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Dec. 21, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show
50:27
Will Trump Be Disqualified Before The Election Even Starts?
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Yesterday, Kamala Harris said something extraordinarily wise.
It was a rare moment of shining brilliance from our very historic Vice President.
Here she was.
You know, every election cycle, we talk about this is the most election of our lifetime.
Lawrence, this one is.
I have been fortunate and blessed to, during the course of being vice president, have many situations where it becomes clear to me that there are, you know, people of every age and gender, by the way, who see something about being the first that lets them know they don't need to be limited by other people's limited Um, understanding of who can do what.
Yes, indeed.
2024 is shaping up to be the most election of our lifetime.
Not just an election, the most election.
In other words, a complete sh** show.
While America awaits the Supreme Court ruling on whether or not Colorado can bar Donald Trump from the ballot, other states are now considering how they can follow Colorado's suit and bar the leading Republican candidate in America, the likely nominee, For the presidency, from the ballot entirely.
According to the New York Times, there are at least 15 other states besides Colorado considering barring Trump from the ballot, including four state lawsuits in Michigan, Oregon, New Jersey, and Wisconsin, and 11 federal lawsuits in Alaska, Arizona, Nevada, New York, New Mexico, South Carolina, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
Right now, the cases in Arizona and Michigan have already been dismissed in Trump's favor, but they have now been appealed.
If the Supreme Court doesn't take up the Colorado case, if they just leave it there, then Trump will remain off the ballot in Colorado.
And we can be sure this insanity will be repeated anywhere there is a Democratic Supreme Court or legislature and governor.
In fact, just yesterday, the California Lieutenant Governor Alina Koulanakis wrote a letter to the California Secretary of State begging for her to, quote, explore every legal option to remove President Donald Trump from California's 2024 presidential primary ballot.
Hilariously, Kounalakis is apparently illiterate.
She writes in her letter, quote, Actually, you have to be 35, but same difference.
Now, it's clear the Colorado Supreme Court is legally in the wrong.
Even Trump's biggest detractors say so.
Here is Trump's former Attorney General, Bill Barr, who has hardly been a Trump ally in the days since the 2020 election.
As you know, I strongly oppose Donald Trump for the Republican nomination.
But I think that this case is legally wrong and untenable.
And I think this kind of action of stretching the law, taking these hyper aggressive positions to try to knock Trump out of the race are counterproductive.
They backfire.
As you know, he feeds on grievance, just like a fire feeds on oxygen.
And this is going to end up as a grievance that helps him.
And here's Chris Christie, who's running a campaign simply and specifically to throw dirt in Trump's eye.
I do not believe Donald Trump should be prevented from being president of the United States by any court.
I think he should be prevented from being president of the United States by the voters of this country.
Well, that doesn't matter.
Those who hate Trump believe that it is morally justifiable to use literally any means necessary to keep him from the White House.
According to a brand new poll from YouGov, 54% of Americans approve of the Colorado State Supreme Court's decision to boot Trump from the ballot, including 84% of Democrats.
So a majority of Americans, according to this poll, believe that the Colorado State Supreme Court should boot Trump from the ballot.
Doesn't bode particularly well for the actual election cycle.
That's not because these people believe the legal theory behind what the Colorado Supreme Court just did.
It's because they believe that any club available to slam Trump in the skull must be used.
They're in the same camp as Mary Trump, Trump's niece, who no one had ever heard of five years ago, but who has now made a nice career for herself bashing her uncle.
Fabulous news today from the Colorado Supreme Court, who ruled that Donald Trump Yes, Donald Trump, the insurrectionist, anti-American, anti-Democratic fascist who, for some bizarre reason, is leading the Republican nominating contest by 50 points or something, is not eligible to be on the ballot for the Republican
Primary in that state.
This is amazing news.
Yes, it's going to go to the United States Supreme Court, but if they are able to read English, they should concur with this decision.
This legal scholar, who is a psychologist, by the way, has her legal thoughts.
Joe Biden is fomenting all of this by supporting the rationale behind the
Colorado ban. So yesterday he was asked about the Colorado state Supreme Court
ruling, and he said that Trump was certainly an insurrectionist and that
should presumably bar him from the ballot.
Trump an insurrectionist, sir?
Well, I think it's certainly self-evident.
You saw it all.
Now, whether the 14th Amendment applies, I'll let the court make that decision.
But he certainly supported an insurrection.
No question about it.
None.
Zero.
Zero question, says our doddering old president.
No wonder Republicans are up in arms.
If Democrats are going to claim that the law can be used as a club, and simultaneously that they are law-abiding citizens merely following the law, Trump fans are similarly going to pick up any club at hand.
That's why Trump fans are increasingly cheering his applause line about temporary dictatorship.
Here are some of those fans, for example.
They can't say that he's... Well, I mean, they are saying that he's coming after his political opponents, but literally, that's exactly... Everything they're accusing this man of doing is literally what has been going on for the last... That's why I have no problem with Day One Dictator.
