Peter Schiff and Joe Rogan clash over economic collapse, with Schiff warning the U.S. dollar’s devaluation from $14T in debt and Fed money printing will trigger hyperinflation, shortages, and blackouts—echoing Greenspan/Bernanke-era mistakes. He dismisses Bitcoin as a speculative bubble (e.g., 2017’s $100K peak) and defends gold’s scarcity over fiat, citing Germany’s failed Fort Knox audit. Rogan counters with corporate greed (BP Gulf spill) and prohibition-driven crises (Florida’s OxyContin epidemic), while Schiff argues regulation stifles growth, harming inner-city workers via licensing and minimum wage. Their debate hinges on whether market freedom or oversight better prevents systemic failure, with Schiff insisting shrinking government and sound money are the only antidotes to looming economic disaster. [Automatically generated summary]
This episode of the Joe Rogan Experience is sponsored by Squarespace.
If you've been paying attention to the podcast over the last few weeks, you know that we had a website contest.
Squarespace is a really...
As far as, like, a website that creates websites, you literally cannot find a better place than Squarespace.
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We chose four sites out of ten amazing ones.
There were so many amazing sites.
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But I just like how the website was set up, so we went with that one.
And then there is, who are the other ones?
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If you click on that, it'll tell you what that one is.
And then Goat Soup and Whiskey, which is a place in Colorado that is at a ski resort.
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Cool website.
I really like how they did it.
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They have pool tournaments, so they're on my good side.
I just think they did a great job with it.
So those are our four.
And thank you to those people.
You guys win a free year of Squarespace.
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TV shirts?
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Who lets me talk?
T-shirts!
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And for everybody else, go to squarespace.com and enter in the code JOE and the number 1 for 10% off of Squarespace.
That's JOE And the number one, number one being the month of January.
So congratulations to everyone that won.
And to everyone else, look, there were so many amazing websites.
It's really ridiculous that we even picked four.
The one that was number one for me, though, was that Storm Chaser shit.
That was misochasers.com.
My favorite one.
Sorry.
Sorry, everybody else.
I pick a favorite.
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Alright.
Peter Schiff is here.
Cue the music.
Let's get this popping.
The internet is abuzz.
People are very excited to talk to you.
unidentified
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
I'm a mathematical retard, and I really appreciate people like you out there that can spell things out and explain what's wrong with this ridiculous system that we operate under and what's right.
Well, I would disagree with you, but I saw that movie Inside Job and I saw how the whole system works where they essentially set these financial limitations and then wind up getting jobs after the economics professors set these limitations and then wind up getting jobs and wind up profiting off of the fact that they've made it so that these things go through.
You and your video from Occupy Wall Street is one of my all-time favorites.
Yeah, and my purpose of going down there was to call attention to – I think they misdiagnosed or misunderstood what was really going on, and they bought into this idea that it's capitalism or the free market that is the problem.
And so they were blaming maybe Wall Street because they looked at Wall Street as somehow epitomizing American capitalism.
And I wanted to point out that what they were really upset at was not capitalism.
It was because of government.
It was because of central banking and central planning and crony capitalism.
That was the source of all their problems, that really the solution to the problems is free market capitalism.
They just don't understand it.
And so I wanted to go there and explain to the people in that park But more importantly, if people watch the interactions between me and the occupiers to try to really expose how ridiculous the things that they're saying are, I understood that they were upset and they were frustrated, but the source of their frustration was misplaced.
I mean, they should be protesting Washington.
They should be protesting.
I mean, what's going on in Wall Street is a symptom of the problem, and it's not capitalism, because when you have the government and Wall Street working together, that's not the free market.
And it's government that is at the source of it.
It's not necessarily the bank's fault.
Sure, everybody wants something from government, but the government should deny When somebody wants a bailout or somebody wants something for nothing, the government should not supply it.
I can't necessarily blame Wall Street for wanting something for nothing, but I blame the government for supplying it.
But a lot of it is the government wants to maintain the illusion of prosperity, the illusion of economic growth.
And so the way they do that now is through the financial markets, through assets.
They get the stock market to go up.
They get the real estate market to go up.
And somehow they pretend that that means that the economy is getting better just because asset prices are rising.
But that's not really economic growth just because the price of some asset goes up.
I mean, what's economic growth is when your economy produces more stuff, when you have more output of the goods and services that make people's lives better.
You want to grow your standard of living.
If people are poor, they're poor because they don't have enough stuff.
So we have to produce more stuff for people to consume and that's not what's happening in the US economy.
It's not like we've got more factories turning out more stuff.
All that they do is they get asset prices to rise so that people can borrow more money against those inflated asset values and then spend it.
But we're buying things that are made in other countries.
It doesn't evidence economic growth here.
It evidences the economic growth in the countries who are able to produce all the things that we have to borrow money to consume.
But it doesn't benefit the average American.
That's why the average American is suffering as a result of this massive transfer of wealth that is emanating from government, from the Federal Reserve and from what's happening in Congress and the White House.
They point to these asset markets as evidence that their policies are a success.
Meanwhile, their policies are a complete failure if you judge it by what's actually going on in the economy.
Of course, everything they're doing now is just setting the stage for an economic disaster that is going to be much worse than what we had in 2008. Well, you predicted the one in 2008. You saw it coming.
Well, it would have been far more painful, certainly at that time, to deal with our problems.
It's always painful.
I mean, if you're a drug addict and you want to deal with it and you want to go cold turkey and go to rehab, That's painful.
It's easier to keep taking drugs.
If you're overweight, is it easier to go on a diet and exercise or just keep on picking out?
It's always difficult to do the right thing in the short run, but it pays off in the long run.
If you want to go back to the origin of the 2008 financial crisis, you go look to the stock market bubble that burst in 2008. And the recession that began in 2001, a lot of it, you know, you had this September 11th tragedy, and we were going into a recession.
And so instead of allowing the pain of a recession to play out, and of course nobody enjoys a recession, But recessions are actually necessary.
That's the process where all the mistakes that were made during the boom are corrected.
And of course, we made a lot of mistakes during the tech boom.
A lot of companies were funded, hired people, rented office space that never should have started because they had no real business plans.
They couldn't make any money.
We did a lot of stupid things during the 1990s bubble, and they needed to be corrected during the recession.
But the politicians, you know, Bush had just become president.
He didn't want a big recession on his first term because, of course, he wanted a second term.
And so Alan Greenspan cooperated with Bush because he wanted to get reappointed.
And so they had a big monetary stimulus.
They dropped interest rates down to one percent, which is high by today's standards, but it was record low back then.
And a lot of the money that was going into the stock market went into the real estate market.
So we replaced the stock market bubble with a real estate bubble that actually had began forming a few years earlier.
But it really gathered momentum after the real estate, the stock market bubble burst.
And so the real estate bubble got all the air.
And so now housing prices were going up.
And because they were going up, people thought they were rich.
So they went out and spent money they didn't have.
They borrowed it against the appreciating value of their houses.
They bought more houses.
They bought cars.
They took vacations.
And during that time, I knew this was a mania.
I knew that the big crisis, though, for the real estate market...
was not going to be the buyer of real estate because in the stock market bubble when the stock market bubble burst it was the people who bought stocks who lost because they were buying gambling with their own money but when people were buying houses they were gambling with the bank's money but in fact it was taxpayer money because the banks were all guaranteed by the government and so I knew when the real estate bubble burst and prices went down that the banks would be insolvent and that the banks would fail Now, had the government allowed real estate prices to fall, which was a good thing.
The problem was that they went up.
Coming back down was reality coming back.
Had the government allowed the banks to fail and real estate prices to keep falling, it would have been more painful in the short run.
But it would have been necessary pain.
It would have been constructive pain because we would have laid the foundation for a legitimate economic recovery, which is what we should have done in 2001. We shouldn't have had all that monetary stimulus.
We shouldn't have created a housing bubble.
We should have just endured the pain, and then we would have been in better shape.
So they blew up this housing bubble and now when it bursts, they didn't learn from their mistakes.
Ben Bernanke just repeated all the mistakes of Alan Greenspan, only this time interest rates had to come to zero because it was an even bigger crisis.
And now we have all the money printing they call quantitative easing, but we have much easier, much more aggressive monetary stimulus now.
We're doing far more damage to the economy.
We've managed to reflate the stock market bubble.
We've reflated the real estate bubble.
We have more debt as a society than ever before.
The government has more debt.
Corporations have more debt.
Individuals, there's been no deleveraging.
We were in a deep hole and then we dug it a lot deeper.
And we've set the stage.
Ben Bernanke has set the stage for a much greater economic crisis than the one from 2008. It's going to blow up on Janet Yellen, just like the Greenspan bubble blew up on Bernanke.
The Bernanke bubble is going to blow up on Yellen.
It's much bigger.
And I'm afraid that Yellen is going to do more of the same, only worse when she gets in.
And we're in for a much worse economic crisis because this one, I think, is going to be where the dollar collapses.
And that's going to usher in a lot more pain for ordinary Americans than the bursting of the stock market bubble or the housing bubble.
Let's go back to that word pain, because this is what I really was confused about.
When you say that it would have caused a lot more pain if the banks had failed, but ultimately it would have been better because we figured out what was wrong and then not allowed it to go.
What kind of pain would that have been?
When you're dealing with federally insured banks, so if the average person...
How much of their money would be insured by the government if banks collapse?
And then where does that money come from if they have to insure all the people who had money in the bank accounts?
I mean, the government now stands behind the bank accounts.
I mean, the FDIC has a limit, maybe $250,000, but the government has bailed out banks.
