The Democrats Are Moving the Goal Posts Again # 930 (Ep 930)
In this episode I address the outrageous shift in tactics in the continued witch-hunt against Trump, and why these tactics will never work. I also address the reasons socialism and big government spending will never work.
News Picks:
Great news, new Attorney General William Barr will NOT recuse himself from the Russia probe.
The Democrats are all-in on police-state tyranny.
Christian baker Jack Phillips is 2 and 0 against the state of Colorado.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wonders why we can’t just print our way out of debt.
Tax refunds are up in 2019 as another silly liberal talking point collapses.
The absolutely brilliant Thomas Sowell returns.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez denies breaking FEC laws.
Copyright Dan Bongino All Rights Reserved.
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Get ready to hear the truth about America on a show that's not immune to the facts with your host, Dan Bongino.
Alright, welcome to the Dan Bongino Show.
Producer Joe, how are you today?
Man, rip roaring, ready to go, baby.
He ripped roaring.
So I have surgery after this, so I'm respectfully asking everybody in my audience, you know I love you all to death, you mean the world to me as I do the show for you, to say a prayer for me if you don't mind.
It's not a major thing, I don't want to be dramatic, but I have to go under again for the, gosh, seventh or eighth time.
Joe and I were going through our list of medical maladies.
Gotta have my elbow cleaned out.
I have a bunch of what they call loose bodies in there.
I don't know if that means like aliens.
Like remember Total Recall Arnold Schwarzenegger?
Like a quaddo pops out of his head.
Maybe I have like a quaddo in my elbow, but I can't straighten my left arm.
So I'll show you on camera.
That's all it straightens, my left arm.
So tomorrow I will show you the results.
Hopefully it'll be a little straighter.
I gotta get a Bunch of bone spurs taken out as well.
So I'm going right after my show today.
Joe's like, well, my wife was like, how do you feel?
You a little nervous about something?
I'm like, nah, I'm good.
The doctors are really, really competent, super competent guys.
So I'm excited.
All right, let's get to it.
Enough about me.
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Okay.
Getting right to this, so yesterday, I didn't get to this, I should have, a new Attorney General, thankfully, William Barr, who we have in there, was confirmed, is now acting as the Attorney General of the United States, announced this week that he will not recuse himself from the Russia probe My gosh, finally some sanity up there.
As I've said to you repeatedly, I don't want to pile on Sessions, but the worst decision he ever made, Joe and I frequently brought up, was to recuse himself when there was no reason to do so from the Russia probe.
The Democrats set him up.
They set Sessions up and he fell right into their trap, which was by far the worst decision he made when he was the Attorney General.
So now we have an Attorney General in there that can finally get a hold of the Justice Department.
Now, I want to bring up something critical here, because Barr wrote a piece, an opinion-type piece, a brief, about where the Democrats were going to go next.
They were going to go to obstruction when collusion fell apart.
He wrote a piece before he was the Attorney General, follow me here, because the logic He uses in this piece to knock down the obstruction charge is unassailable.
And when I give it to you, you're going to see how stupid what the Democrats are doing is and where this will lead to the potential collapse of the Republic as we know it.
So just to get out there, the lead, what we're talking about in advance.
Listen, Barr wasn't the perfect choice.
I agree.
There were some issues some people had with him.
But remember one thing about Attorney General Barr.
Joe, he's had this position before.
He gives exactly zero, you figure out the word, it's a family-friendly show, about what people think of him.
He's been the Attorney General before.
If he gets canned tomorrow, or gets attacked by the Democrats tomorrow, he doesn't care.
He doesn't care.
He's had this position before.
You need a guy in there right now willing to do the right thing who is not concerned about Joe running for president, being a U.S.
Senator afterwards, power, donations, jobs.
Barr does not care.
Is he the perfect candidate?
No.
Stipulated and acknowledged.
I get your point.
A lot of you emailed me some problems you had with Barr.
Fine.
I get it.
I'm telling you from the Russia probe, the hoax, the witch hunt perspective, there's no better guy to have in there because Barr doesn't care what they think.
He is only going to do what's right.
Barr knows this whole collusion investigation is a big hoax and a witch hunt, and he knows it's designed to take down the Trump administration and overturn the results of basically a duly elected president, Donald Trump, winning.
Donald Trump would be the first president in American history impeached for the crime of winning a presidential election.
So here's what Barr wrote in general.
The Wall Street Journal has this today in an op-ed column.
Where they cover how this is going down a very dangerous path.
Representative Jerry Nadler, as Joe and I had predicted, you know, a year ago almost, they were going to move from collusion on to, well, the president obstructed justice, which is basically impossible given the fact pattern that they have.
Now, Nadler's premise, and we debunked it earlier last week based on statements by McCabe, Comey, and Jim Baker, lawyers at the FBI, who refuted the idea that Trump had obstructed their investigation.
But on principle alone, Nadler, the Democrat hack going after the president, is wrong.
So I want to be clear what we're talking about.
Whereas last week, the obstruction charges against the President, Joe, you know, we refuted them based on the statements of Jim Comey, who alleges in a memo that Trump asked him to investigate people in his satellites.
He thought there was something wrong.
That doesn't sound like obstruction.
That sounds like solicitation.
McCabe, who gave a congressional testimony under oath and said there were no efforts, that's a quote, to obstruct his investigation.
And Jim Baker, a lawyer at the FBI who informed us that Trump wasn't even informed he was under investigation.
So how you can obstruct an investigation you weren't aware of is nonsensical.
I want to move from that to the overarching principles of how constitutionally speaking there's no way, given the fact pattern of this case in the Russia probe, That Donald Trump could have possibly obstructed an investigation.
Here's a quote from the Wall Street Journal today.
If a president commits a legal act but can be accused of a crime because of his motive, then any presidential action can be called into question based on the accusation of a motive.
