Dave Smith and Robbie Bernstein argue that pandemic-era government bailouts, money printing, and surveillance expansions are accelerating fascism rather than socialism. They critique lockdowns as a failed risk-reward calculation that erodes trust while enabling authoritarian overreach, including facial recognition and mandatory facility roundups. Despite Keynesian failures to stimulate demand, they warn of an impending Great Depression driven by wealth transfers to the elite. Ultimately, the hosts urge libertarians to abandon purity spirals, forming broad alliances against crony corporatism and state encroachment on liberty. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Rolling Back The State00:04:28
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.
What's up, what's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
This is a bonus episode, yet one more, a fireside chat, checking in with the fire number, I forget.
But yeah, I figured out a light that I just literally, I was like, man, my lighting really sucks.
And then I looked over in the corner and there's this big light.
And I was like, how have I not noticed that before?
Maybe I should put that behind me.
So that's the level of production that I'm working with.
Anyway, very good to see the handsome face of Robbie the Fire Bernstein, who I got to say has gotten quite comfortable in that motel room.
It is really, it's looking great.
You built a fireplace, it seems like there.
What do we got going on?
I just wanted to make sure that we had a good setting for the fireside chats.
I felt like, you know, the centerpiece was missing.
So did some construction work, went out into like their parking lot, gathered some stones, put it together, and I think it looks great.
It does.
In all seriousness, though, it's so awesome that your six-year-old nephew was able to draw that for you.
It's really good work.
For a six-year-old, it's really good work.
No, that was a late night arts and crafts project, buddy.
Eat the right weed edible.
You can turn into a six-year-old in no time.
Very good.
Very good.
I'm glad you're safe and staying sane.
I've been talking to a lot of people.
Just was talking while you were figuring out your video settings, was talking to Brian, our producer, about this a bit.
Oh, by the way, we're doing Zoom this time because I've been doing these calls on Skype recording, but I've been told by the powers that be at Gas Digital Network, which of course is code for that maniac Puerto Rican, that this is going to come out better if we do it this way.
Does he know that Zoom comes with cutting the lawn noises?
I didn't know that was a feature.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, I apologize for that.
It's so goddamn quiet out where I am, but it's just freaking as soon as we start recording this guy.
But I, you know, he's mowing his lawn.
Hopefully that'll stop soon.
But anyway, so we're doing it on Zoom.
But I was talking to Brian, and it's something I've been talking to with a few friends of mine recently that around this point, it's really starting to hit people, like the craziness, like getting like, you know, like just like, you know, getting antsy and bouncing off the walls a little bit.
And I was starting to feel that myself too.
For the first couple of weeks, I was just kind of like, you know, aside from all the craziness in the world and the fact that I'm terrified of the depression and fascism that is sure to come from all of this, I was like, wow, I was just spending a lot of time with my family and I really love that.
But I did start to go a little stir crazy over the last couple of days.
Say this, took about like a half hour bike ride the other day.
Helped a lot.
Helped a lot.
Get outside if you can.
Get some exercise.
That stuff is underrated.
When was the last time you got outdoors and went for a bike ride?
The last, I mean, I honestly can't remember.
It might have been 20 years since I got on a bike.
But, you know, it's like riding a bike.
There you go.
It comes right back to you.
It's really unbelievable.
It's like two pedals before you're like standing up on it and you're like, oh yeah, riding a bike.
I remember what this is like.
Did the bike fit at all?
Or you're doing that thing where like your knees are all the way out to the side?
It wasn't, I mean, it wasn't perfect, but it's my father-in-law's bike.
So it's, you know, another grown man who's using it.
It was, it was decent enough.
And he's like, you know, he's, I don't know, he's like 5'11, maybe or something like that.
So he's like, not, it's not like I was using the bike of like a five foot four guy and I'm 6'2, all gangling.
So it was, it was fine.
And my wife jumped on another bike that they have here.
They got a bunch of bikes here.
My wife jumped on one and we just biked around.
It's real beautiful around here.
So it was very nice and cathartic.
And now I'm powered up again and ready to be scared of fascism some more.
So that's good.
Yeah, it's definitely good to get outside, get some fresh air.
But the amount of money printing that's coming and the way that the government's stepping in and going, hey, we're going to take care of everybody.
I don't know how this doesn't become full-scale socialism.
Inflation And Demand Crash00:10:56
It just, it's scaring me.
Well, I mean, I just, the only correction I would make to you there is that I really think it's more fascism than socialism right now.
I mean, I really think that's what we're looking at.
And, you know, you can split hairs about what exactly is what, but what you're looking at here between like the massive corporate handouts on a level like we've never seen before, the consolidation of corporate power through state intervention.
It's just classic, you know, corporatism, fascism.
And it's, you know, there were some people out there.
I'm going to reach out and try to get Peter Schiff on the show.
I want to talk to him.
