Part Of The Problem - Dave Smith - The Latest And Greatest with Scott Horton
Aired: 2020-04-09
Duration: 01:29:08


=== Pandemic Insights and Welcome (02:38) ===

[00:00:00]  Fill her up!
[00:00:02]  You're listening to the Gash Digital Network.
[00:00:08]  We need to roll back the state.
[00:00:10]  We spy on all of our own citizens.
[00:00:12]  Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
[00:00:15]  If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
[00:00:21]  Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
[00:00:26]  You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
[00:00:30]  Here's your host, James Smith.
[00:00:34]  What's up?
[00:00:34]  What's up?
[00:00:35]  What's up, everybody?
[00:00:36]  Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
[00:00:39]  Back with me is, of course, the great Scott Horton, who is the guest that I've had on the most on the show, and I always love getting his insights.
[00:00:48]  And one of the benefits of this whole crazy pandemic that we're living through is that now when I talk to Scott, we can talk about a lot of other stuff besides foreign policy, which we always seem to talk about the most because that's kind of Scott's area of, you know, that he's specialized in.
[00:01:04]  But Scott's great on everything, and I always really enjoy his insights.
[00:01:08]  Very true.
[00:01:09]  I always enjoy his insights on all things.
[00:01:12]  I've benefited a lot from me and Scott's friendship.
[00:01:17]  And of course, if you don't know, he's the author of Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, which is a great book, just incredible, a must-read if you want to understand what's going on in Afghanistan and just the broader foreign policy of the United States of America.
[00:01:32]  And it is still very, very timely and relevant as there seem to be some steps toward finally ending that war, but we'll see.
[00:01:40]  You never know.
[00:01:41]  And of course, also put out the great Ron Paul, which is his many interviews with Dr. Paul over the years.
[00:01:48]  I recommend both of those.
[00:01:49]  Also, go to thelibertarianinstitute.org at antiwar.com if you want to really keep yourself informed.
[00:01:57]  Go there every day.
[00:01:58]  They always have a ton of great stuff so you know what's going on in the world.
[00:02:02]  Scott Horton, welcome back to the show, sir.
[00:02:05]  Thanks, Dave.
[00:02:05]  And don't forget scotthorton.org.
[00:02:07]  I got 5,000 interviews going back to 2003 for you there if you like podcasts and stuff.
[00:02:12]  Yeah, if you're, since a lot of you guys have a lot of time at home, there's no end of just great interviews that Scott's done throughout the years on all types of different topics, but particularly, you know, American foreign policy over the last, really over the last, you know, hundred years that you've covered in those 5,000 interviews.
[00:02:35]  Some really, really great stuff in there.
[00:02:37]  Maybe even longer than the last hundred years.

=== The Flattening Curve Debate (12:50) ===

[00:02:39]  Some of them might go back a little bit further.
[00:02:41]  So we talked about a lot of stuff that's going on with the coronavirus and the lockdowns and all of this stuff since the last time we spoke.
[00:02:51]  I wanted to cover some of the stuff that's been going on.
[00:02:55]  Maybe let's start with a bright side.
[00:02:57]  It seems like the CDC has lowered their estimates of how many people they think are going to die due to this coronavirus in the United States of America.
[00:03:07]  They're crediting the social distancing and all of that stuff.
[00:03:11]  Do you see like a silver lining there?
[00:03:14]  Maybe the actual death toll at the end won't be so bad.
[00:03:17]  Or like, what are your thoughts?
[00:03:19]  Yeah.
[00:03:20]  Well, I sure hope so.
[00:03:22]  I mean, I think reasonable people have assumed or at least hoped with some good reason that the summer sun is going to help.
[00:03:32]  Ultraviolet light is really harsh on viruses.
[00:03:37]  And then also it's the humidity too.
[00:03:39]  The humidity bonds to the virus in the air, condensation type of thing, and then causes them to be much heavier and fall to the ground.
