Part Two: That Time Britain Did A Genocide in Ireland exposes how British laissez-faire policies, championed by figures like Charles Trevelyan and Robert Peel, exacerbated the 1845 Potato Famine. Despite importing £100,000 worth of corn while exports continued, officials refused aid rooted in racist Malthusian views that blamed Irish overpopulation rather than systemic failure. The episode argues this deliberate neglect, which left starving populations eating rotting tubers, constitutes a genocide driven by economic self-interest and prejudice, challenging modern justifications for poverty. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Accent Confusion and Con Artists00:06:59
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England.
That's my terrible English accent.
Boy, we are both, neither of us are very good at this.
I am now being reminded.
I'm not sure if I'm going to be Northern Ireland, calling somebody a ball bag.
How much better Gareth from the dollop is at doing an English accent?
Yes.
Gareth is an Irish name.
I think his mom is actually English, if I'm remembering the dollop episode that his mom came on.
Or at least ethnically.
I have a friend who's ethnically British.
It's a weird situation.
His parents.
You don't meet many of those.
No, but yeah, he has never been outside of the United States, was born and raised here, but his parents are both English who came here in like their late 20s.
So he doesn't know many people like that.
It's weird because he doesn't have like he grew up in Texas, so he like talks like most other Texans.
Well, except for every now and then he'll say like, he doesn't say bathroom.
He says bathroom.
Like there's, there's all there's these little bits where it's like, oh, I can tell that you like were raised by somebody who didn't speak like a Texan.
Yeah.
Also, he exclusively drove sobs most of the time that I knew him when we were younger.
Because his dad had like 30 of them taken apart on his lawn.
That's amazing.
He's got a Jeep now.
Gareth Wilkerson.
I think that's his last name.
But he's very Northern Irish.
So he would say stuff like, ball bag.
Oh, I love like.
I love it.
A ball bag.
I was like, dude, I love your slang.
I got a lot of shit, rightfully so, for my the last time I did an Irish accent on this show.
But I will say, some of my favorite moments in Ireland, and I had another version of this in England, is like you get drunk with your friends and you try each other's accents on.
And the particular thing, one of my buddies who is Irish but grew up in England for reasons that we will be talking about in this episode because that happens to a lot of people in this period.
But the thing that he couldn't get over was the differences in how we pronounced banana.
So there was like a long, drunken conversation that was just me saying banana, and then him being like, banana, because we were making fun of how the others could not get over the banana.
So it's one of the same banana.
One of the real joys of hanging out with people who speak English but are not from the United States is making fun of how you each pronounce the same words differently.
Yeah, I remember I was trying to like tell one of my like my friend who's like, you know, born and raised in London, but they're Punjabi Indian, you know, and so obviously that's quite a quite a ride accent situation.
Oh boy.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But I kept saying like, why y'all spell stuff like that?
Like, what's this you for?
Like, why y'all like, what's wrong with this?
Yeah.
And he was like, he goes just as calm in the most British way possible.
He was just like, yo, it's interesting how like you keep telling me that we're spelling things wrong, but the language is called English because it's from England.
And I was like, touche.
Touche.
Touche.
That's hilarious.
I have no comeback.
He just said in the most British, just as a matter of factly, like, well, it's called English because it's from England.
And one of the things that was always really interesting to me is where I grew up for a decent chunk of my like adolescence, the school that I went to in North Texas had a really high population of people from the Indian subcontinent because like their parents worked for Texas Instruments or for Raytheon or something.
And so they were people, most of them had been born in India, but had come over here pretty young and they had learned English from Americans.
And then I went over to India where the people that I was talking to who spoke English had learned English from British people generally.
And so, and it's really, it's interesting like how the how differently people say, especially since as an American, like most of your contact with people who speak English as a second language is people who learned it from an American.
And it really is like a different beast and there's different types of like different idioms that people pick up and stuff as a second language speaker when they get taught, you know, by one of the other.
Yeah, when he picked me up, when he picked us up from the airport, he was like, hey, I hadn't seen him.
He was like, hey, you know, look, look, look, we're, we're, we're two brothers.
We're Asian dudes.
Grain Prices and Rotting Potatoes00:15:45
I was like, all right.
I walked by them dudes three times.
Yeah.
Because I'm like, hey, man, you said you was Asian.
Well, yeah, because we, yeah, we use it differently than they do over here.
Yeah.
He was like, oh, yeah.
He goes, he goes, yeah, Americans, for some reason, don't think India is a part of Asia.
Yeah, which is weird.
Again, you look at a map and it's like, well, yeah, it's right in there.
It's just the most British, just like condescending but nice way to say, yeah, well, because India is a part of Asia.
Yeah, because it's like, you know how they share that giant land border with China?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a part of Asia.
And I was like, oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I guess, I guess, I guess you're right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I was like, whatever.
You guys are saying that wrong.
Okay.
So, yeah.
Anyway.
Let's talk about this horrible crime against humanity.
The coming of the blight, this, this potato mold, and it's airborne.
Like, this is a nasty fucker to hit you.
And now there's ways to deal with these now.
Like, I think it's a copper sulfate solution that you can spray on your tubers and stuff.
There's people have like developed ways since.
And obviously, one of the better ways to deal with it is to grow more than one kind of potato because one kind of potato may be vulnerable, but another kind won't.
And you can cross, whatever.
There's options.
But we didn't have a lot of.
They do start to figure them out.
And in fact, there's some very smart people when the blight hits who are starting to figure out that, like, oh, there's different things you could spray on these.
So it hits Ireland.
And it's obviously, it's not great, but 1846, it hasn't hit that hard yet.
There's only six counties in Ireland that lose more than a third of their crop, which is significant.
It is devastating in a lot of ways, but it's not as bad as it's going to get.
Now, what this does mean, though, and it all kind of compounds.
So one of the things about potatoes, I've been growing potatoes for a couple of years.
I'm not an expert at it, but one of the things that you do if you're growing potatoes and you're not somebody who can just go to a gardening store and pick up seed potatoes every year is when you harvest potatoes, you set aside a chunk of your harvest as seed for the next planting season and you don't eat them.
You like keep them and let them kind of chill in a cool, dry place so that you can plant them next year.
And generally, broadly, a lot of factors can affect this, but broadly speaking, per one pound of potatoes you plant, you can get between five and 10 pounds of yield, right?
It depends on a lot of factors, but that's kind of back of the envelope math.
So usually you might set aside like a third, a quarter of your harvest, something like that as seed potatoes.
Well, if people are losing a third of the harvest, and as we have established, Irish farmers do not have extra of anything.
So you lose.
