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Oct. 22, 2025 - The David Knight Show
57:15
Argentina: A Century of Socialism
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Welcome back.
Our guest is Steve Bonta.
He's publisher of the New American.
It's a magazine from the John Burch Society.
And we were just talking off air, and he's lived in Argentina.
So he can tell us a little bit about that.
He's also most recently lived in China as well.
He's the author of a book Inside the United Nations and a lot of articles for the New Americans.
As a matter of fact, there was one that I wanted to get to today before he came on that I didn't have a chance to, and we'll talk about that.
And that is the UN trying to establish a tax, a global tax on shipping in the name of the climate MacGuffin.
And so we'll talk about that as well.
But he also contacted me because he wanted to talk about gold and money, and that's also very topical right now.
So thank you for joining us, Steve.
Happy to be here.
Thank you.
Let's talk a little bit since I was just talking about Argentina and beef and things like that.
Give us your take on what's having lived in Argentina.
Give us your take on what's going on.
Yeah, I mean, the thing about Argentina, I lived there as a teenager way back before the Falklands War and the military junta days.
Oh, wow.
And Argentina is not like, well, the whole southern cone, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile in particular, is really quite different from what most Americans think Latin America is like.
When most people think of Latin America, they think of men with sombreros and donkeys and tortillas and that kind of thing.
We think in terms of Mexican, maybe Caribbean American stuff, Puerto Rico.
And southern South America, Argentina in particular, is a lot more like Europe.
In fact, Argentina, culturally, is more Italian than Spanish.
There are more people of Italian ancestry than Spanish ancestry.
And the current president Javier Millé, excuse me, is one of them.
And when I arrived in Argentina in 1979, I was really shocked at how well educated the people were.
It's a very bookish society.
People love to play chess, for example.
Not to put too fine a point on it.
They have their problems too, but they are very well educated.
And in those days, mostly maleducated and pironists and supporters of socialism and so forth.
But Millay is a different animal altogether.
He's a very, very bright guy and extremely articulate.
Anyone who knows Spanish listening to him talk, he's very persuasive.
He's really a silver-tongued individual.
And as is his mentor, an Argentine economist named Alberto Benegas Lynch.
You can find lectures by him on YouTube as well.
And these are both men of very sound understanding of free market economics and principles of libertarianism generally, the non-aggression principle, all the rest of this stuff.
And so Millé is a multi-talented individual, very much in the Argentine mold.
He's an accomplished, I believe, a rock guitarist and a semi-professional soccer player, a football player at one point, and this kind of thing.
And mostly self-educated as an economist, as well as a successful talk show host, kind of a Rush Lindbaugh type figure, and this kind of thing.
And now, obviously, he's the president of Argentina.
Argentina is, of all of the Latin American countries, probably has the government most similar to ours, at least on paper.
So the Argentine, when Argentina first became independent of Spain, it was ruled for several decades by a series of what they called caudillos, which were military dictators, culminating in a guy named General Rosas, who was a really horrific dictator, ran a true police state.
This was in the 1850s.
And when Rosas finally fell, he was replaced.
A group of men quite similar to the American founders, called themselves the Generation of 1838, came forward.
Some of them had studied in Europe and in the United States, had traveled abroad, studied the systems of government of the countries, including the U.S. Constitution, and they attempted to craft a constitution similar to ours.
Argentina is a federal republic, just like the United States is.
It consists of provinces rather than states, but it's very much a federal type arrangement.
And unfortunately, unlike the U.S., well, I mean, maybe similar to us, their constitution has been reformed with scare quotes a number of times.
And so this has enabled the rise of the left.
Obviously, Argentina, as Millais never tires of pointing out, was once one of the world's most powerful countries.
In fact, if you were a European ground down by the yoke of European feudalism, a peasant yearning to be free and have some sort of opportunity in life, there were two prime destinations in the late 19th century.
One was, of course, the U.S., and the other was Argentina.
And Argentina, like the U.S., was and remains a melting pot, very amenable to immigration, and at one time was very, very a place where a man could basically go and do as he pleased and prosper or fail according to his own efforts.
And obviously all that's and that led to a state of affairs where by the early 20th century, Argentina was one of the top five or so richest countries in the world.
And the expression in English, as rich as an Argentine, was a common expression back in the roaring 20s and all that.
All that's changed.
You don't hear that anymore.
Yeah, so yeah, and so Argentina has since undergone almost a century of socialism.
They call it Peronism, but it's a species of collectivism.
And with just horrific results, when I was there more than 40 years ago living there, I've been back since, but when I was actually living there, the inflation rate was running at 50, 100% per month and this kind of thing.
And no one, under those circumstances, could save money.
The moment you got paid anything, you immediately had to buy land or buy gold, silver, any type of actual assets because the idea of actually putting in a savings account or anything like that was not to be thought of.
So this is the way the Argentine economy has evolved.
And then Malay comes along and says, have you had enough?
And the younger generation in Argentina, kind of similar to the way our Gen Z is shaping up here, has said, you know, we don't want this anymore.
You know, this may have worked for our parents and our grandparents and our great-grandparents, but this isn't what we want.
We want opportunity.
We want to be able to actually enjoy the fruits of our labors.
And so I think Millay is right-headed, but now he's encountering, he's in a situation where he's no longer living in the world of theory.
He's living in the pragmatic, rough and tumble world of politics, where the reality is, and this may or may not be reinforced by this weekend's elections, national congressional elections, is that he's kind of a lone man.
