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Sept. 30, 2023 - Blood Money
01:34:35
"Is the US dollar about to collapse??" - Blood Money PODCAST Episode 8
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This episode of Blood Money is brought to you by FreshFarmsCBD.com, the best American-made CBD products on the market.
We're on the next episode of Blood Money.
Today I have Mark Balker here, who actually has a really interesting story.
He's going to tell us a little bit about what's happening with the current financial situation, inflation, what's coming in the future.
Steps of caution for those that are concerned about the devaluation of our currency.
How are you doing, Mark? Hey, I'm doing great.
Thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks for coming down.
Could you tell us a little bit about what you've been up to recently?
Yeah, it started just a few years ago.
I got interested in money and what's happening to our currency.
So I decided to have some meetings with other people that were interested in that topic.
And I met some people Who had started an organization, a bank, essentially a bank that has accounts in gold and silver legal tender coins.
And I made friends with them.
We got talking.
That group started a company to create a new currency made of gold that people can use just like they use paper currency today.
Only instead of being made of paper, it's literally made of gold.
And so they figured out how to do the technology to make these They're called goldbacks.
Once they figured out how to do that in a cost-effective manner, they launched their currency first in the state of Utah and second in here in the state of Nevada and the third state is New Hampshire and now we're looking to add two more states probably maybe South Dakota and Wyoming and we're doing it state by state on a state By state basis.
Each time they create a new series of goldbacks, it has artwork related to the state of issue.
So Nevada has like images of bighorn sheep mines and the state flower and some images of history of Nevada.
Also they have some allegorical figures on each one.
So far they've all been women representing the virtues, various virtues.
So you have liberty and justice and charity and victory and fortitude, things like that.
So explain to the viewer why goldbacks are an important form of currency going forward.
Well, it's because our existing monetary system is reaching the point where it's going to have an existential crisis.
It's going to do what all similar currency systems throughout history have done.
It's basically going to fall apart.
In a very chaotic way.
And when that happens, people are put in a real financial bind because the currency they've been using to buy and sell things and to save for the future falls apart in value, goes down in value very rapidly.
And that basically wipes out the poor and the middle class.
Because most people that are of average means have their savings in things like shares of stock in the stock market.
They have maybe some bonds in a retirement fund, things like that.
And when the currency that those instruments are denominated in collapses in value, they basically get wiped out.
And so to Prepare against that eventuality.
What you do is you buy things of real lasting value.
And in terms of money, that's gold and silver.
So people that can see this happening, can see this coming, start taking some of the assets that they've saved up.
If they can, if they have the ability to manage their own finances, They take some of their stocks and bonds and they sell them and use them to buy gold and silver, which will preserve the value that you have in your savings.
But there are some issues with especially gold.
Gold is very valuable and it's a lot of purchasing power.
In just a single gold coin.
So if you think that your currency, in this case the dollar, is going to go down in value very rapidly in the near future, you can sell your assets denominated in dollars and use them to buy gold coins.
And that will preserve your wealth.
But the problem with it, like a one ounce gold coin, Which now costs about $2,000.
How do you spend that?
You have saved your savings in the form of a gold coin, but how do you use it to buy things?
You need to go down to the store, buy a bag of groceries.
You don't go in there with a one ounce gold coin and present it to the checkout clerk.
Even if she knows that it's very valuable, she's going to tell you, well, I can't accept that because I can't make change.
You're buying $200 worth of food, and you're handing me a coin that's worth thousands of dollars, and I can't give you change for that.
So you've preserved your wealth, but you haven't preserved your ability to buy things with it.
And goldbacks were created to solve that problem because each goldback has a very precise but small amount of gold in it.
So today a one goldback is And I have some here.
I've got some in my wallet.
Yeah, I'd love to check that out. Here's my everyday wallet, and it has, you know, it has bank cards, has my driver license, and I have some, the usual US paper currency in here.
But I also have some goldbacks here.
Got some goldbacks.
And let me pull a few out.
Yeah, I'd love to see the different denominations.
So these are, these are one denomination goldbacks.
And they're a little bit smaller than a US $1 bill, and they are flexible.
So you can put them in a wallet.
So how much is that worth?
Like what would be the actual worth of that note right there?
So this one here, a single, a one, is today worth a little bit under $4.
And by the way, they're called goldbacks because when you turn them over, You can easily see the gold that is embedded in each one.
You can basically buy a gallon of gasoline with this, or a loaf of bread, or maybe with a couple goldbacks you can buy a beer at a local pub.
So these are very spendable.
And yet they're made of gold.
So when the dollar collapses in value, this will maintain its purchasing power, or maybe even increase somewhat, like maybe during an economic crisis, you might be able to buy two loaves of bread with this instead of just one, like you can't can today.
So that's the idea.
It's that we've made gold into a form that is readily usable as currency, as spendable currency.
Whereas, like I said, you could take your paper currency now and buy one ounce gold coins and then what do you do with them?
Yeah, yeah. I guess the very archaic way of doing that would be to shave off some of the gold and have little slivers of gold that then you'd give to somebody that would be the equivalent of that.
But that's a very unexact science.
This has only one thousandth of an ounce of gold in it.
Once you learn to recognize what this is, you know what it has.
Whereas, if someone came in with some gold dust to a grocer or a merchant, and the merchant said, okay, I'm now going to accept gold in payment, the merchant would have to basically perform a test On each bit of gold, you'd have to weigh it, you'd have to figure out how pure is the gold, you know, is it mixed with silver or copper?
You know, I mean, it would be a very sort of clumsy transaction.
Whereas when you have something like this, it has its known appearance and feel, you know, and the person on the other side of the transaction goes, oh, that's a goldback, okay.
And they just take it from you with no value.
So, That's really why we created these.
And they come in...
Here I have some 25s.
Now we also have a 50 gold back.
A 25 has 25 thousandths, or 1 40th of an ounce of gold.
And a 50, which is the highest denomination, has 50 thousandths, or 1 20th of an ounce of gold.
So for comparison, The smallest gold coin minted by the U.S. Mint contains a tenth of an ounce of gold.
This has one fortieth of an ounce.
So sort of where the U.S. Mint mints coins a tenth of an ounce and above, Goldbacks start at the 20th of an ounce and go down to 1,000.
So we sort of fill in the smaller values so you can use it as practical money.
So a question there. So 1,000, so I guess it's $2,000 for an ounce of gold.
Is that correct? So the actual...
Okay, you do have to understand The difference between the sort of what I call the bulk commodity price of gold and the actual price of gold or silver that you will pay when you actually go to buy something made of those metals.
So you can buy gold at the so-called spot price.