And as a side note, City Boy here, checking in, first time caller, long-time listener.
What's a potato seed?
It's like a potato.
You could just like if you were to have a potato, right?
If you were to have a bag, you've had a bag of potatoes and like rotting on the bottom of the yeah, if they start rotting and get all like goopy, then that's not good.
But if they just start to, usually first what they'll do, and it kind of depends on how you store them, but they'll sprout, right?
You'll see like if you plant those under like an inch or two or so of dirt with like, you know, four or five inches underneath it, it'll grow into more potatoes.
What an incredible crop.
It's pretty cool.
Now, the one, the potatoes you do buy in the grocery store, they don't tend to, you're best off buying, generally buying seed potatoes because they're meant to actually grow.
Whereas like, there's a bunch of compliments.
But as a general rule, yeah, you plant the, if you, if your potatoes start to sprout and you throw them in the dirt, you'll get some more potatoes.
But so part of how they people survive in Ireland is, you know, you set aside this chunk of your crop for seed for the next harvest season or for the next planting season.
But when they lose a third of their crop to this plague, they have the same caloric needs they had the year before, but they have less potatoes.
And at some point, when you start to get hungry, you're going to dip into those seed potatoes, which are just as they're fine.
If they're normal potatoes, you can eat them.
But when you eat your seed potatoes, what are you going to do next year?
You have no seed potatoes.
Or at least you have, it's, yeah.
And as another problem, some of these seed potatoes get infected with the blight, and people don't realize it until they like go unseal it to go plant, and they realize that they don't have as much to plant or they don't have anything to plant.
But as a result of all this, like the first year of the so-called so-called potato famine, right?
Yeah.
The first year of it is the least devastating, right?
Because it hasn't killed as much of the crop yet.
And people have, because of these kind of seed potato stocks, they have a little bit of like a little bit of like wiggle room.
The other thing they have is the English government at this point is headed by a guy named Robert Peel.
And Peel is not the worst guy that there's going to be running the English government in this period.
There's a lot of criticisms of what he did too, but he's, he's, we'll talk about him in a second here.
Could be worse.
It is important that I reiterate here: as we talk about this famine, as we talk about what's happening to these farmers and the desperation they're entering in, Ireland has plenty of food to feed everyone living in Ireland.
The famine is not caused by a lack of things to eat that are being grown on the island.
It is caused by the failure of a crop that causes a surge in food prices, which puts avoiding starvation outside of the budget of most Irish families.
It is not that there isn't food, it's that they can't afford not to starve.
That is an important distinction.
At the time the famine started, one quarter of all Irish grain crops were being exported.
Three-fifths of the island's total agricultural output is being sold outside of Ireland.
So 60% of the food produced in Ireland does not stay there.
Yeah, yeah, so yeah.
During the years of the famine, the population of Ireland at the start is about 9 million, and Ireland is growing enough food to feed an estimated 18 million people.
So, again, when people say you shouldn't call it a potato famine, it's because there shouldn't have been a famine.
Shouldn't have been a famine.
There's plenty of food.
There's ample food.
Yeah.
There's plenty of food.
Yeah.
When, like, so I'm working on, I just did recorded two of them, uh, sort of like for hood politics, kind of like an economic version of hood politics.
I'm kind of just calling it like how much a dollar costs.
And really, just this idea of how inflation and commodities, goods, and service, like how that stuff kind of works.
Like, and what you're explaining right now to where it's like essentially like my caloric intake, which is the equivalent of like my cost of living.
Like it hasn't changed.
There's just not enough stuff anymore that is available for me to consume because all the stuff that I have, I don't really own.
I got to give it to somebody else.
So it makes for a situation to where it's like, if I can only, if I only have 30% of what I'm producing to work with, but my 30% just became 15%, I don't, I don't end up being less hungry.
Nope.
You know what I'm saying?
I just have to make less last longer, but that's impossible because it costs more than it did when I had more.
Yep.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's that's what's happening here, kind of in broad.
And most of the food that is being grown in Ireland, then, while there is this famine developing, most of the food being produced in Ireland is being shipped out of the island as soon as it's harvested.
One observer at the time noted a ship sailing into an Irish port during the famine years with a cargo of grain was sure to meet six ships sailing out with a similar cargo.
So, like, ships bringing in food aid are seeing larger amounts of food leave the island for export.
That's got to be maddening.
Yes, it is.
It is, bro.
Maddening.
This will become part of the justification for decades of insurgency and rebellion.
It really does piss some people off.
So, the obvious question you're probably asking here is: couldn't they have just stopped or reduced exports and thus kept food prices low enough that people wouldn't have starved to death?
And the answer to that question is yes, it would have been extremely easy to do that.
It'd have been fine.
It would have been very easy.
But food exports were how Irish farmers paid their rent.
So, if you stop food from being exported, you would have to stop evictions too, because otherwise, you would have people who could not pay their rent and landlords who weren't allowed to kick them off their land.
And that would be violating the rights of the landlords.
Oh, man.
So, there's nothing new.
There's nothing new, bro.
Since the English government's not willing to do that, they decide the next best option is to bring more food into the country, which is producing enough food, but bring in worse food, cheaper and lower quality food, and put enough of it onto the market.
Again, they're not trying to, they don't, when they're importing food aid, it's not that they need to bring in enough food to feed people, it's that they need to bring in enough food to reduce the price of food that people can afford it, you know, and that aid organizations and stuff can afford it and whatnot.
Like, a lot of the way people get aid food is like the Catholic organizations will like buy up a bunch and then distribute it and stuff.
And, like, one of the things we're not really going to get into it a lot, but like the Catholic clergy in Ireland, and there's a lot of criticisms to make of the church in Rome, but in Ireland, the Catholic Church clergy is supported by the people who live there.
And they do, the Catholic clergy in Ireland do a tremendous amount of aid work to try to deal with this.
Whereas the Protestant clergy who are paid for by like Irish taxes, essentially, right?
The Irish are supposed to are paying for the Protestant faith to an extent, are not doing that.
Not to say that none of them do, because there are, in fact, Protestant ministers who do quite a bit, but like in broad, this is one of the things that's seen as happening.
It contributes to like a lot of the anger and hatred that's building in this period between Catholic and Protestant, right?
So the Peel government decides, all right, we can't forgive rent and stop exports.
So let's just bring in shitty food, right?
Kind of, that's the idea.
It just seems like, like, okay, if this you're, you're purposefully choosing the hardest way to do this.
Yep.
Like, just not even efficient, guys.
Like, it's the hardest way for the people who have to live on the island.
It is the easiest way for British politicians who then do not have to fight a politically powerful class of landlords as much.
As much.