You know, I talked to Bob Murphy.
I talked to Gene Epstein.
But, but I just even know David Stockman.
I listened to his episode on Scott Horton's show.
And they, particularly, Stockman and Gene Epstein were not as bearish as I would have expected them to be.
Like they weren't saying like we're going to enter a Great Depression.
And so that gave me a little bit of comfort.
But then just the more I think about it in my head, I mean, I don't know.
Those guys are smarter than me and they know way, you know, those are real deal brilliant economists.
I'm just some idiot comedian.
But I don't think so.
I think we're going to enter a Great Depression.
And I don't know if it's going to happen immediately following this or it'll be over the next year or two.
But the fact that you're looking now at what are the latest unemployment numbers?
Was it 10 million total people who have filed for unemployment?
It's something crazy.
It was 3.2 million on the first round.
And then there was a second round where it was even higher.
It's going to be 10 million by the time this whole thing is over.
You're going to be looking at one to two million small businesses that are closed.
Who knows how many other small to mid-sized businesses will fail subsequently?
That was really a result of all of this.
You know what I mean?
Like maybe pull it together to reopen, but then can't sustain.
You're going to be on top of that, you've got what are we at already?
$6 trillion, $7 trillion total that's been between injected money between monetary and fiscal policy.
That's not going to stop.
This isn't it.
There's going to be another round.
They're already talking about another round.
These $1,200 checks aren't going to be enough to fucking hold people over.
So there'll be another round of that.
I mean, we're quite possibly going to be looking at a $3 trillion deficit for this fiscal year.
This is going to be insane.
And then you're going to have 0% interest rates for God knows how long.
Really, in effect, they're negative interest rates, if you account for inflation.
And who knows?
They might go to legit negative interest rates.
I wouldn't be shocked at this point to see that.
There you go.
Nice sound effect on that one.
Is that on your end, Rob?
Brian, is that?
Yeah, we go.
Oh, that might be.
Are we here in a weeer in a plane crash?
There we go.
I don't know.
I think somebody, I think Brian's audio picked up somebody motorcycling out of New York City.
No, I think it's me.
I think a plane went by.
I should close my window.
Give me one second.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Go ahead.
It's okay.
Are you still listening?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Okay, there you go.
But so I just don't see, you know i i don't i don't see any way that this doesn't end in just utter disaster and just utter utter disaster if you have uh peter schiff on you gotta get him to explain to you um why there seems to be endless dollar demand what the euro dollar is and uh i'm first starting to look into the euro dollar a little bit is that something that you've like researched to come across even no So it's so fascinating,
but like we've been paying attention to the Federal Reserve and everything that goes on in this country, but apparently the picture is actually way bigger than that, that the banks, they basically, you know, they take all this money and then they park it abroad.
And once they park that money abroad, it's not under any of the financial restraints of the Fed or the U.S. monetary policy or anything.
So the money multiplier effect of like, let's say, I don't even know if JP Morgan, I'm assuming JP Morgan Chase is involved in this, but like let's say they take a billion dollars from the U.S. government and then they put it in China.
So that $1 billion can become like, I don't even know, 10, you know, 10 or 20 billion dollars of supposed U.S., like they call it a Euro dollar.
But essentially what's going on is there's massive amounts of debt abroad that's all owed in dollars because they don't want the currency risk of having to pay back the debt in dollars.
So the actual like scheme of what the banks have been pulling in terms of access to finance and capital is much, is so much bigger than you and I thought.
And like the last recession, it wasn't just the credit asset bubble in the housing markets.
It's actually a much bigger picture of like the world's finances.
And it's beyond my comprehension.
I'm at like the beginning of looking into this, but that's going to be part of the picture is like, is there hyperinflation or is there so much like dollar demand and currency use abroad that all that inflation almost just remains on like these fictional balance sheets between you know debts of just companies paying back banks or something.
I don't even, you know, it's beyond my comprehension.
Yeah, that's that is fascinating.
I'll have to look into that a little bit more, but that's fascinating and terrifying.
You know, I'm starting to think that, you know, the big like fear from a lot of people in our camp has always been hyperinflation.
But I'm starting to think that even short of the hyperinflation, almost that doesn't even, even if we don't reach some type of hyperinflation or severe inflation, just the fact that we're going to be, I mean, I mean, this has been what we've, what we've seen in the last few weeks is the largest transfer of wealth from the middle of the country to the rich in the history of the world.
There's nothing that compares to it.
It's more than in 2008.
And so it was something like 40% of the wealth of the middle class was extracted from them in 2008.
This is way more.
This is way more.
And you're going to see, and the fact that it's like it's exacerbated on every level.
So it's not the fact that just the economy shutting down, let's say there were no bailouts, right?
And just the economy shutting down.
Well, obviously the bigger companies are going to be more likely to be able to survive that shutdown.