That's why I have no problem with it.
If a dictator means he's going to drill, baby, drill, sign me up for that dictatorship anyway.
Okay, so, again, the idea is that Trump's language about dictatorship and all the rest of it, by which he really means just using executive authority in the same ways that Biden and Obama used executive authority, When people say this sort of thing, the reason they're saying it is specifically because Democrats claim that they are pro-democracy at the same time they seek to thwart it in a variety of ways.
And if Democrats truly seek to bar Trump from the ballot across the country, Republicans will presumably do the same thing to Democrats.
Here's Texas's Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick.
Arizona tried this about 10 years ago, but our law is different.
It simply says that our law enforcement can arrest anyone, take them in, do a background check, photograph, do fingerprints.
If they saw them cross the border illegally, we can do that.
Or if they happen to reveal in the arrest stop that they crossed illegally, and then the magistrate will send them back and will escort them to the border.
Uh, and they have a choice.
They go to jail or they can go back.
And if they go back and try to come back again and we arrest them again, the penalty gets even higher.
We're fed up.
In fact, seeing what happened in Colorado tonight, Laura, it makes me think, except we believe in democracy in Texas, maybe we should take Joe Biden off the ballot in Texas for allowing 8 million people to cross the border since he's been president.
Again, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment does suggest that if you take sides against America, if you take sides with America's enemies, if you undermine the Constitution, maybe that acts as cause to remove somebody from the ballot.
America is indeed on the precipice of something truly dangerous.
Question, are there now any conditions under which Republicans will accept a Biden victory?
At this point, if Joe Biden wins the 2024 election, how many Republicans are going to simply say, okay, done here, and elections an election?
On the other side, are there any conditions under which Democrats will accept a Trump victory?
And if not, what comes next?
The answer is nothing very good.
2024 is indeed going to be very election.
The most election, as Kamala Harris says.
So, get ready.
In one second, we'll get to the polls.
Donald Trump way out in front nationally, but some interesting things happening in New Hampshire in the primaries first.
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Pure Talk is simply Okay, so looking at the national polls, Donald Trump is experiencing, unsurprisingly, a fairly significant bump after the Colorado Supreme Court just did what it did.
According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, Trump is up nationally 67% to 11% for DeSantis and 11% for Haley.
So two-thirds of the national vote behind Donald Trump.
In the various states, You can see Trump continuing to lead fairly significantly.
So in Iowa, the latest Fox Business poll has Trump up at 52%, DeSantis at 18, and Nikki Haley at 16.
So even if you combined both of their percentages, they would be at 34%, 18% behind Donald Trump.
So he has a significant lead over in Iowa.
New Hampshire is a bit of a different story.
According to a new CBS poll, New Hampshire, Trump is at 44, but Nikki Haley is at 30%.
Chris Christie is at 12%.
So if you added together Chris Christie's support and Nikki Haley's support, if Christie were to get out of the race, as he should, that would look like a competitive state.
Then he'd move down south to South Carolina and things could theoretically get a little interesting because, of course, Nikki Haley is the former governor of South Carolina.
Nationally speaking, the Trump versus Biden polls, they are tightening a little bit.
Quinnipiac has Biden up one, 47 to 46.
Economist YouGov has them tied at 43.
Morning Consult has Trump up by two at 44 to 42.
And again, this is how it works.
As Trump gets back in the headlines, the polls tend to tighten between Trump and Biden.
This is why anybody who is suggesting that it's gonna be a runaway for Trump, I don't see the evidence for that.
Anybody who's suggesting that it's gonna be a runaway for Biden, I don't see the evidence of that either.
This thing could seriously go either way, and a lot is dependent on the candidate's strategy.
So Joe Biden is going to try to run a basement strategy, and it's not going to work because he's the current president of the United States.
Donald Trump should be running a basement strategy.
If Donald Trump runs a basement strategy in 2024, if he does exactly what Joe Biden did in 2020, if he just goes down to his basement and watches Shark Week from now until the election, very solid shot that he becomes president again.
But one of the big problems that the RNC is having is this is a big election year, not just for Donald Trump, but for the Republican Senate, for example.
So Republicans have the upper hand in a bunch of Senate races that they need in order to regain the majority in the Senate.
But the RNC has no cash because all the money is getting sucked up into Trump world.
And Trump doesn't spend the cash on Republican candidates in these various areas.
According to Rob Pryors, who is a political junkie research director for the California Target Book, He has statistics on RNC cash on hand at the end of November by year.
In 2016, the RNC had $21 million on hand.
In 2018, $27 million.
In 2020, $58 million.
2021, $65 million.
As of 2023, the RNC cash on hand is less than $10 million.
Meaning no one is giving to the RNC.
That's a real problem if you're looking at a bunch of competitive congressional races and Senate races where Donald Trump is not going to spend one iota of his time.
That is the reality of the race.
And so, again, the idea that Trump's just going to walk away with this thing, I understand that Trump doesn't like strategy and Trump really does not like planning.