As much.
So the thing that the food that they specifically, the Peel government brings in is what they call Indian corn.
And this is corn grown in the United States.
Obviously, the Irish are growing corn too.
The Indian corn they're importing is a coarser, is a coarser and harsher grade of corn than the Irish are used to.
It has to be milled in order to make it edible.
You have to mill it in ways that they had not been, they didn't need to mill the corn that was grown on the island that they couldn't easily do with the existing equipment.
A lot of workarounds have to be found in order to make this corn they're importing edible for Irish people.
They have to soak it for like days to make it soft enough.
Like one of the problems is that when people start really starving, they won't soak this stuff enough and it'll tear up their stomach.
Some people die because like their bodies can't handle how coarse and harsh this corn is while they're starving, right?
But still, importing this Indian corn, when the Peel government does this and they sell it cheap, they don't give it away, but they sell it very cheap in fairly small quantities.
This does enough to lower prices that a lot, it stops mass death in the first like year or so of a famine.
This is broadly speaking, Tim Pat Coogan, and there's some historians that disagree with him.
There are people who are a lot more critical of Peel.
Coogan's attitude is that by doing this, Peel stops a lot of people from dying right away.
That this is a broadly effective aid strategy.
And I, yeah, we'll talk a little bit more about that later.
But yeah, this starts, this is not popular within English politics.
And in fact, it kicks off what is maybe at the time the most vicious political fight in like modern English parliamentary history.
It was perfectly legal for government for the government to buy corn and sell it in Ireland, but selling it cheaply enough that the Irish could afford to consume it could be seen as a violation of what are called the corn laws.
Now, these are first put in place in 1815.
They're a set of tariffs meant to protect English farmers from being ruined by cheap foreign grain.
And the effect of these laws, it's not just about corn.
It's about the price of corn, barley, wheat, and other grains.
But the purpose is to, so it ensures that grain only gets more expensive in Ireland in order to protect English farmers from being ruined by imports of cheap Irish grain, right?
Or cheap foreign grain, right?
Like that's the purpose of these corn laws.
They are, they keep food very expensive in Ireland, but they ensure profits for the English are kept at a certain level.
To me, this again, this goes back to being like, you choosing the most complicated way to solve this problem.
Because I'm like, you just, oh, now I can't get, okay, so we got to, okay, so you won't let me, you won't let them eat what they grow.
So I'm going to have to take what they grow and then give them worse versions that they're going to have to do all this other stuff to eat, but then you mad that I'm lowering the price because you can't sell yours.
Like, this is so, listen.
Uh, when my daughter was younger, she did not want her door to be shut to her bedroom.
But she also didn't want our door to be shut to our bedroom, but she didn't like the light coming out of our bedroom, nor did she like the temperature from the living room changing.
So her solution was everyone, like the temperature in her room wasn't happy.
She wasn't happy with the temperature in the room.
So her solution was everyone else shut their door and I can leave mine open where I'm like, here's a simple solution, baby.
Shut your door and all the problems are solved.
You don't have to see our light.
You don't have to experience the temperature in the living room.
You don't have to hear the sounds coming from outside.
Just shut your door.
And her solution was, well, how about everybody else shut their doors?
And I'm like, well, baby, we're not going to all, we're not going to do that just because you won't shut your.
Just shut your door.
It'll be fine.
So to me, I'm like, this is what I'm picturing.
I'm just like, fam, lower your rent.
Just lower your rent and the problem is solved.
We'll talk about, we're about to talk about why they don't do that.
But it is worth noting that like one of the reasons why they opt for this coarser kind of seen as like worst grade of corn is that maize is not being, which is the kind of corn that like they're bringing because there's types of corn, but like the kind of corn that they call Indian corn is not being sold by English farmers.
And so it's not, it doesn't fall under these corn laws.
Lowering Rent and Outsiders00:04:46
That's why Peel is a, yeah, that's why Peel's able to get away with it.
But again, he also wants to, Peel wants to get rid of these corn laws in order to make it easier to bring food aid into Ireland, which drives people insane.
There is vicious resistance to him.
To understand the resistance to this plan, we have to talk about laissez-faire capitalism.
You do because you talk about people that are mad that you can't sell at a certain price, but hey, numb nuts, you're selling to your, no one can afford your price point.
Well, so I don't understand what the hell, why what are you talking about?
Anyway, we're about to get into that.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
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What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired.
City hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
This is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey Hood.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber adopts a shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
Malthusian Economics and Murder00:15:28
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listening to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
So the most foundational mind of this school of thought is an economist named Adam Smith.
And Smith believed that, in short, that healthy economies are made up of individuals who are working for their own self-interest and that this benefits society by creating competition in the free market, right?
We're all broadly familiar with these ideas.
Smith, Keynesian, yeah, this is what we all live on.
Smith's most influential work, The Wealth of Nations, is published in 1776.
His work is very influential to the people generally referred to as the founding fathers of the United States, and he was very much beloved by English politicians.
In 1821, a group of them formed the Political Economy Club to discuss his ideas and to try to come to more conclusions about the principles of political economy, right?
People are in this period starting to think about economics in kind of a more scientific sense.
And the Political Economy Club, it's actually today is the oldest economics association in the world.
So this is one of the first places where people are really trying to like put together organized theories of how economic life and policy works.
In 1845, when all this starts to happen, this is where some of the most influential parliamentarians and government officials in the British Empire would go to like shoot the shit out of what should be done in terms of economic policy.
And these guys are all in very strong agreement that England should not intervene directly in the famine in a way that would allow people to get Irish people to get food without paying, right?
You cannot fuck with the free market.
That's their attitude.
You cannot do anything that you do that interferes with the free market.
It would be worse than just letting people starve to death.
That is the conclusion, broadly speaking, that these folks all come to.
As club member Jeremy Bentham wrote, quote, laissez-faire in short, should be the general practice.
Every departure, unless required by some great good, is a certain evil.
Now, you might take from that that, like, well, stopping a lot of people from starving is a great good, but he does not feel that way.
And that's what we're about to get into.
Tim Pat Coogan writes, a central figure in the debate was a classical economist, Nassau Williams Sr., the first professor of political economy at Oxford University, preached, among other things, that it was not the duty of the state to alleviate poverty that came through the fault of the individual.
English poor law owed a great deal to his theories, and during the famine, Whig apologists would see to it that the idea of Irish culpability for Irish poverty would become widespread among the British public.
Lazybeds was used as a term of derision to indicate that the Irish even brought their laziness to bear on their potato cultivation.
Nassau Sr. criticized Irish landlords for neglecting the duty for the performance of which Providence created them, the keeping down population.