Now the bigger companies are going to be getting bailouts in addition to the fact that they were more likely to survive.
Of course, that is in one way or the other going to rest on the shoulders of the taxpayers in general or the people using the currency in general, whatever it may be.
And we're just going to come out of this with enormous inequality of the really bad kind that me and you don't don't care for.
Not good old free market inequality, which is fine.
Yeah, you got to actually go back in time, go to school, pay attention and get a job at a bank because those are the only people.
They got the end.
Yeah, you got to work.
I don't know.
It's big pharma.
It's banks.
It's all these big, the giants.
You got to be in with one of the giants.
You're fucked.
Yeah, well, that seems to be more and more likely.
I mean, there might be some sectors here or there that are somewhat protected, but generally, broad brush speaking, there's just going to be so many people who are fucked over by this.
And it seems really like they really don't.
And there is this, it's almost like a lot of people, I think, don't, you know, who are living in the, like, I'm not talking about the evil fucking, you know, sociopathic. elites or something like that.
I'm just talking about people who like buy into like Keynesian economics or something like that.
I really do think that a lot of them believe we can UBI our way out of this because they're the way they're looking at it is like, well, you just, I mean, you know, obviously demand is down, so you have to increase demand.
But I really think that is going to, I think that Keynesianism, once again, is going to be proven wrong.
Whereas the problem isn't that there isn't enough demand.
I mean, I've never understood that mentality anyway, where people would be like, oh, in times of recession, you have to like stimulate demand because, you know, that's you want more money in the economy so people can consume more.
I mean, demand is like everyone has, every country has demand if you think about it.
It's not like people in poor third world countries don't want nice stuff, right?
Like they, you could have demand for it there.
I'm sure they want like fucking smartphones and, you know, like they want lots of different restaurants and lots of different gadgets and fucking good healthcare and all this stuff.
There is demand there.
The problem is that there isn't production to meet that demand.
And the problem with shutting down the economy isn't that demand slows down.
The problem is that production comes to like a grinding halt.
And that's something that you can't print your way out of or UBI your way out of or whatever, bail out your way out of.
None of that's going to work.
I think part of the picture here, and you read The Creature from Jekyll's Island, right?
Really, really fun, great book.
But one of the things he explains is that the banks were in the business of creating as much debt as possible because the debt, it's not real money.
You know, they get a deposit for $100 and then they can put out $1,000.
So that $900 that they put out in the world, they just want it to sit out there because the interest payments that come in is real money.
So you got to realize they want as much debt in the system as possible because the interest rates they get on that debt is all real money.
Here's the real issue.
In like a real depression or recession, what you're going to have is prices that come down.
If prices start coming down, all of a sudden banks have to take massive losses on their commercial, all like the commercial real estate loans, your housing loans.
Like if all of a sudden like all these items come down in value, then all those loans that they made, they have to actually take the losses on them and they can't collect the interest.
So what they keep on doing is if they pump the money in and they bail everything out, so basically you have inflation, but then the banks never have to like take a loss on these loans and prices never come down in a way that you end up with consumption and a reset.
You know, like you should have a bottoming out in the housing market where you and I can afford a house for nothing, but it's not going to happen.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I mean, it's, it's like, to me, the, the deflation of a recession or a depression is in many ways the market cure for the problem is that it's like, okay, well, like, right, like people can't afford to buy expensive houses anymore.
So the prices get get bid down and down and down.
And then it reaches a level eventually where people can afford to buy houses again, you know?
But the government isn't going to let that happen.
They're just not.
I just don't see a scenario where they would allow, because like you said, the big banks would take big losses.
And just in general, the owners in this country would take big losses.
Tracking Everyone's Liberty00:05:04
And I don't think people are going to stand for that.
But it'll, you know, I guess we'll have to see.
What's really starting to freak me out, I know me and you briefly texted about, and I shared that thing about the Google tracking stuff.
You know, I really wonder is now, I saw one person, some, someone on, I think it was on Rachel Maddow's show, who was arguing that basically at a certain point, we're going to have to start rounding up people who have the coronavirus and that like they can't be staying home with their families anymore.
They're going to have to be going to some other facility.
Like there are some real deal fascistic proposals being thrown out there in a way that even somebody like I've been fucking talking about how authoritarian this system is since this show's existed for a decade now, but I can't even believe that this shit's being thrown out and people are kind of like open to the idea.
Not saying that it's being, you know, that it's being legislated or imposed immediately, but the fact that people are kind of like, yeah, I see where you're coming from with that.
Maybe the government does need to start rounding up anybody with a 101 fever and taking them away from their family.
And if we start putting people into camps, we might as well have them performing labor.
What are they just going to be at a camp hanging out because they're sick?
That doesn't make a lot of sense.
Yeah.
We got a good start supplying to Amazon so they can ship it so they're still healthy.