On Friday afternoon when the markets closed, I think the spot price of gold ended up at just under $1,900 an ounce.
Now, if you go to buy a gold coin from a coin dealer or the mint, you won't get it for a one ounce gold coin.
You won't get it for $1,900.
There will be a premium applied to that.
Maybe it's 10%, maybe it's 15%, maybe it's 20%.
It just depends on the deal that you strike with the person selling the coin.
But you're never going to get That coin for less than the spot price.
You'll always pay a premium.
And it's the same thing with anything else made of gold or silver.
You go to buy an earring or a ring for your finger, you're not going to get that item of manufactured jewelry for just the weight of the gold in it.
You're always going to pay a premium because it takes capital and labor to take the raw material and form it into the thing that has utility.
So it's the same with any things made of gold and silver.
So when you look at The goldback, it has a very small amount of gold in it.
And so the premium is just under 100%.
So the commodity value of the gold in a one goldback note is about $2 now.
The value is about $4 on the market.
And that reflects both the manufacturing cost And also the added utility of you can use it as money.
The person you're offering it to doesn't need to test its goal content for weight and purity.
It's a thing that's formed into a usable, spendable Unit of money.
It's 24 karat gold.
It is. Yeah, it is 24 karat gold.
Totally pure. Nothing mixed in there other than the plastic element.
Right. So the way these are made is they're actually, of course, they are, like I said, very flexible.
But they are two sheets of polymer plastic.
And sandwiched between is the gold.
So the gold is between the protective layers of plastic, so it won't just rub off.
And also on the front, on the obverse as they would call it, you have the image that's printed and embossed Into the note.
So, and it is also not on the surface.
It's on the inside of the note.
So again, it won't easily rub off.
They're not indestructible.
I mean, anything humans can make, they can destroy.
But they're very rugged.
They're more rugged, I think, than your typical Paper currency notes.
Yeah, yeah. It kind of actually reminds me a little bit of Canadian currency has that plastic element to it.
Yeah, that's interesting. So I know that the British pound notes now are starting to be made of polymer plastic.
And I mentioned the Canadian currency too.
So our own government has not seen fit to move away from its traditional linen paper Maybe someday they will, but I kind of doubt it.
I think that by the time they consider changing how to make dollar paper currency, they will decide they aren't going to be making it anymore and they will want to.
Push everyone into using completely digital currency.
That's part of, I think, the strategy that the people running our system have to replace cash with an electronic transaction system that will allow them to watch everybody's financial life in detail and also have a measure of control over what you can do with What used to be money but is turning into sort of a electronic
surveillance and control and reward and punishment system.
Yeah, which is kind of scary considering what's happening in Canada right now with Trudeau and the Canadian government trying to seize all the information about cryptocurrency exchanges and that sort of thing in order to punish anybody that has been helping out the Freedom Truckers.
Yeah, and that's a very good example of what Our future holds if we do not, as a people, pay attention to money and banking and tell the people who run the system that we want to retain our liberty and we want to retain our ability to save a portion of what
we have earned through being productive And keep that saved wealth under our personal control instead of trusting them to hold it for us over years or decades.
You know, every person needs the ability to set aside some of what they earn in a secure way for the future.
And I don't mean just next week or next month.
I mean, you really need to be able to save for Buying a house, maybe your child's education, your own retirement, decades hence.
These are all things that require taking a little bit of money that you earn and setting it aside so that it will be there decades later.
In the case of Your child's education, you know, it's that basically, okay, we're going to have a kid.
We have to start preparing for when he or she goes to college.
That's 20 years later, basically.
So you need to be able to set some of your earnings aside and still have it there 20 years later, or maybe 20 or 30 years later, if you're going to buy a house or 40 or 50 years later, if you're going to retire.
You know, you don't want to be only dependent on distant authority figures to protect your self-interest in preparing for your future.
So the way our money and banking system works currently, it's really difficult to save for the future because of inflation and they even People that run the system even say, every year we're going to take 2% of your saved wealth, we're going to take it from you.
That's the 2% inflation target.
So if you're trying to save your wealth, you're running up against, you're running uphill.
Because if you set aside If you set aside a hundred dollars, by the way, a hundred dollars is about what this 25 gold back is worth right now.
So if this was a hundred dollar bill and I go, I'm going to save that for my kid's college education.
He's one year old now, but I'm going to put that in the savings account.
Every year that's going to shrink in value by 2%.
So over 20 years, That's gone down over 40%.
So you put in $100 of purchasing power and you pull out 20 years later $60 of value.
The $40 just evaporated.
That's by design.
And so you have to take that $100 and you don't just set it aside in a secure place.
You have to put it at risk.
You have to invest it so that you can earn interest or dividends on that saved $100 to grow it faster than the inflation rate.
That means you have to put it at risk because earnings don't come without some risk.
It's not like you're just taking your money and putting it in a lockbox, in a safe deposit box.
And then taking it out 20 years later, you have to go and buy something with it that will provide a rate of return.
And maybe you guessed wrong.
Or maybe the people that you've hired to manage your money have guessed wrong.
Some things can happen.
And this all assumes that the people running the system really do hold the inflation rate at 2%.
As you probably know, just last month, It turns out the inflation rate now has cranked up to over 7%.
So that means if you set aside $100 this year, at that rate, it'll only be worth $93 in spending power just one year later.
Well, prices are going up at the same time for every year.
That's right. That's what happens when the currency loses value.
It looks to everyone like prices everywhere are going up.
But what's really happening is that the value of the currency is going down.
Now that process is not smooth and even across the economy when The currency starts to devalue at a noticeably disturbing rate.
People who make things, people who buy and sell things, they have to adjust to that because if you're making, say you're making bread, you're a baker, and you find that the price of wheat has gone up, okay, you have to factor that through.
And raise the price that you're charging grocers for the loaves of bread that you're producing out of the wheat that you're buying from the farmers.
So you have to adjust your prices so you don't lose money, because if you lose money, you're going to go out of business.
You have to run a profit.
Maybe you don't know what your prices for your input commodities are going to be.
You guess, but suddenly things have become uncertain and a bit chaotic.
So you look at that situation and go, well, I'm going to have to be very conservative.
I'm going to have to assume that the price of wheat is going to go up, say, 10% over the next year and not 7%.
So you have to be prepared to price your Bread to take into account that additional cost and pass that on to the grocers that are going to be buying your loaves of bread.
And then the grocer is going to go, hmm, I see that the foods I'm going to sell to my customers are going up.
I'd better start raising my prices because I can't lose money.
I can't not make a profit.
So I've got bills to meet.
When the inflation rate, when the rate of price increases on everything starts to rise, it doesn't happen in a smooth way.