When they fail, they bail out everybody.
I mean, that's a mistake.
We shouldn't have any government insured deposits.
I mean, it's a huge moral hazard because, you know, people now will put their money into banks and no one cares what the bank does with their money because the government insures the account.
So the banks can be as reckless as they want and there's no free market penalty.
If we had a free market in banking like we had at one point, Banks couldn't be reckless because they wouldn't have any depositors.
Depositors would care about what the bank does with their money.
And so in order to get depositors, banks would have to be cautious and they would advertise how safe their portfolios were.
And you would have companies that would rate them and say, this is a good bank to put your money.
They're only technically supposed to give you now $250,000.
But they have given you all of it.
But the problem is only smaller banks have failed so far.
But if a large bank were to fail...
There's not enough money in the FDIC to bail out the depositors.
So the government would have to create it.
The Federal Reserve would have to print it into existence.
And so what's ultimately going to happen is, sure, we've got all these insured bank accounts, but if a couple of big banks fail and the government has to print all the money to reimburse the depositors, you have massive inflation and you get your money back, but you can't buy anything with it or you can't buy nearly as much.
What would actually happen if the government had done the right thing?
and allowed banks to fail then some depositors would have lost money some depositors would have not got back a hundred cents on the dollar but in the long run that'd be better off than getting back all your money and have it not buy anything and you know there would have been pain for some people right the government would have been forced to cut a lot of spending the government would have had to lay people off and so that would be good for the economy it wouldn't be good in the short run for the guy who got laid off now he has to go get a real job but the government would have to start cutting spending Real estate prices would have fallen,
so some people would lose that home equity.
But if you don't have a house, falling real estate prices is a good thing for you.
I mean, the government always talks about trying to make home ownership affordable.
Well, the best way to do that is let prices come down.
Why is the government trying to stop real estate prices from coming down when they say they want houses to be affordable?
What the government wants is to prop up real estate prices at artificial levels so you have to borrow a fortune to buy a house, but then they want to subsidize the debt.
They do the same thing with college.
They want everyone to go to college but they don't want college tuition to come down because the government guarantees all the student loans and so that's why college is so expensive because the students take all that government money and they bid up tuition and the colleges know that it doesn't matter how high the prices are because the kids are going to get the money from the government to pay the price but meanwhile they graduate, they've got these worthless degrees and they got a pile of debt.
If the government just got out of the way And they didn't give out all this money to students, then the universities would have to slash tuition or they'd have no customers.
And now you can get a college degree without taking on a mortgage.
But we have this service sector economy now that is completely unviable because it's the result of our ability to borrow indefinitely from abroad to pay for the products that are manufactured in other countries.
But this bubble is going to burst because we can't keep borrowing.
The world can't keep lending us money.
It's like a giant vendor financing scheme where other countries produce products and then they lend us the money to buy those products.
But we can't pay back any of the money we've already borrowed, yet they keep lending us more because they don't want to deal with the reality of how much money they've lost.
What kind of an epic change would be involved in getting away from this trend?
What kind of an epic change would be involved in making sure that the government doesn't subsidize universities, making sure that housing costs do go down, making sure that banks aren't government protected?
That seems like it would take an epic change in our culture.
I think it's going to take a crisis, and I think, fortunately or unfortunately, that crisis is coming.
There's going to be a crisis that we can't print our way out of, that we can't bail our way out of, and I think that's where we are.
I mean, I think the bubble that we have now is just so big, and I think the Fed knows that it's so big, it's too big to pop, forgetting about too big to fail, that there is no more bubbles.
This is the last hurrah for our phony economy, because there's nothing left to do once this I think the way the collapse is going to come is going to be in the value of our currency, which right now is relatively stable.
It's actually risen recently against some currencies, although not all currencies.
But I think that the Fed is going to keep on printing money.
There's an expectation right now that there's a real economic recovery and that the Fed is going to be able to remove the monetary props There is no real recovery and the Fed can't remove the props.
It should, but the minute it did, the whole economy would implode.
I think as people begin to realize that, to appreciate what the Fed has created, not a sustainable recovery, but a bubble.
The world is not going to want our dollars anymore because the Fed has to keep printing dollars to buy bonds so that we can keep borrowing money.
The government can keep borrowing money.
But when people don't want the dollars that the Fed is creating, now the value of the dollar starts to go down.
And that's when you start to see a real acceleration in prices for consumer goods.
I mean, and the government tries to deny...
That there's inflation, but there's massive inflation.
It's not all showing up yet in consumer prices, although a lot of prices, look, you know, since 2009, milk prices have more than doubled.
I think beef prices, chopped meat prices are up 80%, 90%.
I mean, look at gasoline prices at record highs.
The government tells us there's no inflation, but there's plenty of it, but it's going to get a lot worse.
That is the bad news.
Now, the government is actually trying to lay the foundation for higher inflation now by trying to tell us that it's a good thing.
If you listen to The Economist today, they'll tell you that the scariest thing, the worst thing that can happen is that we don't have enough inflation, that we have to make sure that prices are rising fast enough to have economic growth.
They used to say that we want stable prices.
Now they tell us that that's dangerous.
That's a bad thing because if prices are stable they might actually go down a little bit and that would be horrible.
So the government wants us to be thankful when the cost of living goes up when obviously a good strong economy has falling consumer prices.
That's the goal of an economy.
It's to bring prices down so that people can buy more stuff.
But there are a lot of incentives to keep it going, to keep the party going as long as possible.
The politicians want to keep it going.
I mean, they love phony prosperity because it's better than reality because if the public knew how screwed they were, they might not re-elect the guys that are there.
So they want to keep it going.
They have no incentive to rain on the parade.
They don't want to solve any problems.
They just want to get through the next election.
Wall Street, I mean, they're making a ton of money.
I mean, there are people that are making a fortune off of this bad monetary policy.
And so they don't want it to stop.
They don't want to deal with reality.
They want to just keep making hay while the sun shines.
And the academics, the media, I think these guys are just clueless.
So nobody really either understands or has a vested interest to understand the truth.
Everybody wants to keep the party going.
That was exactly what was going on in 2003 and 4 and 5 and 6. I mean, when I was going around, going on TV shows, giving lectures...
Explaining all the problems in the housing market and how the Fed was creating it and how bad it was going to be when the bubble burst, nobody wanted to hear it.
I mean, everybody either laughed at me, ridiculed me, and this stuff should have been obvious.
This should have been crystal clear, yet people couldn't see it.
And then everybody was blindsided by what happened.
They said, well, nobody could have possibly predicted this, right?
Of course, that was wrong.
But, you know, and then instead of, you know, Learning from the mistakes or instead of listening to people like me, and I wasn't the only guy that was out there talking about it.
I just did it maybe more publicly than a lot of people.
But instead of saying, hey, let's talk to Peter Schiff.
He saw this thing coming.
What does he think?
They had a government inquiry.
To the financial crisis.
Right after it happened, it was an investigation of why there was a financial crisis.
And you would have thought, gee, I wrote a book predicting the financial crisis, Crash Proof, had a profit for the coming economic collapse, that described exactly what happened.
I wrote about it.
I talked about it for years.
I have all these essays on the internet.
There's all these YouTube videos you can see, you know, conferences.
Look at my mortgage banker speech from 2006. I was like, great.
Why don't I go and testify in front of Congress and explain why we had a financial crisis?
In fact, I did testify twice in front of Congress later on, and you can see those testimonies are on YouTube.
And I was actually surprised that they invited me back a second time after I testified the first time.
I think maybe some people didn't really realize who I was, and so they haven't invited me back a third time.
But, you know, I tell them the truth and I treat these guys like they ought to be treated.
I don't really show any respect for people that are destroying our country.
And so I put them in their place when I testify.
But they didn't really want anybody testifying who knew why there was a crisis because they already had a preconceived conclusion.
They wanted to blame it on capitalism.
They wanted to say we had a crisis because we didn't have enough regulation, because we didn't have enough government, which, of course, was the opposite of why we had the crisis.
We had too much regulation and too much government.
Now, you say that you don't believe in regulation, but do you agree with, when it comes to regulation, when it comes to environmental protections, when it comes to things like the EPA, or when it comes to situations like, what do you do about when you have this massive Gulf oil spill?
Do you believe the government should intervene then?
Markets, in many cases, regulate themselves because of the self-interest of the party.
So, for example, when I talk about banks, right, if there was no government guaranteeing the safety of bank accounts, in order for banks to thrive and get customers, they are going to have to provide a safe platform, a depository of their savings.
And banks will compete with each other based on who's got the safest bank, where's my money going to be secure, because that's really what you're worried about.
And so there is market based regulation from competition, and you get that every place.
I mean, people say, well, you know, don't we need the government to make sure that the airlines are safe?
Well, who's got a better vested interest in a safe airline than the owner of that airline?
I mean, the last thing an airline wants is a crash, and the most important thing...
I fly a lot.
The most important thing to me is that it's a safe flight.
And so I'm not going to go on an airline that says they cut corners to save a couple of bucks.
So there's going to be a lot of regulation in the market.
Unfortunately, what happens is the government comes in, and now they create a moral hazard that undermines the normal market regulation and replaces it with a government regulation that's nowhere near as good.
Yeah, well moral hazard, well, in the bank account, again, in the bank account example, without government interference, I care about what the banks do with my money.
I'm not just going to dump my money in the bank and not worry about it.
I'm going to do some research before I open my bank account.
I want to make sure that the bank is sound.
The bank knows that in order to attract customers, It has to be safe.
It can't just be gambling with depositors' money.