Ladies and gentlemen, think this through logically.
Again, I'm asking you to use logic.
I know this is tough for our liberal friends who listen to the show because you're so passionately and virulently anti-Trump.
I'm asking you to think reasonably for a moment.
If the president commits a legal act, let's put meat on the bone, Joe.
Firing Jim Comey.
Joe, you and I are not constitutional lawyers, but we're not stupid either.
No, we're not.
One of the powers of the presidency under the executive branch is to fire subordinate officers.
Joe, is Jim Comey subordinate to Donald Trump or does Donald Trump work for Jim Comey?
Man, Jim Comey was working for Donald Trump, daddy.
It's not hard to figure out.
Comey was a subordinate officer in the executive branch.
Donald Trump has the constitutional authority to fire for any reason he deems fit Jim Comey!
That's a perfectly legal act!
Now, I'm not suggesting to you that these decisions are all smart politics, although I think the firing of Comey absolutely was.
Sometimes the firing of subordinate officers may be bad politics, Joe.
They may be bad optics.
They may not look good.
They may reflect poorly on the presidency.
But they are not illegal.
They are in fact the constitutional delegated duties of the President of the United States to choose his subordinate officers.
So what the article in the journal is saying, which a lot of you need to understand for your liberal friends arguing with your liberal friends, if we're going to use the President's motives To allege a crime, then do you understand that this could be done for any president, for any decision ever?
Right, right, right.
I mean, think about it, Joe.
Let's say the next president, God forbid, is a Democrat.
Let's say it's Bernie Sanders, bread lines Bernie.
And Bernie makes a foreign policy decision To re-engage on a higher level with the Cubans, to drop all sanctions, to drop everything, the dry foot policy, everything.
We're going to fix everything with the Cubans.
Bernie says we're going to change everything.
They are going to become our new partners on a level like the Five Eyes.
We're going to share intelligence with them.
Listen, Bernie Sanders, if he was the President of the United States and the Commander-in-Chief, has the authority to order his subordinate officers to do that.
Can we arrest Bernie Sanders for that?
No!
Now, you can try to impeach him and allege a high crime and misdemeanor, which they may do for Donald Trump, but you're not going to get him.
But it's not a crime to do it.
Now granted, I used an extreme example to show you that we have remedies for that.
There are constitutional remedies.
The remedies are impeachment and the next election where you can vote Bernie Sanders out, which if he were to embark on a policy like that would most assuredly be voted out.
But you can't point to his motive and say, well, Bernie Sanders is a communist and a traitor to the United States, and that, in fact, is a crime, and we will look to arrest him.
You can't indict a sitting president.
You can't point to motive.
Now, if Bernie Sanders, Joe, to give you a different example.
If Bernie Sanders were caught on videotape as the President of the United States taking a million dollar cash bribe from a Cuban officer to do the same thing, that's a different story.
That is not a legal act.
The President acting as a commander-in-chief and making foreign policy decisions is not criminal.
It may be stupid, it may be bad politics.
The President of the United States taking a cash bribe underneath the table is in fact an illegal act.
That is a legitimate allegation of a crime if it were to happen.
We need to understand this distinction.
Likewise with Trump.
If there were an allegation out there, Joe, that Trump had taken a $2 million cash bribe to fire Jim Comey by a competitor for Jim Comey's job who wanted to be the director of the FBI, there's absolutely no question there would be a criminal investigation, likely an impeachment, and an indictment after the president leaves office.
Because a sitting president cannot be indicted according to OLC guidelines, DOJ guidelines now.
He can't.
Do you understand the dangerous path we would be headed down if motive were used as a reason to charge crimes on a sitting president?
Joe, you could say that about anything.
You could say, well, the president's motive For seeking denuclearization talks with Kim Jong-il because somewhere down the future we think he may want to build a Trump Tower in North Korea.
You don't know any of that!
You have no idea!
You're just making that up!
You're fabricating charges!
Folks, this is a danger.
This would be the collapse of the Republic because you could create and fabricate motives for every decision the President made.
The tax cuts bill!
The tax cuts bill!
The president's motive was to save himself money on his taxes!
Impeach him!
Crime!
Lock him up!
Call the thought police!
It's not a crime!
Yes, exactly!
You would be essentially, it's a great way to frame it, you would be policing things you can't possibly understand which are the internal machinations of a president of the United States.
You don't know that!
As long as he's executing his legal duties, no matter how ill-advised you believe them to be, they are not in fact crimes and you cannot impugn, well you can impugn it, but you cannot use the motive as evidence of a crime.
I wanted to get that out there because there's a lot of confusion about it.
People seem to not understand this.
That they're confusing the two.
Oh, his motives were to protect himself against the Russian probe.
You don't know that!
You have no idea!
And even if you did, even if you did, that motive for him doing it when he pursues a legal act, there's not, it doesn't, that is not, you cannot use it as evidence of a crime!
You don't know that!
You have no evidence of actual criminality there.
They say, oh, well, he told Lester Holt about the Russia thing.
He simply said the Russia thing was on his mind.
I wouldn't have said it, but he did not say he fired Jim Comey because of the Russia thing.
And by the way, even if he did fire Comey because of the, quote, Russia thing, it's still not illegal.
He may say he handled this investigation poorly.
He's a subordinate officer.
He can give him the boot when he wants.
Okay.
Um, second story.
So, uh, the power of capitalism, Joe, this immigration story is me fascinated.
You know, I told you that I thought Trump won on the immigration fight.
And I know I got a lot of emails.
There's this guy, Paul, who emails me negative stuff every day.
That's fine.
I read the emails.
I put it out there for a reason.
He seems to hate Donald Trump.
This guy got worked!
He's a loser!
He's the worst ever!