His on-the-ground game is not really existent.
He sort of throws it out there and then hopes and prays that victory will emerge.
Maybe it will.
I'm not saying it can't.
I'm just saying that right now the RNC is short on cash.
Trump has no ground game and no actual strategy in a lot of these states.
The best thing he could do right now is get some pros on board to actually run the on-the-ground get-out-the-vote campaign if he wins the primaries, which presumably he will.
And then he needs to go to the basement and shut up and watch Joe Biden be a bad president.
Speaking of which, Joe Biden's presidency, it continues to be a mess.
He cannot take clear political positions on nearly anything.
So on the one hand, you have the State Department for the United States saying that Israel should basically be allowed to defend itself by taking out Hamas, which is good.
Your Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, saying that yesterday.
What is striking to me is that even as, again, we hear many countries urging the end to this conflict, which we would all like to see, I hear virtually no one saying, demanding of Hamas.
That it stopped hiding behind civilians, that it laid down its arms, that it surrendered.
This is over tomorrow if Hamas does that.
This would have been over a month ago, six weeks ago, if Hamas had done that.
And how could it be that there are no demands Made of the aggressor and only demands made of the victim.
So it would be good if there was a strong international voice pressing Hamas to do what's necessary to end this.
Hey, obviously that's good, but at the same exact time, the United States is now negotiating with the most eyesleeve international politics, a wretched hive of scum and villainy, the United Nations, in order to facilitate the passage of some sort of UN Security Council resolution about ceasefires and humanitarian aid and all the rest.
It's just a mess of policy inside the Biden administration because apparently they lack the courage of their own convictions.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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So, the reason that you have this mass confusion inside the White House is because they can't take a moral stand.
Too many of their supporters are either radical leftists or weak liberals.
When I say weak liberals, I mean people who are willing to cave to radical leftists if they believe the situation so requires.
So, speaking of the radical leftists, the other night, and this is just an amazing video and it shows you how insane some of the Democratic support base is.
Protesters in New York City were screaming shame on you at an event, outside an event that was being held, a charity event in New York City.
So the woman who's actually leaving here is a woman named Ayelet Levy.
Ayelet's daughter is Naama, who happens to be one of the hostages who was raped and kidnapped by Hamas terrorists.
And here are the protesters screaming at her.
Shame on you!
Flipping off, screaming at, you know, the mothers of people who were kidnapped and raped.
Pretty obviously raped.
You remember the daughter as the woman from the photograph where her pants are covered in blood and her Achilles heels were cut so she could not run away.
She was hobbled so she couldn't run away.
So those are the radical leftists who are part of Joe Biden's base.
Meanwhile, you have the so-called soft liberals inside Biden's congressional caucus.
Those would be people like Jason Crow and Chrissy Houlihan, unfortunately Seth Moulton, Alyssa Slotkin, Abigail Spanberger.
These are the supposed moderates in the Democratic caucus.
They issued a letter yesterday to Biden saying, quote, We are deeply concerned by Prime Minister Netanyahu's current military strategy in Gaza.
The mounting civilian death toll and humanitarian crisis are unacceptable and not in line with
American interests, nor do they advance the cause of security for our ally Israel.
We also believe it jeopardizes efforts to destroy the terrorist organization Hamas and
secure the release of all hostages.
From our positions on the Intelligence, Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committee, we
have consistently pushed for Israel to shift its military strategy.
There has been no significant change.
Now, I have a question.
What exactly would that change look like?
Seriously, all recommendations welcome.
People keep saying that Israel ought to be more humane.
They need to preserve civilian life better.
They need to go in on the ground and be more careful.
Israel has lost about 130 soldiers in the Gaza Strip already, all of them very young men.
Israel is sacrificing those lives in order to save civilians, obviously.
But there is this bizarre mentality that now prevails among many Americans in which war does not exist.
Or if war does exist, it's supposed to be clean.
It's supposed to be precise.
That is not how war works.
This letter includes the following idiotic line, by the way.
We know from personal and often painful experience, you can't destroy a terror ideology with military
force alone, and it can in fact make it worse. Well, the way that you actually destroy a terror
ideology is with long-term occupation, pacification, and counterinsurgency tactics.
That's actually how you destroy a terror ideology over time.
It certainly isn't by making concessions to terrorists, which is what a ceasefire would be, as Blinken correctly stated.
Meanwhile, Hamas is openly thanking its allies in the Western world.
So literally, a spokesperson for Hamas yesterday issued a video thanking the Canadian government for calling for a ceasefire.
Guys, if Hamas is thanking you, you're doing it wrong.
by Canada, Australia and New Zealand backing sustainable ceasefire in Gaza.
We welcome these developments and consider them in the right direction toward isolation
the fascist is a fascist Israeli government globally and ending the longer evil occupation
in our modern time.
Okay, that's Hamas literally thanking Western governments.
Again, when a terrorist group thanks you, you are doing it wrong.
