intellectuals. They're the witch doctors. It's not like West Putin or Che Guevara, where it's very, very focused, very, very clear. Oh, friend Helper, thanks, Frank. Frank Carpath says, Anjo, what is a woman episode? I made a comment that masculinity was a package deal concept. You disagreed to call it a package deal and I see why. I think grab bad concept is more accurate. Well, the point is this, I think masculinity is a legitimate concept. And it's a concept that we don't have a great understanding of. And we're trying to figure it out. We're trying to work through it. And part of working through it is maybe for a while it having a grab bag feel to it. So we stick a lot of stuff there as we're trying to figure this complex psychological thing out. But it is a legitimate concept and much of the stuff that's in the grab app is true. Some of it is fundamental and essential. Some of it is not. But I think it's a good example of when you have a concept that is, that people are thinking about, that people are trying to figure out, that people have vague notions about. They stick all kinds of things in it. Some of the things are contradicting, but they're not. I mean, most people are not trying to undermine it, trying to eviscerate the concept to it. And a package deal is putting things that contradictory so as to eviscerate the concept completely. Now the left might be doing that by putting, for example, you know, intermasculinity violence. So what is the term they use? Bad masculinity equals violence in one form. They equate it to violence and by putting the violent aspects of it, the violence, you know, they're trying to undermine it, they're trying to eliminate it. But there is something really legitimate there. Fenn Helper continues by saying, a grab-back concept to me is one that is vague in nature and an individual's view on the concept is a mesh of vague approximations. I think that's right. I think for almost everybody it is a vague. And I think we still have some thinking to do in psychology to figure out exactly what it is. A toxic masculinity. Thank you. Yes, that's the term they use. Toxic masculinity. Well, I guess there is such a thing as toxic masculinity because there is masculinity does involve strength. It's definitely part of being masculine is strength and I think coverage and, you know, when you talk about strength and the potential for violence, that can be toxic. And, you know, it's good that toxic masculinity is outside of masculinity, right? It's a form of masculinity. Now, I still think they're trying to undermine masculinity generally and I think they view masculinity as toxic. As toxic, right? So, and they're trying to undermine and destroy the very, very fundamental concept. But masculinity is a tricky concept because it definitely has something about courage, about strength and orientation towards reality, towards solving problems. In reality, you know, an orientation that's more towards nature, if you will, towards the world than it is towards other people. All of that is part of what it means to be, I think, to include masculinity. Now, how would you actually define it? I ran to find it as an orientation towards nature, but it includes this idea of strength, physical, mental strength and feminity is different. So, but it's a tricky concept. Concepts of psychology are tricky concepts and it's very easy for people to misunderstand them what women can be strong. That doesn't mean women are masculine if they're strong. It's difficult to essentialize these concepts, to get them right and then apply them correctly. That's true, I think, of all psychological concepts. All right, Bree says, is the high US dollar deflationary? And if it goes back down to 2021 levels, does that add to inflation? If it's up 14%, would we end up with 23% inflation if it went back down? So if the dollar suddenly got weaker all at once, then that would mean all the prices of goods that are imported would go up because it would take us more dollars to buy them because the dollar would be weaker. A strong dollar reduces inflation in a sense that a strong dollar actually inflation of foreign goods and a lot of economy is foreign goods, foreign, what do you call it, natural resources, foreign essential products. So a lot of economy is centered around imports. So the dollar makes a big difference. So having a strong dollar makes everything else held constant, makes things otherwise cheaper. So if you had just a drop tomorrow in the dollar, inflation would be up, right? Inflation in terms of price inflation. But that's not how it works, right? So if the dollar declined, it would decline over time. There would be causes for it. And it's not clear whether the causes of the dollar dropping might, the things that would cause the dollar to drop would also be things that offset the inflationary element. So if you said all things held constant, all things being the same, just changing the value of the dollar, inflation or inflation, yes, that works fine. But that's not how economy works. Why is the dollar high right now, right? And what is underlying it? What does it mean for the prices of goods longer term? All of that is much more complicated and much more complex. You have to be very careful to understand what you're holding constant. I don't know, for