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Dec. 6, 2012 - Davis Aurini
23:44
How to Govern Through a Depression

A basic, viable strategy for a governor to help their people through an economic collapse My website: www.StaresAtTheWorld.com My Twitter: https://twitter.com/Aurini My Novel: http://www.staresattheworld.com/as-i-walk-these-broken-roads/

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How to govern through a depression.
That's the topic of this video.
This is not going to be cheap armchair quarterbacking on Monday morning.
This is actually going to be a valid strategy for what somebody in charge of a government should try and do when an economic collapse hits.
Now, this is certainly going to be using Austrian economic theory.
And we all know that that's been discredited many a time.
And yet, the only people who saw the housing collapse coming, Aaron Clary, Peter Schiff, they were all Austrian economists.
And the Keynesians never even heard of it.
Thought the economy was doing absolutely fine right before the collapse.
So I tend to go with the scientific theories that are backed up by evidence.
So I'm going with the Austrians on this one.
And of course, there is that rumor that Keynes only intended his theories to be applied during the Great Depression and not afterwards.
Supposedly he died before he could correct the students that were getting obsessed with his theories.
The other theoretical basis for this video is the following.
And I've never seen any evidence against it.
So I have a very high probability that's true.
Plus it's internally coherent, but not necessarily absolutely positive.
Around the 97% positivity on it.
And it's this.
Economic collapses are nothing new.
We've had inflationary spirals before.
We've had, well, certainly wars and disruptions before.
We've had economic problems before.
They're nothing new.
But there is something new in the modern era.
There's a reason that the Great Depression is something we all remember, while other depressions in earlier periods of times have been forgotten.
And it's simply the number of people living in major cities divorced from the land.
During earlier times, earlier periods of history, if you have an economic depression, you can't afford new clothes, you can't afford anything nice, but most people live on a farm, so most people are still eating.
Most people can batten down the hatches and weather it out.
Whereas today, and in the 1940s, or the 1930s, we are too divorced from that.
Most people, if the power gets shut off, if they lose their job tomorrow, if they won't be able to afford food, if we can't get the food at the grocery stores, people will be starving in the streets.
And so as a consequence, there is a far, far greater demand for action during an economic apocalypse than there would have been in other eras.
So with that in mind, let's discuss the strategy of what a ruler should do if they encounter an economic collapse.
Well, the very first thing is that you need to take stock of what actually matters.
And the most important thing to recover from this collapse is property law.
See, the solution is not going to come from government.
Government creates the environment that business can flourish in.
You know, whether we're talking about a monarchy, a democracy, or an anarcho-capitalist utopia, you're going to have some organization in charge of the roads, in charge of the military, in charge of the police.
You know, maybe you'll have multiple organizations competing.
But ultimately, all of those organizations are there to provide the environment in which business thrives.
They're not there to create the thrive.
Business does that.
People do that.
You leave people alone.
You make sure there's no murderers and rapists wandering all over the place.
People will figure things out for themselves.
So the very, very number one priority is property.
People need to be able to know that they can sell goods at the store without having a gang of thieves come in and rob them.
They need to know that you're not going to seize their property.
People aren't going to invest in a new venture if the government is going to come and seize their property.
Oh, we need to distribute these goods to the people out there.
You know, you're saving up some seeds because you're going to grow a farm, and all of a sudden, you know, the government comes and seizes them and boils them and gives people the rice pudding or whatever they make out of the seeds.
And you no longer have a farm.
The other aspect of property, of course, is currency.
Because currency is a form of property.
It's accrued wages.
You can invest it in a full tank of gasoline for your car.
You can invest it in whatever, or you can keep it in a monetary form.
Now, chances are, during this depression, you're going to have an inflationary currency.
Which leads to a whole other video, why do we have these depressions in the first place?
But let's just focus on how we respond to them, because it's too late to stop this one.
So, currency is going to be inflating.
People are going to be fleeing the currency.
And the knee-jerk reaction is to try and stabilize the currency by forcing people to use it, by banning gold and silver.
That's what happened in the United States.
By requiring that bills be paid in the legal tender, whatever.
The thing is, when you start changing the rules on people, when people don't know what you're going to do, what your plans are, will I still have my property in a month?
Will I still have my money in a month?
Am I allowed to spend my money the way I want?
That's when they stop investing.
That's when they freeze because they don't know what you're going to do as the governor.
So you need to keep things standard.
You need to protect private property and protect the currency.
If people want to switch to gold, let them do it.