But when the government steps in, now no one cares about safety because the government says, don't worry, we'll make sure the bank is safe.
So now the depositors say, we don't give a damn.
We'll put our money anywhere.
I don't care which bank it is.
Nobody does any research.
I mean, people do more research before they buy a microwave oven or a television set than depositing their life savings into a bank.
It's just whichever one is closest.
That's, you know, I'm going to put my money there.
The banks know this.
The only thing the banks have to do is convince the regulators to give them a pass, but then you've got all kinds of corruption, and you've got the government has all kinds of corrupt incentives.
So market-based regulation is much better, but certainly I do believe in some types of regulation when it comes to externalities like pollution and things like that.
But a lot of that is best done at a local level, not at a federal level, and a lot of it is done through courts because people are still liable in a free market.
So if I damage you in some way, then I'm responsible for your damage and you can sue me.
And so businesses don't want to be sued.
They don't want to harm other people, and so they're going to guard against that.
I think if you look at all of the money that society loses when you buy government protection and government regulation, more money is lost to the cost of regulation than would be lost through fraud or even scrupulous actors that might steal somebody's money.
I mainly make my money in the investment business.
I have a brokerage firm and an asset advisor company, and so I advise people on how to invest their money.
Now, I have to spend a ton of money, a fortune, complying with regulation.
There's so much regulation in my industry, and it costs me – I mean it's – I don't know exactly what it is, over a million dollars a year, much more that I have to spend to stay in business.
And of course, I have to pass on those costs to my clients.
And of course, because the costs are so big, there's less competition than there would be if the government didn't create all these barriers to entry.
Because if you want to compete with me, you just can't do it.
You've got to have enough money to set up the compliance apparatus that the government requires.
There's a lot less competition in my industry and so I think that investors suffer because they don't have as much choices and everybody has to pay higher prices for their services because the government requires us to spend all this money supposedly to protect my customers.
But the government doesn't really give a damn about my customers.
I do.
I'm the one that suffers if my customers are mad at me because they take their business someplace else.
I need happy customers, so I am going to do what's right for my customers regardless of what the government says.
Now, there are some people out there that are going to steal.
There's going to be criminals in every industry.
There's going to be some guy that's going to fraudulently peddle penny stocks or something.
That's going to happen.
But the problem is that's happening now, even with all the government.
Look at Bernie Madoff.
I mean, you have all this stuff going on on top of it.
But if we didn't have any of this regulation, if we have a free market, yes, there would still be some fools that would lose money.
But the losses would pale in comparison to how much everybody is losing now because of the cost of government.
And at least the people who lose money would have to accept responsibility for their own bad decisions Why do my clients have to spend all this extra money because somebody else is foolish with their money?
Because now if you're responsible, you get punished.
Well, this rant started when I was asking you about the BP spill, the idea that the government should possibly regulate that.
You feel that the market should regulate in situations like that, where they should be responsible and be sued, and that the government shouldn't step in and enforce it?
Because it seems like when you're dealing with something like BP, you've got this massive corporation that has untold billions of dollars that they can funnel and move and adjust and spend to combat anything that would cost them money.
But, you know, one of the ironies of the whole BP situation is why are we drilling in such deep water in the first place?
And it has to do with government environmental regulation that made it, you know, very expensive to drill in shallower water that would be, you know, less of an environmental threat.
It would be a lot easier.
But the government, you know, with all that regulation, actually helped bring that situation about and also with insurance.
But also what happened is the government came in and the government capped liability, which was a mistake.
The government basically told companies that your liability is capped at a certain amount.
And that was the government, not the free market.
And so because there was a liability cap imposed by government, corporations were riskier So they would have been.
And then, of course, then BP said, okay, we're going to pay even beyond these caps.
But a lot of this was a byproduct of other government regulation and moral hazard that resulted in drilling in deep water when we should have been drilling in shallower water.
We should be developing – what if we were developing more up in Alaska?
When you talk to the average person in Alaska about drilling, there's some people there that want jobs that might say yes, but most people who don't have a vested interest in that, they don't want any drilling up there.
But let's say we have an oil company that's like BP. That cuts corners precisely to save money and in doing so they cause a massive, massive environmental damage that I believe personally you can't put a dollar value on.
But they did it and you know what they didn't do intentionally?
They made money.
And in doing that intentionally and making money, they made sure That they made as much money as possible in the shortest amount of time as possible, which led them to cut corners in the construction of the well, which makes them ultimately responsible 100% for the damage, and the damage is massive.
I'm talking about you're raising the cost throughout the entire, you're going to have less people exploring for oil, less people, you know, less money going in.
In fact, right now, if you look at some of the oil companies, they're barely even making money at $100 oil.
I mean, I got bad news for you.
I mean, oil prices are going a lot higher anyway.
They're already going a lot higher.
So people in Southern California have got to get ready for $10 gallon gasoline or higher.
Couldn't someone listen to this conversation, listen to you saying this and say, well, this guy does, he thinks that banks should fail, but oil companies shouldn't?
Well, then how do you assess liability in something like BP? Because in BP, I think that there's not enough money in the world to make up for what they've done.
I want real market forces to be able to— So you think that those real market forces would have influenced them to spend more money in the construction of the well, not cut corners in order to reach it?
In fact, they might not have even been drilling there.
I mean, if it was a free market energy, they might have been drilling in areas that were generally safer, but the government won't let them drill there.
But don't you think that most people would vote against that if given the opportunity?
Do you want to have a giant oil rig 50, 100 yards offshore where you could see it?
Most people are going to say no.
Most people are going to think that if there is a mistake, which there are quite often, I mean, it's not all the time, but we can think of several in our lifetimes.
We know about big oil disasters, whether it's Exxon Valdez or whether it's this more recent one.
Yeah, but I mean, people also don't want extremely expensive gasoline.
So there's always a trade-off.
But the big risks that we face, I mean, you could talk about an oil spill.
I mean, the economic catastrophe that the government is in the process of creating is going to have such a profound impact across this economy.
These things, while they're bad, are tiny compared to what's coming, compared to the economic...
This is California, so we're going to get a 10-plus on the Richter scale, and the things that we're talking about really don't even register on it at all compared to what we're going to go through in the United States.
Because of government, you can look at, hey, we think we want government to protect us from this, but meanwhile you've got this huge, enormous government that is creating a massive catastrophe that's coming.
And then we're probably going to end up with a lot more pollution when we're a lot poorer nation and we can't even afford to do the things that would keep the environment clean.
Well look, initially there will probably be some cleaner air here in Southern California when no one can afford to drive.
The next crisis that's going to come is going to kill the dollar and then prices are going to go way up.
They might end up with shortages because they might have price controls.
I think there's going to be big power blackouts because when energy costs really soar, because when the dollar tanks, even though we're producing a lot of oil in the U.S. right now, none of it's going to be consumed here.
It's all going to be shipped over to Asia because their currencies are going to be stronger.
Imagine you've got all these people in China.
They're working hard.
They're in factories.
They're producing.
They're saving.
But they're sacrificing to prop up our economy because a lot of the stuff that they produce gets shipped over here.
Well, when the dollar collapses, they're not going to ship stuff over here anymore.
They're going to make it, and then they're going to take it home.
They're going to consume the stuff.
And you have a lot of Chinese now that are riding around on bicycles.
Well, when the dollar collapses, they're not going to ride bicycles anymore.
They're going to drive cars.
And they're going to use a lot of gasoline.
Americans are going to be riding around on bicycles.
Well, that might be a good reform because let individuals do it.
But if we allow corporations to buy influence, then that's bad.
But the problem isn't that the corporations are buying it.
The problem is that we allow the government to sell it or to peddle it.
So if we were to go back to the Constitution and force it.
Yeah, but if we force the government to obey the law, then there is no influence to sell.
If all we get from government is freedom and liberty, which means we have laws that protect private property, but we don't create special privileges for some people, then there's no power to lobby for.
But right now we allow our politicians to sell power to the highest bidder.
That's not the fault of the bidders, the fault of the bidders, because if I'm a business and I don't try to get a favor from government, what if my competition gets a favor and then uses government power to squash me?
So everybody is forced to bid for that power, but the problem is government.
We have to take the power away from government and then there's no more lobbying because there's nothing to lobby for.
Right, but okay, so how about a situation where like in the movie Inside Job, we have these economics professors that they Set these standards and give advice and then they wind up getting jobs with banks.
You clearly need economic advisors though.
Not really.
I do.
If I'm in the government and I'm a senator and my background is in real estate sales or what have you.
Let's say he's a businessman who sells computers and then he gets into politics.
What do you really know about economics?
You have to have a degree in economics to truly understand it.
Look at 1920. I mean, if you look at the rate of economic growth in the United States in the 19th century, take the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the First World War.
So forget about all the destruction in Europe.
You look at 1865 to 1913. You look at the change in wealth.
There was nothing like America.
I mean, why do you think all the immigrants were pouring into America from Europe?
It wasn't because they wanted to get on welfare, because we had no welfare.
They wanted freedom.
We had something that the world didn't have.
You can come to America and do what you wanted.
There was no income tax.
There was no social security tax.
You can start a business.
There was no labor law.
Anybody can get a job.
Anybody can hire somebody.
Anybody can fire somebody.
You didn't have the government looking over your shoulder.
And we created massive amounts of wealth, not just for the Rockefellers and the Carnegies and the Vanderbilts, but for average people.
The standard of living rose rapidly.
Poor people from all over the world came to America You know, to pursue whatever they couldn't pursue in their own countries because they didn't have the freedom.