So Nassau's like, this, number one, we can't do anything.
We shouldn't do anything here.
But also, this is only a problem because these landlords did not do enough to make it impossible for Irish people to breed.
Yes.
Yeah.
So listen, like, I am like, when we started the first episode of this, I was like, I'm ready to be triggered.
And now I'm at the trigger because we're still to this day trying to explain to people how dumb they sound when they say this.
Because I like I say all the time in my credentialing program as becoming a California high school teacher, the third part was you have to take, you have to pass this test on economics to be able to teach high school.
And I failed it three times.
One, three times because I understood the principles, but I didn't understand the vocabulary.
Like I just didn't know the words, you know what I'm saying?
Which was again some of the genesis of hood politics to where it's like, I know what I'm talking about.
I just don't know how to talk about what I'm talking about.
But some of it was because your theory is absurd to me.
And I'm like, the idea that, because, because look, in what you just read, the founding principle is the government shouldn't solve a problem created by the individual.
But the individual didn't create the problem.
The government did.
And that's why I'm like, I don't understand your principle.
You made the problem.
So how are you?
Your free market ain't all is already not free in the first place.
You created like, so I'm just like, I don't understand how this is a print.
How is this a 400, 300 year old principle when the foundation axiom of it don't exist?
So I've always like, I don't, that's so I think whenever I had to like answer questions about this in school, I would be like, but it don't make no, what you're saying don't make sense.
You know, like, I just, but you don't.
Here's the thing, though.
Like, yes, we can say, obviously, the problems that people are saying are the fault of the Irish people are like problems as the result of the policies this state has enacted and this imperial government has enacted.
And it's not their fault that they are suffering.
That is not the attitude of these intellectuals who are, this is way prior to the development of like prosperity gospel and that kind of stuff.
So the same ideas feed into it.
This idea is like the same.
If you have money, if you're doing well, it's because God wants you to be.
And if you're impoverished and you're suffering, it's because you have done something immoral that has caused God to and which is like even with the prosperity shit.
It's like, I mean, the oldest manuscript in the Bible is Job.
And Job is shooting down that.
The whole point of that book is to shoot down that idea.
I mean, I can't think of anything that matters less in terms of public religion than what's actually in the Bible.
It seems as though that matter.
Are y'all reading what I'm reading?
Because it seemed like this book is basically saying the principle you just said is wrong.
It seems like Jesus of Nazareth probably would not have been a big laissez-faire economics student.
I don't think he would.
I just like to be back into the past, but I'm saying it just, it just, and it's like this, you feel like, I mean, I always felt like even in discussing this stuff, it's the same, like you made the comparison to like the plight of black and brown people and indigenous people in the, in, in America, saying that like, well, y'all lazy.
Y'all can't get this stuff together.
You have the same opportunities we are.
And it's like, are y'all serious?
Do y'all remember the laws y'all made?
Like, what do you, like, you understand you, you understand you made those laws.
So how are you saying, like, I don't know what it is.
God made the economic principle, you know?
And if I, if I know one thing about Jesus of Nazareth, it's that he would never have given free food to people.
Apparently, that's not a thing he did repeatedly in the Bible.
That's not a statement part of the Bible.
The Gospels.
That didn't happen.
Jesus set up a fish stand where he sold fish and chips for a tidy property.
He made sure that everybody there was legal citizens.
And then he reinvested the profits into purchasing apartment houses, which he used in order to fund the startup of a blood testing company.
I don't know why I took this to the Theranos direction.
Theranos, that's an amazing spin.
Anyway, it's fun.
So Nassau Sr., this guy who is this major proponent of laissez-faire economics in this economics club, was in agreement.
Like one of the other dudes who was prominent in this club is a fellow you've probably heard of named Thomas Malthus.
We should probably talk about Malthus someday.
He deserves an episode of his own, but Malthus is the first intellectual who really expounds upon the idea that overpopulation causes famine, right?
Thus, if a famine occurs anywhere, it is because of overpopulation.
And if you take steps to alleviate that famine, all you will be doing is ensuring that overpopulation gets worse.
And so you should not take steps.
You should let the famine run its course, right?
Otherwise, you're just going to make the problem worse.
Now, as we have established, the famine, this is not the result of overpopulation, right?
At all.
Because again, as the Irish population does triple over the course of about a century, but economic, the amount of food they are producing also increases pretty massively, right?
They are growing plenty of food.
But Malthus' idea is that it is the responsibility, the moral responsibility of the working class to not breed too quickly.
And if they breed too quickly, it's nobody's job to take care of them, right?
Malthus famously said this when discussing the plight of poor men.
Quote, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents, on whom he has a just demand, has no claim of right, he has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food.
And in fact, has no business to be where he is.
And what Malthus is saying here is that like the only people who owe you anything are your parents, right?
And you can ask them for food and they got to give it to you, but you have no right to exist inherently.
And you certainly have no right to food.
Yeah.
Now, now, now go hand me them cucumbers you just grew for me.
Not that, yeah, exactly.
And this is part of what makes it so messed up.
Like, it would be messed up if he was just saying this to like starving refugees, but he is saying this to the people growing the food.
As he's munching, as he's munching it, eating the shit.
I'm trying to tell you, bro.
You shouldn't have had all them kids.
Ooh, ooh, ooh, let me get that tomato.
Oh, that looks good.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The tomato you just grew for me.
But that's my land, though.
So like, I mean.
And Malthus, there's this other, because he's also very specifically anti-Irish.
He argues that because of how close Ireland and England are, England is always at threat of poor Irish people like flooding into England and draining the economy by driving down wages and fucking up trade, right?
Just history, so many historical experts are just sociopaths, right?
Yeah.
Like you've got a million people saying the same thing today about different groups of people, but it's always the same attitude.
Welfare about artists.
Yeah.
It's the same argument.
And Malthus maintained, quote, the land in Ireland is infinitely more peopled than in England.
And to give full effect to the natural resources of the country, a great part of the population should be swept from the soil.
So you see, these people, it's not just that they've built a system that is leading to famine.
There's a conscious understanding that they want to depopulate Ireland through policy.
Another big advocate of this is a fellow named Edmund Burke.
And Edmund Burke is an Irish man.
Now, he's a wealthy Irish person, but he's also against government intervention in this growing famine.
And his basic attitude is that, like, you shouldn't intervene, have the government intervene when there's a problem.
Quote, it is not by breaking the laws of commerce, which are the laws of nature and consequently the laws of God, that we are to place our hope of softening the divine displeasure to remove any calamity under which we suffer.
So, Burke's attitude is, if there's a famine, if there's any kind of problem that a population is suffering under our economy, that is the will of God.