Meanwhile, Hamas is rejecting Israel's offer to stop fighting for a week for a hostage deal to go forward.
They say, no, no, no, you have to stop firing on us before we are going to offer you anything.
Meanwhile, as of this morning, Hamas was firing its largest barrage of rockets into Tel Aviv that it has for a couple of weeks, like 30 rockets falling toward Tel Aviv.
So, so much for the ceasefire.
There is no ceasefire.
Hamas knows it.
It's all a tactic by Hamas.
And weakness breeds.
It breeds problems.
It breeds failure.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so.
Weakness breeds failure, and that's what we are seeing in the Red Sea.
So, according to the Wall Street Journal, as a U.S.-led multinational task force steamed toward the Middle East to protect one of the world's vital shipping lanes, the Houthi rebels vowed to retaliate if attacked.
Yet despite rising tensions in the Red Sea on Wednesday, traders reacted with relative calm, even as shipping companies diverted more cargoes to alternative routes.
While the threat of more severe disruption persists, the response of energy markets has been muted compared with dramatic moves in prices sparked by some other past outbreaks of violence in the Middle East.
Well, yeah, I mean, if you compare, it's like 1973, of course, because there's a giant oil embargo from, like, Saudi Arabia.
But the reality of the situation is that when you have, again, ragtag Houthi pirates in inflatables with drones who are holding up One of the key choke points for global trade that is a serious problem.
And it's not just a serious problem because of what's happening in the Red Sea.
It's a serious problem because once States that hate the United States, ones countries that have interests adverse to our own, realize that they can drive America off the ball in the area of freedom of the seas.
They can really affect the global economy in significant and severe ways.
So I want to show you a map.
This is a map of maritime choke points across the world.
And a lot of people don't think about exactly how the stuff that you want gets to you.
But the reality is that there are these choke points, you know, places where a huge percentage of trade actually moves.
So if you can't see the map, there are, again, a bunch of things labeled on this map I'll try to describe for you.
Places that trade moves, and these are bottlenecks, like places that very often are close to nations that are adversarial to the United States.
So, the number one choke point, the primary choke point for Asia, is a place called the Strait of Malacca.
It is very close to China and has the ability, if you close it, to really affect China's economy.
Alternatively, because it's very close to China, you could see China attempt to make aggressive moves in the Strait of Malacca.
It accounts for about 25% of all traded goods and a third of all seaborne oil.
And that is a choke point.
Another choke point, the Taiwan Straits.
So when China is threatening Taiwan, they are also threatening the Taiwan Straits, which is a place where a lot of trade moves.
If you look at, for example, the Strait of Hormuz, this is one of the areas that Iran is currently threatening.
30% of all oil traded on the world's oceans passes through the Strait of Hormuz.
These are moves from the Middle East and down through the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, which is another place where a lot of oil moves.
And then up through the Suez Canal, again, all these places threatened by Iran and Iranian proxies.
So you have China, which is threatening like the Taiwan Straits and the Strait of Malacca.
And you have Middle Eastern countries adversarial to America, like Iran, threatening the Strait of Hormuz, the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, the Suez Canal, forcing people to travel all the way around the southern tip of Africa, the Cape of Good Hope, which is a much longer trip.
It increases all of your prices.
What this really means is that, again, if America does not guarantee freedom of the seas, then what you're going to end up with is a cratered global economy at the behest of countries that hate the United States and seek to curb our power.
And the Chinese are seeing the weakness.
Apparently, according to ABC News last night, Chinese President Xi Jinping told President Joe Biden directly at their recent summit that China will reunify with Taiwan.
It was unclear whether Beijing plans to use force in its efforts to reunify with Taiwan, but Xi indicated they will try at first to do so peacefully.
Key words there being at first.
Xi has said as much publicly what is noteworthy is that he said this so bluntly to the president at a summit intended to thaw their relations.
And John Kirby told reporters, quote, I'm not going to get into specifics of the discussion between the two leaders.
I think you can understand I'm not going to read out that private conversation.
He said, President Xi has been public and clear about his desires for reunification.
That's not something different or new.
We have been clear and the president was clear with you guys and with President Xi, we still adhere to the one China policy.
We don't support independence for Taiwan.
We also don't support a change in the status quo unilaterally and certainly not one by force.
And as the president has said, there's no reason for this to come to blows.
Asked about whether U.S.
involvement in two other global conflicts, Ukraine and Gaza, alters its previous commitment to defend Taiwan from any Chinese military action, Biden reiterated in November the U.S.
position in favor of the one-China policy, which is basically just, let's not talk about this.
The one-China policy is like, sure, Taiwan is part of the one-China policy, and also if you attack Taiwan, we'll defend it probably.
It's strategic vagueness.
Biden said, look, I reiterate what I've said since I've become president and what every previous president of late has said, that we maintain an agreement.
There's one China policy.
I'm not going to change that.
That's not going to change.