This is how crazy the monitoring getting.
Firstly, they're already doing it in China.
Like they're tracking phones.
They're like, you know, they know if you're sick and you go somewhere.
But this is really scary.
In Italy, there's this company, I don't remember the name of it, but they take all of us.
Every time you post a picture on Facebook, they take it, they register it's your name, boom, all of a sudden you go outside, they know your face.
They can, through facial recognition software, they hit up the Italy government and they said, we can tell you who's breaking quarantine.
Here's the list of names.
We're able to do that.
But then you also have all like these fitness tracking apps.
Like they can track heat signatures off of phones to see if people are just getting together.
They know, like, they have the ability now to track us wherever the fuck we're going.
It's really just a question of can they so scare people into we need to be able to track everyone and government needs to be able to contain people that need to be contained.
And then the scariest side of that is them being able to just make up that anyone was unhealthy at any point in time to take you out of your home without question.
Yeah, it's like, like, this is the stuff where, and this is why I'm like, like, I really do think it's so important to have some type of liberty moment right now in America.
There's got to be some pushback against this craziness because this stuff is a really, real threat.
And it's like, if you have, like, if you actually had enough public will to be open to accepting these type of positions, like, yeah, well, I'm scared of getting this virus.
So we got to fucking, you know, they got to start dragging people away from their families who have a fever or something like that.
If you get there, as you were just indicating, so much of the technology is already available.
I mean, we're not that like the facial recognition technology is more advanced than most people realize it is.
It's not perfect, but it's more advanced than people realize it is.
We already have the ability to track us on our phones.
We have drones that have already been flying domestically.
I mean, I don't know how, you know, exactly to what extent, but you could start seeing that as like a regular thing.
I mean, if when you have all these Karens in the world who are ratting people out for, you know, being outside, it's like, and even if you think it's okay, because, well, this virus is so scary, even that, just realize that like, number one, the virus isn't going away anytime soon.
And if you start implementing these programs, they're not going to get rolled back by the federal government.
Nobody ever goes like, ah, yeah, you know, it looks like the TSA isn't doing that good.
So let's roll that back.
It looks like it doesn't matter.
Even Donald Trump, who fucking got spied on for his whole administration, he reauthorizes all those spying powers every time they come up.
This shit does not get rolled back.
And I could see the Karens of the world very much supporting drones with cameras going around and reporting when people are out when they're not supposed to be or whatever it is.
So, and since anyway, it's like a moment where I think we really need a liberty moment or some people who are like kind of like, well, no, fuck this.
We are got to push back against just losing every ounce of freedom that we have in this country and living in some straight up dystopian nightmare.
And I don't, you know, I'm really trying to be as thoughtful as I can and try to think about the best way to present these ideas.
I had Jeff Deist, who's the president of the Mises Institute, he said at one point, I think it was after I was on Jimmy Doerr's show, he like tweeted, or maybe it was Facebook, on Facebook.
He said, he said, Dave's the best messenger for liberty that we have.
And I remember thinking like, man, we are fucked if I am the best that we have to offer.
That should not, I should not be in the top hundred.
Fighting Cartelization Now00:15:26
I mean, you can't even get a studio without it sounding like you're at the dentist's office.
I literally, I've been podcasting nonstop out of this room for the last three weeks, and I just looked over and noticed there was a light on the other side of the room.
I'm the guy.
You're telling me I'm the one.
Even on a terror bonus episode, getting every good guest that's out there, you're making it happen, Davey Smith.
All it took, all it took was the entire collapse of society.
It turns out all these years, if you wanted me to put out bonus episodes, you just had to create a situation where I legally was not allowed to leave my room.
And then I would go, oh, all right, well, I guess since I'm here.
But so I'm trying, and this is why one of the things I've been harping on a lot lately is the idea that it's not socialism or communism that we're fighting against.
This is fascism, because I just think that's a more accurate term.
And I want to stand up to what the threat really is.
It's going to be, it's not going to be the government owning the means of production.
It's not going to be the government, you know, enforcing worker cooperatives.
You know, there's a million problems that we could get into, you know, sure, go read socialism by Ludwig von Mises and you can see all of the economic problems and we could go through all of the like, you know, like the fucking price calculation problem with socialism and all that shit.
But that's not what we're dealing with right now.
That's not, that's not, at least that's not what my big fear is.
And as much as I'm against them, my big fear right now isn't UBI or even Medicare for all.
That's not my big fucking fear.
Now, again, I'm against both of those things and we've talked about that a lot before.
We can talk about that more.
But I know there were some people, like I just had Jimmy Doerr on the show the other day and some people were like, well, why weren't you giving him more pushback when he was proposing Medicare for all and UBI and stuff like that?
It's like, because that's not my big fear right now.
My big fear isn't the socialism.
It's the fascism.
Like that's really what I'm concerned about right now.