And if the government steps in to help people, that is a violation of like you are, you are sinning against God.
You're sinning against the God of the universe.
I just don't understand what God wanted them to eat, they'd be eaten.
You know, I just don't, yeah, I'm just like, what, what page is, what page y'all on?
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah, where'd you find that one?
Where are you at?
What page we at?
I know.
I thought we was on.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know.
What chapter is this?
So Edmund Burke, by the way, is the dude commonly credited with the quote.
You'll see this on like every Holocaust movie or something that came out in like the 90s.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for goodmen to do nothing.
Now, he never said that.
It was probably from Jon Stuart Mill, although he never said exactly those words.
It's one of those, you know how like 90% of the things that Thomas Jefferson gets quoted for saying were never said by Thomas Jefferson.
Whatever.
It's one of those.
It's one of those quotes.
But anyway, he kind of sucked.
Not a cool dude, in my opinion, Edmund Burke.
Another guy who sucked and loved himself some laissez-faire economics was Charles Trevelyan.
Now, this is probably the single most famous name associated with the Great Hunger in Ireland.
There is a song called The Fields of Athenry that is today, for whatever reason, it's become like popular with a couple of different football teams, but it's a song about the Great Hunger.
It's a song about like a dude who tries to steal food, basically, that's owned by the government in order to feed his starving family.
And he gets forced into transportation.
He gets shipped away to Australia.
It's a very sad song, but it mentions Trevelyan specifically.
And he is kind of, he is the face of the English causes of the famine in Ireland in a lot of ways.
Now, this is not entirely fair, not because Trevelyan deserves less shit than he gets, but because a lot more people had to come together to make this.
But like, he's absolutely a monster here.
Don't get me wrong.
So again, he's a central enough figure that I think we should peel back a little bit.
And I'm going to give you an overview of his life before we continue.
So Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan, first baronet, was born on April 2nd, 1807 in Taunton, England, which is probably pronounced something like Terry or whatever, but like, fuck it.
His father was a clergyman, and his family had ancient noble origins in Cornwall.
His mother was also from a fancy family.
They were very, very rich.
They did not get this because his dad was in the clergy.
Their family money comes from slave dealing in Grenada.
There it is.
Yeah, good stuff.
Good stuff, Chucky T. There it is.
So he was educated locally before his family used some of them slave dollars to send his ass to Charterhouse School in central London.
He did well enough there that he gets admission to Haleybury, which is the East India Company's training college.
So the British East India Company has like a college, which I think Amazon.com is like four months away from doing that.
Yeah.
And while Trevelyan is at Haleybury learning how to work for the East India Company, one of his teachers is Thomas Malthus.
So he graduates, or I don't know if he's graduated, but he leaves Haleybury at 18 and he gets sent to India to study at another company college where he learns.
And this is one of those things that's interesting about him.
As British administrators in India go, he's actually like pretty plugged into the culture.
He learns several, he's fluent in several dialects of Hindi, which is impressive, not an easy thing to do.
And he's given a post in Delhi in 1827.
Racism Against Indians and Irish00:02:07
I found a write-up on him for the Irish news agency RTE, which notes, Trevelyan had a very successful career in India, including famously denouncing one of his superiors for bribery, a case which was upheld and led to the subsequent dismissal of Sir Edward Colebrook in 1829.
This event established his credentials as a fearless and opinionated public servant who was not afraid to challenge his masters.
He was later appointed to the political department of the government of India, working closely with the reformist Lord Bentwick, the governor general of India, who later said of him, that man is almost always on the right side in every question.
And it is well that he is so, for he gives a most confounded deal of trouble when he happens to take the wrong one.
So he is a principled man.
He is very anti-corruption, but he is also kind of incapable of seeing himself as being wrong.
Yeah, I was like, what a, what an interesting quote about a person.
You want him to be more of like a goblin than he is in his earlier life, but he's not.
He's actually probably more understanding of Indian people and like injustices being done to them than he is to what's going to happen to the Irish, which is not a unique story, weirdly enough.
It happens sometimes.
It's bizarre.
I just, yeah, it's like, it's, it's so, yeah.
It's like, there's racism in both cases, right?
There's British.
Of course.
They're racist against Indians, but they're different kinds of racism.
And there's kind of more of a like, the Indians are like our kind of like our children.
And like we have to take care of them.
And they're like our beloved little like kids, basically.
Yeah, a white man's burden type thing.
Whereas the Irish are these like violent, quarrelsome like monsters, kind of.
At least not entirely accurate.
Y'all should know better.
There's different kinds of racism at work too, right?
And so a guy like Trevelyan is probably a lot more understanding of problems that Indian people are encountering, right?
That's why he's so anti-corruption within the company than he will be about what's happening in Ireland.
But you know who's not racist?
No, I don't actually know who at all who's not racist.
I'm assuming you two.
White Man's Burden and Monsters00:04:53
I think that's a good safe bet.
I would say, really, if you want to be safe, the products and services that support this podcast, because as products, they have no minds of their own and are thus incapable of the intentionality necessary for racism, you know?
They do not have the institutional power to act any forces upon based upon their prejudices.
It's fair to say that a mattress cannot be racist.
But the Washington State Patrol.
Now, that said, if it is a Washington State Highway Patrol, the authority to enact on their discrimination thoughts.
But if it's a mattress, you can feel confident knowing that that mattress will never commit a hate crime.
Probably safe.
Maybe.
I'm not going to say the same about there's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed.
I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
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I'm Ago Moda.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, And dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
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Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancine.
My mind was blown.
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As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
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10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's docks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Parliamentary Relief Measures00:15:56
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged you a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listening to Rorschach.
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Oh, we're back.
So, Trevalion.
Yeah, the perfect example of like how two things, two opposing things can be true about a person.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, which I'm finding so much more, the more that I understand, like grow up and just become a more mature adult.
Just like this idea of like you can, in one part of your life, be understanding, welcoming, you know what I mean?
And kind, and at the same time, a vicious monster.
And it's like, it's not that you're protecting, hiding one side of you.
It's just you're both.
And it's like, like you say, like this, the type of like racism that shows up in a person like that, which is difficult when you want to do, when you want to make history be like comic books where you're bad guys.
One of the best examples of this is if you look at like, if you, you can find quotes from some of the Americans.
And I'm assuming the same thing exists in some of the Russian sources, the people who liberated concentration camps and were also pretty anti-Semitic, at least prior to that point.
And like there was like a period like Patton wrote something like weird, because he was like, had some real regressive attitudes towards Jewish people.
Yeah.
But it also, people could be capable of being racist and also look at Auschwitz and go, what the fuck?