The Peronas still dominate the Congress, and they use it to thwart most of his agenda.
So it's been very, very rough slog for him.
And whether he'll succeed is still an open question.
I mean, when I see these, right now he's been barnstorming all around the country to rapturous crowds in many towns and cities that have never had an Argentine president visit them before because he wants to make gains in Congress in this weekend's congressional elections.
But I see these videos and I think, yeah, one person could step out of the crowd with a pistol and this would all be done with.
Well, it's a very cautionary tale for us because if they started with a constitution and aspirations of freedom, looking at America, and then you look at what happened with the Peronistas and all the rest of the stuff, a large part of that, I think, is the cult of personality.
And I think that's one of the things that, you know, I don't know.
I've never lived there, so I don't know the pulse of the people.
But when I look at how infatuated they were with Juan and Evita Peron and how that played out through them, this whole idea of people getting attached to an individual or to a party rather than to a set of principles.
And I look at that and say, well, you can't really reverse course.
And in a sense, Javier Malay comes in with a very charismatic personality as well.
It's a different type of personality, as you pointed out, his rock star aspects and his sharp tongue that he's got, throwing out not only debating points, but also insults to people and the hair that he is his trademark and all the rest of this stuff.
So in a sense, you still have the Argentine people, I think, influenced a great deal.
As everybody is, as we are here in America, by personalities that are there.
And if they can have a situation where their free society can be overthrown and you wind up with the Peronistas and you wind up with people being disappeared, put into helicopters and flown out and dropped into the ocean, if you're a political dissident, that can happen anywhere.
It can happen here as well, can't it?
Yeah, and I mean, it has happened here in the sense.
I mean, Peron was the same generation as FDR.
And FDR's, the stamp of his personality still remains in Washington, D.C. I mean, FDR was the pivotal 20th century figure in American politics in which he basically came out, he seized the tiller of the ship of state and said, hard left.
Yeah, that's right.
That's what we're going to do.
And from now on, everything is going to emanate from the federal government, the federal government.
There is no problem that cannot be solved by the creative application of federal government force.
That was the premise of the New Deal.
And these other lesser figures, Lyndon Johnson and more recently, Clinton and Obama and even Joe Biden and so forth, are just really pale shadows, but they're swimming in his wake.
And the state of affairs where Washington, D.C. is wholly owned by the Democratic Party, which embodies that philosophy, I think, more completely than the Republicans, although they're certainly not perfect either.
This is really a partisan issue as such.
But all of that, which Trump is now purporting to fight against and overturn and so forth, is the legacy of the cult of personality of FDR and the man who followed him, Truman as well, to some extent, had that effect.
But they permanently altered, well, up till now, permanently altered the direction of the ship of state.
And it's proving a very rough slog indeed to change people's minds and say, well, we need to get back to the idea that the federal government is the creation and not the creator, that it is to be subordinate to the states, and they in turn to the people and the Constitution and all this type of thing.
It's a very tough sell now.
So, you know, that's the same thing.
Yes.
I had a very interesting interview last week with a guy who just wrote a new biography of FDR.
And very, very interesting.
His point of view was that even though you had the Democrats who wanted to go to the same place that FDR did, you still had a lot of opposition within the Democrat Party to a lot of these extreme radical authoritarian tactics that FDR was doing.
They said, we don't want to do it that way.
There was a clear understanding in early 20th century America, just like we saw with alcohol prohibition.
They wanted alcohol prohibition, but they didn't do something like our drug war.
They said we've got to have a constitutional amendment.
And so you had people, even though they wanted to go the same place that FDR did in terms of government control and government taking over and running everything, they said we're worried about that tactic, whether it's a packing the Supreme Court or various other things that he was doing.
And that's what I think is sadly lacking on both the left and the right in America today.
And I go back and I look at FDR.
I don't know if you are familiar with the work of Strauss and Howe fourth turning the book that's there.
But I see, to me, I see that we're in another fourth turning right now, as they predicted.
And we have these fourth turning presidents like Lincoln and FDR.
Now I think Trump is in that mole who want to go very quickly, accelerationists.
They want to create chaos.
And they don't care what means are used as long as they get their desired end.
And I think we're seeing the problem right now, and I think we're going to see this, is that even if we agree on the goal of where they want to go, I do agree with Trump on many of the goals of where he wants to go, very concerned about the means that he's using because it's going to set very, very dangerous precedents that will come back to haunt us, I think.
Well, and this is, you know, the problem with permitting the radical, I hate to use the word radical left, but these radical utopian reformists, they're all collectivists by disposition, allowing them enough leeway until you get to the point that Argentina was in by the 1970s, where they control the judiciary.
They control all the local governments.
They control the police force, everything else.
And the same was true by the time that Allende came to power in Chile in the 1970s, or when Fujimori came to power in Peru in the 1990s.
In all of those cases, the radical left had progressed to the point where they were militarized, where they were, you know, they're kind of going where Antifa would like to go, but we weren't quite that there yet.
The question becomes, how do you solve that problem when you're so far gone that there's no longer any appeal to the law because the judiciary is all corrupted and the police can't be relied upon and all this type of thing.
And so this creates a well-nigh insoluble problem.
We say, well, the only thing to do is to do what Pinochet did in Chile and Fujimori did in Peru and the military Junta Galtieri and people like that did in Argentina.
And that is you go in and you use extraordinary force and you try to clean house.
