Dave Smith critiques the "Death of Libertarianism," arguing that Republican support for bailouts and stimulus packages never represented true liberty but rather confirmed a history of corporatism. He refutes claims that personal responsibility is dead, asserting instead that the system inherently favors large institutions like banks and airlines over ordinary citizens while condemning political leaders for childish scorekeeping during the pandemic. Ultimately, Smith concludes that government failure proves the market is dead, blaming the Chinese regime for silencing pandemic origins and dismissing ideological shifts as mere confirmation bias within a broken framework. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Government Too Big00:09:53
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
Hey, what's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
Once again, on location, once again, audio only.
I do apologize for that, but I am working on figuring out how to add a video element to this.
So for those of you who enjoy watching the show on YouTube, you'll be able to see my smug face as I rant to you guys about my latest thoughts of the day.
I hope everybody is having a good apocalypse and staying safe.
I hope everybody's healthy.
This is crazy, crazy times that we're living in, as I've been saying for the last few episodes.
I got to say, this is, and maybe, you know, I don't want to repeat myself too much from what I've said the last couple pods that I've recorded, but man, this is huge.
You know, whatever you make of any one aspect of everything that's going on with this whole coronavirus scare, it's becoming, I think, clearer and clearer to me, and I'm sure to all of you guys listening as well, that this is the biggest thing that I've lived through.
Like, if you think about the big, you know, like crisis, you know, time events that I've lived through in my life, it's, you know, I think of 9-11 and I think of the financial collapse in 2008.
And I think this is already proving to be way bigger than both of those things.
And I don't say that lightly, but this is a whole different, a whole different bag.
And I think it's really unlike anything in modern American history.
So since we spoke last time, it looks like California has been shut down.
Looks like Illinois is going to be shut down.
And the next one is going to be New York City or possibly the entire state of New York.
It's unclear as of now.
They were floating out the idea of a shelter in place a few days ago.
They didn't end up doing that.
It looks like they are going to go forward with something like a shelter in place.
But, you know, Cuomo doesn't want to call it a shelter in place because he already said we're not going to do a shelter in place.
So it's, you know, he's going to call it something different.
We're not doing a shelter in place.
We're doing a stay inside and don't fucking leave.
You know, it kind of feels like the exact same thing, but he doesn't want to call it that.
A lot of really just, you know, I mean, I guess I've mentioned this already, but it seems like a pretty strong theme throughout this whole thing is that it's hard to believe.
And this is even true for me.
So it's probably really true for people who, you know, haven't been talking about this stuff forever.
But it's hard to believe the level of unimpressiveness that our, quote, leaders display.
It's just all so ridiculous.
It's all ridiculous.
I mean, you have like President Trump who's like trolling the press by calling the thing that the China, you know, the Chinese coronavirus.
And then the press is asking Donald Trump about, you know, like, well, what about little Chinese kids who are getting bullied and, you know, they're all just trying to make him look bad.
He's just trying to troll them and kind of enjoying the moment.
And all of it is just so outrageously childish and stupid.
And you're like, guys, we are shutting down major cities.
We are about to.
If we do control the spread of this virus, we're going to enter a depression in this country.
These are serious, serious times.
They would call for serious leadership.
This thing is a joke.
Mayor Bill de Blasio spoke yesterday.
And I mean, it's like, it's just the most childish thing I've ever seen in my life.
He just gave like a 30, 40 minute speech taking shots at Donald Trump, just trying to score political points.
Like they are incapable of one, you know, moment of going like, okay, well, I'm actually going to try to be a leader here.
I'm actually going to try to do what's best for the country.
It's all just the cheapest, you know, it's like real public choice theory on display for everybody to see.
It's so funny that the whole like notion of government always seems to be predicated along the lines of we can get people in positions of power who will make choices in the common interest and not in their own self-interest.
Of course, they all, you know, you also believe that can't be achieved through the marketplace.
The marketplace can only be profit-driven, you know, selfish people.
But we could get people into government who can be really, really selfless and only, you know, care about what's good for people.
At least it seems to me like that's the only real argument for having a government, even if people who support the government don't come out and say that exactly.
But I mean, obviously, if you could have really selfless people in the market that would voluntarily provide the services of government, then you wouldn't really need a government.
And obviously, if you had people wielding the enormous power of government that were acting selfishly rather than for the common good, well, then that wouldn't work out very well either.
So it seems like that's kind of the necessary underlying implied belief to be a statist.
And then you see this stuff.
I mean, de Blasio gets up there and he's like, he was mad.
You know, Trump revived some old, you know, or used some old law.
I'm blanking on the name of it right now, but to basically for the federal government to force factories into producing, you know, medical supplies in this case.