I'm like, alright, whatever, man.
I don't even know what you're talking about anymore.
But I still read your stuff, so email away.
I told you I thought he won on the border battle, especially with the funding.
The reason for that is, just to quickly reiterate this point before I get to the coup de grace here.
Trump, the money he got, he needed $5.7 billion to build that 200 miles of border wall
that the border security experts in CBP and elsewhere had told him were critical.
So just to get the lead out in front, the CBP went to the president and the border authorities, ICE and others, and they said, listen, we need this specific 200 plus miles of border secured immediately.
This is where there's a real crisis and an emergency.
They got an estimate on that to be 5.7 billion dollars on that price tag.
The president got some money, he got about 1.6 billion dollars from congress, he took some more money from treasury funds that were taken, the treasury impoundment funds, funds that were impounded due to criminal activity, and he got some other money from the military construction budget.
That left him around 5 billion dollars before there was even a declaration of the emergency and the emergency money was needed.
Now, I want to make that point clear, because as the president said himself, his ace in the hole was he spending this money sequentially.
In other words, Joe, the congressionally allocated money first, no dispute about that.
The treasury forfeiture funds, no real dispute about that.
The military construction funds next, no dispute about that.
And then there were going to be the disputed funds from the emergency declaration.
I had said to you over and over that the president, who's a pretty darn good dealmaker, agreeing to spend that money sequentially kind of screwed them over because the Democrats can't sue about money that hasn't been spent yet.
And Joe, by the time they spend the emergency declaration money, the president is going to be potentially two years down the road because he's already spending the other money first and it's going to take a while to finance that.
How does this fit into the story we saw yesterday?
You see where I'm going with that, Joe?
By the time he gets to those funds, they can't sue until he starts spending them.
That's gonna be way, way down the road, potentially into the 2020 election or real life.
Right, and we did this story in that order.
The order, how it counted, was about a week and a half ago.
Yes, and it's important you understand that.
Because, again, the president was knocked.
Oh, he lost.
He took an L on this.
He did not lose.
He didn't lose.
We're not golden calfing the president either.
I'm just telling you, he had the money.
They're going to spend it in sequence.
Now, there was an interesting story yesterday about this guy.
It's in the Washington Examiner.
It's in the show notes.
A company, a private company, power of capitalism, we love it, comes forward and says, hey, listen, We can do the 234 miles a border you need.
For 1.4 billion!
How great would that be?
So now, even better, if he winds up taking this, and of course it's a more complicated government procurement process, I don't want to be hyperbolic, than just saying, hey, we'll take it.
But, if this company is right, and other companies can match that bid, think about it folks, not only will Trump have won by spending the money in sequence, therefore they can't sue him for the emergency declaration money, because it won't even be spent yet until the other border's built, We may get the 200 miles of border we need, that wall, now for just the congressionally allocated 1.5, 1.6 billion they gave them, which is going to be spent first!
In other words, if that happens and they can match that spending, there will be no lawsuit because the 200 miles of border we need will be spent before you even get to the mildly disputed money, the forfeiture funds and the military construction budget.
Now, I can't attribute that entirely to Trump because this company came out yesterday After the negotiations were over and said they could do it.
But wouldn't this be a major slap in the face to the open borders Democrats if this 200 miles of border gets built with money, with money, Joe, they allocated from Congress and the emergency money's never needed at all.
Now, wouldn't that be special?
How about that?
Wouldn't that be great?
Now, on a serious note, this crisis at the border is getting a lot worse.
Some astonishingly bad numbers.
This is what that guy Paul had emailed me about, and he's not incorrect.
The crisis at the border is getting worse.
Ladies and gentlemen, there's no longer any question among serious, rational people that what's going on at our southern border is a national emergency.
No question.
Now, you can dispute, and we should, the power of the executive to reallocate funds.
I think that'll go through the courts, if we ever get to it, as I just said, the allocation of the funds.
You cannot dispute, effectively, the president's power to declare an emergency declaration pursuant to the 1976 National Emergency Act.
There's no question about that.
What the president's being sued about for the emergency at the border is the allocation of funds, not the declaration of an emergency.
Now, after the numbers that came out yesterday, again, there's no longer any serious dispute about what's going on.
February Joe.
76,000 apprehensions at the border, at our southern border up 30.
I know you, I was waiting for you.
You always go, Oh, anytime I make a point that he goes, Oh, he does.
It reminds me of Andrew Dice Clay, Madison square garden back in the, uh, in the nineties.
Oh, remember 76,000 folks.
I live in Palm city, Florida.
I don't know the population of the town I live in.
I love it down here.
I have no idea.
But I'm going to guess it's not 76,000 people.
And you know, it's not really a small town, like a decent amount of people live down here.
76,000 people were apprehended in February, up 31%.
I'm asking you, our liberal friends, to tell me with a straight face how this is not a crisis at our border.
If we had 76,000 people a month apprehended at our border, can you imagine how many got through?
We're talking probably about tens of thousands of people who are in our country illegally getting through every single month.
Folks, this is a national emergency.
There's no question.
These numbers are absolutely staggering and horrifying.
Alright, moving on.
I've been at this a while now and One of the guys I really adore, the people in the movement, I mean, really adore, who's changed my life.
I've never met him.
And I'm not really a sappy kind of guy.
I never take pictures with people or anything.
I mean, I think we have a couple pictures with the POTUS and everything, but that's different.
But I see people, I run into them in green rooms and stuff.
You know, I'm never like, hey, can we take a selfie?
I just, I don't know.
I just don't really care.
I've taken a few, very, very few, usually at other people's requests.
It's not my thing.
But one guy I really like is Thomas Sowell.
Thomas Sowell is one of the great thinkers of our time.
He was a disciple of Milton Friedman.