And so that's about the extent to which we discussed it.
Apparently, in a readout of the summit, China said, quote, Xi Jinping elaborated on his principled position on the Taiwan issue and pointed out the Taiwan issue has always been the most important and sensitive issue in Sino-U.S.
relations.
China attaches importance to the relevant positive statements made by the United States at the Bali meeting.
China will be unified and inevitably will be unified.
According to U.S.
military intelligence, Xi has been instructing his military to be ready by 2027 to invade Taiwan.
That obviously is a timeline that could be moved up pretty dramatically if Xi senses global weakness by the West, an unwillingness to use, for example, naval power in pursuit of the freedom of the seas.
That could continue to be a serious problem.
And it goes also to a general belief in the United States that we can randomly sort of cut off our own military without real consequence to the American people.
We spend too much money, we should be more isolationist, and all of the rest.
That is, in fact, also a massive problem.
When it comes to American underinvestment, that is particularly true with regard to the Navy.
The Navy does the biggest share of the lifting when it comes to war-making, ensuring freedom of trade.
I did a recent Facts episode all about this.
You can go check it out on YouTube.
But the Navy represents about 23% of our annual military budget that's lower than both the Army and the Air Force.
Not only that, the U.S.
fewer operating naval carriers today than it did four decades ago. The U.S. Navy keeps talking
about growing while shrinking, relying on better technology to make up for lack of ships. One of
the things that we have seen historically with U.S.
military policy is whenever the U.S. military is like, well, we'll do it fewer but better, that tends to
work out not particularly well, whether you're talking about the occupation of Iraq or they're
talking about in Vietnam using much more military technology, but doing graduated escalation.
That doesn't actually work.
You need lots of ships in the water to challenge the Chinese, who have 355 ships.
Now they do have what they call a grey water navy, meaning that they are really relegated to coastal areas to do serious battle, but the thing is the Taiwan Straits for them, that's basically a coastal battle.
Admiral Charles Richard, Commander of U.S.
U.S. Strategic Command said in 2022, as I assess our level of deterrence against China,
the ship is slowly sinking.
It's sinking slowly, but it is sinking as fundamentally they're putting capability
in the field faster than we are.
As those curves keep going, it isn't gonna matter how good our operating plan is
or how good our commanders are or how good our forces are.
We're not gonna have enough of them.
That is a very near-term problem.
Undersea capabilities is still the one true asymmetric advantage we have against our opponents, but unless we pick up pace in terms of getting our maintenance problems fixed, getting new construction going, if we can't figure that out, we're not going to put ourselves in a good position to maintain strategic deterrence and national defense."
So, again, when Xi is threatening Taiwan, the reason he is doing that is because if the United States and its allies can't even deter the Houthis, then how are you going to deter a massive military power like the Chinese?
And that does have serious spillover effects.
I know everybody likes to pretend that war-making and economics are completely disconnected from each other, that isolationism has no actual consequences.
That is wrong.
Not only is that wrong, it's connected to a bizarre view of how the economy works in general.
I'll get to that in just one second.
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Well, all this foreign policy isolationism and vacillation is connected to a deeper view of the American economy that I think is totally and deeply flawed.
And the reality is, freedom of the seas has allowed you to live a better lifestyle.
Freedom of the seas, the spread of democracy, the spread of liberalism, the possibility of free trade, all of these things have a real world impact on you.
Autarky in the United States is possible, but super duper expensive.
This is like basic econ 101.
You can go down to the local McDonald's, you can pick up a hamburger for a couple of bucks.
Do you know how much it would take to produce that hamburger in your backyard?
To like go and buy a cow, to then slaughter the cow, process the cow, to grow the wheat, to grow all the ingredients, to do all this stuff?
A lot of money.
Supply chains, supply lines.
Comparative advantage.
All of these things matter.
It is why efficiencies are created that allow you to go get pretty much any product you want on Amazon for an affordable price.
It's why people have been living better lives consistently over the course of time.
It's because of the rise of free trade.
It's because of the broadening of supply lines.
It's because of that comparative advantage that so many people like to rip upon.
It's because of, for lack of a better term, libertarian economics.
Now, I am not a libertarian when it comes to social policy.
Because I think libertarianism is ignorant of what it is that makes human beings tick when it comes to social policy.
Because we're not just atomized individuals, we are members of communities.
And obviously it's a really important part of being a fulfilled human being capable of living a full human life and experience.
And building institutions and raising families and all the rest.
However, when it comes to economics, there's this phrase that's been used, been tossed around a lot by people on the right of late.
They'll say, like, two cheers for capitalism.
And I always think to myself, that's a dumb phrase, as opposed to three cheers for capitalism.
Why?
Because capitalism doesn't solve all your problems.
Well, duh.
I mean, duh.
I'm always confused as to why anyone would think capitalism would solve literally all of your problems.
Only a Marxist materialist would think that economics can solve all of your problems.
Economics can't solve all your problems.