It happens in a chaotic way.
And sometimes prices go up, and then they go down, and then they go up, and it's not just a smooth increase.
It's very chaotic.
And that adds, that uncertainty also adds to upward price pressure.
Because everybody involved in the economy You know, they have to assume that the prices, when they come to buy the things they need, are going to be higher and not lower.
But if they're lower, then okay, they can adjust.
But again, everybody gets nervous and that provides upward pressure on prices too.
Yeah. So, so, so inflation, I mean, you were mentioning it's gone up seven and a half percent.
Right. Where do you think this is all going?
Well, he sighs heavily.
So.
I'll just tell you where I'm coming from.
So I really got interested in this subject back in 2008, when the so-called 2007 and 2008 financial crisis erupted onto the world scene.
And at the time I was working in the San Francisco Bay Area for a biotech startup and the chaos in the markets And in the financial markets affected our company because we were publicly traded, even though we were a startup.
So we all had to take severe pay cuts just to keep the company's doors open.
And that caused me to not be able to afford rent.
Even back then, even 14 years ago, The cost of living in the San Francisco Bay Area was very high, and that includes especially housing and rent.
So when we all took 30% pay cuts, I found I couldn't make ends meet, and so I sort of became homeless.
And I prevailed upon the CEO of our little company They were leasing a warehouse down in the industrial area of town in San Leandro.
And so I said, you know, can I move into the warehouse and live rent-free?
And so he said, yeah, you can do that.
So instead of paying rent for an apartment, I figured out that I could live rent-free at least for a while.
Of course, I was living in a warehouse.
It wasn't, you know, it wasn't a very nice apartment.
Time in my life, but it caused me to think hard about what the heck was going on with the economy and the financial system.
Because up till then, I treated banks and banking sort of like a utility.
You know, you walk into your house and you flip on the light switch and when it comes on, you never really think about the magic behind how does that power get to the lights in the ceiling?
You know, you don't need to think about it because it's not malfunctioning.
It's doing what you expect.
So, you know, you don't think about how it works.
It's when the lights go out that you start thinking about maybe how the Electric power is generated and how it's transmitted to you and how it works.
So the financial and banking system, I didn't really think much about it up until that point because it all seemed to be working okay.
So why should I pay any attention?
But the 2007 and 2008 financial crisis, it definitely seemed to be malfunctioning.
And I decided that I needed to figure out how this thing worked.
Because maybe if it malfunctioned seriously, it would affect me and I wanted to know, you know, I wanted to know what was going on.
So I started investigating how the monetary and banking system really worked.
And the more I studied, the more disturbing it really looked to my non-economist trained eyes.
I mean, I'm just trained in physical sciences.
But the way this thing was put together, it seemed to me to be really kind of crazy.
And I think it is crazy.
And so that's how I got interested in this whole subject.
And that's why when you asked me, what do you think lies ahead?
I kind of gave a sigh because knowing how the system works, I know that it is built to fail.
There is no way it's not going to fail.
It's sort of a question of what form will the failure take?
There are basically two ways that the failure can occur.
In one way, which I call systemic bankruptcy, In one way of failing, basically everybody goes bankrupt.
They literally lose the ability to service their debt and they go bankrupt.
Because the money is worthless?
No, not because the money is worthless, but because they've taken on a lot of debt and they find they can no longer service that debt.
If they have an auto loan, if they have credit cards, if they have a mortgage, if they're a corporation, maybe they have bonds outstanding that they have to make payments on.
If they're a governmental unit, whether it's a city or a county or a state or even the federal government, those organizations find that they can't pay the interest on the debt that they have outstanding.
So that mode of failure is all of those people and institutions that have taken on a lot of debt over the last 40 or 50 years find that when the hard times come,
they can no longer make good on paying their creditors and they go bankrupt, which is what I call systemic bankruptcy because pretty much everybody in the system goes bankrupt at about the same time.
The other failure mode is the currency collapses in value, which is sort of another form of systemic bankruptcy, but there are definite differences between people not being able to pay their debts in currency that still has value Versus the currency itself loses value.
Historically, when a society reaches this point where you can either have systemic bankruptcy or the currency collapses in value, the people controlling the system decide to let the currency collapse.
In other words, they decide that Having everyone go bankrupt at about the same time is a worse fate than having the currency collapse in value.
So they take measures to keep bailing people out, especially if they're well-connected people, by creating more and more currency.
And in that way, the currency loses value.
There is a famous economist by the name of Ludwig von Mises, Who in his magnum opus, a thick book on economics called Human Action, he describes this process of currency and credit expansion followed by collapse.
And he calls it the crack-up boom.
So, and he points out that there really is this only two...
Two paths that we can take when we get to the point where we are now.
We can decide to not print the currency into oblivion and let almost everyone go bankrupt, or we can decide we can't let everyone go bankrupt.
And the only way to avoid doing that is to keep increasing The amount of currency in circulation and using it to bail out well-connected groups and institutions.
So that's where we are right now.
I think we're at that point where one or the other is going to happen and if history is any guide, it's going to be the currency collapse path.
Now, it's interesting Because just today, apparently, a report came out, or maybe it was Friday or something, that the Federal Reserve Board, their Open Market Committee,
which sets interest rates, announced that, or maybe the rumor is that they're going to announce that they're going to be increasing interest rates from the current 0.25%.
Well, there's sort of a base interest rate that all the other interest rates are derived from.
It's called the federal funds rate, and it's basically the interest rate that the big banks charge each other to borrow money, one bank to another, or from the Federal Reserve.
That has been pushed down to only one quarter of one percent per year interest rate.
And that low interest rate is what people recognize contributes to weakness in the value of the currency.
So to keep the dollar from collapsing in value, the Federal Reserve, the central bank, needs to do two things.
It has to quit creating so many dollars, first of all, and it also has to start Putting interest rates higher so they're at about the lowest they can ever be right now only one quarter of one percent and they apparently are going to announce that they're going to increase the interest rate by one quarter of one percent every time they meet for the next year and a half which
would end up putting The base interest rate, the federal funds rate, at two and a quarter percent.
How many times do they meet?
They meet eight times a year.
They meet eight times a year.
So if they're going to increase the interest rates by one quarter, one percent, every time they meet for the next nine meetings, that is a little over a year.
And the next meeting might be in a couple weeks.
So basically, over the next...
Say 15 or 16 months, apparently they're going to increase interest rates from one quarter of 1% to 2.25%.
So the end point is 2.25% at the end of the cycle.
Yeah, if they make good on this plan.
Now, we as a society, we're in a similar problem Back in the late 1970s.