And I'm very much afraid that we're approaching that point in the United States because we've already gotten to the point where the law is so twisted that they don't do much if you go out and wearing the banner of Antifa or Black Lives Matter or something like that and vandalize stores, assault, even kill people and this sort of thing, the law gives you a slap on the wrist.
But heaven forfend if you defend yourself against someone like that, as happened in Kenosha right here in Wisconsin a few years ago, and this type of thing, where you get the point where the law and the judiciary can no longer be relied upon.
It gets to the point, and this is what revolutionaries, of course, know.
They understand that if they can destabilize things to a certain point, the only possible remedy is some sort of a crackdown from above.
And then that generates the pretext to say, you see, you see, they are fascist, just like we're saying, you know, and that gives them more impetus.
And that's kind of what's happening now, where the Trump administration has the situation where the cores of a number of our major cities are completely out of control.
And the local magistrates don't want to do anything about it because they're in sympathy within because they perceive that crime creates creates a rationale for more government.
I mean, at some level, venal politicians like crime and like civil unrest because it creates a need for them and their services.
And so that's the reason that places like Chicago and Memphis and Portland and LA and New York, of course, their local constabularies are saying, oh, we're not going to crack down and so forth.
And so what are you going to do?
It's a very difficult problem.
And I think that push is coming from the right also.
I've said for the longest time in terms of this fourth turning, you go back and you're like, previous three, fourth turnings we've had in the U.S. have been the Depression, World War II, part of that, the Civil War, part of the whole thing.
And I said, yeah.
And so I said, you know, I think we're probably going to have all three of these things at once.
I think we're going to have a depression.
I think we're going to also have a civil war, a revolutionary war, and a world war.
And it seems like all of our global leaders, regardless of what political party they're in, regardless of whether they're left or right, they all seem to be pushing us in this direction.
I wish I could say, no, you're wrong, and here's why.
But I mean, obviously anything can happen.
No one can see the future.
But I would not be at all surprised if that scenario unfolds over the next five to ten years.
Well, let's bring it back to the farmers.
I mean, what do you think?
Have you paid attention to what's going on?
I mean, a lot of what they're saying is, and we have seen this when we saw things with the eggs, for example.
They go through with a PCR procedure and say, well, we've got one chicken here that tested positive, so we're going to kill all five million of them here at this location, that type of thing.
It was kind of a government-imposed thing, began under Biden, but it continued under Trump's USDA until Brooke Rollins said, now our solution is that you vaccinate all the chickens with mRNA and other animals with this mRNA vaccine.
So the question is, we have so many different issues.
One of the issues with beef stuff is the consolidation of it.
Part of that is the government-mandated centralized processing, meat processing places that are there.
What do we do from a market perspective?
I mean, certainly Trump and Besant are not even focused on what's going on with the farms.
And it's a surprise because we saw what happened in the first Trump administration when he started messing with China and trade and tariffs and things like that.
They immediately retaliated against agriculture.
And the government was slow to act at that point in time to repair the damage that they had inflicted.
And they're being very, very slow to do it now.
What do you think is going on with that?
Well, in generalities, first of all, I mean, the problem is we tend to elect urban people as presidents.
Obviously, Trump being no exception.
He's an East Coast urbanite.
He's now a Florida urbanite, whereas formerly he was a New York urbanite.
But those people, and I can say this without prejudice because I grew up in rural western Pennsylvania on a farm.
And I've lived in Nebraska as well, worked in a small cattle bank in a Nebraska cattle town for some reason.
Well, you had quite a background.
I've been around and around the world.
But I can tell you this.
I mean, the contrast in culture between, I live in Wisconsin now, by the way, which is a farming state, primarily dairy farms.
But the contrast in the mentality of the man of the earth, the farmer, and the urbanite is very stark.
And urbanites tend to view the economy primarily in financial terms.
The key secret to economic success is making sure, keeping an eye on the money supply and proper monetary policy, all that type of thing.
Because, of course, all the big cities are where the banking and the finance takes place.
That's their primary raison d'être is to be enablers of international trade and finance and banking and all that sort of thing.
I mean, the Federal Reserve is actually the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is where all the action is as far as monetary policy is concerned.
So that's the lens through which someone like Trump is going to tend to see the world and not really have a grasp of farming.
I mean, I happen to think that Casey, Ezra Taph Benson, some other good secretaries of agriculture, that we shouldn't even have a Department of Agriculture.
Oh, I agree.
I don't see that as being part of the constitutional purview of the federal government.
And that's kind of an extra constitutional heresy that goes back also more than 100 years, well before FDR.
The Department of Agriculture was already had its finger in the pie and was influencing meddling with the market mechanisms as far as the prices of crops were concerned and this kind of thing.
So, I mean, I tend to be a Jeffersonian in the sense that I think that an ideal republic is first and foremost, you know, agrarian.
Yes.
I think manufacturing and finance and all those things are fine, but it's all predicated on a strong agrarian.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, I absolutely agree.
Yeah, he believed that an agrarian society was essential to maintaining our liberty and our form of government.
And I agree with him.
When you look at our Civil War, for example, I've mentioned many, many times that Italy had a civil war at exactly the same time.
And they didn't have slaves, but it was about the consolidation and centralization of power, creating a nation-state, when in the past they had had a relatively decentralized, agrarian Italy.
They wanted to create a nation-state, and it was driven by a lot of manufacturing and urban interests that were involved in that.
And so that's what we see happening over and over again.