It can solve some of your economic problems, but it can't solve, you know, spiritual problems.
It can't solve the problems you're having with your wife.
Economics is not going to solve whatever family issues you have or whether your church is breaking down.
In fact, depending on the economic system, it can exacerbate some of those conflicts.
What economics can do, depending on the system, is make things better and cheaper and more plentiful and innovative.
That's what economics can do.
When people say two cheers for economics or two cheers for capitalism, I think to myself, it's like saying two cheers for a hammer.
Well, no, I mean, it depends what you're doing.
If you're hitting a nail, three cheers for the hammer.
If you're holding a baby, zero cheers for the hammer.
What exactly is it that you are attempting to do with the tool?
What is the system you're describing?
The reason this comes to mind is because I've had sort of this long-standing debate with Tucker Carlson about the nature of economics in the United States and what we should be pursuing.
So Tucker and I did this really interesting interview a couple years ago now, probably longer than that, maybe five years ago now, where we talked about the role of the government in the economy.
And Tucker has a significantly more socialistic view of the economy than I do, just blatantly.
I mean, he has endorsed, for example, many of the plans of Senator Elizabeth Warren.
This is not a slander against Tucker.
I mean, it's something that he will say openly and clearly.
Well, he was doing an interview the other day with Glenn Greenwald, who's also been a guest on my program.
And they were talking about economics.
And Tucker went into this rant about the evils of libertarian economics.
And I think this is so short-sighted.
I think it's really damaging to the future of American prosperity.
And it relies on a bunch of Falsehoods with regard to how the world works.
Now, I want to listen to this because, again, I think this has spillover effects for foreign policy.
It assumes that the best policy is going to be protectionist.
That high tariffs around America's borders are what's going to make American people wealthier and better off.
It assumes that an uninvolved America in the world's fear is somehow going to make American citizens better off.
It's all predicated on this notion of economics that ignores the importance of comparative advantage and price structure and all the rest in favor of vaguer concepts like beauty.
Now again, I'm not anti-beauty, but when I need a hamburger, I'm more interested in the hamburger than I am in, you know, the Venus de Milo.
In any case, here is Tucker, and then I want to break this down a little bit because it's interesting.
I think a lot of people have awakened to the now demonstrable fact that libertarian economics was a scam perpetrated by the beneficiaries of the economic system that they were defending.
So they created this whole intellectual framework.
Okay, pause that for a second.
So I don't like this conspiracy theorizing about the nature of libertarian economics.
Libertarian economics says the government should not control the free flow of goods and services.
That's all libertarian economics says.
A free market has property rights for you and the government can't get involved.
That is the opposite of a conspiracy theory.
A conspiracy is when a group of powerful people restructure an entire economy around particular interests.
So for example, if you were to push forward a protectionist policy, that is a policy designed to protect specific people in your country in a particular industry from competition from other people in the country and also elsewhere.
That is the goal of it.
That's an actual cadre of powerful people shaping the economic system for everyone.
A baseline rule, which is that you have freely alienatable goods and services.
You can alienate your own labor.
Someone can pay you for your labor at a given wage.
That's not a conspiracy.
Me giving you the ability.
To actually trade with other people.
I'm confused as to how that would be a conspiracy by me.
Now, it may not end to the benefit of people who are less competitive in a particular industry.
And there may be very good reasons to protect certain industries.
For example, for national security reasons.
I think that we should be cutting down on trade from China because I don't think we should be enriching our enemies.
That's a different thing from saying that economically speaking, there's this group, this secret group of libertarian economists Who for their own benefit, like Milton Friedman was sitting in the back room and he's like, I need to be rich.
And the only way I'm going to be rich is if there's free market economics.
That's just not true.
It's just not true.
There's a kind of politics that a lot of people are engaged in these days called emotivism.
It's a basic philosophy that suggests that the reason your opponents are doing the thing they are doing is because of their own emotions.
They're doing it because they're badly motivated, because they want the worst for you.
I think it's an ugly way to do politics unless you have actual evidence that that is the case.
It's a conspiracy way to do politics.
It turns out that some people have ideas that are different from you.
Sometimes it is because they're corrupt or they're being paid or whatever it is.
But in many cases, it's because they just disagree.
I don't think Tucker's saying what he's saying because he's being paid off or because he's a vested interest.
And so I kind of object to this idea that anyone who disagrees disagrees because they're trying to actively harm somebody else.
I don't think that that's the case when you are talking about, for example, free market economics.
Here's more of Tucker.
...actual framework to justify the private equity culture that's hollowed out the country.
That's my personal view and I've seen it up close my whole life, so I think it's a fair assessment.
I think a smarter way to assess an economic system is by its results.
So you can assign whatever name you want to the economic system of the United States.
You could call it market capitalism.
You could call it, I mean, you could call it a whole host of different things.
But I don't think any of that's useful.
Those are boring conversations.
I think you need to ask, does this economic system produce a lot of dollar stores?