[00:03:48]  And so I live in Texas, so it's humid as hell and hot as hell here.
[00:03:53]  So I'm really hoping that the sun comes out and that that really makes a difference.
[00:03:56]  I don't know how much of a difference that's going to make where you are or not, or how long it takes for the summer to kick in.
[00:04:02]  It'll be summer here in another couple of weeks, really.
[00:04:04]  We don't do spring and autumn in Texas so much.
[00:04:08]  So, you know, that's a hopeful sign.
[00:04:11]  I talked to my sister today, and she's a nurse at Dell Children's Hospital.
[00:04:16]  I guess I'm not supposed to say that, but anyway, so they pulled her from the children's hospital, and they have her working at the other hospitals in town dealing with adults now.
[00:04:26]  She said that they are not overwhelmed as far as that goes, but they are seeing a huge increase from this week over last week.
[00:04:34]  So it looks like, and the number is still pretty low.
[00:04:37]  I think the number in Austin and Travis County, where Austin is, is about 500 and something sick.
[00:04:44]  And then I think last I saw was like 20 dead or that it may have even been lower than that.
[00:04:49]  Where I live in Williamson County, just north of Austin, it's the last I saw, two had died and a total of, I think, 70 something sick.
[00:04:59]  So that could be much worse.
[00:05:01]  I don't know exactly how to look at it.
[00:05:02]  Part of that, too, is they don't have the tests.
[00:05:05]  So a lot of people who have it are just not being tested.
[00:05:07]  And of course, people who are asymptomatic, who knows those numbers at all.
[00:05:13]  We won't know for a long time, I guess, until they figure out how to get really cheap tests in the hands of everybody.
[00:05:19]  But, you know, as far as outbreaks go, it's, you know, they have, you know, they, meaning the people of this society have kept a pretty good handle on it by staying home.
[00:05:31]  I think, you know, it's hard to judge the counterfactual, but seems like things would be much, much worse.
[00:05:37]  And, you know, part of part of the deal, Dave, is with flattening the curve, it means spreading it out to the right.
[00:05:44]  And so it means that the peak and the slope and the way down, everything is going to take much longer.
[00:05:50]  At the same time, though, it's keeping it hopefully below the threshold of what the hospitals can continue to handle because the nightmare scenario is people just dying in the hallways and the parking lots because of, you know, people just being triaged because they just don't have the beds and that kind of deal.
[00:06:06]  So, you know, it's a compromise either way.
[00:06:09]  We might have been over the peak by now and on our way down, but then have a higher number of dead and in much worse circumstances dying out in a parking lot, you know, by yourself somewhere.
[00:06:19]  Yeah.
[00:06:20]  So, you know, that's what they're working with.
[00:06:22]  And, you know, it's funny because I see, you know, I admit I've been kind of trolling Twitter.
[00:06:27]  I'm not tweeting, but I'm looking at, you know, other people's tweets and stuff.
[00:06:31]  I keep, they keep pulling me back in or I just keep falling off the wagon or whichever metaphor you like, thing of jig, figure of speech.
[00:06:39]  But, you know, people are really, I think they're saying, well, you know, the model said that this was going to happen and it ain't that bad yet.
[00:06:47]  So the whole thing is a hoax and this kind of thing.
[00:06:49]  People are, you know, I guess when people are afraid or angry, they'll kind of believe anything, depending.
[00:06:57]  So, you know, people will say, if CBS News played a clip of the wrong emergency room, they played a clip of an emergency room in Italy instead of in New York City.
[00:07:09]  And then people just extrapolate from that, that the whole thing is just a put on.
[00:07:13]  And of course, since every government agency is trying to take advantage, then the crisis itself must be fake for them to try to take advantage.
[00:07:22]  But as Ram Emanuel and Condaleza Rice agree, you never let a crisis go to waste.
[00:07:28]  So that doesn't mean that they, you know, deliberately drown New Orleans.