So the dollar was collapsing in value and the then chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Paul Volcker, no relation, to keep the dollar from totally collapsing in value, he just relentlessly increased interest rates until the federal funds rate It was over 18% per year.
What that does when interest rates go up, the first thing that does is it suppresses people borrowing.
People don't want to borrow money when interest rates are high because it's expensive to make payments on the loan.
So that suppresses the urge to go spend money because it's harder to get money to spend.
And that in turn, it also induces people to take the money that they do have and not spend it, but put it in the bank to earn interest.
Because if you can earn 15 or 18% interest on, say, government bonds, I mean, if you had $100,000 Saved up and you could earn $15,000 a year by just leaving that money on deposit or buying a U.S. government security,
which you know is not going to default, you know, you're probably going to do that instead of taking that $100,000 and buying something with it, like a fancy car or something.
So that also holds down Price increases because there's fewer people that want to go spend money and buy stuff.
Instead, they want to save their money and earn more money with their savings.
So that's how Paul Volcker, back around 1980, in the late 70s or 1980, saved the dollar from total collapse.
He cranked interest rates up to nosebleed levels and broke the psychology of inflation, that is, It caused people to doubt that prices were going to continue going up and that caused them to want to save their money more and spend it less and that stopped the price increases.
So to fix our problem today, which is again rapid price increases and just about everything, that's the way to do it.
It's to increase interest rates.
And surely enough, the Federal Reserve apparently is going to announce they're going to be increasing interest rates.
Question real quick. So Paul Volcker, he raised it to how many percent back then?
I think you can go look, you can find a chart of the historical federal funds rate and it peaks around 1980 at like 18 percent.
18 percent. So in comparison we're going to 2.25 percent.
Exactly, right. I mean, Back in the late 70s, in the mid to late 1970s, the consumer price index was going up at rates like high single digits or even low double digits when it really got going.
So we're at that same place in terms of Increase in the cost of living and what people call inflation.
We're at the same place we were in the mid-1970s in terms of percentage points per year of price increases.
So to stop that and to save the dollar, if history is any guide, The Federal Reserve would have to do what Paul Volcker did back 50 years ago, 40 or 50 years ago.
They'd have to increase interest rates to 15 or 18 percent or something to break the psychology of inflation.
The problem is that if the Federal Reserve did that today, pretty much everybody would go bankrupt, including the Federal Reserve.
So why?
Because we've had 40 years of declining interest rates, and pretty much everyone has gorged themselves on cheap money.
They've borrowed lots of money because they think they can pay it with cheap monthly payments, basically, because interest rates are so low.
So they've just borrowed up to their eyeballs.
Whether it's an individual consumer or whether it's a corporation or whether it's a government, even the federal government.
I think the federal government securities now, the Treasury has issued $30 trillion worth of securities.
And most of them have short maturation dates.
They're not 30 year bonds.
They're shorter. There may be Bills are maybe two-year notes or three-year notes.
So when interest rates go up, to roll over those government securities, they're going to have to pay those higher interest rates.
And the people that pay interest on government treasury bonds and notes and bills, it's not the government.
It's not the politicians.
It's you and me.
With our taxes. We're the ones that service that government debt.
So again, if interest rates are pushed up, which is how the Fed saved the dollar 40 years ago, if interest rates are pushed up from A couple percent per year on existing government bonds to 20%, suddenly the interest payments that you and I as taxpayers are going to have to pay are going to go up tenfold.
That would bankrupt the government.
And if the government tried to pass those interest costs on to the taxpayers, it would bankrupt the taxpayers.
How would they pass it on to us?
They would just have to increase tax rates.
There's no other way. The government doesn't have savings.
It doesn't have a pot of money that it can draw from.
If it needs more money, it takes money from the people out of their paychecks.
Either that or it borrows more, which is what it has been doing for decades.
It's been borrowing ever more.
But the crisis at hand is that it can't borrow anymore.
It's reached its limit.
It can't borrow anymore.
That means that the debt that it's now taken on, which currently has low interest rates, that the cost of servicing that debt will explode if the Federal Reserve raises interest rates, which is what the Federal Reserve needs to do to keep the dollar from collapsing in value.
So again, we come back to this choice.
We either bankrupt everybody where they can't service their debts anymore by increasing interest rates across the board, or we don't do that and let the dollar collapse in value.
There's no middle ground.
It's like we're working to a corner, basically.
We have worked ourselves into a corner.
And if you look historically, that's not an uncommon place to be for societies.
It happened in Germany a hundred years ago when their Reichsmark collapsed after World War I. Yeah, so Germany lost World War I and the victorious The Allies, the French and the British and the Americans, demanded that Germany pay heavy reparations.
Germany couldn't afford that, and so they paid the reparations simply by printing lots of their currency and handing it out.
That crashed the value of the German currency so that it basically collapsed in value to nothing in the early 1920s.
That wiped out the German middle class.
So everybody in Germany in the 1920s that maybe had some saving, had maybe 100,000 marks saved up for something, retirement or buying a house or whatever, that was all wiped out.
So people that were middle class suddenly found themselves destitute.
And poor people were already destitute.
And, of course, when you take a society and you totally wipe out its middle class, that sets the stage for mass civil unrest and revolution.
And it happened in France in the late 18th century.
That was the French Revolution.
And it also happened in France 70 years before that in the 1720s.
Apparently the French didn't learn from the first experience or maybe 70 years had forgotten the lessons of 1720s and they repeated the same mistakes.
So those were some examples.
And if you go back even further, the Roman Empire collapsed its economy with too much warfare and welfare spending basically.
And they couldn't afford it, and so they didn't have paper currency.
What they did was, is they took their silver coins, it was called the denarius, and they started mixing more and more copper in with the silver.
Until over a space of several decades, it went from like 90% silver down to basically No silver, but just a little wash of silver on the outside.
And that caused hyperinflation.
And the same responses that you see today in modern societies, the attempt to set fixed limits on prices, Harsh penalties for charging more than the government mandated prices for things, forcing people to stay on their jobs even when they were losing money performing the work.
You know, the Romans in the 300s tried the same coercive tactics to save their system while creating Incredible amounts of debased cheap money and flooding their society with the cheap money and of course the empire collapsed.
So again you see this historical cycle of the rulers of a society getting into financial trouble and fixing their problem by just creating more and more of their currency and debasing its value And eventually that causes mass social unrest.
What's so scary about what you're saying is every example you gave there, there was at least one or two points that we have done in the last few decades.
You know whether it's war spending whether it's printing too much money right whether it's taking ourselves off the gold standard in 1971 right every single Historic like it's almost like what we're doing right now is a combination of all these disastrous elements and at the same time We are seeing you know hints of a revolution already Because people are not satisfied with how government's been handling Now you have also other questions like voter fraud.