By 1913, right now you had a lot of people living in cities, but they had indoor plumbing, they had electric lights, they had a telephone, they had all kinds of gadgets that made their lives better that didn't exist in 1865. I mean, everybody's life got better.
There was a lot of things that were created all over the world.
If you look at where America was going into the First World War, and you look at all the cars, 90% of everything was here.
We made everything.
We consumed everything.
We had a standard of living unparalleled.
Poor people in America were wealthy in other countries.
That's where the whole expression, ugly American, came from, and somebody, an American, would go to Europe.
And they were just a school teacher or a plumber and they got there and they thought they were king because everything was so cheap compared to, you know, things here.
The attitude that we had when we got there of superiority and how rich we were and how everybody didn't have any of the things that we had, that was really where it came from.
I certainly think that creativity and innovation help.
Or it helps it to be free.
To have freedom certainly is going to enhance the ability to create and the ability to put out new inventions and new things that are going to make life easier.
No question about it.
But the idea that that has to be all completely unregulated by the government makes me very nervous.
And I know the word...
I don't trust the government either.
I don't like the word the government.
But I think...
The unregulated industry that can pollute like BP has is incredibly dangerous.
They're going to take a chance, and maybe they'll go out of business, but they might fuck up.
Look, people aren't rational.
Your idea that everyone who starts a business is going to know exactly what they're doing because they're going to have to or they're going to go under, that's preposterous.
The real issue I have is with things like construction or things like electrical, things that involve safety.
And I think you and I are both not in favor of the government regulating these things because I don't necessarily think they're going to do the best job.
The industry itself should regulate.
If the industry could prove some sort of a very efficient, very competent, and very educated regulatory system, then the government should just step down and say, hey, we're not going to do this anymore.
Let's say we have a society where you say, look, if you pay your dues, we'll give you a certified member of Basket Weavers of America.
And if anybody sees that sign on your shop, they know that you really know how to weave a basket.
You went through our vigorous training program.
You took a course.
But once you have this group, they say, you know what?
If we can simply require everybody to be a member of our group and make it illegal for them to sell any baskets if they're not a member of our group, then we can charge a lot more money because we won't have competition.
So they go to Washington and they say, hey, why don't you require anybody who weaves baskets to join our organization and force them into it, right?
That's what I'm in, in the brokerage industry.
I'm only allowed to be a stockbroker because I'm a member of FINRA, right?
Now, I don't want to be a member of FINRA. I'd rather just be a stockbroker and not be a member of FINRA, but I can't.
The government made it illegal.
So in order for me to be a stockbroker, I have to be in this organization, and I have to spend millions of dollars a year to comply with all these ridiculous rules and regulations.
But the net effect of it is that there's a lot fewer brokers than there would be if we didn't have FINRA. Now, if FINRA was voluntary, if it was private, then I could just say, hey, I'm a broker and I'm not a member of FINRA, so caveat emptor.
I would much rather have that than have to be.
But all these organizations, they always want it.
They always want the government to force people to join so that they can charge more money and have less competition.
Well, I think also the idea is that the government is going to be the one that's impartial.
The government's going to be standing outside, looking at this industry, having no vested interest in you profiting over you or you over you, and say, hey, these are the rules, and this is how we can make this fair and ethical.
That's the idea that most people have about the government.
But they do have a vested interest because now this organization, right, that got the government to force everybody to join it, now they're going to give donations to the government to continue.
What has to stop it is you have to take away the government's power to do all these things, because as long as they have the power, people will get around those requirements and there will be ways to do it.
You have to limit the power of government, which is what we did so successfully for our first 100, 150 years as a republic.
We were very successful at limiting the power of government, and that's why we achieved so much.
The problem is, you know, We lost that advantage.
The government was chained up by the Constitution, but it freed itself from those chains.
And so now it does whatever it wants, and we're suffering as a result because we've lost a lot of freedom.
And by losing the freedom, we lost all the opportunity and economic growth that went along with it.
I agree that you would be more cautious, but I think that people are assholes.
And I think that people who have a lot of money and a lot of hubris and a lot of ego, and they're probably on pills, they're going to do some wild, wacky shit.
I see what you're saying and I agree with you for the most part.
I think the only problem that I'm having with what you're saying is the idea that the government would regulate environmental protection or that rather industry or business would regulate environmental protection.
I don't think they would and I think that if they were in a situation where They're making billions of dollars and they had some sort of a catastrophic oil spill or chemical spill or some sort of a disaster.
They would cover it up.
Just like it's been proven that it's been done with fracking.
I mean, there's a real issue with fracking right now in America.
And if you've watched any of the documentaries or read any of the articles that are written about people's areas, farms, water supplies destroyed, oxygen level in the atmosphere changes.
Well, you know, I'm involved, I mean, pretty heavy with fracking myself because we have a lot of wells.
So you're a fracker.
I guess.
I mean, I'm in North Dakota.
I'm up in the Bakken.
I started there about three years ago.
And look, I mean, there's tremendous wealth that's been created up in that region in North Dakota, and it's one of the bright spots of the U.S. economy.
I mean, fortunately, the energy industry domestically is doing something.
It's a pocket of strength or an island of strength in a sea of weakness.
I mean, most of what's going on is bad, but that's one of the one things that we got going.
And we're going to need to develop our energy resources even more effectively, especially once the dollar collapses.
Why have these companies that have been fracking come in and shipped fresh water to these people that have lost their drinking water where they can fucking light it on fire now?
What's going on?
It's not happening in any circumstance whatsoever?
And, you know, the same thing, look, they've been doing this with various, you know, we've got to say this species, this subspecies, that subspecies, we can't go here, we can't go there.
So people should probably be concerned that that could take place almost anywhere in the country because the systems that we have in place are not foolproof.
And this is a new thing that is not just...
Not just is it a new thing, but most people are not even aware of it.
They start getting aware of it.
They start seeing things like people's water being able to be lit on fire.
They start talking to people that have been forced out of their farms because their groundwater is polluted.
Yeah, but the accident with BP, and it wasn't just BP, there's other companies involved, but the accident there happened with all the regulation that we have.
As I said, if you want to have a tradeoff, if you want to say no drilling offshore because something bad might happen, if you want to eliminate all that oil, then be prepared to pay a lot more for gasoline and a lot more for products that we consume that not only have gasoline.
But by the way, right now, and of course this is going to change, but most of the stuff that we consume in America isn't made here.
It has to get shipped here on a big ship that comes across from China, and it takes a lot of gasoline to get it over here.
So every single thing that we buy in America, there's a lot of energy that goes into getting it here.
And so if we're going to make energy much more expensive because we want to make sure that we can't have another environmental accident, then we better be prepared to accept the lower standard of living that comes with that.
But you see what you're doing here that's problematic?
You are automatically leaning towards the profit side over the environment side.
This is what makes people really nervous about people that are really into the market.
What your concern is, is not about the earth itself.
The very place where your children are going to grow up.
That's not what you're concerned about.
You're not concerned about that.
You're concerned about the devastation to the market by regulating these businesses and forcing them to raise the price of gasoline.
And everyone's going to suffer because we didn't let everybody take this fucking wacky chance and pump fluid into the ground and pull out oil or whatever.
But do you see that argument is a very callous argument.
Small farmers come on my radio show and they tell me about all the problems that the government has created for them, putting them out of business and the things that they're doing to regulate them out of existence.
Well, you can look at some of the areas of Africa where a lot of private money has come in and tried to create wildlife reserves where there's now, instead of hunting elephants now for their ivory, there's a lot of people now that are spending money preserving them because they want to come and take a safari there and they want to see them in their habitat.
So you have entrepreneurs seeing a profit in preserving an environment in a way that they can profit from it.
If there was no way to profit from it, people wouldn't be expending the money to do that.
Well, I mean, look, I know there's some big game hunting, and I'm sure that to the extent that there's hunting, they're not hunting them to extinction.
You take one person, you shoot them, and you keep everybody else healthy and well-fed.
If we had a Hunger Games type scenario where we had to kill a couple of people every year but everybody else lived great, I think I know what side you'd be on.
To the extent that we need regulation for externalities that result from pollution, it can be done at a more local level than having it done in Washington.
The problem that we have in this country with lawyers is it's too easy to sue people.
I mean, there's so much lawsuits here because, you know, if you sue somebody, you basically can extort money out of them because it costs so much to defend yourself.
Look at all the income taxes that are paid in the state of California.
Look at all the property taxes that are sent up there to Sacramento.
I mean, the problems in California are not because the government doesn't have enough money.
The government has too much money.
There's too much government.
There's too much taxes.
There's too much regulation.
There's too many people who work for government because they have to be supported by everybody else.
I mean they don't produce anything.
I mean most people who work for government, not only don't they produce anything, they get in the way of other people who would produce stuff but the government won't let them.
So we're all poor because we have to pay the salaries of all these government workers.
And now if you actually look at how much government workers make relative to private sector workers, you throw in all the benefits, the average person working for government is making twice as much as the average person working in the private sector.
Why do you think all the wealthiest counties in America are all surrounding Washington, D.C.? I mean, they're sucking the life out of the rest of the country.
And they're all getting rich, the lobbyists and the politicians and the lawyers, because that's where all the power is.
That's where, you know, as Washington gets wealthier, everybody else gets poorer.
I just know that I think there's more laws on the books than we should have, certainly for the federal government.
But I'm saying, my point is, even if I'd be fine leaving them all there, because...
The problem that we are creating from excess environmental regulation is small compared to all the other problems.
I mean, you know, there is a regulation.