If they want to start whopping chickens for cows, let them do it.
Even though it violates the tax code, you can't tax a chicken when you buy a chicken with a cow.
Leave it be.
People need security in their property if they're ever going to recover from the depression.
That's your number one priority.
Maintain the regularity of property and currency.
Number two, maintain critical services and infrastructure.
Primarily, this is water, food, and power.
Water and power are generally a private-public partnership.
So, that one should take care of itself.
You're already doing that.
So, of all your departments and services, that should be your number one priority: water and power.
As for food, thank God the Soviets taught us not to nationalize food.
Do not nationalize food.
Okay, this is not what you should be doing.
You should not be nationalizing all of these things so you have direct control of them.
What you want to ensure is that the farmers have water, the farmers are safe from bandits and roaming mobs, and that the highways work so the food can be delivered.
You should not take over the trucking companies.
You should just make sure that the highways are working for food.
One thing that might be valid, if the highways are deteriorating, for instance, ban civilian transport on the highways.
Allow only the semi-trucks to drive on them.
This is your infrastructure.
You don't want to control it precisely, but you want to make sure that it doesn't fall apart.
And the third thing: after you've enshrined private property rights, you're not going to be stealing things from people.
You've made sure that the people providing critical services can continue to do so.
That's when you get to criminal law.
We're talking about rape and murder here.
Quite frankly, if it's not property-related, it's not your highest priority.
You want to ensure that the hard-working, productive citizens can walk down the street to work without being molested.
You want to be able to draw a line between them.
You want to make sure your cops should be protecting the good people.
And if the good people are breaking a couple of laws, if they're violating a couple of statutes, that's not a concern right now.
You want to be protecting citizens.
So if somebody steals a car, hunt down the scumbag.
If somebody breaks into a store, if somebody mugs somebody, or if they break into property, stealing things, raping people, then deal with them.
So, that's your three main priorities.
Make sure people can trust the property law.
Make sure that the critical service providers can keep doing what they're doing.
And make sure that people are safe.
Now, what shouldn't you worry about?
Because this is where the big mistakes happen.
Because here we have a depression.
People in the cities are out of work and starving.
They have no access to food, and you have this huge human cry to take some action.
These are the actions you should not be taking.
As I mentioned, with the security, you're trying to maintain security for law-abiding people.
If somebody gets murdered in a theft, prosecute that person.
If somebody gets murdered in a bar fight, leave it alone.
You do not have the resources to pursue this right now.
If you have revenge killings, if you have, quite frankly, and this is horrible, but if you have random rapes unconnected to property crime, date rapes, murder of prostitutes, all that, you cannot afford to enforce this right now.
Somebody that's going to a bar during a major depression and getting into a knife fight, they're making that choice with themselves, for themselves, to do that.
If there is a thief that gets shotgun blasted to the face, best to sweep that under the rug.
And certainly, certainly, all the petty crimes, the graffiti, the drug dealing, the ordinance violations, you do not have the resources to waste your cops on these things.
Maintain the cops and the military for critical services.
Have them escort petroleum and food shipments.
Don't send them out because there's a noise complaint.
What else?
You certainly have the social workers.
All of our governments are completely bloated right now.
And you're going to hear all these screaming and crying from the government employees about their contracts and how they, you can't let them, you can't fire them during a depression, they'll starve.
Well, nobody deserves a government job.
if the government doesn't have the money to employ these people it should not be employing them social workers uh the guys patrol for cars that are parked somewhere too long you know bureaucrats teachers You don't need teachers during a depression.
If people need to learn a skill, they will learn the skill on the job.
We do not have the luxury for teachers right now.
We are in a depression.
Rome is burning.
We need to rebuild it right freaking now.
We don't need to spend four years in school learning about poetry.
Poetry is wonderful, but we don't have time for that right now.
All unnecessary services should be cut.
And of course you have major projects.
This is the worst time to start a major project, and there's going to be such an urge for it.
So many people are going to be demanding work and it'll be so tempting.
We're going to build a bridge to nowhere and that will solve all our problems.
Let's put it this way.
When times are good, when economic times are good, you have some money in the bank, that's when you build a veranda on your house.
That's when you install a new heater.
When things are going poorly, you ride out the stuff as long as possible.
When you're in debt, you don't pull out the credit card and buy a new furnace because it increases the value of your home.
It doesn't matter.
You're now more in debt.
Building a bridge might be wonderful for your country, but it's going to put you deeper in debt.
The people working on that bridge could have been satisfying more immediate wants.