[00:07:32]  It just means that they took the opportunity to put the army on the street and seize some guns and set some precedents because they could, you know, same with this and same with the rest.
[00:07:41]  And like, frankly, we're dealing with, as they call it, a novel virus.
[00:07:45]  It's brand new.
[00:07:46]  There's no one is really an expert in this virus, right?
[00:07:49]  Is everybody's guessing.
[00:07:50]  And all the models, of course, are just garbage in, garbage out.
[00:07:54]  I mean, what kind of numbers are they working with?
[00:07:55]  The best they can tell from the numbers from China and France and Italy and Spain and New York State.
[00:08:02]  And then they try to figure out exactly what that means.
[00:08:06]  And so, you know, apparently they overestimated how bad it would be in order, you know, either deliberately, probably not deliberately, but maybe just to scare the hell out of people in a way.
[00:08:17]  But then when the numbers are less than that, people say, okay, see, crisis averted.
[00:08:22]  It's no big deal.
[00:08:23]  You know, now forget flattening the curve.
[00:08:26]  It's already flat enough.
[00:08:27]  Let's go ahead and call the whole thing off now, which I don't think is really a reasonable reaction.
[00:08:34]  But of course, you know, because they're not leaving it up to people.
[00:08:38]  You know, it's the governors and the mayors and all of the bureaucrats are calling the shots for everyone else.
[00:08:44]  So it's pretty easy to see, you know, that they're not really qualified to make these decisions for everybody else.
[00:08:51]  And so it makes sense that people rebel against that, right?
[00:08:54]  The same person who told you not to wear a mask because it'll get you sicker, Dave, but also we need them for the healthcare workers because it'll prevent them from getting sick and this kind of crap.
[00:09:06]  Then, you know, they've already blown all their credibility, right?
[00:09:09]  All it takes is playing the wrong clip once, overestimating a number of deaths in a week, one time, and this kind of thing, and all their credibility and, you know, warning you not to wear a mask.
[00:09:19]  Now all their credibility is shot.
[00:09:21]  Nobody wants to listen to them about anything.
[00:09:23]  But it seems like if they called off all the distancing and all the stay-at-home lockdowns now and everybody went back to work now, we would have a lot worse peak.
[00:09:32]  It's, you know, it would, it would be much worse.
[00:09:35]  It's hard to say for sure, right?
[00:09:36]  But it makes sense that it would be.
[00:09:39]  Yeah.
[00:09:39]  Well, the crazy thing about it too is that, you know, like I agree with you and the fact that CNN shows the wrong footage is not proof of anything other than that CNN sucks.
[00:09:49]  And that certainly is that they're there that that is a slam dunk of an argument.
[00:09:53]  I like neocon terms.
[00:09:55]  That's a slam dunk.
[00:09:57]  But it is like infuriating to me when you see like, so the CDC changed finally.
[00:10:06]  Like everyone had already known they were full of shit.
[00:10:08]  But it was only like three days ago or something.
[00:10:10]  They go, yeah, you know, everyone should really wear a mask.
[00:10:13]  And even if it's a freaking bandana, even if you just put a sock over your nose, like you're probably better off than with nothing.
[00:10:19]  So yeah, go ahead and wear a mask.
[00:10:21]  And you would think that this would come with the sincerest apology.
[00:10:27]  Like, you know, oh my God, we were so wrong.
[00:10:30]  In the point where what we specialize in is disease control.
[00:10:34]  And when the worst outbreak came, we gave you the absolute wrong advice.
[00:10:38]  My God, we're sorry.
[00:10:39]  Here's why we got it wrong.
[00:10:40]  And it's none of that.
[00:10:40]  It's just like, yeah, we changed it.
[00:10:43]  Nope.
[00:10:43]  So it's like they almost say it as if they were right all along.
[00:10:47]  And now they're telling you the polar opposite thing of what they told you before.