He's an economist that, I believe he's at the Hoover Institution over at Stanford University.
He's just incredible.
He's written books that have changed my life.
The most powerful book I've ever read is called Vision of the Anointed by Thomas Sowell.
I can't recommend to you in strong enough terms.
I have no financial interest in his books at all, by the way.
Zero.
But Vision of the Anointed will change your life.
It's an older book.
It's not new.
It's been out, gosh, for decades.
But it really breaks down the ideological underpinnings of the left, you know, the socialist central planner left, and how basically nothing they will do will ever work, the socialists, because it can't work.
It's a fascinating, fascinating book.
Again, I can't recommend it enough, but he has a new book out.
And Thomas Sowell appeared on, I believe it was David Asman on Fox Business the other day.
And Seoul has a way of distilling things down, whether it be on this latest call for reparations, which we addressed last week, or the wealth tax.
This is a seven-minute cut.
We took just two shortcuts.
I can't play a seven-minute cut on the show.
You'll all tune out.
I took two cuts from his interview with David Asman.
And the first one is Asman asking him about this call by these radical far-leftists running for president right now, Kamala Harris and others included, for reparations to Americans who they believe were the descendants of slaves.
An economically unworkable, irrational program.
I explained this last week.
The program, mechanically, would never ever work.
You giving money to other people who are descendants of people who unquestionably moral, ethical, and human crimes were committed against, but not to them, and you had nothing to do with, makes no economic sense.
So Sol was asked about this, and play this cut, here was his answer.
You know, another economic myth is one that you expose in the new edition of your book, Discrimination and Disparities, that all disparities, economic disparities in our economy, etc., are due to discrimination.
That that's the sole course and therefore they have to be addressed by economic policies.
The most recent fad is reparations for slavery.
How do you respond to that?
Well, this is one of any number of one-factor explanations as to why everyone doesn't have the same outcome.
A hundred years ago, it was genetics.
In other times and places, it was exploitation.
But again, these are ideas that sound plausible.
But when you do research, you discover that everywhere you turn, there are a thousand reasons why people don't turn out the same.
It goes right down to the family in the first chapter of this book.
I point out that the firstborn has higher IQs than his siblings, and later life has more achievements.
Among astronauts, for example, of the 29 astronauts in the Apollo program that put a man on the moon, 22 were either the firstborn or an only child.
Now, if you can't get equality among people born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, why in the world would you think you're going to get it among people who've had such different histories and cultures around the world?
Sol's a genius.
He is one of the finest thinkers of our time.
And he gave, obviously, a deeper answer to the question about reparations.
But the answer, I want to just dig into that a second and hit two quick points.
Sol is great at, he has this thing called, you know, the then what, right?
So then what?
And he mentions it.
He says, well, one factor explanations.
Whenever you're arguing with your liberal friends and they bring things up like reparations, you're thinking, well then what?
Well, okay, well how are we going to do it?
Well, are you going to take money from people who say, say a wealthy black family, right?
Is money taken from them or given to them?
And I asked you last week, what if you came from, say, Jamaican heritage and not essentially African heritage?
What if you came here after, what if your parents came here just recently?
And weren't victims of slavery in the United States.
They get paid too.
Is it strictly based on skin color?
So he talks about these things called one-factor explanations.
He relates it to a larger topic of inequality in society.
But it's important.
You should always ask your liberal friends, and then what?
And then stop, stop.
You can't let them stop at the first factor explanation.
He had a better way of explaining it.
He was, um, a clip we used to play on the show often.
It was back in the 70s, Sowell's on a show, on a television show, with this Pennsylvania bureaucrat who heads their welfare department, Helen O'Banion.
You can look it up on YouTube, it's fascinating.
And she talks about how women on welfare, how we need to support them, and how Pennsylvania and how the state budget, we should give them money.
And Sowell asks her a fascinating question.
Okay, well why are you starting the story in the middle?
Let's start the story at the beginning of the book and ask, how did they get on welfare in the first place?
Right.
And he hits on it in his answer there when he talks about largely this is due to a lot of family factors.
Families being broken up.
Like there's not one factor here.
So that's first, ask the then what question.
And then secondly, he brings up another point.
For government to equalize all of these factors.
Are you first born?
Are you a minority status?
How were you treated growing up?
Did you have two parents?
Did you get the proper nutrition?
All of these factors that can lead to different outcomes in life.
We can all agree, right Joe?
Sure, man.
People who have better nutrition, probably had better life outcomes than people who didn't.
People who grew up with a mother and a father in a household probably grew up with different outcomes than a single parent.
I know, my wife and I both grew up in single parent households.
It's tough, okay?
There are so many factors.
He brings up this point that there's no way to control for all this.
And the logical extension of that, which he addresses in many of his books is, and Hayek addresses it, and Milton Friedman as well is, In order to equalize outcomes at the back end, in other words, well, you may have failed because of this, this, and this, and we're going to institute a government policy to bring you up, it requires, Joe, that you treat people unequally.
Right.
The great irony of government equalizing outcomes is it requires you to treat people unequally because you can't control for all those factors.
Think about what I'm telling you.
This is a critical point.
It is the ultimate endgame failure of liberalism and socialism.
You will never be aware of the struggles Joe's had.
Joe, with little Joe, and his son, and his jobs, and working.
I know Joe well.
I probably am aware of about two or three percent of Joe's struggles and how he got through.
I have no idea.
I can't control for all of those.
The government, if I know Joe well, and I don't know, the government has an even lesser idea.
So to take from Joe to give to someone else who makes less money than Joe under the guise of equalizing outcomes, how do you know the money you're taking from Joe to give to someone else who makes less than Joe, that the guy's not going to go spend it on drugs and the guy's poor because he's a drug addict?
The answer is you don't know that.
You can never know that.
You can't control for those outcomes.