Jefferson said, as you're talking about, how it's always focused on finances and other things, they said cities are a threat to the health, the wealth, and the liberty of man.
I think nothing has changed with that.
It's just in the nature of the way that people live.
Well, here's the thing about agrarianism: is that, number one, it delivers the best possible standard of living.
I mean, Rome never had it better than when they were an agrarian republic, for example.
And the same could be said, mutatis mutandis, of the medieval Italian republics and so forth and so on, although many of them were also, they were based on trade and all this kind of thing.
But the thing is that agrarianism is not conducive to domination.
That's right.
You're self-sufficient, yes, exactly.
But finance is.
I mean, the basis, yeah, the basis for imperialism or whatever you want to call it, that kind of thing, being a superpower, is finance.
You have to have robust finances and robust banking systems and all this.
That's very much, of course, in sync with the Hamiltonian vision of America.
But America did just fine for all of the decades that it wasn't a superpower, a world-engirding power.
And the idea, and this is as much implicit in the policies and rhetoric of the Trump administration as it was in all of his predecessors going back to the early 20th century.
The idea is that America is a superpower and must remain a superpower.
Yes.
Yes.
Phrases like, we're the indispensable nation, all this kind of thing, well, kind of feed into that.
And here's an interesting thing.
Speaking of Argentina as well, I mean, Argentina, interestingly enough, has never been a great military power.
They've never, actually mostly South, they've never been.
But they showed that during the Falkland Wars, didn't they?
Yeah, the Falkland Wars was an exception.
There's some interesting history there, too.
The wind of that right now.
But by and large, Argentina has been very content with its dominion there in southern South America.
It has all that it needs and feels no need, though it certainly has the resources.
I mean, resource-wise, it's just as blessed as the United States.
They could become a superpower if they wanted to.
They just don't want that.
And so the United States, I mean, it's heresy to say this, but I wrote an article a while ago for the magazine questioning the very premise.
Should America be a superpower?
Is this really what the founders envisioned?
Is that what we want?
And obviously, it depends what you mean if by superpower you mean, well, the greatest country on earth, the place that everybody wants to go to live and all that.
Okay, well, I suppose.
But if you mean it in the sense that we mean it today, the dominatrix of the world, so to speak, that is something very much counter to what the founders wanted.
And so going back to our agrarian roots, what's his name?
The financial wizard who now lives in Singapore.
I can't think of his name.
But he's said a lot in recent years.
He thinks that the future of wealth is actually going to be in farming after this whole fourth turning thing gets through.
Well, Bill Gates kind of thinks that, doesn't he?
He's bought a lot of land, even though he doesn't want to have agricultural farming.
He wants to manufacture food.
He still has bought a lot of land.
And I think he realizes that's the fallback position.
Maybe after they destroy the food supply and everybody is fed up just like they are with Beyond Meat, I was just talking about how their stock that hit a high of $240 is now less than $1.
So after all of that, people turn back to the farm.
And so he's kind of hedging his bets by getting farmland.
Yeah, and why not?
I mean, I mean, because that's they call it real estate for a reason.
There's a certain tangible reality about owning land and developing it for farming or whatever.
And I think we've sort of become divorced from that in our relentless quest for ascendancy over nature, which I think is understandable.
It's good that we have things like the polio vaccine and all the rest of that nowadays.
We have modern medicine and maybe that life is not quite so Hobbesian as it once was.
So it's understandable that we want to subdue nature, the more brutish aspects of nature.
But at the same time, you don't want to throw the baby out with a bath and say, we're going to live entirely in this technocratic society, completely divorced from the need to get our hands dirty, Mike Rose style or anything like that.
And so, yeah.
Yeah, a virtual reality, which is not a reality at all.
Well, you were talking about this idea of American exceptionalism and how we are indispensable and how we have to be, you know, it has to be Pax Americana and so forth, and how financial issues are so much a part of that.
And so, of course, when we look at the Federal Reserve and what is happening with gold, give us your take on that.
That is, of course, the superpower that underlies the American empire, and that is the ability to conjure money up out of nowhere.
And they may be at the end of their road to use it.
And force everywhere else to do it because it's the world reserve currency.
That's the real rub.
And that's the reason.
I mean, I was talking with an economist the other day on this.
Why is it that Argentina, when they print a lot of money, all they get is horrendous inflation?
Whereas we do the same thing, and somehow it never has that same effect.
Well, the answer is that we enjoy a luxury that the Argentine central bank does not.
Namely, we can export.
We can print lots of money.
We can create lots of debt, ex nihilo, and people will come and buy it because pursuant the remnants of the Bretton Woods Agreement and just the way the world works now, everything is denominated in dollars.
There's a unique demand for U.S. dollars that doesn't exist for Argentine pesos or even Euros or Japanese yen or something like that.
So we've managed to insulate ourselves to some extent, and a lot of the inflation has been shipped abroad.
But what's happening now, I mean, inflation is a very, is a little more complex than simply, okay, you know, we double the money supply and prices double, that kind of thing.
It's not as simple as that.
It's more diffuse.
And this is the reason that a lot of economists, not just modern monetary theorists, but a lot of economists, Keynesians all, reject the idea that inflation is ultimately a monetary phenomenon that's caused, in effect, by governments and banks printing money because it's hard to see, in terms of the prices, price rises versus the money supply.
It's very complex.
It's hard to perceive.
Some prices rise faster than others and so forth and so on.
But the reality is that inflation is caused by printing money.