You know, which of course, right, like during World War II, that was a big thing.
They made factories.
They turned all types of factories into war factories, essentially.
So he's basically doing that, but for, you know, medical supplies, inhalers or something.
I don't know.
And he did it, I believe, on the 18th of March.
And so de Blasio goes off on this whole thing about how he should have done it weeks before.
Why would Trump have waited this long?
It makes no sense that he waited this long.
This was terrible.
And it's like, okay, so what's the point of you airing this out right now?
Like, let's just say, hypothetically, let's just say you were right and he should have done it earlier.
Well, okay, he didn't, but he did it eventually.
So he did what you wanted to be done, but he did it a little bit later.
Okay, maybe you think that's wrong.
But if you're saying we're in the middle of a crisis to the level that you're pushing a shelter in place, his position is that we should shut down the biggest city in this country.
Now that is, now I'm not even saying, again, I'll grant you, let's just say hypothetically that he's right that Donald Trump should have moved faster on this, and he's right that we need a shelter in place in New York City.
I'm not saying I agree with both of those.
I'm just saying hypothetically, let's say he's right about all of that, okay?
So you're saying then, by definition, you're saying that this is a crisis so bad that the fact that we are going to destroy people's livelihoods, destroy the lives of countless numbers of people, countless numbers of businesses will go under because of this.
Countless number of people will not be, you know, will not be able to earn a living temporarily.
Just untold amounts of economic damage to real people, real people's lives.
And you think that's worth it?
So that's how serious the crisis is.
That doing that is actually a better option than the alternative, which would be to not do that, right?
So that's the, so we're at that level of crisis, a 10 out of 10, the highest level crisis you could imagine.
Worse than anything, worse than the financial recession, worse than 9-11, worse than Hurricane Sandy, worse than Katrina, worse than any of these things.
We're at this level where we need to destroy these lives because the alternative is worse than that.
Okay.
So we're at that level of a crisis and you're going to get on and talk to people.
This is your moment to be a leader in this incredible crisis, right?
And you're going to use it to say, I told you so.
You should have done something that you didn't do.
I mean, it's in the past now, right?
There's no need.
There's no real reason why you would have to air this grievance out.
It's for one simple reason to say, look, see, don't blame me when things go bad.
Let me take a shot at the Republican president because I'm a Democratic mayor.
Let me make sure you blame the Rs and not the Ds if shit hits the fan.
Like, that's the level of leadership.
That's the, like, man, I've seen high school basketball coaches who are, you know, 100,000 times the leader that guy is.
BlueChew Chewables00:02:47
How just pathetic.
What an embarrassment for every for every grown man in this country, for all of us.
I'm embarrassed as a father to my daughter that we all have allowed this to be the society that we live in.
It's just, oh my God, just an outrage.
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Anyway, yeah, it looks like things are going to continue for a while.
And this is, I mean, I just don't see where there would be any short end in sight.
I mean, this will end eventually, I think.
But, You know, like if something was shut down last week, what are the odds it's going to be okay to open it up next week or even the week after?
I mean, this is, they're saying now, at least some of the experts are, that this is going to be a 12 to 18 month battle.
Now, they can't keep everything closed for 12 to 18 months, but how long do they go with this?
I mean, I mean, look, I'm not like saying I haven't answered that question.
I'm almost just asking you guys.
Maybe you guys have an answer.
You can tell me.
I'm not sure, but it's just, I mean, if you're talking about shutting down all of these major cities for weeks at a time, this is, I don't see how we get out of this not in a depression.
I just don't see it.
There's been reports that when I say reports, there's been pictures that I've seen posted on Twitter and stuff like this about military trucks that are roaming through New York City.
Tulsi Gabbard Endorsement00:09:32
This is going to get real quick, guys.
Like things, I mean, look, think about this.
Like, think about where we are now versus three weeks ago.
This would have seemed almost unfathomable.
And so where we're going to be in another three weeks from right now might be the same.
It might be something that we couldn't even imagine.
But this is, this is, we're living through something big.
We're living through something big.
Don't get it twisted.
This is different than anything else than any of us have ever lived through.
This is just a, it's a different beast.
Now, don't get me wrong.
I mean, if you were one of the soldiers going to fight in Iraq, that was, you know, like, I'm not trying to downplay that.
Or if you were an Iraqi watching soldiers come in to fight you, that's, you know, that was real.
But this is something different.
And it's on a big, like the magnitude is different.
It's on a national scale.
And then, of course, it's on a global scale.
It's, it's pretty crazy.
Anyway, it's, you know, maybe I'll, I had some other thoughts, but you know what?