But that's right.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Because human beings contain multitudes.
Anyway, yes.
So Charles Trevelyan, broadly speaking, one of the better employees of the British East India Company, probably from the perspective of a lot of people who are indigenous Indians.
Again, we're summing up a lot of history here, but broadly speaking, not corrupt or anything like that, certainly.
So he marries this broad Hannah Macaulay, who is the daughter of one of the men who had helped to abolish slavery in the British Empire, which is like if your family money comes from slave money, that's a nice way of morally divvying up your inheritance, right?
You know, marry somebody who helped in slavery.
That's good.
And the two seem to love living on the subcontinent.
So you get the feeling they probably would have been happy staying there for the rest of their careers.
But in 1838, they go back to have a vacation in England.
And like when you do that working for the company, it's like you're gone for a couple of years, right?
Because it's not easy to get to England in the 1840s.
You don't like pop back for a holiday.
So they go back in 1838.
And actually in 1840, rather than go back to India, he gets a job as the assistant secretary to the treasury.
So again, 1840, not long before the potato blight's kind of hit.
So he does a bunch of stuff while he's in that job in those first kind of like five years.
He reduces corruption.
One of the things he does is he creates some reforms.
Government civil service jobs before Trevelyan are heavily based on like who knows who and who your family is and who your friends are.
And he's a big part of actually changing that so that there's legitimate competition for civil service jobs, which is probably good.
Again, the civil service in this case is administering the British Empire.
So you could argue he's just making this horrible engine of blood work a bit better, which is fair to say too.
But the thing obviously that he's going to go down in history for doing is the fact that because he's the assistant treasury secretary or whatever, he is effectively the management, the guy in charge of the government's purse strokes for any kind of relief efforts in Ireland.
He's going to be the dude in charge of that.
He's going to basically be the point man for Irish relief.
Even though there is like, there's a relief agency and he's not heading that, but he's like, you know, he's the money man, essentially.
His primary concerns then, when it came when the potato crops start to fail and people start to go hungry, his primary concern when he's looking at aid is to limit British financial exposure in funding relief for starving people.
He also wants to, the fact that he's anti-corruption, he's really obsessed with the fact that people might get aid that they don't deserve, that like government funds might go to people who are like conning the government out of it, which is like not a non-issue, right?
Like a lot of COVID money like got conned out of people.
Like, yeah, if, yeah, yeah, you should care about that, but him carrying it is part of what leads him to adopt this really laissez-faire economic policy towards famine relief.
Cheats.
Because the safest way to make sure nobody scams aid money is for there to not be aid money.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's the same, Robert.
It's all the same.
That's the, yeah.
Yeah, and like, we're not going to get into this a lot, but like one of the characteristics of this period is like they pass work schemes because you can't just give people money to take care of themselves.
They have to work for it.
And so they have, but for a variety of complex reasons, having people do things that would actually have improved life or infrastructure in Ireland is not popular.
So a lot of the aid schemes take the form of paying people to build roads to nowhere.
What is the most illogical shit gets done?
Let's do that.
Yeah.
Let's build a road we don't need.
A road no one needs in the middle of nowhere.
A bunch of dumb shit happens like that.
So because of men like these, like all of these guys we've gone over, Peel, again, this prime minister who does the Indian corn deal, he has to be really careful with all this stuff.
So again, he's able to avoid running afoul of the corn laws with this initial, he imports 100,000 pounds sterling worth of corn, and he's able to avoid running afoul of the corn laws.
And it's worth noting in terms of how easy it would have been to stop massive starvation and death.
The loss of the potato crop in 1845 is estimated at 3.5 million pounds.
100,000 pounds worth of imported corn is able to stop mass famine that year.
It does not take a lot.
Like, it does not take a ton.
But Peel's actions cause outrage among his fellow conservatives.
He attempts to repeal the corn laws because, again, he's like, this isn't going to stop after a year.
We have to like take some more proactive steps.
And the resistance to this is so titanic that he retires in December of 1845.
He's like, I can't get anywhere with this.
Like, this is nuts.
The Duke of Wellington, who's the guy who beats Napoleon and is his friend, says, I have never witnessed such agony as what he sees Peel go through trying to get these corn laws repealed.
He is sort of successful.
They do kind of repeal these laws, but it's debatable as to how much it helps because a bunch of other shit gets done that like kind of minimizes whatever.
You know, it doesn't work as well as it should have worked.
So when Peel quits, he's like, fuck this shit.
I'm out.
Queen Victoria brings in a member of the opposition, Lord John Russell, and she asks him to form an administration.
And I'm not going to, English parliamentary politics are always very frustrating.
It doesn't work.
And Peel gets brought in for six months or so before Russell finally does succeed in forming a government for most of the famine that follows.
Russell's government is the one that's in charge.
And so guys like Coogan will generally say that like Peel did all right at famine relief, but Russell is where things really got nasty.
Now, other analogies I've found will point out that like a lot of the economic policies that were that were used with such disaster in responding to the famine were things that Peel had helped to set up prior to the famine and that he actually deserves a lot of blame for why it's just that once it started, he was more reasonable, but he did lay a lot of the groundwork for why it got so bad.
So I don't want to be like pretending he was just purely a positive figure.
And it's not to flush the past, you know, but I'm like, this was a solvable problem.
Yeah.
Like every time I hear stuff, I'm like, it really was.
It was not beyond their means.
This would not have been a blip in history.
Like it's just an easy problem.
You hear about stuff like the bubonic plague, right?
Which kills just this nightmarish chunk of the population.
And it's like, yeah, looking back in history, we can say, well, if this had been added on, it wouldn't have been as bad.
But based on their knowledge at the time and the level of resources, it's like, I can't, I'm not like, you can't really be like, well, someone engineered this to be so bad.
Like, no, it was just like a thing.
It was a, it was a thing that hit that they were not, they, they were not ever going to deal with well, you know, because it just was not possible.
It's just a plagues happen, you know?
Um, and there have been in the past, but again, part of why a lot of Irish people get really angry at calling it the potato famine is that like there have been real famines in the past where there's just no food, you know?
Yeah.
This is not that.
There was plenty of food being made, you know?
So, yeah.
Um, so he during this kind of interregnum period almost where Peel quits, but then he's back because Russell can't form a government during this like period of time.
Um, how to deal with the famine becomes the chief question asks of English leaders because from like 1845 to 1846, the plague, the blight only gets worse.
And it becomes clear that like we have to figure out a longer-term solution to this.
Like we're, we're, this is not going to get better anytime soon.
Um, so Trevelyan travels to Ireland himself during this period to like see what's going on.