Inflation is not possible except under conditions of a fiat money source.
And fiat means money that's not tied to gold and silver.
Funny thing is that gold and silver, for all of all the obloquy that's been thrown at them, gold was famously called a barbarous relic by Keynes.
And this kind of thing, people who believe in the advisability of returning to the gold standard are derisively called gold bugs in economic parlance and so forth.
In spite of all that, the fact is that gold and silver remain real money.
And their price behaves like real money.
So if you want to sort of cut through all of the complications of inflation, consumer price inflation versus asset inflation, all this type of thing, and see, well, what's really happening?
You look at the price of gold and silver, and it's going through the roof.
But here's the interesting thing.
I saw an article.
And I think it's because the central banks don't buy into this Keynesianism.
And certainly they don't buy into the modern monetary theory, which I call the magic money tree of the MMT.
They're accumulating gold for their own purposes.
And even if they're trying to come up with an alternative economic system, financial system to ours, which has been weaponized, they are still turning to gold for credibility.
Well, sure.
Although they say, well, it's just a hedge and all this type of thing.
But the reality is, and I saw, I mean, so if you, I was just attending a conference the other day down in Florida at the Mises Institute, and there was a lot of talk about this.
And one of the cardinal features of a free market, a non-inflationary free market economy, is that over time, prices will tend to fall.
And we saw this, for example, in the United States post-Civil War, the latter half of the 19th century, is that prices of goods and services gradually decrease over time.
And to some extent, we even see it today, although it's very much muddied by the inflationary waters.
But you see, for example, things like the prices of cell phones and laptops and so forth tend to decline over time.
But here's something that never declines in price, supposedly, and that's houses.
People love to flip houses, buy houses, investments, real estate, because people, the mantra goes, the value is always going to go up.
Even if you don't do anything to improve, the value is going to go up over time.
This has been our experience.
Well, there's a reason for that.
And the reason is that those are assets that are very close to where the money spigots are, and the money center banks, where the new money enters the economy.
And so, like stock prices, the prices of real estate, houses and so forth, are driven up artificially by inflationary government policy.
But here's an interesting fact.
Apparently, the price of houses, if reckoned in terms of gold, has also been slowly declining over the years and decades.
In other words, if you reckon things in terms of gold and or silver, then you see the true, you know, the real economy.
Yes.
And what we're seeing now with gold, you know, the skyrocketing gold and now silver prices as well.
I'm kind of glad I bought silver over the last several years.
Although that's a silly thing to say, though, isn't it?
Because my silver is quote unquote worth more, but it really isn't.
Yeah, it's the dollar is worthless.
And it would be the height of folly for me to take the silver and say, oh, now it's worth twice what it was.
I'm going to sell it and make a profit on it.
I'm not making a profit.
Because what's happened is the worth of the dollar relative to real money, to silver and gold, has plummeted.
And those are both indices of very severe inflation, even if we're not yet seeing it at the grocery stores.
I agree.
Yeah, as a matter of fact, there were some articles saying, you know, you need to start looking at assets and even things like the stock markets.
Look at them in terms of gold and they don't look so good.
We've had a lot of inflation in terms of stock prices, a lot of it because of the AI bubble.
But when you look at it in terms of the Dow Jones Industrial Average or these other market-wide metrics, it hasn't gone up as much as gold has.
And I know I've talked to Tony Arnaban in the past.
We've looked at people who have done experiments, gone back and saying, how much would it cost to do certain things over 100 years, say 120 years ago or so, before they went onto the fiat thing?
If you had gold, if you bought a custom soup or you took a trip where you did this or that and start to compare it, they would find that it was pretty much comparable, just like you were saying with real estate, that it was basically the prices were about the same if you priced it in terms of gold, although the prices have gone up significantly in terms of fiat currency.
Well, and the fact that people have this mistaken idea, they think in terms of what things are worth in the dollar, is a reflection of the intuition that people have that goes back to the days when we had sound money, you know, pre-the act and pre-FDR and all that kind of thing.
And that is the idea that money should be both something with value and also an accountancy, something, a way of keeping records.
Whereas in a fiat money system, money no longer has value.
It's just an accountancy device.
The value is still there, but it's been divorced from money.
And that's reflected in the behavior of gold and silver in that sense.
But money itself is no longer a repository for value.
And I know that some of the Misians will criticize the very idea of value this kind of thing because valuation is very subjective.
But that's the issue.
But people still think money should be valuable in some sense, in the sense that it once was.
And so that's where this confusion arises from.
People say, well, how much is this worth in $1965 or $1980 and this kind of thing?
But what we have now is under so-called fiat money, which is really a contradiction in terms, is purely and simply a system of accountancy that is fraudulent.
Yeah, that's right.
Because, you know, it says, you know, you put a thousand of me in the bank, and it's still going to be worth $1,000 plus whatever interest, you know, 10 years from now, 20 years from now.
And of course, that's not the case.
Everybody knows this.
Yes, that's right.
And so when you look at the retail trade, a lot of urban mining going on.
People, New York Times actually wrote an article about it this last week about the rush of people to go down to the diamond district in New York City where people will pay you for your jewelry.
So people are taking gold and silver jewelry down, cashing it out.
One woman was saying, well, you know, I got $7,000 for this, and now I'm going to go take a vacation or whatever.
So she's not using it as a store of value.
She's just cashing it in and taking a vacation at, you know, taking advantage of the fact that she can get the vacation that's still priced in dollars.
She can get that in the value of gold.