I might save that for the later segment because there was a video that was posted that I wanted to go through.
So maybe I'll hold on to that thought for the moment.
Anyway, so I switching gears a little bit to some political news, something that I thought I'd want to chat with you guys about that a lot of people have been messaging me and asking me to give my two cents on is Tulsi Gabbard.
Tulsi Gabbard dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Joe Biden.
That's right.
I did not misspeak.
That actually happened.
Tulsi Gabbard's presidential campaign is over, and she endorsed Joe Biden.
Now, for people who listen to this show, you know that Tulsi Gabbard was the Democratic candidate who I liked the most.
That's not saying much, but she was the best in show.
She was the, you know, the, I don't know, struggling for an analogy here, but she was like, you know, the prettiest plus size model or something like that.
You know, not saying something great about her, but she was better than she was better than the rest.
And of course, I, you know, to me, it's pretty obvious what the value in Tulsi Gabbard's campaign was.
And that's just that, look, I mean, she was, besides, since Ron Paul and Ron Paul being the only other one in my lifetime, she was the only one who made her campaign about being anti-war.
And not just like anti-war was like one of the taglines in her campaign or she gave some lip service to being against the wars or something like that.
She said, this is the number one issue.
The number one issue is war and peace, and I'm against the wars.
And there was something valuable about that.
There was no way to have Tulsi Gabbard in the race.
And as long as you were talking about her, you had to be talking about the wars.
And I just thought there was something very important about that, because if it was up to everybody else, and when it was up to everybody else, the wars would be like the maybe 13th, 14th thing on the agenda that comes up if it comes up at all, which, you know, to me seems just, you know, not right.
Seeing as how we're involved in the longest wars in American history, it's like, yeah, we should probably be talking about them.
I mean, even if you think they're necessary, you should still kind of think it's the most important thing to talk about, why they're necessary.
And of course, if you realize that they are very, very unnecessary, then you really want to talk about them.
So that was Tulsi Gabbard's campaign.
Throughout the campaign, I gave her advice at different points and gave her a little bit of criticism at several points.
And, you know, she didn't listen to me.
So what can I say?
I mean, I don't know.
I somehow doubt Tulsi Gabbard has ever listened to this show.
Although, as I told you before, some of her people had reached out to me.
And like she follows me on Twitter and stuff like that.
So at some point, at least people around her were aware of us.
And, you know, whatever.
She didn't want to listen and follow advice.
I certainly think she would have been better off too.
But hey, who am I?
Who am I to say some shit like that?
It's never stopped me before, but you know, still, who am I?
But anyway, she did a terrible job in the campaign.
It just really, you know, she was screwed over at every angle for sure, but she did not do what was in her own power to do.
So, you know, anyway, the campaign's over.
It did not accomplish what any of us hoped, which was just to insert a conversation about the wars and to get her a little bit of traction, to maybe make it appealing to other people, you know, to other politicians to be like, oh, yeah, there's some value in being against these wars because people kind of like that or whatever.
You know, she got some, she made a little bit of noise on the internet.
She, you know, was Google searched a lot and raised a little bit of money, but nothing really major.
So disappointment there.
Now, the second big part of this is that it's not just that she dropped out.
It's that she dropped out and endorsed Joe Biden, which is something that many were surprised about, didn't see it coming.
Tulsi Gabbard had supported Bernie Sanders in 2016 over Hillary Clinton.
Still no love lost there.
But she didn't support him this time.
She endorsed Joe Biden.
So I want to say two things about Tulsi endorsing Joe Biden, right?
So there's two different points.
You know, just trying to walk and chew gum here.
So don't get ahead of me when I make the first point.
But here is the first point.
Bernie Sanders deserves to not have Tulsi Gabbard's endorsement.
He absolutely deserves that.
Bernie Sanders, as I said on the last podcast, listen, the last show I did, I did a recap of the Dem debate.
Tulsi Gabbard deserved to be at that debate.
She absolutely deserved to be at that debate.
She met the criteria and then they changed it on her.
And Bernie Sanders said nothing for his friend who supported him in 2016 and stuck her neck out.
He did nothing for her.
This whole time when Hillary Clinton was, you know, when all these people were just slandering her, I mean, she's involved in a lawsuit over this shit.
Like, I don't think it's too, you know, I don't think that's too strong a word.
Calling this woman who went and fought in these wars, went and served in a medical unit in Iraq, this disastrous war that Hillary Clinton supported.
And then she stands up and says, I'm against those wars.
And Hillary Clinton calls her a Russian agent.
And Bernie Sanders, you know, at the time was like the frontrunner.
He's the fucking, or if not the frontrunner at the time, he was right up there.
has huge popularity.