I'm concerned about partnerships between Google and the government and Apple and the government and these other companies working together to spy on Americans, round up Americans.
That real deal shit.
I'm concerned with the corporate bailouts a lot more right now than I am with the 1200 bucks that people are getting.
I mean, I don't know.
Truthfully speaking, even from a strict libertarian point of view, there is some argument to hand people checks right now.
Like, did we talk about this when we were together?
Because I spoke about this on Bob Murphy made this point.
And Bob Murphy, and this really kind of made me think where Bob Murphy is like the purest libertarian you could find out there.
He's at least tied for purest libertarian on the face of the earth.
And even he said, the way he put it was like, he goes, well, look, if we might be against eminent domain, right?
But if the government takes someone's home and kicks them out, we're not against the government giving that person a market rate for their home.
You know what I mean?
Like it'd be worse if they just kicked him out and didn't give them a check for the house.
I mean, both are bad, but in the same way, this isn't traditional welfare.
This isn't somebody who's not working asking for a handout.
This is somebody who's asking to work and the government is telling them, no, you're not allowed to go to work.
There is actually a libertarian argument.
I'm not, you know, I'm not sure.
I'm still thinking this through in my head, but there is an argument to be said.
Well, then the government kind of owes you, you know what I mean, something.
Now, I know there's problems with this because the government doesn't have any money.
It just steals it from other people and all this.
But all I'm saying is that's not my big outrage right now.
So if I see someone like Jimmy Doerr and I'm kind of making, you know, to some degree, forming an alliance on certain issues with him, and this is somebody who's like anti-war, anti-corporate bailout, he's railing against the cronyism and how, you know, we're all getting ripped off by these stimulus packages.
I just see that more as a moment that I'd rather try to bring in anyone from the left, anyone from the right who is at least against the scariest aspects of what we're facing right now and kind of go after that.
And we can still have our disagreements.
Like universal healthcare will be a disaster.
I don't want to have that.
I'm just saying that's not what I'm terrified of at the moment.
Does that make sense to you, Rob?
I get where you're coming from that you just see you're saying I can align myself with Jimmy Doer right now because the biggest risk is government and fascism and really going full skill like dictatorship style.
So let's ensure that that's not going on and then we can deal with these other elements like universal basic income.
The only flaw to me might be, and this is kind of the socialist thing is the lie that government can provide these goods and that that universal basic income might be one of the stepping stones and tools that they use to kind of consolidate power, have people relying on them buying into the idea of, oh, at least government's providing for me.
And that kind of becomes the bribe by which you accept a little bit more of them into your life.
And then that's like, that's like the pawn move in order to kind of get towards more of a dictatorship type setting.
That to me is kind of...
I agree with that.
And actually, Jimmy Door, I think, kind of agreed with that.
He called the UBI the cheese and the trap.
He said, this is like how they kind of get you in.
Like, oh, you get this money that you need so bad.
And then, okay, you have to deal with the fact that we're giving trillions out to big corporations.
So I agree with that.
You know, it's funny.
I was watching one of Jimmy Doerr's videos recently where he basically said, now, of course, me and you all have a different take on this, but I thought it was an interesting point he was making that he was like, oh, all these people who claim to believe in capitalism, as soon as there's a disaster, they look to socialism.
And now I think he was taking this more of like, this is proof that socialism is really what works, which, you know, that I would disagree with, obviously.
But there is something to be said for that, right?
That all of these people who, you know, like who are running our country, that, you know, when you have an economic disaster, nobody there is talking about like, oh, shit, well, since this is going to be such a bad economy, we need to free up the market.
Everybody's talking about how government needs to intervene to help out, which is, this is, this is one of the reasons why I'm so bearish on the future of the economy, because it's like, yeah, if you think you're going to big government your way out of this problem, you're obviously only going to make it worse.
Why would it be, right?
If capitalism is a preferable economic system to socialism, then why would it be in an emergency situation, you would want more government intervention, right?
Wouldn't you want whatever the best economic system is during an emergency situation?
Now, okay, so you could take that in one direction and say, okay, well, this is proof that government intervention is, you know what I mean?
Like that this is actually better because we need it in the emergency.
Problem with that that you would have is you would go, well, then why is it that socialism and government interventionism has been such a failure historically?
I mean, why is it, you know, like all the examples, North Korea, South Korea, Hong Kong, China, East Berlin, West Berlin?
Why is it always the government that intervened less, far, less?
Why were they always richer and more prosperous?
Why were the economy?
Why was the Soviet Union's economy in shambles?
Now, the typical democratic socialists of today would say something like, well, that's not real socialism.
That was authoritarianism.
It was anti-democratic.
And it's like, okay, yeah, yeah, sure, fine.
It was anti-democratic and it was authoritarian, but that doesn't really explain the economics of it.
You know, I mean, like you could vote to have those same policies.