example, confidence and strength of the US economy. You know, one reason why the dollar could weak weaker is inflation going higher. People overseas not wanting to hold dollars because they can't buy anything with them. And that would actually weaken the dollar, but it would actually increase the ability of foreigners to buy our stuff. So all these things are constantly interacting and working together. They don't work all, not everything works in the same direction. So it's very difficult extrapolate to say, OK, if I just move this economic parameter in a particular direction, what's going to happen? Because it never, you never actually just move this one thing. We're almost always moving a bunch of different things. And therefore the response, the reaction is complex. It's complex. Catherine says, let's get closer to the goal. To get closer to the goal, you know, I think we're going to need somebody among the 97 live listeners right now. Although we've had, I think over 200 so far to step in with like 100 bucks or 200 bucks or 50 bucks or something to get us close because otherwise I'm going to finish the super chat before you even have a chance to get us closer. But you know, I'm traveling now and it's pretty cool to have a really strong dollar. So I'm going to Japan and the dollar is 140 yen, 139 yen. It's pretty amazing. A lot of stuff in Japan suddenly got a lot cheaper for me. I don't know how the dollar is done relative to the Korean won because I'm going to be in Korea as well. But I'm sure it's gone up because it's gone up relative to all the other currencies. And the primary reason it's gone up is two things, two reasons for the US dollar to go up. One is the world still has confidence whether you buy it or not, it still has confidence of all the economies in the world. Once all this mess of inflation and supply chain issues and war and everything else is over, the world still has confidence that this economy is the economy that will do the best and that is the most resilient. And as a consequence, what you want to be holding now is dollars. You don't want to be holding euros. Europe is a mess. You don't want to be holding rubles because the rubles are worthless. You don't want to be owning yuan because China's in deep shit. You don't want to be holding any other currency. What you want to be holding is dollars, not even gold. Gold has gone down. So what you want to hold is dollars. Because at the end of the day dollars are what you're going to be transacting with because the world believes that the US economy is still the most resilient economy in the world. And I think they're right. This is where I for years have disagreed with Peter Schiff and others in terms of how fragile the US economy is. I don't think it's very fragile. I think it's incredibly resilient in spite of the mess it's in. And the world, as bad as the mess in the United States is, the world is as bad if not worse. That's reason number one. Second reason is I think that they believe, the world believes that the Federal Reserve is going to take interest rates, is going to take inflation more seriously. And therefore the potential is that they raise interest rates on bonds higher. Although, you know, think of it, people are holding bonds and they're buying 10-year bonds at 3.2% when inflation is over 8%. I don't know who does that. I wouldn't. I wouldn't. I wouldn't be buying bonds right now. It would be crazy. But people are buying them. Now they're not, if they're foreigners, they haven't been hurt that badly because in the meantime the dollar has appreciated. So in dollar terms, in their local currency terms, the interest rate, if you add the interest rate they get on US Treasuries plus the appreciation of the dollar, they're in better shape. So you can buy inflation adjusted bonds, but now is not the time to buy them. The time to buy them was two years ago. You don't buy inflation protection bonds in the midst of high inflation. It's priced. What you want to buy them is before there's inflation. And then they protect you from the inflation that's coming. Alright, Justin, let's see. So it's still $359 short. I don't know if anybody's going to step forward or not. We'll see. Justin says, many of my progressive friends are actively embracing the quiet quitting phenomenon, not unsurprising. Most of these friends are government quota or union employees. Yeah. And how do they make a living? Do they go in the government dole? Is that how they survive? Is the Australian government generous enough? Australian benefits generous enough that they can continue living in spite of not having a job and being on the dole? But more and more people are doing that, working age people. And that said, you know, labor participation rates are still not anywhere near where they should and have been. Gabe C 562 says, what is your moral take on the student loan debt forgiveness that was announced recently and all the criticism from the GOP members that have companies that have also been shown to have been forgiven for PPP loans? I talked about this on a show I did on loan forgiveness. You can find this much more extensive both on the economics and the moral aspect of it. First of all, I think it's morally offensive for the government to forgive this debt. But I think what's really