You always talk about, what about drugs, right?
What about, oh, the government needs to make sure that the drugs are safe.
But I'm pretty sure that more people die because drugs that might have helped them are kept off the market.
Than people who die because a drug killed them.
And I think the reason that pharmaceuticals and drugs are so expensive in America is because it's so expensive to get something approved by the FDA. I think we had a much better and much healthier system before the FDA existed.
And at least initially, the FDA only made you prove that your drugs weren't harmful.
Now you have to prove that they're not harmful and that they work.
That they're efficacious and that is extremely expensive.
Well, I don't think my doctor has enough time to review all of the medication in the world and all the studies that have been done, all the different...
Different tests that have been done on different types of people.
Okay, but the efficacy should also be in place when you're dealing with things like cancer drugs, and dealing with things that devastate the immune system, and may or may not be even effective.
But the government says, no, we want to keep testing it.
We know it can't hurt you, but we want to just do another three years of testing.
Meanwhile, I die while I'm waiting for that drug to come.
Why can't I say, look, I don't care about the test.
I just want the drug.
The government says you can't.
You have to wait.
And I know that there are a lot of drugs that work that they don't let on the market.
You're talking about, what if I'm a big pharmaceutical company and I have a lot of money, and here's some small company that comes out with a new pill that's better than mine, that has no side effects, I don't want it on the market.
What do I do?
I give money to my politician in my pit pocket and I say, you kill that drug because that's better than my drug, it has less side effects, and I don't want the competition.
But don't you think that that would always take place, those kind of crimes?
Yes, because of the FDA. So you think that if there was no regulatory commissions or no governing bodies when it comes to drugs, that what we would do is just put it all on the market and we would all figure out what was effective, what was not, and the market would decide.
How would the doctor know if he prescribed Fen-Fen or Vioxx or all these different drugs that have been pulled off the market after they have been prescribed by people who went to medical school?
Right, but if your doctor doesn't know who went to medical school and is a doctor, how does some bureaucrat in the FDA know who maybe didn't go to medical school and isn't competent enough to be a doctor?
Worst case scenario if you smoke pot is you might get you guys high because you're in the room.
You might get some secondhand pot.
The difference between that and environmental protection, there's a huge difference between that and regulating environmental disasters or the potential for environmental disasters.
No, no, but that's because that's an expression of free people coming together in a free market.
It's individuals making exchanges that are mutual beneficial to both parties.
That's what freedom is all about.
The minute you involve government, the minute you have laws and regulations, what that does is diminish our freedom because the government tells us what we can't do, right?
If the government doesn't say we can't do it, then we can do it.
And so that's why government laws should be about protecting Private property and life and liberty.
Look, I can do whatever I want as long as I don't infringe upon you.
I have a right to pursue my own happiness, but I can't steal from you to do it.
I can't injure you.
And that's where, yes, I can't pollute your air.
I can't pollute your water.
I agree with you there.
But as long as I'm not harming you, But you are if you're polluting my water and polluting my air.
If you're doing something like fracking that's generating billions of dollars and you have to pay off a million here or a million there because you fuck up some guy's farm...
That's not that big of a deal.
But that's not the answer.
The answer is not you can give them money or they can give you money because they ruined your life.
If there was something that you could do that would guarantee kill every fish in Lake Michigan forever, but provide massive economic prosperity to everyone else in the country, lift us out of a recession, would you be in favor of doing it?
Because just because everybody would be better off doesn't mean that's the only way we could do it.
I think there could be a way to do that without doing that, and that should be pursued above all else, the idea of figuring out a way to make this world better without polluting it.
Well, we already know how to make the world better.
I mean, it's freedom.
It's the freer we are, the more prosperous we're going to be, and the enemy of freedom is government, right?
Now, if you have a little bit of government, that's a good thing.
If you have just enough government to secure your freedoms and secure your liberties, then you have prosperity.
But if you have too much government, then it's an impediment to liberty and prosperity.
But what we should really be talking about is what's going to happen.
And you've got all this propaganda out there by the government that is being spread by Wall Street as well, that what Ben Bernanke has done has worked, that we've got a real economic recovery, that the jobs are on their way.
That there's no inflation.
All of this is wrong.
The economy is suffering because of what the government is doing.
There is no recovery.
I think we're in a depression.
I think we've been in a depression the whole time.
I think the numbers are manipulated.
I think the government is understating the true rate of inflation.
So that means it looks like the economy is growing, but it's actually contracting.
That's why the labor force is imploding.
That's why people, you know, there's no good jobs.
That's why people have a falling standard of living.
People feel like it's a recession because it is.
The government is trying to pretend that it's not because they point to the stock market.
But so what?
Stock market going up doesn't mean anything.
I mean it's not even that earnings are going up.
Corporations aren't really earning more money.
Just their stock prices are going up.
And there are a lot of people that say, well, the corporations have a lot of cash.
Well, because they borrowed it.
They only have that cash because they issued debt.
Corporations now have more debt than ever before, even if you net out the cash.
The government has more debt than ever before.
Americans have more debt.
Look at all the student loans we have.
Look at the mortgage debt, credit card debt.
We are leveraged up to the hilt, and the only way we keep this thing going is because we can borrow more because the people loaning us the money don't realize that we're too broke to pay it back.
So 44, 57. So you're at like 57% marginal tax rate in California.
But that's just your income tax.
What about your property taxes, your sales taxes, all the other taxes you pay?
I mean, the government's taking 57%, and then out of the 43% you got left, I was listening to one of your other podcasts, and you were talking, and you said something like, look, I don't want the government to take half, more than half, or something like that.
Why half?
Do you know a medieval serf, and this is feudal system of serfdom, which was considered very repressive in the Middle Ages, If you were a serf, you had to give the Lord 25% of what you produced.
So you were in the 25% tax bracket, and you got to keep 75 cents on the dollar, and that was considered exploitation.
What I would give to be a serf, I would love to be able to be as free as a serf.
If the government just treated me like a Lord treated the serf, I'd be awesome.
They'd have to cut my taxes in half to get my tax bracket down to just 25% so I could be a serf.
But at one point in America, the government took nothing.
Nothing.
In fact, when they first created the income tax in 1913, they got an income tax 100 years ago.
The reason that they created it was because the government told average Americans, if we tax the top 1% of the top 1%, it was a tiny tax.
You had to earn something like the equivalent of like $2 million a year before you had to get into the 1% bracket.
And the top bracket was 7%.
But what Congress told the average American is that if we can tax the very wealthy, a tiny bit, You won't have to pay any taxes at all.
We'll get rid of all of the duties and the import taxes and all of the federal government, because the federal government was tiny back then.
They said, we'll pay for everything just by a tiny little tax on the rich.
Now the income tax taxes the average guy.
At rates far in excess of anything contemplated for the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, I mean, you know, we got caught.
That was the original, you know, 99% versus the 1%, right?
Because the 99% wanted the income tax on the 1%, and now they're clobbered with tax rates that nobody would have even considered.
Because the top tax bracket initially was 7%.
That was as high as it went.
And of course, you know, there was no Social Security taxes back then, there were no state income taxes, so Americans were really free.
See, I think if the Chinese weren't obsessed with selling stuff to Americans who can't afford to pay for it, If they simply let their currency go up in value, their own citizens would be able to consume those products and they'd have a lot more wealth to take care of their environment.
I think they're sacrificing to keep our economy propped up.
I'll go back to World War II. So during the Second World War, Americans were employed either, if you were a man, you were in the army.
If you were A1, I mean, if you were 4F, you were working for a factory that made bombs.
Women, right, who were formerly housewives, were now in factories working, making bombs.
So everybody had jobs.
Everybody was making stuff for the war.
Meanwhile, everything that you needed was rationed at home.
It was very tough being in the U.S. during the war because we had nothing, because everything was used to supply the war.
As the war was nearing an end, there were a lot of economists who were advising the president, President Truman, we can't end the war because there's going to be massive unemployment, because all the soldiers are going to be unemployed, the people making bombs are going to be unemployed.
What are we going to do?
And they were actually worried about this.
That's how stupid it was to have economic advisors.
But then the war ended.
And did we have a collapse?
No, we had a boom.
Because now all the people that were making stuff that blew up started to make things that we actually wanted.
Well, I'm talking about the things – you could say that we're better off in the long run because we got rid of Adolf Hitler.
But in the short run, the fact that we had to divert all those resources out of peacetime production to military production – was a burden on the economy.
People suffered during the war.
Now they didn't complain because the war was on.
But this is my point about China.
Right now, you have all these factories in China.
And the Chinese are working there.
But the stuff that they're making is going to America.
It's kind of like when we had factories and we were making stuff for the war.
They're making stuff that they can't use.
We're using it.
Now, if they let their own currency go up, because the Chinese government is actively suppressing the value of their currency.
That's why they have $4 trillion in foreign reserves.
That's why China is the biggest owner of U.S. Treasuries other than the Federal Reserve, because they keep buying them up in order to keep their currency from going up.
But when they keep their currency from going up they keep their own citizens from buying their own products.
But if the Chinese let their currency go up The idea is that, well, if Americans now can't afford to buy Chinese products, all those Chinese workers are going to lose their jobs.
No, they won't.
Just like the soldiers didn't lose.
The factory's still there.
They just made stuff for Americans.
So you've got all these factories.
The Chinese people, there's almost a billion people in China, they need a lot more stuff than we do.
They need all the stuff that they're producing in those factories.
They don't need us to consume it.
They're perfectly happy to consume that stuff.
The reason they can't consume it is they can't afford it because their currency is too weak.