Now, you can have some principle, which we would probably disagree with, but that, you know, voting democracy is good.
But let's say people voted for that same system.
You're still not explaining why the economics of it didn't work at all.
And if free markets are, you know, produced better for the economy, as I mean, I just think there's so much empirical and a priori reasoning to believe that they do, then what you'd want in a situation like this is to really free up the markets like as much as possible.
But there's what chance is there that we're going to do that right now?
Yeah, so I think there's a couple of reasons why you'll never see that.
One is there's an element of government wants to pretend like they can control and help out.
And so if they step in and go, listen, we're just going to step back and this thing's going to sort itself out.
That's not very comforting, especially when you're in a situation where everything went to shit.
Now, if you start looking at why it went to shit, how many different ways has government intervened where it wasn't a free market that you ended up in this environment?
But once you're in this environment, that's part of it is that government's got to step in and sell you that you need them.
And so part of the sale is, hey, listen, we can control this and we're going to smooth out the business cycle and we're going to get the stimulus that you need and we can grow our way out of it.
That's one element.
The other element is just the element of fairness that we all understand that they're intervening.
And so like when things are good, we'll kind of sit back and go, okay, well, I'm competing.
But then all of a sudden, when there's no way to win unless you're getting a government handout, then everyone's running to the teacher going, hey, this isn't fair.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I think you're absolutely right.
And of course, it is, and this is kind of back to what I was saying before.
There is this, and I'm a little bit torn.
I'll be honest.
I'm a little bit torn on this, but I'm still figuring this all out in my head.
But there is, it's almost a little tempting to think that right now our battle is with the left who have their own explanation for what the lessons of this whole thing are.
And they're, you know, like would say like, oh, well, look, you know, like we were talking about last time we chatted, someone like AOC can say, and you got to admit there's something to this, that she goes, oh, oh, you guys have been making fun of me for the last three years about how are we going to pay for it?
Where's all the money going to come?
And then we just found $6 trillion in three weeks.
So for three years, you've been making fun of how we have to figure out how we're going to pay for this.
And now all of a sudden, look, we have all the money in the world.
And when it comes to bailing out bankers and fighting wars and all this shit, we have all the money in the world.
No one asks how we're going to pay for it.
So I'm saying we should spend that money on yada yada instead of this.
Now, it's very tempting to be like, we want to battle the left right now and be like, no, no, no, we have the real answer for what happened here and why you can't pay for this shit and you couldn't pay for the wars and the banker bailouts.
And none of this is going to do anything except lead to disaster.
But I'm just right now more concerned about the stuff we were saying before, the fascism stuff.
That's just like where I'm really getting scared of.
And I don't know.
So anyway, go ahead.
No, I think you're 100% right.
I guess our war is more with the banks and the feds and all the people with the power.
And we kind of need to showcase that they're the ones that are messing this whole thing up.
And if we can introduce some free markets to the world and people started winning and feeling good about what was going on in their life and the fact that they could take responsibility for themselves, work hard and have prosperity in a future, that's the sale is people actually seeing like, oh, I like what's going on out here.
But in the current market, where people like, I think that there is some sort of a natural sense of fairness.
People realize how much the banks and certain industries are winning and they understand that it's not just a fair game.
And they're like, well, if it's not a fair game, give me my fucking, you know, I want to cheat too.
Give me my cheat code.
Yeah, let me at least get something out of this rather than nothing.
You know, so I understand that.
But the truth is that, like, really from my perspective, how I see it here, and it's almost kind of scary.
Like, I don't, I don't, you know, I don't take this as like, I'm not like, oh, look, we've been proven right.
I'm like, oh, shit, we've been proven right.
Like, this is not, that's more my attitude is like, fuck, I think we were right about all of this.
But I really, to me, it's like all of these things that libertarians have been talking about for so long is now all really coming together and having these disastrous effects.
So the problem with the like people advocating the UBI or advocating government, you know, well, we found the money for this.
Why don't we spend it on other things?
Well, it's like the number one major problem you have is like, well, yeah, that is true.
I mean, in theory, government could have used all of this money and spent it on what they saw as do-gooder causes.
But instead, they're bailing out the banks and fighting wars with the money.
So that's a pretty big problem right away.
It almost seems that this power tends to corrupt.
And so now it's like, okay, so now you have to find a way to have this power without it corrupting.
That seems to be a pretty difficult, you know, it's funny because they call us the like, they say we're in fantasy land.
But to me, that's the fantasy.
The fantasy is thinking that this power won't be used for corrupt purposes.
But look, the stuff that we are going to have to get across is that, and this is why I'm trying to at least start with when I'm when I'm doing outreach to the left, like, hey, I'm not, I'm not railing against what you think I am.
I'm not railing against socialism.
I mean, I am.
I've been doing it for years, but for the conversation's sake, right now, I'm railing against fascism and give them the like, see, that's something we both hate.