Was there voter fraud? Half the country thinks there was.
People are buying guns more today than they've ever bought guns before.
What's scary is that while there was a few factors to each of those examples that you gave, what we're currently going through is a combination of all those factors.
These things seem to happen at the same time, and it's hard to disentangle what causes what.
In other words, they're coincident in time, but does the debasement of the currency and its loss in value cause people to get desperate and then Lose respect for the government.
They want their concerns addressed.
They see they're not being addressed.
They're being brushed aside.
And they think that they have to do something dramatic just to get attention, to be taken seriously.
Now, I do think that if the people in charge Do not credibly address the concerns of the people, then they are setting the stage for violent revolution.
I can't remember who said it.
Some famous person said that if you don't let people speak their mind, you are creating the conditions for violent revolution.
Was that Kennedy?
Okay, I mean...
And I agree with him.
I think that's why we have freedom of speech.
That's why we have Supposedly a representative government, it's that when people can say, no, I really don't like this policy, here's why you have to listen to me and consider my point of view, when that is denied, that process is stifled.
It's like shutting the safety valve on the boiler while you're putting more fuel under it.
There will eventually be an explosion.
And it goes along with The troubles we're having in the economy and the monetary system, this von Mises crack-up boom, which I see unfolding here as the dollar collapses in value.
It'll be a lot like, I think, like Germany in the 1920s, only it'll be worldwide.
Because those paper dollars in our wallet are the world's reserve currency, not just America's.
A hundred years ago, the German currency, when it collapsed, it really only affected Germany.
Because everybody else, they still had sound money and they could continue on with their lives.
But in this case, when you look at how the world monetary system is set up, Which is a legacy of the system set up after the end of World War II called the Bretton Woods system.
So that system was set up where all the other currencies of the world, all of the reasonably important ones, I'm sure you had tiny countries somewhere that really weren't part of the system, but all the big ones, you know, the French franc and the German mark and the British pound and, you know, The major currencies were all defined, their value was defined relative to the US dollar.
So you had sort of a tree with all the other currencies and then the dollar was the trunk.
And then at the base of the tree, the roots, the dollar was defined as 1 35th of an ounce of gold.
So the whole system was the foundation of the entire monetary system after World War II was gold.
And in practical terms, that meant that if you were a foreigner that had dollars, a corporation or a government, and you wanted to get the gold, you could take those dollars, present them to the US Treasury, and say, here, I have $35, give me an ounce of gold.
And the Treasury was obligated to hand over one ounce of gold, and they took the $35.
What happened in 1971 was the U.S. had spent a lot of money on war, the Vietnam War, and also on welfare.
You know, President Johnson had created the so-called Great Society, a lot of welfare programs, and those were expensive.
And the government was not taxing people heavily enough to pay for all of this warfare welfare.
Just like the Romans, you know, the ancient Romans had to keep the legions fed and they had to give free grain to everybody in Rome so they wouldn't revolt.
So here we were doing the same thing, you know, 1700 years later, and the US Treasury didn't have enough gold in its vaults to make good on its promise to take dollars in and give them, give the foreign governments gold.
And so Word got out, and there was a run on the bank.
That's what that really was.
The bank being the US Treasury.
You know, when people think that a bank is failing, they run down to the bank and try to get in there to get their money out.
Before the bank runs out of money.
So you get a line that comes out the door and hopefully you get to the teller and get your withdrawal before the bank runs out of money.
Well, that's what was going on with the US Treasury.
The foreign governments and creditors were lining up to exchange their paper dollars for gold and it became obvious to everybody that the Treasury would run out of gold well before People ran out of paper dollars.
So Nixon said, okay, well, we're going to not do that anymore.
That was a default.
That was the U.S. basically declaring bankruptcy at that point.
And we've been living on by rolling over and increasing our debt ever since for 50 years plus now.
And I think we're about the end of the road doing that.
So, that's why I gave that sigh.
That's why, when you ask me what do I think is going to be happening here, I think we're going to have a worldwide Weimar event.
And the people running the system, they've got to know this too.
So they're strategizing, they're going to try and figure out how do we get through this without losing our heads, literally, probably.
Since it is a worldwide issue, what happens if all the world powers just say, you know, we screwed up.
We screwed up bad.
Why don't we just cancel all our debt and basically start from scratch?
So now the U.S. doesn't owe $30 trillion.
China knows that if the U.S. falls, that we don't buy all their stuff.
So it's kind of like becomes this like deal where we just kind of cancel all the debt and issues So the world doesn't fall apart. I Would say that in the process of That cancellation The world would sort of be falling apart work.
Because think about it, so you probably have retirement savings.
Most people do if they've been working and they have maybe a 401k, maybe their company or their state has a Pension fund and a lot of those funds a lot of the assets in those funds are bonds both government and corporate and so if the government said we're basically
not going to pay If the Treasury announced, we're not going to be paying you your money back, you lent us the money and we're not going to pay you back, it wouldn't be the government that goes bankrupt, it would be the people. It would be everybody that had saved money by buying those bonds.
Your retirement savings is wiped out.
Or a big part of it, like maybe 80 or 90% would be wiped out.
I don't know what the exact ratio would be, but it would be a huge hit.
And again, people would be really upset.
Some of them would probably get desperate and violent.
So, unfortunately, I don't see any Non-painful way out of this problem.
We as a world have basically got ourselves so far into debt that we can't service it anymore.
We have to, we collectively, most of the world has to come to the realization that we're bankrupt and The real struggle will be who gets left holding the bag.
And that's what the politics will be about.
And the people that are running the system now, they want to make sure they don't lose.
They want to retain their wealth and power and put the bankruptcy pain onto everybody else.
Just like in any bankruptcy, you know, the creditors come, if it's a formal bankruptcy, the creditors come before a judge.
And the judge looks and says, there's not enough assets here to pay everybody off.
That's why the bankruptcy is occurring.
So I have to decide who gets what.
You know, who gets more or less of what is owed them.
And of course, in the case of society-wide or even global bankruptcy, there is no impartial court that can try to make it as fair as possible.
It's an all-out Power struggle for who gets the wealth and who loses everything.
And that's why these situations historically are usually accompanied by war and mass civil unrest.
Revolution, where everybody's upset.
They want the heads of all the rulers that got them in this mess.
Right, exactly. And, you know, not...
Unreasonably. I mean, people have made promises.
They've been promised.
You know, you pay taxes and we'll take care of you.
Or, you know, you loaned us money and we'll pay you back.
And suddenly those promises are broken.
And it's not just an academic effect because people's livelihoods and their ability to keep themselves fed and clothed and sheltered are at risk.