The Chinese government lets their currency go up, and now all of a sudden the Chinese are going to have the jobs and the stuff.
See, right now they get the jobs and we get the stuff.
That's a lousy trade-off for them, but it's good for us because we get stuff without having to work for it.
They get to work without any of the stuff.
But that's what you want.
When you have a job, you don't want the job.
You want the stuff that you can buy with your paycheck.
Nobody works, you know, most people don't work because they enjoy work.
They look forward to quitting time.
They look forward to the weekend.
They want to spend the money.
And right now the Chinese aren't able to spend it because we're spending it for them.
And when the Chinese cut the cord from the United States, when they stop subsidizing our economy, when they let their currency go up, they will be able to deal with their pollution.
And they're also going to enjoy a greater benefit from their effort.
Wouldn't you just assume that just like the regular market itself, like you feel, if government regulations stepped out, if we had less imports, we would pick up the slack with American construction and innovation and designing of new materials.
Well, the idea is to keep away from some sort of a Foxconn-type scenario where one group has a gigantic amount of money and they take advantage of these incredibly poor people, paying them a tiny, tiny, tiny amount of money and forcing them to work ungodly hours to the point where they have to put nets all around their building.
If I advertise a job at a particular rate of pay and somebody shows up, when Walmart runs an ad, they get like, I don't know, 50 applicants per position.
So obviously they're not exploiting people.
I mean, 50 people wouldn't apply for the job.
If Walmart was out there netting people and they had people with guns standing around the workers making sure that they didn't leave, then you'd have a point.
But nobody is forcing anybody to take these jobs.
They're taking them because it's the best job they can get.
And why is Walmart bad for offering somebody the best job they can get?
Now some people will say, well they should offer even more money.
Why?
The worker's not worth it.
They don't have enough productivity.
They don't have enough skills.
And a lot of people, and this is what I did with Occupy Wall Street, but a lot of people who want to criticize people who hire people, and they say, look, you don't pay your workers enough money.
They don't have any employees.
They don't pay their workers anything.
I said, look, you don't think the guy at Walmart is making enough money?
How do you have a gigantic business that makes billions of dollars and pays people pennies and makes them work 16 hours a day, takes advantage of these people that don't have any other opportunity?
But the government not only does that infringe upon your liberties and your freedoms, But it actually creates a lot of problems, and the biggest problems in America is not drugs, but the war on drugs.
That's what does much more harm to the economy.
In fact, I actually think that more people do drugs because they're illegal than probably if they were legal, but certainly they would be safer if they were legal.
We wouldn't be dealing with criminals.
I'd rather buy drugs from a company, a pharmaceutical company, than from a gang in South Central LA. I think they're going to be more concerned about their brand and the purity of their products than the Crips or the Bloods or wherever you have to go to buy your heroin down here.
Do you know the situation in Florida where Florida for the longest time didn't have a database?
They had these things called pain management centers where people would go in and they would say, oh, my head hurts.
Okay, we'll go right next door.
I'll write you up some OxyContin.
And they would go in the same facility.
They'd go to a doctor and then to the pharmacist that only prescribed pain pills.
And because of that, they have this massive amount of people that are addicted to OxyContin in Florida.
In fact, it is an area of Florida leading up to the northern states that's called the OxyContin Express.
Vanguard actually did a show on it called the OxyContin Express and we had them on the podcast and talked about it.
There's 90% of all OxyContin in the country is prescribed in Florida.
I mean, and why is that?
It's because of deregulation.
It's because of a lack of regulation.
It's because they weren't forced to have a database where they made sure that people weren't doing something unethical and just prescribing pain pills all willy-nilly.
I'm not really familiar with it because I'm hearing about it for the first time from you, so I don't know.
But I know it's not that there's no regulation down there because obviously these are doctors or if they're writing prescriptions, there is a lot of regulation involved in that process.
So I'm not familiar with it to really comment on it.
But I do believe – I mean the war on drugs has destroyed our inner cities.
It's corrupted the police forces.
It's screwed up police south of the border.
And now you have a situation too where you're an inner city kid.
And, you know, you've got minimum wage laws and you've got occupational licensing laws that make it almost impossible for a young kid to get a legitimate job, yet you've got the gangbangers flashing around, you know, a wad of cash.
Hey, just deal drugs and you can make a lot of money.
So what you're saying essentially is that minimum wage is just more government intrusion and the more freedom that you have the government take away from you, whether it's minimum wage freedom, whether it's tax freedom, whatever it is, the worse you're going to be.
You're going to have more regulations, you're going to have more people involved, more red tape, more bullshit, more waste, more corruption.
But then that was even worse because what would happen sometimes in order to keep themselves safe because the employers didn't want to run afoul of the employment law.
So they would only give you the internship if you got it through a college, right?
So now what would happen is you'd actually have to pay to be an intern.
Because you'd go and pay tuition to a college just so you can go and work for free.
I mean, wouldn't it be better not to pay the tuition and go into debt and just work for a low wage than to pay to work for no wage?
I mean, this is what happens when you have all these government regulations.
Everybody is worse off.
And people think, oh, these young people are being exploited.
No, they're not.
It's not exploitation.
A lot of times it's the best thing that can happen to them is they get a job and, you know, people say, well, you know, you can't raise a family on the minimum wage.
Of course not.
And you shouldn't even try.
I mean, if all you can do is flip burgers, why are you starting a family?
I mean, you should, you know, you got to develop your skills.
You've got to be able to earn more money than that before you take on those extra responsibilities.
But if you say, hey, every wage has to be a wage that could let you support a family, then there are no entry-level jobs.
Well, then how do you enter the labor market if there's no entry-level position?
Well, some people start out cooking french fries or mopping up and go on to own a franchise.
So you can certainly move up.
And there are people – I think the guy who's about to be the new CEO of Walmart, his first job was working on a loading dock in one of the distribution centers.
And now he's going to be the CEO. He worked his way up to the very top of the company.
If they enforced a minimum wage of $15 an hour on McDonald's, There would be no human beings working there.
It would all be automated.
There might be one guy there that made sure that the robots didn't break down, but there would be machines making the hamburgers, making the french fries.
But no, but that is their entry to the job market.
I mean, they have no skills.
Look, believe me, if these people had better skills, would they be working at McDonald's?
Now, part of the problem is, and this isn't, you know, that there are some people that really could be working better jobs, but they're not because we have this phony economy that is preventing those better jobs from being created.
That's the problem.
There are a lot of people now that are working at McDonald's because that's all they can get.
And, you know, it's not like, you know, at least they got that to fall back on.
But the problem is, why aren't there better jobs?
Why aren't the jobs that would normally be there for you to work up, right?
The jobs that are higher up on the ladder, where are those jobs?
And those jobs are being destroyed by the government because we need more savings, we need more capital investment, we need higher interest rates for that to happen, and the government is so busy inflating this bubble economy...
That they're sucking all the air out of the real economy.
They're diverting resources from Main Street to Wall Street, and they are preventing these jobs from being created.
In fact, they're destroying a lot of the jobs that exist.
He's got to start repealing rules and regulations and shrinking government and closing down agencies and departments and laying off government workers.
So, obviously, the world has changed drastically since the time when we imported 50%, and maybe our needs are greatly disproportionate to back then as well.
That's why we need 70%.
But what you're saying is there's no benefit in having the Department of Energy.
And then once they have a job, they've got to figure out something to do.
They've got to make up stuff.
I mean, that's how government works.
I mean, government doesn't want to solve a problem because then there's no need for the agency.
The minute you have a problem and you say, okay, let's have the government solve it.
The last thing they want to do is solve it because then there's no reason to exist.
They want the problem to get bigger so they can demand more resources.
They can have more people, a bigger department.
So it's like the opposite of capitalism.
It's not the survival of the fittest.
The worse you do your job, the more you're rewarded.
And so you don't want to have government doing all these things.
You want to let the market, you want individuals that have a vested interest, you want the profit incentive, the invisible hand, all the benefits of capitalism.
You don't want to get it screwed up by government.
The thing that we have to understand is we can't have this phony service sector economy.
We can't have everybody working in healthcare and education.
We can't send every kid to college.
This idea that everybody needs to go to college is nonsense.
Most people don't need to go to college.
At one point, maybe before the Second World War, maybe not even one out of ten people went to college.
But if you went to college, you know, it's because you wanted to be a doctor or you wanted to be something that you really needed to go.
I mean, now you have more people waiting on tending bar, waiting tables, driving cab with college degrees.
Some of them have advanced degrees.
You know, you want to get a laugh.
I did this video.
I don't know if you saw it.
I was in New Orleans.
And I was walking down Bourbon Street and I was interviewing people and asking them, you know, if they graduated from college and what their major was and when they graduated.
And they all did and some of them had two or three degrees and they were all, you know, bartenders or bouncers at strip clubs or pedicab drivers or screen in the street.
Everybody had a college degree.
Nobody needed it, but they all had debt that they were working off.
I mean, the idea that we have to send every kid to college, regardless of their aptitude, regardless of whether or not they're going to have any real benefit, who benefits from this?
It's the colleges, the universities, the administrators that make a fortune off of all this money.
And the kids graduate with a worthless degree because everybody else has one, so who cares?
You don't know anything, but you've got all this debt.
And are the kids better off spending the first six years of adulthood in college?
A lot of them, they move out of their parents' house because they can borrow all this money to live off campus or frat or live in the dorms.
But now they're 22, 23, 24 years old.
They have such a pile of debt they can never get out for money.
Now they're back home for good.