He could have stood up like really aggressively and said, this is an outrage.
Hillary Clinton ought to be ashamed of herself and she should apologize.
And he didn't.
He didn't.
He may have said like one little thing about it.
Like, yeah, no, I don't think she's a Russian agent, but he was basically quiet about it.
He never caught her back, even when he should have.
And for that, I completely understand why she would not endorse Bernie Sanders.
I get that 100%.
He doesn't deserve it.
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Crypto IRA Trading00:07:18
A lot of the Bernie Sanders people have to realize this shit.
Like they want to, you know, they want to blame everybody else.
And there is a lot of blame to go around if you're a Bernie Sanders supporter.
No question.
The entire machine turned against Bernie Sanders to try to make sure he wasn't the nominee.
That to me is just beyond debate.
The media was calling his supporters Nazis, comparing them to the Third Reich.
The former nominee came out and saying nobody likes him and everybody just got duped into this thing.
Elizabeth Warren is basically calling him a sexist.
The media is just being completely unfair in their treatment toward him at the debates.
The moderators, all this stuff.
It's all true.
But the Bernie Sanders supporters got to also realize that you picked a flawed leader.
You picked a guy who does not have the integrity that you're selling him as having.
He just doesn't.
I mean, there were signs, you know, there were signs when you're a multi-millionaire who owns three homes and your whole thing is income inequality.
Maybe you're, you know, you might not be the real deal.
But he never stood up for Tulsi Gabbard, even when she was being treated horribly by all these other people.
And it's funny because, you know, like if you say something bad about Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris or, you know, like one of the establishment, you know, preferred candidates, you know, if you say something about them, it's like there's going to be accusations of sexism or racism or something like that.
But then you have this woman of color who's, you know, was a veteran and they just, who care?
Nobody stands up for her.
Nobody has the decency.
So I could completely understand.
Tulsi Gabbard getting out of the race and just saying, I'm not endorsing Bernie.
Fuck him.
You know, I could completely get that.
What I cannot, and this is point number two, what I cannot get is Tulsi Gabbard endorsing Joe Biden.
And I got to say, man, fuck her for endorsing Joe Biden.
And she just, I mean, she just forfeited her credibility forever.
It's all over, Tulsi.
It's all over.
Now, I don't really care because I was never really that married to like Tulsi's the real deal.
And after this campaign, I never really thought she could be that effective going forward anyway.
I mean, I'm still a little disappointed because it would have been at least, you know, maybe she could have been valuable in some way.
But the only real value that I saw in Tulsi was that she was forcing this conversation and she failed to force it.
So, you know, she was attempting to force this conversation, I should say.
But that's it.
She's, I mean, Tulsi Gabbard, in terms of being a hero to anyone in the anti-war movement or anyone who's just on the principled left who thought like she could be a voice for them, that's it.
She's done.
Every last point that she made is completely undermined by supporting Joe Biden.
I mean, you want to say all these things about, you know, how, you know, you're so against these regime change wars and that your brothers and sisters have died in these wars, but then you're going to go endorse the guy who was integral in a lot of them.
You know, like a senator who voted for the war in Iraq, was the vice president during, now I know, I think according to Gates, the defense secretary under W and Obama, I think they actually said Biden didn't support the move in Libya, but you know, it's still his administration.
It's not like he's condemning them for doing it.
Definitely supported what they did in Syria, the attempted regime change there, the one that she was, you know, standing against, the stuff in Yemen, all of it, the regime change in Yemen, like all this stuff.
Joe Biden was right there for it.
He was the vice president, the number two to the president while this was all going down.
So you're going to, and then you're going to turn around and endorse that guy?
How do you have one ounce of credibility?
You know, it's really something.
And then her big moment, right?
Her big fucking moment in the debate was what?
Going after Kamala Harris.
Why?
Because you fucking locked up all these people from marijuana.
That's so evil.
What an evil thing to do, lock people up for marijuana.
Then you joke around when you say that you, you know, smoked weed.
Yeah, you're a hypocrite.
Okay, great.
Great point.
So now you're going to lock up Joe Biden, who fucking co-sponsored that crime bill.
Like, he's, he's, of all the people on the debate stage, if you wanted to blame somebody for people getting locked up for drugs, he's the best guy to blame.
He's the guy who actually was bragging about how he's the one who got it done.
So now you turn around and you endorse this guy.
And it does seem a little bit strange now, you know, as some people pointed out at the time.
I always kind of thought she just kind of picked other spots and that wasn't the guy.
You know, like I thought, like, yeah, I don't know.
She was just like focusing on other people.
And maybe like me, she assumed Joe Biden would never actually get the nomination.
But she never went after Joe Biden and all those things.