But what they're doing is they're transferring out of an asset that retains its value into something that is evaporating very quickly.
It makes sense if you're going to immediately consume it.
And a lot of people are caught in a liquidity trap.
As a matter of fact, when we saw the plunge in gold and silver, the questions were, was this the last day or so?
Questions are, is this profit-taking?
Because it's been going straight up for quite some time.
Or as one person who is a former Federal Reserve governor said, I think this is indicating something's bigger than that, than just price than taking profits.
They said, this looks to me like a liquidity issue, like the type of thing that we saw back in the spring of 2020 when we had the lockdowns imposed on us and that type of thing.
And said, I think a lot of people in the financial markets are getting caught in a liquidity squeeze and they're having to liquidate gold with that.
So we'll see what happens with that.
But that's the key issue.
And it's really a control issue.
I think it's kind of interesting.
You know, we talk about Bretton Woods, as you mentioned before.
When you look at what happened with Bretton Woods 2, Kissinger moved it to essentially the petrodollar.
He kind of tied the dollar to energy using Saudi Arabia.
And that has now disappeared.
Perhaps that's what's going on with Venezuela.
What do you think about that?
They got more oil than Saudi.
We could reinstitute a petro dollar if we control that oil.
Yeah, that's part of it, to be sure.
And his neighbor Guiana, it turns out, has a lot of oil too.
So, you know, that whole part of the world, as does Mexico.
And so, yeah, I mean, and Argentina does, too.
I don't know if people don't know this, but particularly down in Patagonia in Chubut province, in particular, and Ushuaya, way down the southern tip of Argentina, is now become quite the oil boom town.
Wow.
So Patagonia is not just high-expensive clothing, right?
No, no, I've been down there.
It's not a beautiful area, but it's definitely prospering quite remarkably.
And a lot of that is because of the oil that's found on the continental shelf off the coast of Argentina there.
And so, yeah, there's a lot of, and you can bet that that's in the back of Trump's mind and Besson's mind as well when they're kind of building this new bromance with Malays Argentina.
So, yeah, I mean, no doubt, oil is still, in spite of all of the quest for alternative energy and the kind of fanatical attempts to rid the world of fossil fuels, the pragmatic reality is that oil ain't going anywhere anytime soon.
That's right.
So it's going to remain the main stock in trade.
The engine of growth, yeah.
I mean, China right now is trying to sort of belatedly realize that their policy of having a financial bamboo curtain around China and preventing the Renminbi from being used internationally for fear that it might become destabilized or something like this.
They're finally realizing if we really want to compete with the United States, we have to try to internationalize, to globalize the Renminbi and make it an alternative to the U.S. dollar.
But they have one major disadvantage, and that is that China has no oil.
None that anyone's aware of.
They're completely an oil and gas importing country from Russia and other places.
And so they're not a power player.
Yeah, and you go back and look at it.
I mean, oil is foundational to so many of our wars as well as to the economy.
And if you go back to the 1930s and the technocrats and the technocracy incorporated and so forth, they were talking about essentially getting rid of money and evaluating everything in terms of energy usage.
And of course, you've got a lot of people who buy into that technocracy philosophy, people like Thiel and Musk who are around Trump.
And, you know, yeah, exactly.
And so, you know, I think this whole idea that for them, it makes sense to evaluate things in terms of energy.
And of course, the energy would be the barrel of oil still as a practical matter.
So I think that's the foundation of a lot of this stuff that we're seeing here.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
Enough so.
So while we talk about that, I mean, the UN, though, sees that their power basis is kind of using what I call a MacGuffin because that goes back to what Hitchcock said.
You know, it's basically just something that you put out there to control the narrative.
And so their basis is to try to also control energy by restricting it, by taxing it, and so forth.
And you had an interesting article on the New American about the UN tax.
And we see something being done right by Trump here.
I have been very critical of most of Trump's policies, but I think one place where he has done a far better job than any of the other presidents has been on the energy issue in both the first term and now I think in the second term, it's still not perfect.
There's many things that are still left out of it.
But they put their foot down against this UN global tax on shipping.
Tell us a little bit about that.
Yeah, well, so this is something that has been in the works for a number of years at the behest of the IMO, the International Maritime Organization, which is a little-known UN appendage.
It's part of the UN, and its job is to regulate shipping.
Okay, and there's, by the way, there's a corresponding organization to regulate aviation, and they're trying to do the same thing to instigate a global tax on aviation fuel as well.
But that's another story.
So the shipping tax is potentially a tectonic event because it would represent, I mean, irrespective of what kind of taxes, it would be the first time that the United Nations would have independent taxing authority.
And they have to have that.
And they have to have that to be a powerhouse, really.
You know, first you've got to have the ability to tax, and then you have to have the ability to raise an army.
Right.
Yeah, and so those are two things that politically were not palatable back in the mid-1940s when the UN and also the Bretton Woods system were set up.
The people who said I would have dearly liked to have proclaimed the UN a world government then, but knew that that was not feasible.
And so they created an organization that could be the framework, could be gradually filled out over time and turn into a world, which is why the UN looks like a government, why it has basically a bicameral legislature, has the Security Council and the General Assembly, and it has, or purports to have, executive, legislative, and judicial powers and all this type of thing.
There's a reason for all of that.
But what the UN doesn't have de facto is the, number one, you mentioned a military.
I mean, to the extent that there's a UN military at all, it's crucially dependent on the willingness of member states to contribute troops to serve under UN command.