You know, it is a true existential crisis.
I mean, okay. Let's get a little bold here.
Like, let's do a crystal ball moment here, right?
I won't hold you to abuse this, but...
Oh, man. Okay.
What do you think is going to happen?
If you were to give us a future prediction, which, you know, your honest opinion, what do you think is going to happen?
Right. And with timelines over the next five to ten years, or the next two to three years, whatever timeline you choose, Give us your crystal ball of what you think is going to happen.
Okay, well, I don't have a crystal ball and I don't have a time machine.
Yeah, just your opinion.
The best time machine we have is reading history and seeing how these things unfolded when they unfolded in the past.
And with humility say, okay, things will probably be somewhat different this time than last time, but not different in the essentials.
So in the past, when a society has found itself in a similar economic situation that we're in now, I would say all of the drama unfolds in the next two or three years.
So in the case of Germany, their currency went from several to the dollar to trillions to the dollar over about two years.
And when they reached the point where we seem, it feels like we're at that point right now, that Germany was in, say, 1921.
And by the end of 1923, their currency had totally collapsed, and their whole economy was in shambles.
That was over two years.
Now, you could say, nowadays, they're better at balancing this rickety, they're better at keeping the house of cards up.
Okay, because they're just better at it.
They have more control over the media.
They're better at propaganda.
Okay, so maybe that would, instead of two years, maybe they could stretch it out to five years.
But on the opposite, People now communicate much more rapidly than they did 100 years ago.
I mean, we've got these cell phone things, and you text, and even though they're trying to control what people see, that's not a very effective process.
So it could happen a lot faster than two years.
But just looking at history, I'd say probably two or three years from now, the dollar will be toast.
What do I mean by that?
I mean, if you have...
If you have a $100 bill, you might be able to get a cup of coffee with it.
Okay? Now maybe it would take a hundred hundred dollar bills to buy a cup of coffee.
Or maybe it would take a $20 bill to buy a cup of coffee.
But, I mean, it's going to be something like that.
And when that happens, the people are basically wiped out.
And that's when they get desperate.
And I think what the people in charge, I think what they're planning on doing is the dollar will collapse, but they're not going to print Paper currency with ever larger numbers on the bills.
So you look at countries like even today that are undergoing hyperinflation like Turkey is collapsed.
Their currency is collapsing right now.
And you look at Venezuela and you look at Yugoslavia and Romania back 30 years ago.
I mean, I happened to have visited Yugoslavia 30 years ago.
And had some pretty surreal moments there handling their currency.
But our guys are not going to start printing thousand dollar bills and ten thousand dollar bills and million dollar bills.
They are just gonna let the paper currency die.
Because they want to get rid of cash anyway.
Cash, the ability to hold and spend cash Even the weak depreciated paper cash that we have is still a powerful source of freedom that the individual has.
Like if I owed you something, I could pay you in paper currency and no one can stop me from doing that and no one can even know that it happened unless one of us tells somebody else.
It's a private transaction that can't be controlled By anyone but the two of us.
And that kind of freedom, that kind of individual power is anathema to rulers.
They don't like that. They want to be able to say, oh, Mark, I don't want this transaction happening.
I'm going to keep you from doing it.
First, they have to know that it's going to happen.
And secondly, they have to be able to intervene in sort of real time and say, no, you can't do that.
And you can't do that with cash, but you can do it with electronic digital currency.
And so what they're going to do is they're going to let the dollar, as the dollar inevitably crashes in value, they're going to not print ever larger denomination bills.
They'll let the cash disappear until it literally becomes worthless.
You can't even buy a candy bar with a $100 bill.
At that point, it will just be trash blowing in the streets.
And as this is happening, people will rely more and more on their cards.
They're going to be taking these things What digital currency are you attached to it?
Well, this is already digital.
You know, most of the transactions that we engage in are not using paper currency nowadays.
They're using credit or debit cards, which is digital currency.
And it's not a cryptocurrency, but it's still just as digital as any cryptocurrency.
So I think what the Federal Reserve and our rulers are planning on doing is as cash becomes so worthless that it becomes irrelevant and a nuisance, they're not going to try to maintain any form of independent payment through Cash or coins.
They're just going to let the system collapse into a totally digital form.
And then the currency they're going to usher in will allow these surveillance and control functions that today's monetary system really doesn't do very well.
In other words, if I use a credit card to buy something, I know about it, the merchant knows about it, my bank knows about it.
But maybe a month later, it gets reported as a statement.
The new federal digital currency will be updated in real time.
So as I go to, say, McDonald's to buy a hamburger, when I make that purchase, you know, somebody sitting at a screen somewhere in the Federal Reserve could watch me buy that hamburger, okay?
Basically, in real time, or maybe they would have some sort of a computer program that would screen transactions and pick out ones that they should pay attention to.
So, for instance, government subsidizes medical care, all right?
That gives them the moral reason or excuse to tell me how to stay healthy in their eyes.
So maybe they say, oh, Mark, you're likely to have a heart attack.
You fit that profile.
So we're not going to let you eat Big Macs anymore.
If you try to go to McDonald's and buy a Big Mac, we're going to block the transaction.
And I won't be able to take paper money out of my Wallet and hand it to the the clerk at McDonald's because there won't be any paper money anymore.
It'll just be the digits.
I mean you see this encroaching right now anyways because a lot of places you go they don't even have change.
A lot of them say they don't take cash anymore.
They only take cards.
So they're already moving people towards this now and that's why there are these Supposed coin shortages.
They're starting to get people annoyed with using cash and coins.
They want to make it inconvenient.
They want to encourage people to go and pull out their debit or credit cards.
So that when the collapse comes and paper money Really becomes irrelevant.
People will be used to, oh, I don't have to deal with that cash anymore.
But what they'll be losing is they'll be losing the ability to buy and sell things without permission of Big Brother, and they'll be losing the privacy that they now have in their financial life.
Which is, I mean, That's right.
made Trudeau accelerate what the plans were, which was basically to start monitoring everybody's bank accounts.
Oh, you're donating to Trump. We don't like Trump.
Therefore, you're a white supremacist, and now we're going to cancel your bank account.
Right. That is a scary thought.
They make up nonsense stories to justify this, but it's basically a raw exercise of power.
We are going to punish you.
We don't like what you're doing. We don't like your opinions.
We're going to make life as hard as we can for you.
And part of that is basically cutting you off from financial life, making it so you can't Buy and sell things anymore.
Stealing your savings.
And that's the perfect example.
Which then now you're not in a real democracy because obviously what we've seen right now is where you've seen the right who most people on the Canada, then you have essentially like a monoparty culture.