She went hard after Kamala Harris.
She went hard after Mayor Pete.
She even went after Elizabeth Warren.
She went at that, what was his name?
Tim something?
The guy at the beginning who said the guy who dropped out pretty early who said that the Taliban attacked us on 9-11.
I mean, okay.
Granted, that one was kind of a layup, but she went hard at him.
Never went hard at Joe Biden.
Always somehow let him off the hook.
You know, at the time, I heard some people saying that, and it didn't really seem that suspicious to me, but now that she's endorsing him, I, you know, looking back at it in hindsight, maybe it was a little bit suspicious.
Anyway, that's that.
Tulsi is out of here, and she destroyed her own credibility and her own value for anything productive going forward.
So, you know, that's too bad.
I don't know what to say.
I do feel for, you know, feel bad for people who are Tulsi supporters.
But I don't feel bad for people who are Bernie Sanders supporters who are like, why wouldn't she have endorsed Bernie?
He didn't earn that endorsement from her.
I completely understand her doing that.
But the move then, obviously, you know, and I don't know.
Like, I've heard some people speculate.
Maybe she thinks she's going to get something out of Joe Biden.
Maybe that's it.
Maybe she's just that, you know, like that cynical or whatever.
Or maybe it's that cynical.
Like maybe she's just that much of an opportunist and she thinks she's going to get some cabinet position out of him.
I doubt she will.
But I kind of don't, maybe that's it because I don't really understand how, even from her own perspective, how does this do her any good?
BetDSI In-Game Wagering00:03:10
You just, you just forfeited all of your credibility.
So, you know, like she would have been better off, you know, at least it seems like to me, unless there's some other, you know, some under-the-table deal that I don't know about.
But I think she would have been better off to just not endorse anybody.
Just get out of the race and don't even say anything about it.
Say you're waiting, you know, until the end.
You'll see.
But she just knows too much to forgive her for endorsing Joe Biden.
This is somebody who actually knows what's up, at least knows what's up with, like, she's very well aware that the Obama administration committed treason.
Literal treason.
That they armed Al-Qaeda.
They knowingly armed Al-Qaeda.
Like, not, you know, just treason, how it's thrown around loosely.
Like, that's, you know, whatever.
You said something I don't like.
That's treason.
I'm talking about giving material aid and comfort to the enemy of the United States of America.
Arming al-Qaeda.
That literal treason.
Treason with a capital T.
Okay.
And she knows this.
She's talked all about this.
And yet you would still endorse the vice president from that administration.
That is, that's unforgivable to me.
Unforgivable.
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Anyway, so all right, I guess let's move on to there's this video that I wanted to play.
I'm going to apologize in advance because the quality of this is not going to be great, but I think it'll be good enough that you can still kind of make out what's being said and we can enjoy this together.
So this video was sent to me.
It's a video from The Hill, their morning show that they have with Crystal Ball and that Sager, Sager Injeti.
Nixon System Bailout00:14:58
I don't know if I'm saying his name right.
And someone said this to me.
And of course, the title of the video already got me somewhat interested.
And I was asked to give my comment on the video, so I will.
Excuse me.
The title is Sagar Njeti Celebrates the Death of Libertarianism.
So turns out we are dead.
And somebody is celebrating that.
So, I mean, that's bad news.
Anyway, let's listen to the video and we can discuss it together.
Today is a dark time in America.
There's no getting around it.
Millions are filing for unemployment.
They're facing lost wages.
Wondering how they might pay their bills, pay their student loans, put food on the table for their kids, so much more.
But there's one speck of good news that emerged from this crisis, and that is the final and complete death of libertarianism on the right and on the left.
Right now, Republican President Donald Trump is proposing a trillion-dollar stimulus package for the American economy.
200 billion more than that was offered by Barack Obama in 2020.
All right.
So, well, look at that.
What would you say?
The libertarianism is dead.
I want to try.
I really, listen, like I said last time when we talked about this, I actually enjoy this show.
I think both of these guys are pretty good.
They've had interesting commentary on the election season so far.
And that's, you know, it's not that often that I find something that I think is really interesting commentary on the political theater.
So, you know, they do a pretty good job.
So I don't want to be too disrespectful to this guy.
You know, it's just he is such a dumb fuck when it comes to talking about libertarianism.
Like, I don't even know what to say.
First of all, to end everybody going like libertarianism is dead.
It's like, I don't know what, I don't know what situation you're living in.
I don't know what you're seeing.
You know, it's like libertarianism is dead.
Let me tell you something.
This is, these are scary fucking times.
Real deal scary times.
If you're talking about like libertarian policies being enacted, yeah, like, well, we've been dead for a long time then, if that's what you're talking about.