They could have been working for lower wages on a farm making food.
Yes, it sucks, but this is how you get out of it.
And eventually, one of your priorities is going to be regulation.
And now, people misunderstand this word now.
They hear regulation, they think ordinance.
They think this stupid rule that everybody's supposed to follow, as opposed to the original root meaning of the word, which is to make business regular.
Having a universal set of measurements is a form of regulation.
So ignore all the fun stuff that we love to do with society and government, major projects, social work, education, and focus on the fundamentals.
Make sure people can predict what you're going to be doing with their property in the future.
Protect their private property.
Allow them to switch to a different currency if they want to gold, silver, mules.
Let them do that.
Next, ensure that the critical services, power, water, and food, are able to operate.
And finally, make sure that people are able to operate.
That they are not afraid of leaving their apartment.
That they can get to work.
And eventually, allow some regulation, some normalization of business so people know what to expect.
So that's the first step.
Get your priorities in order.
Too many politicians.
Typically, what does a politician do?
Do they worry about the roads?
No, the roads take care of themselves.
Do they worry about the cops?
The cops take care of themselves.
They worry about big projects, about ambition, about moving towards the future.
And so they double down and try and do more and more of that during a depression.
That is the exactly wrong thing to do.
They're worrying about the cart when the horse is sick.
Normally the horse is healthy.
You don't worry about the horse.
It just keeps trotting along and the cart follows it.
Now the cart stopped moving.
You don't build a fancier cart.
You find a new horse.
You help the horse get healthy again.
So once you've got your priorities straight, next you need to establish leadership.
Because everybody is going to be desperate and screaming for their piece of the pie.
Things are falling apart.
People want to rip out the wires out of the wall, the copper from the wall, try and sell it.
They're scared.
They want to grab a piece as quickly as they can.
You need a strong leader.
You as governor need to be a strong leader.
And you need to, this goes into the whole theory of leadership.
Put your foot down.
Do not accept any BS from these people.
If the teachers' union comes in and is complaining that they're getting a pay cut and it's illegal and it's kick them out of your office.
We don't have time to pay people to babysit children, whatever they're getting a year.
Establish that this is going to be no BS.
This is not going to be some huge long debate where everybody's trying to rip a piece out of the pie.
No, we are going to work at rebuilding these things.
Make contacts with industry.
Presumably you already have good contacts.
Talk to them.
Get them into a room and explain what you're going to do.
What the big things to worry about are in your area and how you're going to fix them.
Get these people behind you and community leaders.
Let's not forget about the churches.
You need to get all of the leaders in the community and get them on board with you.
You need to work in tandem on this.
And finally, the last thing you need to do.
And I'm going to use C.S. Lewis as a metaphor here.
C.S. Lewis in Near Christianity talked about how he hears all these Britons saying that, well, won't the church take some leadership on this issue?
He mentioned, for instance, credit banking.
Is that usury or not, according to a Christian opinion?
And he said, you know, technically these people are right, but they're asking the priests to take leadership.
Priests are not experts on medical science.
They're not experts on banking.
They're not experts on a lot of things.
They're experts on theology is what they're experts at.
And so C.S. Lewis said that what we need is the church to take leadership, and the church is the people sitting in the pews.
That's who's going to get us out of it.
Is not a messianic government figure.
It's going to be the people that get us out of this.
So, yes, we have people starving in the streets during this depression.
What do we do?
Do we confiscate all the farms, rip up all the crops, and feed the people for six months and then have nothing in the future?
Or do you start help organizing the people that do have resources?
Organizing charity.
Building civic virtue.
Instead of having everybody try and rip the furniture and the furnishings off the walls and run away to the countryside, develop civic virtue.
Get the people that do have resources to start helping others.
Put pleas on television that if you can help out a guy that's down on its luck, if you can offer them a job, do that.
Get people involved through their local communities, their churches, their whatever.
Civic virtue is going to get us out of this.
And if you, as governor, can engender the civic virtue, that will kill the depression faster than anything else.
It will enable people to be great, to help one another.
It's a funny thing about leadership is that you don't really do anything as a leader.
And a good leader knows that.
A good leader enables his subordinates to work to the best of their ability.
You give them the confidence that there is a structure and a sense to everything in the society, to the whole organization, that yes, we will actually get through it by these misbutted.
I'm not going to do it for you.
You're going to do it for yourselves.
That's what leadership is.
And depressions call for top-notch, excellent leadership.
Get your priorities in order.
Establish a support base from all the important people in society.
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