That's where, when you read Sowell's work, you see, that's what he's talking about in this piece.
That you can't possibly control for all these factors.
You know, an example Joe and I used to use, because we, I love Saul, we've used this quote so many times, is, you know, let's say you got this guy, he's really, really poor, and then you got this guy really, really rich.
The simple-minded, one-factor liberals would be like, well it's obvious, we should tax the guy who's rich and give some money, he doesn't need all that money, and we should give it to the poor guy.
And then when you start saying, well and then what?
And you start digging through the factors, you find out that, well, the poor guy was rich, and he blew away his inheritance partying on bad business investments, and the guy who's rich now, who we're taking from, was poor, came here as an immigrant, started a belt factory, made a bunch of great belts, worked for 20 years, and finally was bought out last year, and now he's worth a million dollars.
Now it's fair to take his money and give it to the kid who was born rich and flushed it down the toilet?
You may say, well of course that isn't fair, but that's not, we don't know that.
Of course, that's why the government shouldn't do it.
I don't think I like your tone.
For the government to equalize outcomes, they have to treat people unequally.
The guy who worked his whole life to make his million dollars and grew up poor, worked his whole life to pay off a guy who flushed his money down the toilet.
They're being treated unequally.
Alright, let me play this second cut from Sowell.
This was a great appearance yesterday.
This is Thomas Sowell again on Fox Business with David Asman.
Talking about wealth tax, redistribution, and other things, and Sowell again, no one says it better.
Play that cut.
...love to throw out there is the wealth tax, is that there are too many wealthy people that in order to redistribute income, we don't want to take away all wealthy people, we don't want to bring back the guillotine, but we need a wealth tax in order to cut into some of their riches.
What do you think of that?
Well, I think that's one of the biggest fallacies, because the most fundamental kind of wealth is human capital, which is inside people's heads, and you can't confiscate that.
Any number of countries have forced people out of the country, they've expelled them or driven them out, and wouldn't let them take their wealth with them.
And when they did that in Uganda, for example, the Ugandan economy collapsed.
The Asians who arrived destitute in Britain, you know, within a number of years, they were prosperous again, whereas the Ugandan economy never recovered.
If you can't confiscate the most fundamental wealth, the case for doing it means nothing if you can't do it.
Folks, this is one of the more profound things, and Saul repeats throughout his works, his writings, his speeches, his seminars, a lot of his YouTube clips.
This is an idea Saul brings up often.
You can control and confiscate capital.
When I say capital, Joe, I mean tractors, factories, business assets, computers, hard assets, real estate.
You can do that.
And communist socialist planners will do that because a communist, the essence of a communist and a socialist is the government control of the means of production.
The means of production of how we produce our economic output are those factories, are the real estate, the computers, the phones.
You can confiscate that.
But you can never confiscate an idea.
Sowell talks about this so beautifully and so often, and I hope, I know this show, we're digging a little deep into the economic philosophy material, but it's really important.
You cannot confiscate an idea.
And think about that.
It's not just that you obviously can't confiscate an idea.
And when I say an idea, Joe, I mean the idea that, let's say, the Japanese, they had, When they started doing enhancements in their production capabilities, they invented a lot of procedures like just-in-time where restocking of your shelves and things like this, you wouldn't hold a lot of excess inventory which would tie up your capital.
That was an idea.
The idea, and I was reading it when I was in business school about A certain company that found out a way to design their warehouses to be able to transport and import more products into the warehouse by using an X-based design.
So the trucks would have more surface area to load and unload their products rather than the traditional square.
It was genius.
It was an idea.
An idea that led to incredible enhancements for that company and the ability in their logistics to take in and export products.
You can't confiscate an idea.
An idea travels with you.
So Sol's point that when these countries implement these confiscation government planning and heavy taxation processes where we're gonna, we're just going to tax your stuff to death or confiscate it outright.
Fine.
People move and they take their ideas elsewhere because you can't lock up their ideas.
They're lodged in their cerebral cortex.
They leave with them and they take that idea for an ex A warehouse shaped like an X to another country where those warehouses become more efficient, their economies produce more stuff, making the people wealthier.
One more thing about an idea.
Joe, what is it about an idea that is different, tautologically, from material goods, you know, capital goods?
An idea can be reused, Joe, over and over and over and over with no, there's no scarcity to it.
Now that's not the case with a caterpillar tractor.
Say you're an agricultural business and you have this, you know, $10 million piece of equipment that's going to work on your field.
That equipment has a lifespan.
Right.
Maybe 10 years, maybe 20.
After that, you have to buy a new one.
There's a lifespan.
It's not usable.
Number one, it has a lifespan.
Number two, again, this is common sense, but liberals have a hard time with this.
It's only usable in one place at one time.
It can't clone itself.
It's only usable in one field in Wisconsin.
You can transport it to Georgia, but then it's not going to be used in Wisconsin.
That's not the case with an idea.
An idea can be used everywhere.
The idea of not keeping excess inventory in a factory and learning just-in-time production methods.
The idea of building your warehouse in an X layout rather than a square to increase the efficiency of the trucks coming in and out.
Those ideas can be used again, and again, and again, and again, and again.
Now, again, there are patents and things like that.
There are some ideas like, you know, software codes that can be patented and things like that.
But I'm talking about the big ideas, Joe.
Logistics change, things like electricity.
You know, someone thought of this.
Wait, maybe if we could get a current into a wire.
They changed the world.
You will never, ever contain these ideas.
And this is where the ridiculous, absurd, silly socialists and their tyrannical communist buddies always go wrong.
You can try to plan, control, and confiscate people's means of production.
They are going to take their ideas and they are going to go elsewhere.
And he makes a fascinating point there.
Idi Amin and the Ugandans.
Another tyrant.
When they took over the economy.
People left.