But if you're talking about like people believing in liberty, this may be the best thing that's ever happened to us.
Listen, what we're living through is not just a viral outbreak, okay?
What we're living through right now is the failure of governments on monumental levels all across the globe, all across the globe.
Okay, first of all, this whole fucking thing started with a failure of the Chinese government.
That's what this all started with.
There were fucking doctors in China heroically trying to sound the alarm on this whole thing, and they were silenced.
If those doctors had been listened to, if those participants in the market had been listened to, okay, this whole thing could have been nipped in the bud.
But they weren't.
They were silenced by an authoritarian government.
And so this thing got out of control.
And then the governments were way too fucking slow in responding to it.
And they were way too bogged down in red tape and regulations, which they're still trying to do their best to peel out of the way to try to get some type of functioning system going.
Okay?
This is the big problem they're having right now is we're trying to find a fucking, you know, a vaccine.
They're trying to try all these experimental different things that might help people who have the coronavirus, but they've got to get through all this FDA red tape.
So now they're trying to pass regulation, you know, trying to pass executive orders to get this red tape out of the way.
These are failures of governments all around.
But he's not talking about any of that shit.
He's saying in this simple-minded fucking mentality.
And here's what's so funny about it, right?
So when we played the episode, right, I played where Robbie Suave was on this show, and he's talking to him, and he starts with the belief system, and Robbie didn't really do a great job of, you know, convincing him otherwise or even presenting an argument otherwise.
But he's going to start with the idea that, well, basically, the whole Republican Party is all a bunch of libertarians.
And that's the problem.
You libertarians have so much influence in the Republican Party.
Is this fucking this dumbass fucking view that a lot of these right-wing populists have that it just, I don't know what to say.
It has no relation to reality.
Just no relationship with the actual world at all.
It's just like, I don't know, maybe it's comforting for you to think that way.
That makes it easier to reject freedom if you go, well, freedom's what the Republicans are all about.
And look what freedom's got us.
So fuck freedom.
Maybe that makes you feel better, but it's dumb as shit and it has nothing to do with reality.
Tucker Carlson does the same thing.
Oh, it's all a bunch of libertarians in the Republican Party.
Fucking Nick Fuentes did the same thing too, although he knows better and he basically admitted it when he was on the show.
But yeah, the idea, the fucking idea that they're all a bunch of libertarians, like let's get real.
The fucking Republic is that the Republican establishment is not libertarian, okay?
They're not really anything.
They're oligarchs.
They're power brokers.
I mean, if you accurately want to call them something, they're fucking corporatists.
Okay.
Like that's really what they are.
They represent corporate interests and using state power to assist corporate interests.
That's what they, that's literally what they are.
They're corporatists, but they love big government.
So don't tell me for a fucking second that these are a bunch of libertarians.
All right.
It's nothing even close to that.
So anyway, I mean, so he's going to go, you know, so you have this worldview, right, in your mind.
And this is, this is like, it's almost a really great example of like pure confirmation bias because what he's saying is, well, libertarianism is dead because even the Republicans have embraced big government, right?
So that's like the mental gymnastics that you play in your head.
Just think about that, right?
So you have this assertion, this belief that the Republicans are libertarians, okay?
And then you get a piece of evidence that directly contradicts that view.
Look at all these Republicans embracing the opposite of libertarianism, right?
But instead of going, oh, maybe I was wrong with my view, you go, this is proof that the thing I said was true.
And even they're acknowledging that the thing that I said was true just doesn't work anymore.
That's actually what's happening here.
Oh my God, Donald Trump embraced a stimulus package bigger than Barack Obama's stimulus package.
Well, that's it then.
Libertarianism is dead.
Right?
Okay.
If you want to say that libertarianism is dead because the Republicans aren't libertarians, okay, fine.
But this isn't exactly new, is it?
How far back would you like me to start?
How far back?
I mean, I could go back to every Republican president who's ever lived, but let's just start for, like, I don't know how old this guy is.
He's probably a little bit older than me.
Let's start with Nixon.
So we'll cover at least your entire life.
So we'll cover Segar's entire life and probably a little bit more.
I don't know exactly when he was born.
But so he's probably younger than that.
But let's just start with Nixon just to be safe, okay?
We'll go through every Republican president.
So this Richard Nixon took America off the gold standard and said, and I quote, we're all Keynesians now.
How libertarian does that sound to you?
I guess back then, libertarianism was dead, right?
I guess that, right?
That must have done it right there.
I mean, what's less libertarian than that?
Taking us off the gold standard so that the federal government was not restricted at all in the amount of money it could create out of thin air.