Right. Now we're basically China.
Yeah, we're headed, and I think, I've seen a video of Trudeau praising China because, you know, so these people are, and it's not just Trudeau, you have this group over, headed by this guy, Klaus Schwab, who basically says openly, well, he says, you will own nothing.
Mm-hmm. They aim to turn everybody into serfs, except for their group, which will be the lords.
And it will be sort of a high-tech, neo-feudal world, where instead of wealth being landed estates, wealth is control of corporations.
But it's still sort of a feudal system.
And I don't want to live in a futile system.
That sounds like what we bled to get out of 250 years ago.
Yeah, people, they risk their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.
They put it all on the line so that human beings could be free.
Was it perfect? No.
But they had the right idea.
And they made it happen.
And the result was probably the best society to live in the world has ever seen.
Maybe like first century Rome was just as good.
But I'm lucky to have been born in the United States when I was born here.
I could have been born in China.
I could have been born in Russia in 1955.
I mean, there's a lot worse places to be than 20th century America or 21st century.
We're still pretty much there.
They haven't closed in on us yet, but you can see the chess pieces being moved around, you know, getting ready for the checkmate.
And I think the checkmate is going to be the collapse of the dollar, because when that happens, that's going to cause such Upset and chaos and anger that they're gonna have to be prepared to deal with it.
So they're planning for that.
And you can see it up in Canada.
That's like a maybe a practice run.
They're seeing what they can get away with.
Can we shut people's bank accounts off?
Can we send police into the streets to beat up peaceful protesters and get away with it?
Can we intimidate people into submission?
And so that's what's going on in Canada right now.
And it'll happen everywhere in the world.
And that's part of the reason we created Goldbacks, because to be free, you have to have.
In a society, you can be free if you're living alone out in the wilderness without money, but if you're living in a society of people that has division of labor and people produce things and trade them.
you have to have money.
You can't do it without money.
And the money has to be honest money of real value or else it's not money.
But this paper stuff we have in our wallets and the digital version of that is really, it's actually not money.
And it's becoming less and less Money-like with every move they make to dematerialize it and move it into the ether.
It started out as hard pieces of valuable metal that you would give to somebody in payment for something and now it's either inherently worthless pieces of paper representing debt or it's digital ledger entries in banks that represent debt.
And the next step is going to be just complete dematerialization.
What you're doing is definitely a threat to the system.
Could you tell us a little bit about how recently your payment accounts were cancelled?
Yeah, that was about a week ago.
So I've been selling goldbacks online and Watching demand for them ebb and flow along with concern for inflation.
And just last week, my payment processor sent me an email saying, you have violated our terms of service, so we are going to stop processing your payments.
Did they tell you what you violated?
No. No, of course not.
No, all they did was send a link to their Terms of Service, which is this lengthy document with so many clauses and sub-clauses that, you know, which thing did I violate?
Who knows? But they just, they have their excuse and they shut me off.
I want the viewer here, and this is why I'm looking right at the camera, to notice a pattern of events over here because you had, you know, Trump, you could love him or hate him or whatever, but one thing that Trump was doing Understanding our economy,
being reliant upon our own resources, and ideas such as goldbacks now, is a threat.
They keep shutting these people down.
Freedom truckers. They keep you're using the word freedom trucker and you're called a Nazi. You're called Essentially a fascist you're called all these nasty names because it has nothing Nothing to do with that. What it really has to do with is this massive movement that started around the world For our true freedoms and that's what they keep shutting down I hope I mean I don't wear a wig
I just hope that other people start waking up because really, I don't know if you've seen that movie, Another Brick or The Wall, you know.
I remember The Wall, yeah.
I mean, this is what they're trying to do to the world.
That's right. Marching soldiers, marching in unison.
I mean, this is what they're trying to do to the world.
They're trying to do the world what Hitler was trying to do with the Hitler Youth, like literally carving copies of one another and all character taken out, all freedom taken out, because that's what suits the real dictators and the authoritarians, the real authoritarians and fascists.
So anyway, just wanted to get that off my chest.
You know? A free people needs honest money to remain free and to prosper.
And we don't have honest money and we haven't had honest money really for decades.
You could debate when really the counterfeiting really got out of hand.
Maybe you could say it was when Nixon had to Welch on his promises, go back on the promises of the US government to pay something of value for dollars.
Or maybe you could go back to 1933 when FDR did that to American citizens domestically.
Or maybe you could even go back to the origin of the Federal Reserve in 1913 when that federally chartered banking cartel Was signed into existence by then President Wilson and was given a grant of basically U.S. government approved counterfeiting.
So which of those or maybe it was when they finally lost all control in 2008 and just cranked up the printing presses to warp 10 or maybe you could say that they finally lost it In January of 2020,
when they both shut down the economy and increased the rate of dollar creation by an order of magnitude again.
What's amazing to me is that none of what we're talking about is secret.
I don't have any secret connections to The bowels of government policy making.
I just go out and I look on like the Federal Reserve's economic data website and you can see that M1 money supply, they have it there.
There's a graph. It goes back decades and you can see how many dollars in M1 which is like checking account and cash and that kind of stuff.
It goes, it sort of does this in 1975 and then in 2008 it turns up And then in January of 2020, it literally does the hockey stick, vertical.
And in two years, it's gone from $4 trillion to over $18 trillion.
That's why I say we're at where Germany was in 1921, because if you look at the German Currency supply versus time.
It does a similar turn vertical in 1921.
And by the end of 1923, their whole currency had collapsed to literally nothing.
Wow. So if you overlay what we've done On the German experience, when you slide it back a hundred years and put them together, you see we've got about two years to go before everything just goes nuts.
Yeah. And what came after, I mean, I know they couldn't predict this, but what came after in 1923 is, like, you have the rise of Hitler, you have this rise again.
Right. Well, you wipe out the middle class, the productive class, the farmers, the small merchants, the workers, the factory owners even, You wipe that out and you set the stage for dictatorship.
It happened in Germany. It happened in France also.
Alright? I don't know about I'm not up on Roman history, but I know...
The Ottoman Empire is one that you missed out in those examples.
Which one? The Ottoman Empire.
The Ottoman Empire, same thing happened because you had essentially the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which was also a big genocide happened there.
And the funny thing that nobody talks about because it's not...
People don't talk about what actually happened in the Ottoman Empire because you had this rise of a very liberal group of people that were not actually liberal and they were helped to come into power by basically the Christian Right.
Right. Okay. You know,
the new Turkish Republic and, you know, maybe he wasn't like as bad as Hitler or Stalin, but really you had this, you know, the statues of Ataturk.
He was looked at as, you know, this authoritarian figure, which has continued on to today.