And if it does, it's not a system that you want because it degrades people and it makes their lives worse and it increases exponentially the amount of ugliness in your society.
And anything that increases ugliness is evil.
Let's just start there.
So if it's such a good system, why do we have all these dollar stores?
Okay, that is an amazing statement.
Why exactly are dollar stores the root of all evil?
So first of all, I should point out at this point that according to Consumer Reports, 88% of Americans shop at dollar stores at least occasionally.
My family shops at the dollar store at least occasionally.
Almost a third of respondents in the 2021 Consumer Reports survey said they shop at dollar stores more than once a month.
This seems like a really elitist attitude.
It seems like dollar stores are good.
You buy things for a dollar, or at least you did until Joe Biden took office and inflated the currency.
Now it's like the $5 store.
It is good to have products at your disposal for cheaper.
This is a good thing.
Why are we frowning upon this?
It seems to me a much, much worse system is a system that produces no dollar stores.
A system that produces more expensive goods and services that force your family to pay more.
A system that, for example, relies on guilds and doesn't produce dollars or relies on government.
Are bread lines better than dollar stores?
Because there are a few choices when it comes to economics.
Dollar stores are actually not.
And then he shifts into this discussion of it increases ugliness.
Now, when he talks about ugliness, are we talking about the physical stature of dollar stores?
These are not like gorgeous, gothic edifices.
They're not beautiful to look at?
Well obviously, that's true.
Obviously it's true.
That dollar stores are not beautiful to look at.
They look like big box stores.
Also, that's one of the reasons that you can get the product for cheap at the dollar store.
Because if they look like gothic cathedrals, they'd have to upcharge you on the product in order to pay for the gothic cathedral looking place where you're buying your tomatoes.
Which would be weird.
There's this kind of break that's happening here, where from an elite perspective, they don't like that it looks bad, that there's like an ugly store at the corner of town that makes it possible for you to feed your family.
That seems really elitist to me.
It also seems to be disconnected from history.
If you go to Hungary, which is a country that a lot of people love and has a lot of history to it, and a lot of the architecture there is spectacular.
I mean, Budapest is an incredibly beautiful city.
I can tell you, because this is the way that it worked in Hungary for hundreds of years.
Nobody was running the farmer's market from the church.
They had like a hut outside.
The equivalent of the dollar store in Hungary is not a gothic cathedral.
A gothic cathedral is a gothic cathedral.
The equivalent of a dollar store in Hungary for hundreds of years was like an outdoor stall in the market that was significantly worse for produce than, for example, a dollar store.
Here's the thing about America.
America As always, this is one of the beauties of America.
It's the reason why we're a world power.
This is one of the reasons we have always been a nascent and then obviously dominant world power.
It is because in America, function frequently defeats beauty as a priority.
Because Americans are a pragmatic and practical people who are seeking to better the lives of their citizens through things like economic opportunity, which means more dollar stores, not fewer dollar stores.
Not only do you shop at them, tons of people work at them.
Go back to Alexis de Tocqueville, writing in 1831.
Again, this is nothing new.
I don't know where this idea came from, that America was always filled with gorgeous edifices.
It's not true.
The vast majority of early American history was filled with abandoned log cabins.
Here's what Alexis de Tocqueville writes in Democracy in America, quote, Thus, the European quits his cottage to go to inhabit transatlantic shores, and the American who is born on the same coast plunges in turn into the solitudes of the center of America.
This double movement of emigration never stops.
It begins deep in Europe.
It continues over the Great Ocean.
It follows across the solitudes of the New World.
Millions of men advance at once toward the same point on the horizon.
Their language, their religion, their mores differ.
Their goal is common.
They were told that fortune is to be found somewhere toward the west and they go off in haste to meet it.
Sometimes man advances so quickly the wilderness reappears behind him.
The forest is only bent underneath his feet.
As soon as he has passed, it recovers.
It is not rare when passing through the new states of the west to encounter abandoned dwellings in the middle of the woods.
Often one discovers the debris of a hut in the deepest solitude and one is astonished to come across partial clearings which attest at once to human power and human inconstancy.
In Europe, we habitually regard restiveness of mind, immoderate desire for wealth, extreme love of independence as great social dangers.
It is precisely all these things that guarantee a long and peaceful future to the American republics.
This is Alexis de Tocqueville writing in 1831, two centuries ago.
Without these restive passions, the population would be concentrated around certain places and would, as among us, soon feel needs difficult to satisfy.
What a happy country is the new world, where man's vices are almost as useful to society as his virtues.
The American republics in our day I like companies of merchants formed to exploit income in the wilderness lands of the new world and busy in a commerce that is prospering.
And then he talks about what exactly log cabins look like in America.
He says, quote, At the extreme limits of the Confederated States, on the boundaries of society and wilderness, stands a population of hardy adventurers who, in order to flee the poverty ready to afflict them under their father's roofs, have no fear of plunging into the solitudes of America and seeking a new native country there.