So basically just the era of big government starts under Republican Richard Nixon.
But, you know, if that's not libertarian, you know, if that's not anti-libertarian enough for you, you know, you could also look at the price and wage controls, the creation of the EPA.
There's a whole long list of other shit, not to mention fucking expanding the war in Vietnam and all the secrecy of government and all that shit.
But yeah, I guess, you know, there was a little bit of it then, right?
So then who's the next Republican president after Richard Nixon?
It goes, Nixon, Ford, Carter.
Well, Ford, I guess, was a Republican, but he, you know, I don't even count him really as a president.
So then what do we go to Ronald Reagan?
Okay.
Ronald Reagan, the guy who's ramping up the war on drugs, who's, yeah, Nixon also give him credit for creating the war on drugs, very libertarian of him.
And then Reagan, of course, runs with that and ramps it up to really, you know, start creating more of what we know as the war on drugs today.
He's, you know, shipping drugs in from fucking Nicaragua while he's ramping up the war on drugs.
Government spending goes up every single year under Ronald Reagan.
He comes in on, you know, government is the problem, not the solution, and then just gives us more and more government.
Nothing but big government.
Then we have George H.W. Bush, the former CIA man, the guy who was from that very libertarian organization, the CIA, and then gets in there, raises taxes, raises spending, expands the size of government every single year that he was in there for all four of them.
Then the next Republican president is his son, George W. Bush.
Do I even have to do George W. Bush?
Record high levels of government spending.
The wars for basically after 9-11 through the rest of his administration, spying, fucking torture, literally says the words, I am abandoning the free market.
Those are his actual quotes.
So I don't know.
If libertarianism is dead because Donald Trump spent it, well, guess what?
You're just shooting a corpse at this point because we've been dead for a long time if you measure us by Republican policy positions.
And yet, so yes, he abandons the free market.
He bails out the auto industry, bails out the banks, all of this stuff, stimulus packages, the same fucking thing, the same proposals, cutting checks to Americans, all this stuff.
It's the exact same thing.
And now the next one is Donald Trump.
And yeah, just like spending went up from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush, spending went up from Barack Obama to Donald Trump.
Donald Trump's, you know, pushed all these protectionist tariff stuff.
Nothing libertarian about that, right?
So yeah, of course.
So Donald Trump wants a big bailout, a big stimulus package.
But how does this prove that libertarianism is dead?
All it proves is that you're wrong.
See, this is what's so crazy about the confirmation bias of this.
All it proves, right?
Like, just look at this objectively.
If you're saying the Republicans are all permeated by libertarians, and now you're saying, well, this is proof that libertarianism is dead.
No, you dumb fuck.
This is proof that you were wrong.
That in fact, the Republicans are not permeated by libertarians.
That's the only thing that's been proven here.
That's it.
All right, let's see if I can get back.
Let's play a little bit more of this video.
See what else he says.
I don't think I made it past this point, by the way.
2008.
He's being pushed by Republican Senator Josh Hawley to increase the payments proposed to working families to thousands of dollars a month provided by the federal government.
Others, like Senator Marco Rubio, are proposing that the federal government provide billions to small or medium-sized businesses and that as long as they use it to keep their workers on payrolls, they don't even have to pay it back to the federal government.
Intercept journalist Lee Fang summed it up quite well, saying, quote, Trump suspending mortgage foreclosures, demanding cash payments to Americans, now invoking the Defense Production Act to force private firms to produce needed supplies is incredible.
It's kind of a shell shock for anybody who reported on any economic policies in the Obama years.
Long gone are the days of people holding a pocketbook constitutions and keyboard warriors on Twitter railing against taxpayer bailouts for anyone because they should have had the good sense and personal responsibility to anticipate a global pandemic in which we were all literally forced to stay inside and not spend money.
The debate on Capitol Hill today is not whether we should bail people and affected industries out, but what strings may I want to attach to that money for businesses or exactly how much, how many billions they want to get.
The corporate Democrats were not ready for this, as I covered in my radar yesterday.
They are completing the Hillary maneuver by working for shedding average Americans from their political coalition and relying on the votes of rich people in the suburbs, Wall Street, and their African-American voting base.
They've left workers out in the cold in their worst time of need, the fake paid sick leave bill, and Chuck Schumer galvanizing Democratic support for less relief of American families, then the GOP.
It's a welcome development.
When the right was faced with crisis, they made the final break away from the libertarian deadweights that have weighed them down politically.
No, no, they made that break way back in the, like I just said, maybe Nixon made that break.
Maybe after Barry Goldwater, you could say Richard Nixon made that break.
But Donald Trump didn't make that break.
There was never a connection.
There was never a connection to begin with.