I mean, I'd rather have the kids stay at home after they graduate high school, get a low-paying job, don't take on any debt, maybe get some skills, and then when they're 20 or 23, then they can move out.
They can rent their own place.
They're self-sufficient.
Instead, now they've got no options because they follow the government's advice.
Well, obviously some have options, and obviously some people go from college to get jobs.
I don't know what the percentage is of people that have successful careers after college, but I assume we're not dealing with a nation of constantly advancing homeless people, where every year the homeless population goes up 3 million.
The internet goes on forever, and time is an illusion.
It's created by the man.
They've created these fucking clocks.
Energy?
Done.
We'll get rid of those.
We'll figure out the energy.
We'll regulate it statewide.
That's how we'll deal with environmental concerns.
Okay, I like that.
Education?
Let's be honest.
It's a mess, right?
The levels of education that we're accepting for high school students is absolutely ridiculous.
I agree that college educations are insanely expensive.
The idea behind it is absurd.
The idea that you can go to school for X amount of years, come out, and be more in debt than you're gonna make in a decade of working every fucking day in your life.
Explain it to people who don't understand because I've seen your explanation of the Social Security system and it's very enlightening because it's disgusting.
Yeah, they ought to erect a statue of Ponzi right in the lobby of the Social Security Administration.
But, you know, Social Security was conceived and sold to the American public as a complete fraud, right?
The idea initially, and the government deliberately used this kind of language, was that it was like insurance because the taxes that you pay are called premiums and you're a beneficiary and they have a trust fund, right?
All this is what an insurance company does.
But Social Security doesn't have a real trust fund.
Nothing is invested.
It's an intergenerational Ponzi scheme.
And what happened is people paid into Social Security.
Now, to play devil's advocate, the benefits of Social Security are that some people that made a decent wage their whole life but lived check to check would someday be able to stop working.
But the reason that pyramid schemes are illegal is because they don't work.
They benefit the people that get in at the beginning at the expense of people that get in at the end.
Well, if a pyramid doesn't work, the government can't make it work.
If the government runs it, they're not going to be more successful than the private sector.
The only difference is when people in the private sector figure out it's a Ponzi scheme.
Why did Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme fall apart?
Because when people realized it was a Ponzi scheme, they wanted their money back.
Social Security is the Ponzi scheme you can't get out of.
The government requires you to participate at gunpoint, and even if you know it's a Ponzi scheme, I'm paying Social Security taxes, even though I know it's a Ponzi scheme.
Well, if you buy legitimate insurance, the money is invested, and it grows so that it could pay off, whether you're buying life insurance, fire insurance, auto insurance.
The insurance companies invest the money, and some people put in claims, other people don't.
But for retirement, a funded pension system, a legitimate system, you take money as you work, and you invest it.
And over time, compounding interest or the investment returns, eventually, based on your contributions and the gains and the reinvestment of the interest and the dividends, you accumulate a portfolio of stocks and bonds or whatever, real estate, whatever you bought, that you can live on.
You can live off of your income from your investments.
But there's also no return because there's no compound.
You don't generate anything.
And so the only way the government can pay you the money when you retire is if they can get it from somebody else.
But how is the baby bust?
Generation X, going to pay for the retirement of the baby boom.
It's impossible.
I mean, they don't have the incomes.
They're loaded up with debt themselves.
If you've got a bunch of college debt, not only do you have to pay that, but you've got to pay somebody Social Security and their Medicare.
It is impossible.
So we've got to admit, the politicians have to admit, all the false promises that they made in order to buy votes.
That's what they do.
They promise something for nothing because that's what people vote for.
People are dumb enough to do that.
They vote for something for nothing.
But there's nothing more expensive than something you get for free from the government.
And we're going to find out just how expensive all this free stuff is.
But we've got to level with people and say, look, there is no trust fund.
There is no money there.
And so let's end the program.
Let's stop it.
And then let's figure out how to deal with the people who unfortunately now, because of this program, now depend on this program, but who would have been self-sufficient if the government had let them plan for their own retirement.
Yes, because if we get rid of all these government rules and regulations, there will be jobs for them.
I don't want them working in government because now I have to pay their salary.
If they work in the private sector, I don't.
I don't want to employ all these bureaucrats, especially when the average bureaucrat is making more than the average person who's paying the taxes that pay the bureaucrats.
And they just gave everybody in Washington a 1% pay raise.
Who could afford that?
I mean, they should be giving these guys pay cuts.
But part of the deal to fund the government was to give everybody a raise in Washington.
Now, when you hear the Eisenhower speech when he was leaving office and he warned of the military industrial complex, that's essentially what he was warning us about.
The fact that this business has arisen that profits off of war, and once it becomes big, like any bureaucratic institution, like any gigantic corporation, like anything that has too much power and influence, Yeah, look, we're the warfare state, we're the welfare state, all of that has to end.
At the turn of the 19th century, so 1900, 1901, The government, federal government, state government, local government, collectively, all the government was 5% of our GDP. What year was this?
The government, we set up that we're going to get rid of energy, we're going to get rid of education, we're going to get rid of change, alter the way we deal with defense, make it actually defense, not offense.
We're down to how many, what percentage of the economy?
How much should we eliminate about the government?
Because, you know, the thing is, it's going to fall apart, right?
Eventually.
The sooner, the better.
I guess the longer it takes, the worse it's going to be.
Because we are getting, you know...
We're digging ourselves into a deeper hole every day.
The sooner that the phony economy collapses, the sooner we can start replacing it and building a legitimate economy.
I know this huge economic crash is coming.
It's way worse than 2008. If it happens in 2014, it won't be as bad as if it happens in 2015. And if it happens in 2016, well, that's even worse than 2015 because we're going to have that much more debt.
It's going to be that much bigger a bubble.
The bigger the bubble, the bigger the fallout when it bursts.
So the sooner we can stop doing the wrong thing, the sooner we can start doing the right things.
So let's say, worst case scenario, it goes to shit in 2016. It survives another couple of years limping along with band-aids on, then one day it implodes.
Well, this is my best guess for how it's going to happen, right?
The economic data is going to start to come out weaker than a lot of people think.
I think the jobs numbers are going to deteriorate.
Of course, they never really improved.
The reason the unemployment rate has come down, it's not because the unemployed have found jobs.
It's because they've stopped looking.
They've left the labor force and now they're collecting disability checks instead of unemployment checks.
But the numbers are going to get worse.
Janet Yellen is going to be the Fed chairman, and she is going to prescribe more quantitative easing.
And so they're going to reverse this tapering process, and they're going to do more quantitative easing.
Now, everybody is assuming that the Fed is going to continue to...
To reduce these purchases and eventually unwind their balance sheet.
And of course, that's impossible.
I was saying that from the beginning, that there was no exit strategy, that it was a lie, that they had checked into a monetary roach motel, that once they had committed to this, that they couldn't stop.
And if you live by QE, you die by QE. And so the Fed is going to come in, and they're going to do more quantitative easing.
They're going to print more money to try to bring interest rates back down, to try to artificially stimulate the economy.
But the market is expecting the reverse to happen.
And as a result, the dollar has risen a little bit.
Gold prices have come down.
Markets come up because people are optimistic about a legitimate recovery.
When they realize that it was false optimism and that the Fed is going to do even more monetary stimulus because none of the other stimulus worked, right?
And that's what they do in Washington.
If something doesn't work, you don't reevaluate.
You just do more of it and just assume it will work if you do it bigger.
So I think when that happens, you're going to see a lot of downward pressure on the dollar.
It's going to really start to fall on foreign exchange markets.
And that's going to have a profound impact on consumer prices.
Price of gasoline, price of food, stuff like that.
And now the Fed is going to be looking at CPI inflation which is much higher than it should tolerate.
But the Fed can't do anything.
The Fed raises interest rates to fight that inflation.
The stock market will crash.
The real estate market will crash.
And all the big banks that we bailed out are going to fail again.
Only now they're going to have even more debt.
So we'll be at an even worse financial crisis than 2008. So the Fed can't let that happen.
So they've got to print even more money.
But now the dollar goes down even more and now inflation is even bigger.
And maybe for a while the government will try to convince us that inflation is good for us and that we should be happy because at least we're not suffering deflation.
But at some point you're going to reach a critical point where the Fed is going to have to either dramatically raise interest rates to protect the dollar and stop hyperinflation and allow the markets to implode and allow a much worse financial crisis in 2008 or They're going to keep printing the dollar until they print it into oblivion, and then it's worthless, and then everybody is wiped out because no matter how much money you have, you don't even have enough money to buy a cup of coffee because the currency has been wiped out.
And you could take your $10 To the US Treasury and you can say, give me my dollars.
This is my receipt because it actually was an IOU. It was a Federal Reserve note, even when it was a note, but it was a note payable in lawful money.
The lawful money was the gold or silver because there were some silver certificates, there were some gold certificates, but there was real money backing the notes, backing the currency.
What happened in 1971 when we went off the gold standard, right?
The government basically repudiated its promises.
So instead of the $10 bill saying we'll pay to the bearer on demand $10, it just says $10.
It's kind of like if I go to a coat check and I give them my coat and they give me a little claim check and it says, I owe you one coat, right?
The claim check is just a receipt for the coat that the coat check has.
But imagine if you went down there.
And you gave them your claim check, and they just crossed out the, you know, IOU one quote, and they just gave you back your receipt that said one quote.
Here's your quote.
That's not my quote.
Well, it says one quote, but doesn't matter what it says, it's not a quote, right?
The $10 bill, just because it says $10, it's not $10.
It used to represent an IOU for $10.