But they don't have the authority to levy their own troops, to conscript people.
They don't have their own independent military.
And the same is true of taxation.
All governments worth their salt have the authority, the power to levy taxes, which the UN doesn't.
I mean, how does it get funded?
Well, primarily by, again, by donations from member states, membership fees and the like.
Man, that's been a great, has curtailed the UN's ability to live up to the potential envisaged by its founders.
But now, and, you know, we were warning about this.
I and my colleague Alex Newman in particular have written a number of articles on this impending global tax in shipping, which has been in the making for five, six years.
It's kind of been out there.
And we fully expected that it was going to happen this year.
And that would represent the first time that the UN was able to collect to have its own revenue stream.
And it won't be the last.
I mean, if it's passed, there are other ideas out there like taxing international transactions on the internet, obviously carbon tax of jet fuel is another major one.
Things like a global income tax and global property taxes are further down the road.
But certainly, they kind of hope for that as well.
And in this case, what happened was that the Trump administration, in a rare, I have to say, a rare spasm of ideological clarity, Trump himself said, this is an unconstitutional global tax.
It's not happening.
And if anyone tries to make this happen, we're going to impose severe penalties on them and so forth.
And the result was that some countries, including Argentina, by the way, which earlier this year abstained from voting on the measure, they kind of tried to wiggle their way through it.
They turned into a firm no vote.
And on the other hand, Brazil, China, and most of the EU, certainly great UK, are supporters of the measure.
But Saudi Arabia and the other major petroleum exporting countries, a lot of countries that are crucially dependent on cruise lines like the Caribbean nations for their economic well-being, were all opposed to it.
And it ended up being a very slim vote no, but it's not really no.
Okay, so what they were going to basically at the IMO summit in London, they were supposed to rubber stamp this thing, and in another year or two, it's going to start coming into effect, and the UN will start having all this money coming in, ostensibly in the name of reducing carbon emissions and moving forward the net zero 2050 goal, all that stuff.
And instead, they were on the verge of saying it's just not going to happen, but in a last-minute act of parliamentary ledger demand, a couple of the people said, oh, well, here's what we'll do.
We'll vote to table the thing for a year.
So that's what they did.
They said, okay, we're not going to make a decision on it now.
We're going to meet again a year from now.
And of course, they're hoping against hope that the politics will change by then.
And this is what they always do.
This is how the globalists operate.
If once you don't succeed, you try, try, try, try, try again until eventually you get the result that you want.
So this is not going away.
Kudos to Trump.
Give credit where credit is due.
Just like the WHO's pandemic treaty.
They get shut down.
They keep coming back.
They're relentless.
They're going to keep coming back and changing the whole thing or maybe just bringing it up as it was for another one of these things.
And it is kind of interesting because we've kind of seen this pattern.
And of course, Zbignary Brzezinski was all about this in terms of creating the trilateral commission and these different economic areas, creating trade groups that would essentially have some economic control over people and then unifying those trade groups into a political entity.
That's the pattern that we saw happening in Europe with the common market then becoming, you know, going in with more and more economic control in the marketplace and then finally coming in with the Euro and things like that.
Now they're moving to, you know, after they establish more and more political control of people, probably all of this push with Ukraine and everything is to give them a European army, which they denied they were doing as Brexit was happening.
Reports, they wanted a European army.
Oh, no, no, we don't want that.
Now they're talking about it openly.
And so we see these types of things.
It's kind of interesting that the UN has taken, you know, you can unify people economically and then unify them politically to create this large governing block and then bring those blocks together into a world government.
But in the case of the UN, they're doing it politically and now they're moving into the economic stage, kind of doing it in reverse order.
Either way, it's that same goal of consolidation and centralization, isn't it?
Yes, and using as an entering wedge things like trade and economics.
Saying in effect, as of course, the Europeans did way back in the 1950s.
Oh, no, no, this isn't political.
This is just about free trade and open borders.
And obviously, who can oppose such positive-sounding axioms?
But, of course, as it turned out, it was about much more than that.
And then they're trying to do the same thing here in the New World they did with the FTAA of a generation ago that ultimately kind of fell apart.
They tried to create, you know, from Canada to Tierra del Fuego, you know, this free trade zone, ostensibly free trade zone.
And that eventually didn't work out.
But they're still working.
I mean, you know, this the fact that we have a sort of a customs agreement, a trade agreement amongst the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, there are souls out there who want to transform that into some kind of a broader North American political union.
And people like Mark Carney openly talk about that.
His predecessor, Justin Trudeau, up in Canada, are very well aware of this.
And certainly some of the people in Washington as well know that that's the real goal.
You use trade and you persuade people of the advisability of having open borders and free trade, and then you work toward the political conversions.
That's right.
And of course, I remember when Trump said, I'm going to get rid of NAFTA.
We don't like NAFTA, so I'm going to do the USMCU.
And replace it with something else.
Yeah, and you guys were spot on at the New American and saying that, well, the USMCA is not really fundamentally different from NAFTA.
There's just been some tweaking of some other stuff.
So what do you make of the fact that Trump began this administration by attacking a lot of the same agreements that he was boasting about in his first administration, coming after Mexico, coming after Canada, even accusing Canada of bringing fentanyl into the country?
What do you make of that?
Has he changed?
Does he not want to have this unification that is there with Mexico and Canada, this economic unification?
Well, there's some evidence that he did learn some things during his four years in the political wilderness.