They stole all their stuff, the Ugandans.
And they left.
They took their ideas, went elsewhere.
And you know what, Joe?
They became rich and wealthy again somewhere else because they just took their ideas elsewhere.
I really wish people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and socialist Bernie Sanders, Breadlines Bernie, would understand that.
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Okay.
What's that turkey neck?
You won't have any more turkey necks, Ben!
It'll be all gone!
Okay.
I have a great story in the show notes today.
Please folks, if you don't mind, subscribe to my email list.
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At Bongino.com.
If you click the dropdown menu on the homepage, it says subscribe.
Uh, we will send you these articles in your email box every day.
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Okay.
Uh, but these, uh, these articles are really good.
I have one today by CNS News, and it's about how liberals are basically hypocrites on financing bigger government, and how the author—it's a great piece, Joe, because I love categories, and what do they call them?
Listicles.
In the business, they call them listicles, like people who do lists.
So the author of the piece puts together a list of the four types of liberals that want to expand government into like greek-like status like greek big government so we could go bankrupt quick and he has an interesting in the in the piece he has this little chart in there that's fascinating uh if paul if you could throw it up that'd be great if you could find it in a piece i didn't tell you before uh there's a family operation here my wife said we didn't tell me this stuff before the show sheesh He has this little chart.
It's simple.
It says, uh, people who want to finance Greek like big government, like sane people don't do it.
And then he has another branch like irrational people.
Here's the four.
It's really great.
He has the four categories of people who want to blow up the government.
So category one.
He has class warriors, and their way of doing it, financing Greek-like big government in the United States, is the whole tax the rich!
Tax the rich, that'll do it!
So he breaks that down, it's a great piece, and he says, listen, there's just not enough money for that.
We've said it on the show repeatedly, I showed you how taxing the rich at the rates Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and people like Julian Castro running for president at the 70-90% marginal rates, We'll raise according to their estimates between maybe 200 and 400 billion over 10 years.
Now you may say, wow, that's a lot of money.
Number one, it won't do that because people, the rich people will take their ideas, Joe, and take them to another country with a lower tax rate, which is what happens every time we do this.
But even if they were to stay and actually pay those tax rates, which won't happen, Joe, the $200 to $400 billion over 10 years is just a little short.
Joe, a little bit.
Just a little short, considering that Ocasio-Cortez's programs, the Green New Deal and others, will cost $93 trillion.
So Joe, $93 trillion, $200 billion.
$93 trillion, $200 billion.
We're not even in the ballpark.
So yeah, the number one category of Greek-like expansion of the United States government The class warriors are just mathematical idiots.
And they're just basically lying to you.
They say tax the rich because they know people think, well, that won't affect me.
No, it will.
It will basically collapse our economy.
Because as Thomas Sowell said in that clip before, and I can't emphasize enough, people who are wealthy and successful have ideas.
It is those ideas which have financed the explosive growth in our economy.
Ideas like the iPhone, ideas like 3D printing, It is people who have later become wealthy off those ideas, who have invented those ideas, who have led to the dramatic expansion of jobs and prosperity in our economy.
Engaging in the politics of envy.
Oh, we should get those people.
It's just stupid.
And frankly, I think it's immoral.
These people worked for their money.
Did everyone work for them?
No, but it's just immoral and frankly stupid.
Okay, second category of people who want to finance massive Greek-style government in the United States, the Keynesians.
They're not the Kinesians for some liberal.
Yeah, I engaged in a debate with a liberal once who was trying to quote Keynesian economics called the Kinesians.
Maybe you should call it the right thing first.
It was John Maynard Keynes, not Keynes.
Just saying.
I don't mean to sound like a snob, but if you're going to cite the guy's economic principles, you should probably know how to pronounce his name.
From the planet Kinesia.
Yes.
That's good.
That's good.
We should have a shirt made up for our store on the website.
We haven't thrown that out there.
All proceeds from our store go to charity on the website, by the way.
From Planet Kinesia!
So the Keynesians want to just borrow the money.
Now, Keynesian economics is a largely debunked discredited theory eponymously named for now long since past economist John Maynard Keynes and the idea was we should drive interest rates down very low via the borrowing and spending of money that basically the driving down of interest rates would incentivize people to marginally consume rather than save.
Let me explain that in kind of non-wonky terms.
If interest rates are high and you're a saver, and you have assets and money, say you have a million dollars.
Right.
If interest rates are high, like 8% or so, Joe, that's a healthy interest rate.
You can make a lot of money.
Yeah, man.
You put a million dollars in the bank at 8%, that's a lot of dough, folks.
That's tens of thousands of dollars racking up into your bank account every single day.
Keynes' theory, which again has largely been debunked, was we need to incentivize people to consume on the margin.
He called it the marginal propensity to consume.
Because he believed it was the spending of money that would generate economic activity.
And he's not wrong on that front.
The problem is it's a one-sided, as Sowell said again in his piece, one-factor view of economics.
If people don't save, Joe, Then there is going to be no money for people to borrow to build their businesses, to build the productive capacity and the products people consume later.
You can't view consumption, the buying of stuff, computers, hot dogs, telephones, whatever, Without viewing the production side of it, too.
You can't consume, Joe, in other words, what you don't produce.
Does that make sense?
Correct, yes.
You have to have people in factories.
This isn't hard, folks.
I'm not trying to scare you with complex economics.
This is simple stuff.
So where Keynes went wrong is he wanted to push interest rates down very low vis-a-vis government borrowing and policies like that.
To incentivize people to not save their money and therefore spend it.
And that's great.
Spending money is great.
But savings is important too because it gives people a capital base to borrow money and finance the production of the stuff we want to consume.
Makes sense, Joe?
Yeah, man.
Big time.
You have to build a computer before someone buys it.