Scarcely arrived at a place that will serve as a refuge for him, the pioneer hastily fells some trees and raises a cabin under the leaves.
It might build a dollar store.
Nothing offers a more miserable aspect than these isolated dwellings.
The traveler who approaches them toward evening perceives from afar the flame of the hearth glittering through the walls, and at night, if the wind comes up, he hears the roof of foliage rustling in the midst of the trees of the forest.
Who could not believe that this poor cottage serves as a refuge for coarseness and ignorance?
Yet, one must not establish any relation between the pioneer and the place that serves as his refuge.
All is primitive and savage around him.
But he is, so to speak, the result of 18 centuries of work and experience.
He wears the clothing of the towns.
He speaks their language.
He knows the past, is curious about the future, argues about the present.
He's a very civilized man who, for a time, submits to living in the middle of the woods, who plunges into the wilderness of the new world with a Bible, a hatchet, and newspapers.
It is difficult to imagine how incredibly rapidly thought circulates within this wilderness.
There is scarcely a pioneer's cabin where one does not encounter some odd volumes of Shakespeare.
I recall having read the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log house.
And the sort of scorn that's being poured on people who shop at the dollar store in the name of the people is very weird to me.
I don't understand it.
It doesn't make sense.
What makes lives better for middle class and lower income Americans is freedom of the seas, trade, better products at a cheaper price.
And their lives, contrary to public opinion, are getting better.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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Okay, meanwhile, the same sort of critique that could be leveraged, that could be levied against the dollar store, because it's ugly, because it's put up in a big box, you know, steel frame building.
That same critique could have been levied at tract housing across America.
So in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, you know, the golden era, when everyone was seeking a house.
By the way, our house is now much bigger.
But these are like the golden era, according to many of the people who are now proclaiming that American economics has done us wrong.
Those tract houses are ugly.
They are not beautiful.
But the purpose of the tract house was to give a man a plot of land to live on and a house to have.
And they were built cheap.
If you've ever been in these wood frame houses from 1940, they were thrown up and they all look the same.
And here's a picture of tract housing in Cincinnati.
Does this look beautiful to you?
This picture of tract housing in Cincinnati?
This is not beautiful.
This is not ad to the beauty.
There's nothing gorgeous about these tract houses in Cincinnati.
Except for the opportunity they provide to a person to live in his own home with his family.
Maybe these people shop at the dollar store.
I don't know.
It turns out that more than 40 million housing units were built in the United States during the 30-year period following the end of World War II.
At least 30 million of those were single-family homes.
And a huge percentage of those were these tract houses.
Right again, thrown up.
Don't look like Eastern Colonials.
Aren't beautiful.
All they did is provide people with opportunity.
That is what libertarian economics actually does.
People buy these tracts of land.
They build tract houses and then they sell them.
And as for the notion that libertarian economics has sort of hollowed out America, I'm sorry, but it's not true.
It is simply not true.
There are certain industries in the United States that have gone away as the world supply chains have become more broad and diverse.
We don't make a lot of t-shirts here in the United States anymore, for example.
But has life become easier for the normal American over the course of time?
Absolutely it has.
And anybody who denies that should take a trip back to 1980 and see how their Walkman is working.
Let's talk about the cost of food, for example.
According to Marion Toopey, writing over at Human Progress, they started with the 1919 nominal prices of 42 food items, ranging from a pound of sirloin steak to a dozen oranges.
And they assessed how much time you would have to work in order to buy those things in 1919, and then forward to today.
They say, quote, we find that the unweighted average time price of our 42 food items fell by 87% between 1919 and 2019.
The total time price, i.e.
the nominal price divided by the nominal hourly wage of our basket of 42 food items fell from 27.3 hours of work in 1919 to 3.85 hours in 2019.
By the way, this is an excellent way of measuring whether life has gotten easier or harder, not in terms of wage numbers or price numbers, because those are fungible.
They're changeable due to inflation statistics and the value of the dollar and all the rest of it.
The question is, how long you had to work in order to earn a particular good?
Well, when it comes to food, you had to work 87% less today for the same basket of food for which you've had to work a century ago.
Does that mean that libertarian economics betrayed everybody?
Doesn't sound like it to me.
Sounds like far from it to me.
And again, the problem with all of this is that when you throw that out, when you throw out that entire system, you fail to recognize the counter.
Which is what happens afterward when you get rid of the freedom of the seas.
When China does grab those choke points.
When the Suez Canal is closed.
When we go isolationist.
When the United States retreats within our own borders, do you think life gets better for Americans or worse for Americans?
Like, markedly, a lot worse for Americans.
When all those dollar stores disappear because nothing costs a dollar anymore, do you think it's easier for Americans to live or harder for Americans to live?
And by the way, you're going to have a lot of time left over and money left over to build those beautiful Gothic architecture pieces?
That's the real question.
America has prospered because America is free when it comes to economics.
Free market economics doesn't solve all your problems, but it tends to do a really good job solving the economic part of your problems.
Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
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