morally offensive, and I've said this over and over again, what's really morally offensive is that the government gave these loans out to begin with. Government should not be giving anybody loans. Government should not be in the business of loan making to anybody under any circumstances. It should not give anyone money. But certainly not giving loans to people where there's a private market that can do that and does it very well. Now, not everybody wants a loan gets it. With the government, everybody wants a loan gets it. In the private sector, not everybody. But capital is available for student loans. Let the private market deal with it. Government should not be involved at all in loans. So that to me is the original sin. Now, once they give those loans out, then if they don't collect the money, then they're basically, you know, benefiting the universities who got the money at my expense, at all taxpayers expense. Well, maybe not my expense, but taxpayers expense. So everybody else in the economy is paying for the benefit of the students who got the loan forgiven and to the university who got the money and it's gone. So I think that's a travesty. It's a redistribution of wealth and it's wrong. Now, the PPP program was wrong as well, but the PPP program had some justification, whereas the student loan program has no justification. And the justification of the PPP loan program was that the government, the government shut down businesses. The government told you you couldn't open your restaurant. The government told you you couldn't open your store. The government told you you couldn't run your business. The government destroyed the economy for small and medium-sized businesses. And then it said, okay, to compensate you for what we did, we'll pay you. Now, I don't like that, but in a sense, what could see it as, it's the same as the, you know, why aren't Democrats, you know, why aren't Republicans, and they should be, why are Republicans upset about the checks that the government wrote to everybody? Like the stimulus checks that the Trump administration distributed and then Biden distributed. Well, because the only justification for them, I don't think it's a legitimate justification, but it is, but it's better than general regular welfare, is we destroyed your jobs. We destroyed the economy. It's our incompetence and our pathetic lockdowns that did this to you, so we're bailing you out. Not great. So I think the Democrats criticizing a GOP because of the PPP is absurd and ridiculous. I think the PPP is a lot more justified than the student loans. But yeah, all we distribution of wealth is wrong. The welfare state is wrong. The bailout of banks is wrong. The bailout of businesses is wrong. All bailouts are wrong. But Democrats are criticizing GOP and GOP criticizing Democrats. They'll all do it. All of them all the time. All of them. Bush did it during the great financial crisis. Obama did it. Trump did it. Biden did it. They all love to use the printing process to hand out free money and bail out anybody to make themselves look good. So they're all immoral in that sense. And yes, you should criticize the Democrats' student loans. You should criticize Republicans for allowing lockdowns and then bailing people out. It would be better if people had suffered the full cost of the lockdowns, so then maybe they would have insisted that it never happened again. The problem with the lockdowns is, because the government gave us money through PPP and through checks to every worker, is it never felt that bad. It was kind of a long vacation for a lot of people. And they went on spending sprees. It's called inflation. Maybe if they'd suffered and it would really have been hard, they would next time there's a lockdown, they would say, no, no, no, no, we're not accepting lockdowns. We're going to go to work. We don't want that pain. Now, if there's a lockdown in the future, they'll go, ooh, free checks from the government. Cool. I'm okay with lockdowns. It's fine. Take away my rights. Just give me the, give me the dough. Give me the money. I don't know what's going on, Catherine. Slow night. It's been a slow, since I got back from California. I don't know. Since I got back from California, it's like something's changed. We'll have to do a survey or something to figure out what's going on. All right, Spock says, relative to this, Marion Tuppy and Gail Pooley just released a book called Super Abundance that sounds terrific. Can't wait to read it. Yeah, it does sound terrific. You know, I know them and it's part of the, it's about how good life is and how good life could be. And it sounds fantastic and I encourage you guys to go read it and get a dose of optimism because I think it'll really help your life to see objectively how good things are. We all know how bad things are. But it's also good to see how much good there is out there. Valdrin says, you've changed my mind on issues that matter most. I regard you with the same respect that you have for Pika. Wow, thank you. This sounds gay though. I don't, I don't like that terminology. This sounds gay. I don't know what that means. You could show an admiration to the male without it implying that you are gay if that's what you mean by it. Indeed, it's a form of justice to show appreciation for other people