And Keynes was short-sighted on that front.
Now, The problem with endlessly borrowing and printing money using the United States government printing press and the borrowing of money from other countries is eventually you get debt levels so high that sooner or later countries figure out that are lending us money that we may not get paid back.
And then what happens?
The effort to lower interest rates to make saving unpalatable, no one wants to save money if it's 1%, they'd rather just spend it.
The problem, Joe, is borrowing money to drive those interest rates down eventually does what?
Leads foreign countries to say, wait, how much money is the United States borrowing exactly?
Well, they borrowed $22 trillion.
$22 trillion?
I'm not lending them a dime.
And then what happens?
In order to get countries to lend us money, you have to do what?
You have to raise interest rates and say to those countries, OK, we'll pay you 10% if you lend us money.
I want 15% because I think you're going to default.
You get my point, Joe?
Yeah!
The very effort to print money and spend money under Keynesian principles to lower interest rates, to get people to not save and spend money, ironically leads to interest rates going up in the future as people stop lending us money because we're gonna default!
It doesn't work, it backfires!
So Category 2!
The Keynesians.
That's debunked, too.
Category one, the tax the rich people.
Debunked, there's not enough money there.
The rich don't have enough money to finance this, and they'll just leave.
Category three.
This one's a good one.
He calls this the honest libs.
The honest liberals.
Yeah, which is very rare.
I have yet to meet one, candidly speaking.
I don't know an honest lib out there when it comes to economics.
And he says the way to do this and finance big government is to soak the middle class.
And, again, being honest about it, there may be enough money not to finance 93 trillion of the Green New Deal over 10 years.
That's an absurd amount of money.
That works out to be roughly $65,000 per household, in addition to what you're paying now.
The money's just not there.
But if we were to tax the middle class through something like a VAT, a value-added tax, at the point of purchase, you may find a decent amount of money.
You could probably find tens of trillions over 10 years.
The problem is, you may say, well, why aren't the liberals just honest?
Why don't they just say that?
Because, Joe, the bulk of our society that votes are middle class Americans.
When you look at the breaking down into fifths of our income categories, lower income, lower middle, middle, upper income, and then the wealthy, that's how we break it down.
Into those categories.
The bulk of people are in the middle class.
Well, those are also the bulk of, Joe?
Voters!
Yes, voters!
So the reason liberals aren't honest and say, hey, well, we can finance at least some of the Green New Deal by taxing the middle class is because the middle class are the ones that vote for them.
And they know they'll get no votes if they tell middle class people, hey, by the way, your taxes are going to go up $40,000 a year.
So category three, the honest libs.
What's the problem with that category?
There are no honest libs.
That's the problem.
Of course, the Keynesians, we have the interest rate problem.
Class warriors, there's not enough money with the rich.
Finally, he addresses the modern monetary theorists, category four, the MMT people.
And this is where we get to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Again, I keep bringing her up because this is a very dangerous person right now, folks.
I'm speaking about her ideology.
She proposed the preposterous idea of, well, we have the monopoly on the Federal Reserve on our Federal Reserve notes and our currency.
Why don't we just print the money?
And the modern monetary theorists, this guy just discredits them completely.
That's basically their bedrock principle that, well, we can just print it.
Well, Joe, what's the problem with that?
Well, I've given this example on the show many times.
Ladies and gentlemen, when you print money endlessly, the money you have now is worth less.
Let me give you just a quick example.
Ironically, From John Maynard Keynes himself.
Yes, the guy I just told you whose economic theories have been discredited, who understood in the long run the dangers of endless inflation.
Maynard Keynes, John Maynard Keynes had said, let's say, Joe, you wanted to spend roughly, you know, 25% of the economy, right?
The government, that is.
So, say the economy is $100, it's a small whatever, it's a small town, and the government says, we're gonna spend 25% of what we're worth, $100, the entire town, on government services.
Now, there's two ways to do it.
The first way is the obvious one.
You could tax your citizens at a rate of, effective rate of 25%, and hope they pay.
And then you would get $25 from the town of the $100 of productive capacity.
Now, there's a second way to do that, too.
The second way is the modern monetary theorists, let's just print the money people.
And what do they say?
They say, well, we can just print 30 additional dollars.
So now you have $100 in production capacity in this small town.
The government there, small town government A, just prints 30 extra dollars and spends it.
Everybody say, great.
You don't have to tax the citizens.
This is wonderful.
We print the $30.
We just go spend it on the roads, whatever we want to do.
And nobody gets hurt.
No, ladies and gentlemen, you do get hurt.
That $30, by the way, is roughly 25% of $130.
Ballpark, right?
So it's still 25% of the economy.
The problem, ladies and gentlemen, is now you have $130 chasing the same $100 worth of goods that are produced.
Meaning what?
The price of everything goes up!
So say that economy produces 100 chairs.
And you had $100 in that economy before they printed $30.
Each of those chairs could have fetched a dollar.
A hundred chairs, a hundred dollars.
Now with $130, you have $130 chasing Joe the same 100 chairs.
The economy's not worth $130.
They just printed the $30.
Which means every chair's price is going to go up as more circulating money chases the same amount of products.
Meaning what?
Everything just gets more expensive.
This isn't hard.
My gosh, this isn't hard.
Ocasio-Cortez, they could just print the money.
So no value added at all?
We're not going to add any value?
We're just going to start printing money?
Uh, Ms.
Cortez, aren't the prices of everything going to go up as the money you print starts chasing the exact same amount of products?
Uh, I didn't really think that one through.
Of course you didn't.
You're a Democrat.
You never think things through.
So read the piece, it's really good.
It breaks it down into these four categories.
It's excellent.
Very, very well done.
And confront your liberal friends about it.
But the chart is great.
People, rational people who want to expand the Greek government.
Chart A, don't do it.