We can both hate fascism together.
Like, you don't, it's not, it's not that I hate the idea of government taking care of grandma's hip surgery.
Like, that's not what's getting me animated right now.
Now, I do think a free market would do a better job of providing the services at a reasonable cost.
But that aside, it's like understand that the problem we have here is not that there's a free market.
I mean, the one thing that I did give Jimmy Doerr a little bit of pushback on when he was on my show is he referred to what's going on as supply-side economics.
And I said, no, this is way, way worse than supply-side economics.
You know, this isn't saying we're going to cut the taxes of corporations and that will help the economy.
This is just giving them taxpayer handouts.
That's a whole different thing than supply side.
Like, that's not what we're not talking about freeing up the market.
That's not what's happening here.
It's the complete opposite.
We're talking about the biggest government intervention in our history.
And to try to make some of them, if it's possible, realize that the problem here, if you accept the problem as fascism, then you realize that it's not the problems in healthcare, the problems with hospital beds, the problem with our whole goddamn economy is that it's the cartelization.
It's not that there's whether there's a market or even that it's socialist.
The real problem is that it's all run by cartels who fucking keep out all competition, keep their own prices inflated high, just like we've been talking about for years with the, you know, the college prices.
This is the real problem here.
It's like, why the hell is all this shit so goddamn expensive to begin with?
And anyway, I guess that's the plan of attack, but I'm still working on it, still trying to figure it out.
Well, I'm just hoping that maybe this is like an extension on a task where this crazy fucking stimulus package inflates the wheel one more time.
Hope For A Pure Future00:08:24
Maybe we buy another 10 years and we're all a little bit smarter.
We know that it's coming and we actually prepare a little bit better.
Yeah, well, I kind of hope that's the case.
I think there might be some, maybe some of the silver lining of this type of disaster is that it will encourage some people to do the right things going forward.
I don't think, can I tell you, this is how I know it won't, because I knew what happened in the last financial crisis.
And I remember afterwards, I used to read Zero Hedge every day, a friend of mine also, and we were like loading up on physical silver.
And at one point, we both kind of realized you got to stop reading Zero Hedge every day because you read it every day and you're like, the world's coming to an end.
But now you get to this landmark and you're like, man, Zero Hedge has been right for the last decade.
And I should have been following their advice.
And there wasn't a single day that they were wrong.
It's really hard to run against the stream, especially when the Fed is the biggest player in the room and the stock market can go up tomorrow because they start directly buying stocks.
There's no fundamentals here.
It's very hard to predict what the hell is going to go on.
I think you're right about that.
But the thing that's different about this is people are like trapped in their homes watching people die on the news.
It's just a little bit different of a thing than even being like, oh, the economy took a big hit or I lost my job or even I lost my house.
There's something different about this.
And I do think that people are certainly going to be more likely to have, you know, like toilet paper for a few weeks in the home, to have more canned goods and maybe even more savings.
I mean, I know the Fed will do everything they can to incentivize people not to save.
They already have.
But I think that maybe there'll be some positive effects on people's behavior going forward.
I think it's something that certainly it's possible that at least a lot of businesses learn the lesson that, hey, you got to be prepared for the possibility of an unforeseen disaster.
Like that can happen.
And you can't operate in a world where you think that can't possibly happen.
That is a possibility.
That's something you never foresaw.
And that on the individual level as well.
You got to be a little bit prepared for a disaster.
I mean, how many people in America, you know, what you see those numbers?
I always forget the numbers like 60% of Americans don't have $400 put away for an emergency.
And fair enough, I'm sure there are some people who are in a situation where they're really just getting by.
It's like I live paycheck to paycheck.
Believe me, I do empathize with the fact that housing prices are way higher than they should be, that healthcare costs are way higher than they should be.
Okay.
But then I do wonder how many of those people, like if you got a couple kids and you have, you know, if you have three TVs in your house and two nice cars and everyone's got smartphones and you're getting like, you know what I mean?
Like you have fucking, you know, 25 different, you know, fucking shirts and all of this shit that most average Americans have today and don't really think twice about.
And I could go on and on.
And you don't have fucking $1,000 in the bank put away.
I mean, which you should have more than that.
But at least for a lot of these people, part of that is somewhat on you.
You know what I mean?
And maybe some of those people will get better a little bit.
I don't know.
You know, I can hope that that's the silver lining.
But I am.
If you got $1,000 and you ain't going to Coachella, you have fucking problems, man.
You got to live in the moment while your currency is still good.
Just go to Coachella with gold bars.
That's going to be our future.
No matter how much blue chew you take, your dick ain't going to work forever.
You got 20 to 35 maybe.
And how long can you bang 18-year-olds?
Maybe till you're 22.
You got to spend that money when you got it.
All right.
So different, different perspectives being offered here.