no matter what their sex is and no matter what your sexual orientation is. So don't use that language. Just eradicate it from your vocabulary. Sounding gay, not sounding gay. It's silly, right? And particularly in a context in which you're, you know, acting out of your sense of justice and what does that have to do with sex, sexual orientation or anything like that? But thank you, Valdrin. I appreciate it and I appreciate that you feel that way. Okay, this is the last super chat question, last question, so this will be it. If you want to contribute to the show or you want to ask a question, now's the time. All right, now's your last chance, not the time. And Catherine seems to have disappeared. I think you guys insulted Catherine. I think, I think, I don't know if she will cover. She's gone. She looks like she's gone. She's left. She's abandoned me and abandoned you. Well, this is, is Yuval Harari as dangerous as Chomsky? I don't think so. I don't think he's dangerous as Chomsky. He seems like a pretty, you know, he's not as, he's not as crazy, he's not as out there, he's not as adamant, he's not as influential. His ideas ultimately, he's just not that convincing. I don't think he inspires young people quite as much as Chomsky did, so no, I don't think he's. I've been watching a lot of Yuval Harari recently because I've been looking for segments to use, to criticize, and you can criticize everything he says, but it's, it doesn't have punch, it doesn't have oomph to it. So I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to do, but anyway, you know, I'm not a fan of Yuval Harari as you know from my shows on Harari. I'll be doing more shows as Harari given his influence. I'm hoping one day to even debate him. We'll see if that ever happens, but that would be cool. Okay, Spock says, thank you, we got a couple of, a few more super chat questions, so we're keeping the show alive, right? As questions trickle in, you get to extend the show on and on and on indefinitely, right? Spock says, I'm a middle school teacher. That's amazing. Wondering if you have your rules for life enlist form somewhere. I'd like to try to adapt them for the classroom rules. Well, you can go to YouTube channel and you can put up the rules for life playlist, and that'll have most of the rules listed there. I mean, ultimately, one day I'd like to turn them kind of into a book, but you'll have most of the rules listed in the, in the playlist, and you can probably, you could probably use that. And I think the first two episodes of rules for life, I don't have a theme to them, so you'd probably have to listen to those, but that's not as bad as listening to all 14 or 15. Those you can just get from the title, you can get what the rule is. So yeah, I'm interested, if you do that project, I'm interested in the outcome, so definitely keep me updated on how that project goes. Frank says, a Biden speech struck me as superfluous, fear mongering, and the art of suspicion. What do you think of Biden's political skills? I don't know. I mean, he's been in politics forever. He's the president of the United States. He won an election. He won the Democratic nomination and then beat Trump. So that's, he must have some political skills. He must have some people around him that have some political skills, although he did run against Trump. So your main skill in beating Trump was to be breathing and not to say anything just too stupid. I don't think much of Biden. I don't think he, I think he's an empty suit. I think he's not very smart. I don't think he's, he's very passionate about anything in particular. I think he doesn't believe in anything particular. I don't think he understands most of the issues involved. Again, I don't think he's smart and I think his mental capabilities are probably diminished with age and he was never very smart to begin with. So no, I have no positive impression of Biden. He's not a good speaker. He's not, he's not good in Q and A's. There's nothing really particularly good at him other than he's not crazy left and he's not Trump. That's what got him elected. That's his political skill set. Not crazy left and not Trump. That's all you have to be and still standing. And all the other Democrats were crazy left or just even less than Joe Biden. Nobody's. He at least had a name recognition because he's been around for a long time. He's been in politics forever. Now in terms of the speech itself, it was a terrible speech. Not because of anything in particular said. It was just so political. I think he's right on most of what he said about Trump and about Trump make America great kind of dedicated supporters. But it just came across as angry and ugly and what purpose did it have? Did it convince anybody? Did it change anybody's mind about anything? It was just, it was just, yeah. It's, it was beneath. It was beneath a proper president, but we don't have a proper president. Haven't had one in a long time. John asks, the new edition of the movie version of We The Living is coming out in early 2023. Do you know anything about this? How much is it different from the edition which was released earlier? Yes, I know a lot about it because I saw it or at least I saw 90% of it. I think there was still some sound editing that they were doing to improve the sound quality. But