Um, and he kind of, you know, he does this thing that you see shitty journalists do where he like goes to the place where the bad thing is happening and then he only hangs around rich people and just kind of writes down whatever they say about what's happening to poor people in Ireland.
And he's very pleased that when he goes to Ireland, he does not encounter anything that makes him feel differently about the plague or about the famine.
So his conclusion is that we shouldn't do anything, right?
That there's there's there's this is like the Irish people's fault and you've just got to kind of let this run its course.
Yeah.
And while this is happening, that guy O'Connell we talked about, right?
O'Connell's still in parliament.
He is old and kind of sick at this point.
He's passed his prime.
He's not capable of like really working to the same extent that he had, but he is desperately trying to get parliament to do something, right?
It is not the case that everyone in parliament is just like asleep at the wheel.
And he's part of like a coalition in parliament who's like, we've got to do something.
And Trevelyan writes this basically open letter type thing where he's like, O'Connell is a demagogue who's trying to stir up trouble and it's going to be fine.
Just we don't got to deal with this shit.
Near the end of 1845, O'Connell gets together a group of nobles and parliamentarians to suggest that the government adopt emergency measures.
These included stopping the export of food and allowing food to be imported to Ireland free of taxes, right?
Pretty reasonable seeming solution.
O'Connell also wants a tax on landlords to fund a public works program that will give people jobs so they can afford food, right?
He's like, okay, you don't want people getting shit for free.
What if we tax landlords to fund a public works program and then they can buy food and pay their rent?
This pisses off an awful lot of people.
So the guy they have to go to for whatever reason of parliamentary shit, there's a dude they have to bring this proposal to to try to get him to introduce it in parliament.
Lord Hatesbury.
He's a motherfucker named Lord Hatesbury.
Okay.
I was going to say like...
Yeah, it's I-E-Y-T-E, but like Hatesbury, I'm assuming.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hey, this is Lord Racism.
Lord racism is done.
You've got this moment, prop, where this guy O'Connell, you know, this kind of near the end of his life when he's sort of fading in his powers as a politician, but he's still got like all of this.
He's kind of the, he's the only, he's really like the only Catholic Irish person with any kind of power, right?
Okay.
And he gets together this group of nobles and parliamentarians to try to push this raft of emergency measures, including like stopping the export of food, allowing food to be imported to Ireland free of taxes, like really basic shit, right?
He's, if you wanted to kind of put this in modern terms, he's not like a far-left revolutionary.
He's like one of those like progressive kinds of Democrat type dudes where he's like, he doesn't want to end, he's not trying to end the system of landlord.
I mean, an O'Connell is personally more radical than that, but these moves are not super radical.
Like, he's not saying we should upend the landlording system and give everyone the land that they live on and like change this.
He's saying, like, what if we did these very basic things to stop them from starving to death, right?
Like, these are not radical changes.
He's a bare minimum progressive.
There needs to be a term called that.
Bare minimum.
And I think honestly, O'Connell is more of one.
Okay.
But, but he's also very pragmatic, right?
And he's old too.
He has tried the more radical shit.
He did try to separate Ireland from England.
Yeah.
That shit failed.
So now he's just like, can we tax the landlords to fund a public works program so people can afford to buy food, right?
Yeah.
Like, you know, which is fair enough.
Like, what, like, it's not like anything did work in this period at all.
You're a tax of the rich.
Yeah, I'm not going to blame the guy for trying a more moderate.
There's a fun moment with this dude, O'Connell.
Fun may not be the right word, but if I'm remembering correctly, this is just something I read.
It's not in the script, but like there's a moment when he's talking about trying to end the act of union and separate Ireland and the UK.
And some like poor peasant farmer sees him and like calls him the liberator.
And he's like, is this what you do for a living?
And the guy's like, yeah.
And he's like, then why do you care?
Like, your life's not going to change at all if we get there's still going to be rich people lording over you and stuff.
Oh my God.
So I think he is personally like, he's pretty aware of things, but he's also very much a, let's see what we can do within the confines of this system kind of dude.
So for whatever reason, British parliamentary shit, neither of us are experts on that.
And it's not really important.
The guy who has to make the suggestions in parliament or whatever to try and get this series of emergency measures together is a dude named Lord Hatesbury.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I know that, yeah, H-E-Y-T-E-S, but it is, it is funny because he's pretty hateful.
My lord.
So he, yeah, they send this like very modest list of requests to him.
And he's like, absolutely the fuck not.
Yes.
Yeah.
Of course.
And his justification is, and this will sound familiar to anyone who's lived through a plague in the last couple of years.
I don't know who that applies to, but I'm sure a couple of people.
He's like, look, yeah, some of the information about this famine sounds really bad.
But some people, like Trevelyan, are saying it's fine.
So we can't know whether or not it's a problem and we shouldn't do anything until we get more information.
Listen, listen, I can see out my window because Ireland is a mile and a half away.
Yeah, it is 30 feet to the left.
Yes.
But this fool's saying it's not that.
So there's no way of knowing.
It's not like any of us could just go to Ireland.
Yeah, we couldn't.
I mean, well, no, Trevelyan went to Ireland.
He says it's all right.
Oh, but yeah.
Oh, the homie went.
He said it was cool.
Yeah.
Oh, my lord.
It's very, it's not funny, but it's cool.
Yeah, we can't know.
We got to hold up.
We got to hold up.
Let's wait for some more info.
Fool is Ron Bergen.
So in 18.
Well, the direct translation has been lost in time.
No, it means St. Diego.
Yeah.
Potato Blight and Economic Principles00:07:02
So 1846, you know, you have 1845, you lose like a third of the crop thereabouts, and then people have to eat a lot of their seed potatoes and stuff.
And so 1846, they plant what little they have, but the potato bug moves in again, right?
Or it's not really a bug, it's a fungus.
But like it hits again, and it hits really hard this time.
And that year, the harvest fails pretty much entirely.
Basically, a lot of people get nothing, right?
A lot of folks get absolutely meaningfully nothing.
And a lot of, because they're starving.
So, one of the fucked up things about this, if you've ever seen like potatoes that have gotten affected by this, they often you could like pull them out of the ground and they'll look fine.
Like they'll look like a normal potato.
And then you like grab them and they'll just like mush apart in your hands.
And it's this reeking, filthy, rotting goop soup of potato stuff.
It's nasty.
And it's no nutritional value in this.
But people are so desperate that they eat them.
Oh, that they're, and of course, that gets people sick when some people die as a result of that and stuff.
But like, that's the level of desperation they are.
Where like there's this rotting mass of potato and you're like, fuck it, let's try.