But one way or the other, I do think that we need what I think it's important.
In a sense, like this is, this is the conflict to me here.
Maybe we'll just wrap up on this, but this is to me the conflict of going forward, right?
It's really important that we have a liberty movement in this country right now going forward, because everything that we've ever warned against is happening right now.
Everything.
I mean, from just, you know, if we were against big government and we were against bailouts, well, holy shit, we are living through the era of big governments and bailouts.
Like we make the biggest government in the history of the world look tiny compared to the government we're about to be.
We're looking at, if we've been railing against easy money and artificially low interest rates, holy shit.
This is the era of easy money and artificially low interest rates.
And what the scariest aspect of it is we've been, you know, railing against government authoritarianism.
And holy shit, this government is getting authoritarian in ways that a month ago would have seemed impossible.
It's happened that quickly.
Like a month ago, you would have been like, there's no way people would accept this out of our government.
And now it's happening.
It will be interesting if it turns out that they got us to self-isolate on the most unfaulty models of what the predictions were for how bad this contagion was.
Now, that could turn out to be true that like the same way they kind of tout these insane global warming models, they just kind of had faulty models that like showed us the absolute worst case scenario and the risk reward of locking everyone in just based off this disaster scenario that was unlikely wasn't intelligent.
If enough people like kind of realize, oh, I guess government shouldn't have this much power.
They locked us all down in this fear and my business is no longer.
Like they kind of invested in, they might be able to sell us on, hey, there would have been more deaths if we didn't get involved.
But it could be that if deaths don't start tallying up, that people are going to lose a little bit of faith and trust.
It's possible.
It's also possible that if the deaths aren't that bad, they'll use that to justify these draconian procedures.
C, everybody was going to die, but then we stepped in and made you all stay in your house.
So look, that could go either way.
We'll see.
But I just think that for all of the reasons I was laying out, it's going to be really important that we have some people who believe in liberty speaking out and really building up as big of an audience to listen to them as possible.
And I want to, you know, I think it's important that people like me and you stay really pure on principle.
Like it is important that we point out why this is a reason why we need to abolish the FDA, abolish the CDC, why we need all of these restraints on the market gone.
There's lots of opportunity and we should keep doing that.
We should keep hounding that home.
No question about that.
Okay.
And stay pure.
We need the purest libertarians we can have.
But the other thing that we need, like desperately need in this country, and this is what I was doing with Jimmy Dore.
And I hope people can appreciate and understand what I'm trying to accomplish.
And maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe I'm doing it the wrong way.
But we need as big of a movement against the scariest parts of what could be coming next as we can get, whether that's left wingers, right-wingers, anybody who does not want to see this country turn into a fucking crony corporatist fucking nightmare of some fucking authoritarian Fucking novel.
Anybody who's against that, we need to build up as big a movement against this whole encroachment on liberties as possible.
And we can't, while we want to stay pure, we can't purity spiral about how, like, oh no, well, this person's for the UBI, so they can't be a part of this team where we're trying to fight back against fucking Google drones reporting you to the government for leaving your house.
You know what I'm saying?
So, so that's like what we got to kind of figure out here is how can how can we get the largest number of people who will kind of to some degree put their foot down and be like, we're not, we are not going to let this country turn into this, um, because it's a very real possibility right now.
And uh, that's you know, it's it's scary.
So, we gotta, we gotta try to make some some real impact in this, if possible.
Sounds sensible, no arguments from me.
All right, well, uh, I uh we'll uh you know, of course, we'll keep doing this.
We'll do another one of these in a couple days.
Ridge Wallets And Pants00:02:06
It does seem to me that this Zoom thing works a little bit better.
There you go, Lewis was right again.
What the hell are you gonna, what are you gonna do?
Um, hopefully, uh, I'll just say uh to wrap up on this, but hopefully, there does seem to be a little bit of good news on the virus end that at least in New York, which is like the epicenter or whatever they're saying.
I don't know if this is even true, they've done more tests than anywhere else.
So, I don't really have a that have an understanding, but um, there's there were less deaths, I believe, than than there were over the last few days, over the last two days.
So, um, Italy going down also, I believe.
So, maybe we're starting to see this thing slow down.
Maybe if it's not the apex right now, it's it's at least like you know, soon, and and maybe that'll that'll start slowing down.
So, that would be good.
Um, hopefully, that's that's the case.
Um, anyway, all right, thanks everybody for listening.
And uh, you know, obviously, I'm putting out a whole bunch of episodes, so we'll have uh I have some more stuff.
I've I've put some uh uh some calls into some some cool guests who I'm hoping to line up.
So, uh, you know, and of course, like I said before, anyone has guests they want to see on the show, let me know, tweet it at me, and uh, we'll try to make it happen.
All right, I love you all.
Stay safe, stay healthy.
We'll talk to you soon.
Peace.
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