Now it's just a piece of paper with writing on it, but it doesn't represent anything.
But right now, all we have is this fiat money, which means just, you know, let it be made.
It's just paper money.
And the founding fathers, when they established...
With all the population we have now, I mean, there's no way that Congress today can come even close.
I mean, maybe there's a couple of guys, but I mean, nothing like – because we only had 3 million people back then, and we had such an intelligent group of men in Congress compared to now we're drawing off a 250 million, and we have a bunch of idiots.
We claim that there is a bunch of gold there, but it's interesting that Germany, which the United States, in addition to our own gold, we also store gold on behalf of a lot of other countries.
So Germany, a year ago, asked for half of their gold back.
They told the United States government, look, we want half our gold.
And we basically told Germany, okay, but it's going to take us eight years to give it to you.
But as a gold investor, certainly if it's not there, the price of gold is going to go a lot higher because eventually the world is going back to a gold standard.
I mean, there is no question in my mind that we will be back on a gold standard, not because we want it.
The politicians will never want it, but they're going to be forced to adopt it because it's going to be the only way to end the chaos.
But, you know, it's like a chaperone at a high school prom, right?
If I thought that they should own something else, I mean, oftentimes, you know, It's easier to sell people what they want than what you think that they need.
I actually built my brokerage business really in the late 1990s when everybody I talked to wanted tech stocks.
And I used to spend all day and all night trying to talk people out of those stocks, saying, look, this is a bubble.
You don't want to buy this.
This is what you need.
You should buy this company or this dividend.
And it was difficult.
A lot of my friends were making a lot more money than I was back then because they were just selling their clients what they wanted.
But I make a lot more money than they do now because I took a long-term approach.
I wanted to do what was right for my clients, not what made me the money in the short run.
I was concerned about my reputation and building a lasting business beyond the tech bubble.
It made it hard for me in 98, 99, and 2000. But now I'm getting the same kind of thing again, where now a lot of people are buying these social media stocks, and they're succumbing to the hype again.
There's a lot of similarities between what's going on now in the markets and what was going on in the late 1990s.
People forget the past, they keep reliving it, even if it's recent.
It shows you how worthless our schools are.
I mean, not only don't they know history of 50 or 100 years ago, people don't even know history from 5 or 10 years ago.
Look, to me, I see a lot of similarities in the people who are irrationally defending the Bitcoin to what I saw in the dot-com bubble or the real estate bubble.
Look, I believe in sound money.
I want to take power away from government.
But I think a lot of people, if they get into the Bitcoin market now, they're going to lose a lot of money.
Even if it goes higher first, I think eventually it goes down.
Now, I know there's a lot of people that got in early who have a vested interest in expanding the market so they can sell.
They can cash out and actually convert their paper wealth into real things that they want to buy.
I know it makes me unpopular with some people because they want me out there.
They want everybody in the hard money community.
But I am an equal opportunity bubble spotter.
I'm not going to let my ideology get in my way.
So if I see a housing bubble, it's a bubble.
If it looks like a duck and it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it's a duck.
I don't care if I have something philosophically in common.
With people who are anti-Fed.
I just don't think that Bitcoin...
Now, if you get a real digital currency backed by gold, I can be on board with that.
Because if you go back, the original paper money was backed by gold, and it was issued by private banks, not a government.
It was like the original warehouse receipt from a goldsmith.
They had your gold, and they would issue an IOU, and it would circulate.
Well, the ones that are backed by nothing started in 1971. Isn't that like looking at a baby and going, this little motherfucker is not going to be shit.
But the only reason the dollar worked for a while, not backed by gold, and it hasn't worked very well, is because it had a history of being backed by something.
So as this little baby, this Bitcoin baby grows up, he's going to realize this dollar that everybody's been holding over my head as being superior is just older.
It's like some old asshole that just happens to be your dad but doesn't know fucking jack shit about the way the world runs.
And he's telling you how to live your life.
Meanwhile, he's a fucking mess.
Maybe Bitcoin's going to grow up.
Maybe Bitcoin's a little baby that doesn't know shit now.
But one day, Bitcoin's going to grow up and realize, you know what?
Well, I think that, yeah, it's the people buying them that would grow up.
But, you know, there is – you have – people get used to it.
Like if you look at the money that we have now, the chain, you look at a quarter, right?
You know, if you look at the ridges of a quarter, at the side of a quarter, you'll see that it's got these ridges on the sides.
And people say, well, why are they there?
Why are there these ridges?
And why is a quarter even silver in color?
Because it's mostly made of copper, and it's coated with a little bit of zinc.
But why does the government go through the process of binding zinc to copper, and why do they go through the expense of making all these little ridges on the sides of the coin?
Well, it's because the coins were originally made of silver.
And the ridges were there, so you couldn't clip the coin because when it was valuable silver, people would try to take some of the silver off the coin and then spend it.
But when the government, nobody is going to clip the copper coin.
But when the government originally made quarters, when they took the silver out, they made it look like the old silver coins even though there was no silver in there.
It was like people were used to silver coins, and so when the government debased them, that's where the word debase comes from.
It's when the Romans debased their currency by putting base metal into the currency instead of gold.
But they dumb you down over time.
But now our money is just tokens.
We don't have any real money, and we have fiat, we have counterfeit paper, we have tokens for coins, we have this monetary system that is the root cause of all these problems that we have, and I think it's all coming to a head.
We're at the end of the game now, and it's about to blow up.
2008, that financial crisis, that was the beginning of the end.
It wasn't the end of it.
The real crash is coming.
That's why, if you go and look at my book, the book that I wrote, Crash Proof, that came out in February of 2007, the crash that I was writing about isn't the one that happened in 2008, even though I predicted that crash.
The crash that I was worried about was the one that's coming, the one that was going to be a consequence of what I knew the government was going to do to artificially stimulate the economy after the 2008 financial crisis.
I was against the government bailouts and the stimulus before the government even knew they were going to do it, because I knew exactly what they were going to do.
And unfortunately, I was right about that, and that's my book that's out now, my most recent book, other than the one I just gave you on how an economy grows and why it crashes.
But he wrote a series of books deciphering the Sumerian text.
You know, the oldest written language that we're aware of, and one of the things that he believes the Sumerian text depicts is that the Anunnaki, or this race of beings that created human beings, and they live on a planet that's in an elliptical orbit that comes around near Earth every 3,600 years, and they need gold to sustain their atmosphere.
They suspend particles, reflective particles, because they've ruined their atmosphere, sort of like the way we've ruined ours, like the way China's fucking up.
Well, they created a bunch of computers over there, and they fucked up their atmosphere, too.
I mean, I'm not going to be naive to think that out of all of the billions of stars and the billions of planets that may be orbiting those stars, that we are the only one that evolved intelligent life.
So that's probably not the case.
But...
The universe is vast, and the distances that you're talking about are vast, and whether we'll ever be able to navigate them, I don't know.
Obviously, we're dealing with primitive tribes and people that live in indigenous cultures, like, say, in the rainforest or what have you.
Their economy's not really based on money.
It's not based on gold.
It's based on what they can get from their environment.
Their lifestyle, rather, is based on what they can get from their environment, how they stay alive and their happiness.
Is based entirely on what they can get out of their atmosphere.
The world that they live in.
The jungle or what have you.
I mean, isn't that like a more efficient and more natural way to live than the way we're living now with these propped up ridiculous economies and percentage rates.
Well, that now is not natural because we have all this government that we don't need.
But we were talking about a primitive society.
I mean, the only way, and that's why this How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes, I start this book off, three guys living on an island, and they've got nothing.
But the reason that we have an advanced society is because we have tools, because we were able to improve upon our hand.
If all we had as humans was what we can do with our bare hands, if that's all we could do, I mean, we can only eat what we can kill with our bare hands.
There was a purpose to me asking you this question.
The purpose was, if you were going to go to a culture, say like the Native Americans when the Europeans arrived, and say you weren't an asshole, you didn't give them polio and diseases, you didn't kill them all.
If you were going to try to create an economy from scratch based on people who were essentially living off the land, how would you go about doing that?
And money allows for loans because I can loan you money, you can pay me back so we can have capital investments.
The economy is a function much more efficiently with money than through barter.
So money was an improvement.
It was an advancement.
Just like, you know, just like, you know, Plumbing was an advancement, or electricity was an advancement, or the wheel was a great investment, all these things.
Money was a great invention of mankind that allowed for a more efficient allocation of resources, a better distribution of labor.
So if you say, if you take money away from a society, you're going to make that society less efficient and less productive, and so the people are going to have a lower standard of living.
There would be something that would have to happen.
But listen, I really appreciate you enlightening us.
I really appreciate you tolerating my devil's advocate.
Questionnaire.
I think that this is a fascinating episode for a lot of people because a lot of people like me are very uneducated when it comes to finances, don't really understand it, and never really have the opportunity to sit down with a guy who knows as much as you do.
Understand how you've been fucked and then live the rest of your life in a paranoid frenzy trying to prepare yourself for the imminent demise that Peter Schiff has described.
There is no escape.
Be nice to your neighbors.
Collect water.
Find a nice stream.
Learn how to hunt and fish.
Alright, we love the fuck out of you people and we'll see you next week.
We have a lot of podcast shit coming at you.
This weekend, I will be in Chicago.
I'm at the Chicago Theater Friday night with Ari Shafir.
There's a few tickets still available.
And then the weekend after that, I'm at the Grand Volume in New York City, and that shit is sold the fuck out.
We will be talking about Bitcoin on Monday with an actual expert, unlike myself, Andreas Antonopoulos.