Or maybe we can try and cut a piece off and maybe that'll be a little bit, you know.
People are very desperate.
And of course, this is so bad that like last year, people have to eat their seed potatoes, right?
In order to like make ends meet and get something in their bellies.
This year, so little gets harvested at all that there's just not seed potatoes for a lot of people, right?
So there's not only did the crop fail, but people are like, what the fuck are we going to plant next year?
You know, even so, even as desperate as the situation is, the government holds against the idea of stopping the export of food, right?
And their justification is that the Irish grain, so the grain that these people who are starving grew, is more expensive than they can afford.
They can't afford to pay for the grain that they grew.
They just grew.
That they grew.
They can't afford that.
So if it's kept in the country, the government's going to have to subsidize its purchase in order for people, Irish people, to afford the grain that, again, they grew.
That we like pretzel.
Like this, just the oh my gosh.
And this is again, this is why Irish people get so pissed when it is referred to as a potato famine.
Yes.
Because there's no fucking famine, really.
Like there's a famine and like, yes, people are starving to death, but like there shouldn't have been.
Like it wasn't that all of the food failed, you know?
Dog.
Yeah.
It just.
Yeah.
How are you?
Yeah, man.
Just the getting the I, getting the words out of your brain with a straight face to be like, well, I mean, they can't afford, they can't afford it.
So we can't get what they're like, yeah, what are we, what are we going to do?
What are we going to do, dog?
They can't afford it.
And it's like, can't afford what?
What they just gave us.
What are we going to do?
Pay people to stay home so the plague doesn't spread?
Absolutely not.
It's not.
It doesn't, you know.
Elite logic is similar in all times.
It's just the same.
And again, I'm like, you're this is the longest, most horrible route to a very simple solution.
It's just over why you can't just be like, hey, look, tell you what.
Next month, just keep, just, just keep the grain.
Okay.
Just keep the grain.
And we'll build back next month.
Okay.
Just keep the grain this month.
We'll be cool.
Well, that's the thing.
Like O'Connell's suggesting, there's a way to deal with this that keeps the elites in power, if that's your concern, where you're like, hey, you know what?
Government's going to pay your rent till this thing's over.
Yeah.
We got you.
That way your landlords are still in charge.
We're not fucking up this system that you have to stay rich for nobody.
You'll be good.
But that would be too much.
And that's so stupid because I'm just like, what the hell you care whose name on the check?
Don't you just want your check?
One of the people who really cares is Charles Trevelyan.
And he is firm that you cannot subsid, you can't prohibit exports and you can't subsidize the purchase of the grain that was grown in Ireland.
He writes, do not encourage the idea of prohibiting exports.
Perfect free trade is the right course.
I'm just like, okay, why?
Like, why?
Just like, tell me why.
So, just okay.
It's because anytime you hear people talking about laissez-faire economics, free market shit, Adam Smith, it's a religion, you know?
It is a religion.
It's a religion.
Everything is.
But when you say, okay, when you look at it, this is another reason why I had such a hard time passing these exams.
Because when you say, when you build an economic model, you build it on, you know, that the mythical average man.
Yeah.
So this is the average man.
So who is the average man?
He's 32.1 years old.
He's got 2.5 children and three and a half like pets.
And I'm like, the person you're modeling your whole model off doesn't exist.
That's not, no one has 2.5 kids.
So I'm like, how are you setting?
How is this?
I don't understand how you could think any of this makes any sense if you build in your model off a person that will never be.
But you're setting everybody.
And I'm like, I get what you're saying.
Well, when you average all this stuff out, but listen to yourself.
Like, you're, what do you mean, average?
That your model is for it is for a made-up person that could never exist in real life.
Because nobody, again, I can't stress this.
And nobody got two and a half kids.
This is the thing where it gets to, it's not rational, right?
These people are very obsessed with the idea of like rationality and that this is a science, but it's not because when problems of reality conflict with what they believe about economics, they are incapable of adapting to that.
Some of them can't change your model.
Yeah.
Not everyone.
It's the same thing with like any, like with a normal religion.
There are some people who like are raised believing something and then like they reach something that conflicts and they manage to, without losing their faith, adapt it.
Peel might be a good example.
That first prime minister who is very much in with this laissez-faire stuff, but when the disaster hits, he makes alterations because he sees that like not everyone is this way, but a lot of these guys like Trevelyan are.
They cannot countenance violating some of these economic principles that they believe in.
And maybe you could argue that they just really hate Irish people and want to get rid of them.
And that's the justification, right?
Belfast Towns and Hip Hop00:05:11
I'm like, yo, you pretzeling all this ridiculous stuff just to say what we already know about you.
And I'm just like, okay, you just hate them.
You don't think they're humans and you frustrated that they actually need food to give you what you need.
And you ain't trying to help them, Moti.
You just, you hate them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I just, you doing all this stuff that you and I both know sitting across here.
What the hell are you saying don't make no sense?
You know it don't.
You know it don't.
So just, but you're going to keep making it make sense rather than just saying, oh, yeah.
Yeah.
And that's where we're going to leave for part two.
And when part three starts up, things are going to get real unpleasant real quick.
But prop.
Yes.
Before we hit that moment, you want to plug some pluggables?
I do, man.
I am on all my socials.
I am prop hip hop.
Although I've been called before prof e-hop.
And I'm like, what?
They're putting the P with the H.
So they're going prof. Because you're the professor of hip-hop, apparently.
So I was like, I don't know how y'all, I don't know how y'all, what, whatever.
Prophipop.com.
And again, at There's music and books and the hood politics pod.
Yeah, that's all the things.
All right.
Well, check that out and check out Ireland when it's possible to go places without the plague.
It's pretty nice, pretty nice spot.
IMO.
Galway, good town.
Antrim Coast, lovely.
A lot of good stuff in Ireland.
Belfast.
Oh, I do like Belfast.
It is the city.
I've been there twice and both times I have been to Belfast.
There just happened to be riots for different unrelated reasons.
I love Belfast.
It is a thing that happens a lot in Belfast.
I love it, though.
Like, I've never met nobody.
We're supposed to be closing this show, but I tell you this, like, a way I've always felt like it's very simple.
Like, Belfast reminds me of Long Beach in the sense that I've never met somebody from that city that I didn't like.
Where I was just like, I don't know what it is about your city, but you just make very likable people.
You're dangerous.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, you are, I know that you could somewhere in that smile and sense of humor is a cold-blooded murder.
Yeah, I know.
There's a town.
As a town, you are good at making Molotov cocktails.
That's what I'm trying to say.
People, a lot of people with experience melting British armored vehicles.
Anyway, podcast.
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