You can't walk into any room in Turkey without seeing the statue of Ataturk.
Ataturk, okay. Alright. Well, I mean, okay, so there's Ataturk and the Ottoman Empire and And the Turkish Republic, which followed it.
You have, of course, Hitler, who rose to power on the desperation and destruction of the German middle class due to the collapse of their currency.
In the case of late 18th century France, the monarchy had spent its way into oblivion and the economy collapsed.
And the only person that But it doesn't, you know, all these stories don't seem to go the way that I guess the modern day central bankers and the powers that be wanted to go because These individuals...
What do they want? What do the powers that be and the central bankers and the ruling...
George Carlin's club, you know, the big club that we're not members of?
What do those people really want?
What do the people that meet over in Davos once a year...
I think they would want somebody like a Biden or a Trudeau to continue ruling.
But what happens in all these scenarios we've talked about is you get somebody that nobody really knew was going to come to power And that person actually becomes a menace not only to the people, but also becomes a menace to the powers that used to be.
Yeah, I mean, there are, there is this cycle, this historical theme that keeps repeating variations each time.
You know, Napoleon wasn't Hitler, wasn't Ataturk.
You know, they were different people.
And had slightly different ideas, but still you see the common theme of how things evolved.
So what will happen to our world?
I would not like to have a strong man arise to try to pull society out of The chaos, but I don't know, I have no idea how that will unfold.
It's like I see there's a hurricane that's coming, so you should be putting plywood on your windows and getting ready, but what the damage is going to be, which buildings get destroyed, and who Gets hurt or killed.
Who knows? It's chaos.
It's just a crazy time.
So the best you can do is recognize that something like this is headed our way and prepare as best you can.
I mean, at the end of World War I, after the German economy fell, didn't I think what he did was he came in and he basically...
I'm sure there were elites in Germany that didn't like this guy.
But they were marginalized or maybe even at some point killed.
And the ones that were left were the ones that would...
Go along with him either actively or begrudgingly and do what was required.
And I think society, German society, obviously the end of World War II was just totally demolished.
I mean, if you were one of the rulers of pre-war Germany, if you were an industrialist or a wealthy elite, You probably were lucky to escape with your life.
What I'm noticing in all these examples, the Russian Revolution is another one that we didn't talk about, but the Tsars were demolished.
They were killed.
The whole family was murdered.
In the German example with Hitler, Were removed somehow.
Like, throughout that... I mean, I know the...
What is it called? The Bismarck?
They used to wear the...
Yeah, right. The spike on the helmet.
Yeah, yeah. Autobahn, Bismarck, and...
Yeah.
And in the Ottoman Empire example, like, all the rulers of what the Young Turk Party was, again, were demolished at the end of that.
That elite was destroyed.
So, I mean, I guess what I'm...
Even though, you know, we have the Davos and the Karl Schwabs and all these people plotting.
The Karl Schwab and yeah, all those people.
They might actually be, in plotting our destruction, history has shown that they're also likely to be destroyed.
Oh, I agree. I agree, you know.
Yeah. I don't think she really said it, but you know, Marie Antoinette, let them eat cake.
You know, it's the power elite that The peasants with torches and pitchforks storm the castle.
And the people in the castle end up getting it.
And I don't know why that keeps happening.
They all would seem to think this time they'll do it right.
They've got the power. They understand human nature well enough.
They've got enough influence that this time they'll pull it off.
They'll successfully conquer and remain On the Game of Thrones throne.
Could I say the answer to that?
Okay, go ahead. And this is because I think I've learned from dealing and doing a lot of stories, documentaries about criminals, right?
Yeah. You know, Al Capone ran Chicago.
Al Capone had a very low IQ. Criminals, they might have power, they may have organization, they might be in groups where they could oppress us, but the criminal mind is never an intelligent mind.
It's never an intelligent mind.
Now, Karl Schwab might have all the power in the world.
Obviously, the man is not highly intelligent.
I mean, maybe he is intelligent in some ways because there's, you know, book smarts, there's street smarts.
Right. Once you think this through and you look at the historical precedent and you realize that whenever somebody's plotting I agree.
They're putting themselves at risk.
And it may be that...
And don't forget, we're talking about a large group of people.
So there may be some people who, shall we say, attend Davos that think that they actually can pull it off and rule the world.
And then maybe there are others in that same social circle who are trying to tell those people Hey, you know, I don't think this is going to work out.
Let's not do this.
Let's try and figure some other path forward.
You know, we're really in trouble here.
Just leave them alone. Leave them alone. Leave the people alone.
They did in the COVID plan to destroy small business in the middle class and go to these extents where the freedom truckers and they can't deliver food and Trudeau now has to invade their bank accounts.
I mean, it's just leave us alone.
Yeah, that's really the key.
It's the leave us alone.
It's quit trying to boss us around and steal our stuff ever more.
But it's characteristic that The parasites don't know when to quit sucking blood.
They can't tell when they're going to kill the host.
It's sort of like that.
These people, they've got all this power, they think they know they're on top, they think they know what's going on, but they really don't, just because they can't know enough.
There's an interesting idea that was put forth by, I think it was the economists of F.A. Hayek.
He wrote a little book called Economic Calculation and the Socialist Commonwealth.
This was in 1920.
It's a tiny, thin little book about this big.
So back then, there was a lot of talk in economic circles about socialism was, you know, an exciting thing.
It was up and coming.
And it was a real, there was a lot of academic discussion about how to make central planning work and Hayek wrote this monograph to basically say it can't work and here's why and basically it's an information processing problem so that even if the people who are in charge of planning the economy
you know making these five-year plans or setting interest rates or you know deciding How many houses should be built here or there?
Even if those people were genuinely trying to do the right thing, weren't trying to line their own pockets and get rich at other people's expense, even if they're generally trying to do the right thing, they can't because they can't know enough to make the right decisions.
And because a human society is not an anthill.
A human society is a vast distributed processing, parallel processing system where every individual has agency.
You see the world as you see it and you have certain goals that you have set and you make decisions in economics.
It's do I buy this or do I buy that or do I not spend money or whatever.
You make those decisions based on your personal state of knowledge and what you want to do with your life.
And no one else can know that, what you know.
And what the job of a central planner or committee of central planners is Is to try to make those decisions without having the knowledge and desires of millions or hundreds of millions of people.
So that's why this idea of rationally, centrally planning An economy or basically a society is doomed to fail.
Even if the people who are tasked with making these decisions are trying their best to do the right thing and not just being corrupt jerks who want to steal from everybody else.
They can't because they don't know how to make the decisions.
So it's a hopeless task.
Well, Mark, thank you so much for coming down for Thank you for your time.
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