Chart B, here are the four idiots who want to, here are the four categories of idiots who want to do that.
It's worth your time.
Alright, final story of the day.
On a really positive note, yesterday's show did really terrific numbers.
I appreciate it.
And by the way, my wife wanted me to bring something.
I am so sorry about the audio quality.
That is 100% my fault.
My wife and Paula put a lot of work into this and the microphone, we have two mics, this mic, the RE-20.
If you go and listen to yesterday's show that Joe puts together, the audio show on iTunes or SoundCloud, the audio quality's peerless.
Joe does a great, it's great.
But if you watched on our YouTube channel yesterday, the audio quality was horrible.
It sounded like we were in a tin can.
I have a little lav mic below this.
You can't see it on camera.
Let me show you how I do it.
Yeah, go ahead.
Look at that.
You see, you see that?
Can you see that?
Yeah.
And I keep it attached to this thing.
It fell and I didn't notice.
So it sounds like on yesterday's YouTube, we're in a tin can, but we still got 40,000 views.
You can hear the show.
It's not horrible, but it's not, it's not our, it's not up to snuff.
So our apologies, but we wanted to get the show up.
So, uh, Paul is like, please tell him that wasn't me.
That was you.
It was, it was a hundred percent my fault.
But today's quality should be pretty good.
So, uh, but we, that's why we have it is I like to put you behind the scenes.
We have two separate microphones.
Um, okay.
Uh, final show of the day yesterday was a story of the day.
Excuse me.
Yesterday we discussed, Hey, make a scene.
It's time to make a scene folks.
I'm glad you liked that.
The show did incredible numbers yesterday.
Really.
Uh, we were kind of surprised when we woke up this morning.
Don't take it anymore.
To the parents of the kids in Arizona who wore MAGA hats to school, who got that principal on tape and held a rally outside of school, God bless you.
Good for you.
I'm with you.
So is everyone in our listening audience.
To that kid in the Berkeley campus that got punched in the face, and now we find out today that his alleged attacker now is being charged with a very serious felony, put that kid in jail.
Don't accept any plea for this.
Do not let them plea it out.
Someone rips a MAGA hat off your head?
Call the cops.
Have them arrested.
Don't let it go.
Follow them all the way down the street.
Get them on video.
Humiliate them forever.
Make them subject to YouTube infamy for the rest of their lives.
Make a scene.
I said yesterday, my grandmother used to tell me in church growing up, don't make a scene.
Now it's time to make a scene.
Well, Jack Phillips made a scene.
Who's Jack Phillips?
Jack Phillips is a Christian baker in Colorado who says, listen, I'll bake a cake for anybody they want, but I will not put a message on that cake that conflicts with my religious beliefs.
Good for you, Jack.
God bless you, brother.
Because Jack Phillips went through a lot.
Jack Phillips was harassed endlessly, not once, but twice, by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission.
They attacked him, they attacked his business.
And instead of not making a scene, Jack fought back all the way to Supreme Court and he won.
In a 7-2 ruling.
That he does not have to put a message about a gay wedding on a cake.
That he can make a cake, but he is not going to put a message that conflicts with his religious beliefs.
This is not about gay marriage, folks.
This is about the freedom of religion in this country.
Don't let them fool you on this.
So they came back for Jack Phillips again, Joe, even after he won his 7-2 ruling in the Supreme Court.
Because what did I tell you yesterday about liberals?
You can split the country into as many conservative places as you want.
They will never stop, folks.
We must remain the United States because it's never, ever gonna stop.
You doubt me?
They didn't stop for Jack Phillips.
Jack Phillips won in the Supreme Court, and they came and asked him to make, into his store again, and asked him to make a transgender cake with a message on it he disagreed with.
Jack Phillips made a scene again.
Good for Jack.
Jack threatened another lawsuit, which would have went right to the Supreme Court again.
And Jack would have won again.
And you know what happened, Joe?
We found out yesterday.
I have the story in the Daily Signal today.
The Civil Rights Commission in Colorado, who was harassing this patriot, finally backed down.
Because you know what happened, Joe?
They were going to be held personally liable.
Personally!
These people on the Civil Rights Commission for harassing him.
Ladies and gentlemen, you sue the living s*** out of these people every time you can.
They harass you, you make them personally pay.
You put meat on that bone.
You put their skin in the game.
They want to harass you and hide behind the veil of government bureaucracy?
You take their house.
You take their assets.
The time for not making a scene is over.
God bless Jack Phillips in this fight.
You're a warrior for the cause.
Your name will go down amongst religious patriots in this country, and people will remember you for something more important.
Good for you, brother.
You fight on.
We're with you.
All right, folks, thanks again for tuning in.
I'll be back with you tomorrow.
Maybe the... I don't know how my left arm will look.
We'll see.
Let's see how... Here it is.
So everybody get a picture.
There's a microphone.
Let's see.
I'm not making a muscle, by the way.
Like, hey, look at me.
Where's the... It's that way.
You know, that muscle thing.
That is... Look, look.
There you go.
No muscles there.
But let's see how swollen it is tomorrow.
I'll show you my left arm.
That used to be a joke growing up in Queens.
Hey, where's the park?
It's that way.
The guy's like struggling to make a muscle.
Look at my... Check that out.
So we'll see how swollen it is.
And let's get a measure because I won't be able to work out my left arm for a couple weeks.
It'll probably be like a string bean by the time next week comes.
But my doctor's an awesome guy.
Love the guy.
So God bless his hands today.
I hope everything goes okay.
I hope things go well, Dan.
Thanks, brother.
Yeah, Joe's got a big heart, man.
I appreciate that.
You're welcome.
All right, folks.
Happy Ash Wednesday.
Go out, get your ashes today for all you Christians out there, and I will see you all tomorrow.