Obviously, certainly experiencing the brunt of lawfare and all that had an effect on him.
But more than that, I suspect that he's actually done something that he probably hasn't done a lot of in his adult life, and that's done some serious reading about some of these issues.
This is the one thing about moneymen, a lot of money men, they're so busy doing what they do, they don't take the time to really read.
And so, while I think a lot of Trump's instincts are spot on, he's instinctively hues toward freedom and so forth.
He doesn't really have a strong understanding of a lot of these issues, and he relies on his advisors and this kind of thing.
And he does seem to have a different crop of advisors.
His first time around, he bought into the idea that, well, I need to surround myself with policy experts.
And in practice, that usually means people of CFR and trilateral pedigree.
And that's why we had that revolving door of Secretary of State and this kind of thing under the first Trump administration.
And he's constantly feuding with his cabinet.
That's because he'd appoint people who were basically globalists and elitists and thought differently than he did, but they were sold to him by his circle of advisors.
Well, you need to have, you know, you're a newcomer to Washington, so you need to have these seasoned experts.
You know, to help him he quickly realized, I don't like what they're telling me to do.
And so this time around, he does seem to have made wiser choices in that regard.
In fact, fortunately, he's got this one really bad hangover, Peter Navarro, who came up with those reciprocal tariffs on that chart that was just utter nonsense.
You know, Navarro's been in prison too, so he's got a chip on his shoulder.
So maybe he's trying to get away from the money.
I mean, Scott Besant is the one guy in this Trump administration that is kind of cut from that cloth, this kind of establishment type guy.
But most of the rest of them are, you know, I mean, there's a lot to quibble with, certainly.
Trump is certainly no Ron Paul or Thomas Massey.
But, you know.
That's right.
Yeah.
And, you know, you get back to Scott Besant and where we began with Argentina.
When you look at this, the beginning of his $20 billion bailout to Argentina, this hasn't gone very well.
Actually, the peso, the Argentine peso, has continued to go down in spite of his financial levers that he's been pulling.
Yeah, well, and again, much as I love Millay and Argentina, we have no, you know, the president has no constitutional power to bail out other countries even via currency swap.
I mean, Clinton did that with Mexico back in the mid-1990s and got into all kinds of trouble.
He used the exchange stabilization fund in his case to just up and send money to Mexico to stabilize the Mexican treasuries and all that type of thing.
Whereas, you know, Besson said, well, it's a currency swap.
Well, what does that mean?
It means that we go in and buy their worthless currency with our somewhat less worthless currency.
So, you know, that's pretty much what's happened.
And yeah, I mean, we'll see.
The elections in Argentina are coming up this weekend to kind of come full circle and we'll see what happens.
Millay will be president one way or the other for two more years, presumably.
But whether or not he has a more compliant Congress is very much in doubt at this point.
We'll see.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, and again, I think a big part of what we're seeing happening in the backfire of Besant's policy is the de-dollarization that's going on internationally.
People are walking away from the dollar because it was weaponized by Biden and continuing to be weaponized by Trump.
They want a different financial system.
They're moving to gold or they're trying to establish BRICS or something like that.
And just to, I think it is also a harbinger of the declining power of the dollar financial system that's there.
What do you think?
Well, absolutely.
I mean, I mean, you know, this is something, again, as with military power, we're loath to admit that the state of affairs that we have all come to accept as natural for the past several generations, to wit, that the dollar is going to be forever and ever, amen, you know, the world's dominant currency, that that could ever change.
But again, you know, the Germans thought the same up through World War I. I mean, you know, the German mark was, you know, alongside the British pound.
And we could, you know, also adduce the example of the British pound, which up until World War II was the world's great currency.
Where's the pound today?
Yeah.
Where's the mark?
Well, the mark doesn't even exist anymore.
We know about German hyperinflation after World War I. So, yeah.
And here's the thing, too.
The triggers for calamitous hyperinflation, Weimar Republic-style hyperinflation, usually are major traumatic events, like a civil war or a major military loss.
And so if the other things that we talk about come to pass, if the civil unrest continues, if the United States gets involved in some kind of major world war starting over Taiwan or Ukraine or something like that, these things could all prove the death knell to dollar supremacy.
Yes.
cause, you know, potentially at least, you know, could just absolutely detonate a bomb in the middle of our American sense of confidence and complacency about the dollar.
I think a lot of people see that.
I think that is fundamental to a lot of this move into gold and silver away from the dollar that we're seeing.
And of course, again, the weaponization of this financial system that we set up, we're destroying it ourselves, even if we don't do it from within.
But there's a lot of issues that are coming up within.
So very important that people keep their ear to the ground.
And one of the great places to do that is at thenewAmerican.com.
Thank you so much, Steve, for joining us.
Our guest has been Steve Bonta, who is the publisher of The New American.
And it's always a pleasure to have people on from JBS.
And I just, I want to see more stories out there about concern about the federalization of policing and other things like that.
Because I tell you, I'm just going back.
I talk about it constantly.
I said, well, the John Burch Society was like 60 years ahead of the rest of everybody when they talked about the dangers of the federalization of the police and the militarization of the police, you know, back in the 1960s, support your local sheriff or whatever.
That is more important than ever, I think.
And we've got to be careful that we don't move into that because of a particular goal that we have.
We have to be mindful of the precedents that we're setting and of the means that we're using because those are going to be the things that are going to be used to hang us when the administration changes as it inevitably will.
Yes.
So thank you so much for joining us.
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