yeah, it's a beautiful printing of We The Living. We The Living is, I think, the best movie of an Iran book. It's also, it's just a good movie. It stands on its own as a movie. It's beautifully done. It's amazingly acted. I love Anita Valley as Kira. It's in Italian with English subtitles. The subtitles were edited by Ayn Rand. So the subtitles are, subtitles that, titles, the dialogue in a sense is approved by Ayn Rand. It was, it's got a great story. If anybody's interested in the story, you can ask about it. A great story about making it under fascist, in fascist Italy and, and a great story of rediscovering it. Because Ayn Rand did not know it existed. It was made in 1942, I think, and Ayn Rand didn't know it existed until the 1960s. So there's a lot of backstory that's really interesting. Happy to go over that if anybody's interested. All right. So Francis, I don't know if he has, I don't think this is a question. He's saying The Thinker by Brutton Braley, a poem for today. So, yeah, The Thinker is a, is a poem by Brutton Braley. It is a poem that is perfect. Thank you. Thank you, Francis, for Labor Day. So let me recite the poem for you. You ready for Euron Brook's poetry recitation? This is, this is the, this is perfect for Labor Day. It's really a perfect poem for any time. But this is Euron Brook reciting The Thinker by Brutton Braley. Back of the beating hammer, by which the steel is wrought, back of the workers clamor, the seeker may find the thought, the thought that is ever master of iron and steam and steel that rises above disaster and tramples it under heel. The drudge may fret and tinker, or labor with lusty blows, but back of him stands The Thinker, the clear-eyed man who knows, for into each plow or sabre, each piece and part and whole must go the brains of labor, which gives the work a soul. Back of the motors humming, back of the bells that sing, back of the hammers drumming, back of the cranes that swing, there is the eye which scans them, watching through stress and strain. There is the mind which plans them, back of the brawn, the brain, might of the roaring boiler, force of the engine's thrust, strength of the sweating toilet. Greatly in these we trust, but back of them stands the schema, the thinker who drives things through, back of the job, the dreamer who's making the dreams come true. So think of the culture. Think of a world in which that poem was written, in which people understood the wall of the mind and celebrated it, and that somebody, in this case Breton Braley, I love many, many, many of his poems. I encourage you to seek him out. Braley is B-R-A-L-E-Y, Burton B-E-R-T-O-N. But, you know, it's, you know, the kind of culture where something like that would be appreciated is rare and unusual and is gone. A poem like this, nobody would take seriously today, but it's truer today than ever, and today it's more evident than ever. And yet, the thing that is least appreciated in the world today, I think, the thing that is least appreciated in the world today, is the thinker, is the human mind, is reason and rationality. And that relates to Yuval Harari. It has, the human mind has no place in history, no place in explaining the world, the individual in his mind, no place. Here's a poem that celebrates that. Hope you enjoyed that. Alright, Jack says, is debt-funded government more moral than tax-funded government? No, absolutely no. It's exactly the same. It's, you know, debt has to be funded, ultimately paid back. You have to pay back through taxes. When you suck money out through debt, you're denying a private economy capital. In every respect, both morally and financially, it's the same thing. It's the same thing. Valdrin says, I know how much you respect. Pick off, I knew you'd understand when I say I respect you to that degree. I appreciate that, Valdrin. Thank you. Whoops. And Francis says, I didn't expect you to recite it. We'll clip this. That was a perfect opportunity to recite it. Why wouldn't I? But easy to look up at Google. Easy to find, easy to recite. And I love that poem. I've recited it many times. I've read it many times. It's a beautiful poem. Hopefully I didn't butcher it. And you enjoyed it. Oh, and Catherine is still here somehow. Where did you go, Catherine? You disappeared on us there. She went to get dessert at the restaurant. Alright, guys. I think we're done for tonight. I really appreciate those of you who supported the show. Thank you. Those of you who are listening after the fact or not listening live who cannot participate in the Super Chat, you can support the show with the Monte Contribution and Patreon or at your own bookshow.com. So, you know, please, please do so. And I will see you all probably do a show tomorrow. I'm not sure exactly what the topic will be but we will do something tomorrow and Tuesday. Again, I said I'm going to do more shows because I'm going to be gone for such a long time and then we'll probably do Monday, Tuesday, and then Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and then I'm gone. And then I'll be doing shows if the internet is good enough in Korea and in Japan. I'll be doing shows from over there, from the hotels. Alright, everybody. I will see you tomorrow probably. And I did answer your question, Frank. I will see you tomorrow. Bye.