And he's sitting here celebrating these fucking bailouts as if they're good for the American people.
Because the bailouts, we're going to give the fucking big banks $1.5 trillion and infinite free money, infinite free money.
And then what?
We're going to send some Americans a crummy thousand dollars?
That's, that's the, what?
So this is now represents us, the government working for the people.
That's choosing the people and not the big corporations?
The whole goddamn system is fucking built around corporate welfare.
The whole thing is a fucking bailout of fucking corporations, which by the way, that's who's going to get the majority of these bailouts.
It's going to be big corporations.
You watch.
It'll be fucking like the MTA and Amtrak and fucking, you know, all these government agencies anyway, then the airlines, which are like hyper-regulated fields, hospitals, things like that.
That's who's going to get the fucking bailouts.
You'll be fucking lucky to get a crummy fucking little, you know, they'll do things for the people like, oh, okay, we'll give you an extra 90 days to fucking pay your federal taxes.
That's there you go.
There's your bailout.
The banks get fucking unlimited free money that they can lend out on interest, but fucking you get you get an extra 90 days to still pay the same fucking money.
You'll still owe the same thing.
Corporate Welfare Crisis00:04:10
I mean, like, come on.
If you actually cared about bailing people out, right?
If you were going to spend money to bail people out, how about like fucking half people's taxes?
Like, okay, you actually don't have to pay.
You only have to pay 50% of what you thought you were going to have to pay.
Oh, that could actually help people out.
But all this shit, this is all just such fucking nonsense, man.
It's all such bullshit.
You look at failure all around, government failure all around, and go, yeah, this is proof that the market is fucking dead.
And, you know, to mock people, he goes, oh, gone are the days of people waving their pocket constitutions around.
It's like, okay, so you're openly just saying you don't care about the Constitution.
By the way, I'll openly say I don't fucking care about the Constitution, but I'm not a fucking statist like you.
So you're going to say basically that what you're for is a fucking government with no rule of law.
Because isn't the Constitution supposed to be the rule of law?
Isn't that the founding document of the whole fucking thing?
So just like, yeah, fuck that, fuck that document.
Whatever.
Gone are the days of people saying, oh, you know, this is your personal responsibility.
Yeah, obviously it's not just a matter of fucking personal responsibility.
It's not, I don't blame people for the corona fucking craziness, but you know who I do blame?
I don't know.
The Chinese government for fucking silencing the fucking guy who blew the lid off this thing when they could have like stopped it to begin with.
I think they deserve a little bit of blame.
No?
Is that unfair?
Jesus Christ.
All right.
Let's play a little bit more of it.
I don't know how much more of this I can take, to be honest.
For so long.
And as Crystal covered in her radar yesterday, we don't ask questions about how we're going to pay for each individual line item of this bailout crisis because we understand that a pandemic is the definition of a problem that affects all of us.
And there is no way to personal responsibility or individualism your way out of this one.
The way that political change happens in this country is maddening.
You slog away, you can talk into the ether, you shout and you yell and more for years and years and years and years and nothing ever happens.
But then, in a span of just a few months, literally, the entire world can change.
That's where we are today.
The right is ditching libertarianism in a flash in the pan.
They're accepting the idea that when the public good is threatened, it is okay to act in the public interests economically.
The corporate wing of the Democratic Party is learning that their lip service to working people while selling them out for nearly a generation isn't going to be enough anymore.
Sure, they looked fine when they were posed up against people who literally didn't believe in public policy, but now they're actually going to have to fight on the merits.
All right, all right.
So more just confirmation bias.
So the fact that these corporate Republicans who were so libertarian, the fact that in a drop of a fucking hat, they bailed, they were very happy to bail on any semblance of libertarianism is proof that they just realized libertarianism is dead.
Or maybe it's proof that they weren't fucking libertarians to begin with.
To begin with.
Why do you think these corporate Republicans have championed every last one of these bailouts?
They love the bailouts.
They don't fucking care about liberty.
I mean, how much evidence do you need?
God damn.
What a fucking stupid take.
And like I said again, I do.
I fucking, I like their show.
I think it's a fucking, I think it's a good show.
I'd be happy to go do their show someday.
I would love to argue with this guy about all this shit.
Maybe I should be, maybe I should calm down on the insults a little bit so we can fucking talk one day.
But god damn it.
This is just like the fucking dumbest take I could imagine.
The dumbest take.
Anyway, I am, I'm going to wrap up here just because I'm pressed on time and I want to get this episode up in time to stream for you guys at 6 p.m.
I'm going to do my best.
You guys know I'm tech retarded here, but I'm going to do my best to get some video content out for you guys tomorrow as well.