[00:10:49]  So I certainly am sympathetic to people who just go, well, I can't trust anything any of these people say.
[00:10:55]  So I agree.
[00:10:56]  You know, I get that.
[00:10:57]  But I also, I've been saying from the very beginning of this virus, as has Tom Woods and you and a lot of other people in the libertarian space to some of our own, like knock it off to the people who are pretending that this doesn't exist because it's, you're making us look bad.
[00:11:10]  And this is not, and more than that, it's just, that's not true.
[00:11:13]  Like listen to, there are these expert virologists.
[00:11:16]  They are telling us what this thing is.
[00:11:18]  Real people are getting sick and dying from it.
[00:11:20]  However, I am getting more and more concerned as we get further into this.
[00:11:26]  Well, I'm concerned for a lot of things, but just the one concern that I'm starting to have is that, is it possible that really, even if we are flattening the curve and even if we're building some, you know, like in New York, they're building some makeshift hospitals and the Javit Center in Central Park.
[00:11:42]  They're bringing some ships in.
[00:11:43]  It's like, okay, we're getting a little bit more prepared.
[00:11:46]  But if the worst projections of this had come true, you know, then we still wouldn't be prepared.
[00:11:52]  We still wouldn't have enough hospital beds.
[00:11:54]  Is it possible?
[00:11:55]  Because we really have no idea.
[00:11:56]  There's so much we don't know that this thing is already widespread enough.
[00:11:59]  And there's a big enough percentage of people who are asymptomatic who are walking around with this virus that whenever they have to let up on these controls, the thing is just going to spread around rapidly, really quickly again.
[00:12:10]  I mean, I know people are optimistic about the summer, but we're going to get into the fall and this thing probably will be back with us.
[00:12:16]  It could even mutate.
[00:12:17]  You know, there are all these possibilities out there that we're still going to be dealing with the same problems.
[00:12:22]  And what we have done is cause enormous pain to a lot of people.
[00:12:27]  So I'm just going to just mention real quickly the one study that I believe me and you were talking about on the phone.
[00:12:32]  I apologize if this was on the last podcast.
[00:12:34]  Me and Scott talk on the phone a lot and then we podcast a lot.
[00:12:37]  And so it all kind of bleeds together in my mind.
[00:12:39]  And I never remember which one was being recorded.
[00:12:41]  But the thing that stood out to a lot of people was in Iceland.
[00:12:45]  So in Iceland, they've done the most testing as a percentage of their population.
[00:12:49]  They've got something like 5% of the population has been tested.
[00:12:53]  Comparing that to America, I mean, I think we're at like 0.3% or something, nowhere near what they've done.
[00:12:59]  And what their testing found, again, this is limited testing.
[00:13:03]  And I'm not sure that this is a random sample.
[00:13:06]  In fact, it probably isn't.
[00:13:08]  But they found that 50% of the people who tested positive for COVID-19 were asymptomatic.
[00:13:14]  Now, if that's the case, now when you hear that news, there's almost like two reactions right away.
[00:13:18]  Like number one, you're like, oh, okay.
[00:13:20]  Well, if I get it, there's a 50-50 shot that I, you know, I don't get sick from it.
[00:13:24]  So that's kind of nice.
[00:13:25]  But the bad part about that is that we know you can still spread this when you're asymptomatic.
[00:13:30]  And if those are the numbers, I just don't understand how any shelter in place or any type of, again, I'm not an expert in this stuff, but it just doesn't make sense to me that any type of crackdown is actually going to stop the spread of this ultimately.
[00:13:44]  And it is causing very, very real catastrophic harm to millions and millions of people.
[00:13:50]  So this is like a big concern of mine right now.
[00:13:53]  Yeah.
[00:13:54]  Well, and again, yeah, there's nobody's expert in this.
[00:13:57]  So what's the trade-off?
[00:13:58]  Nobody knows.
[00:13:58]  Like we know that suicide rates are probably going up.
[00:14:02]  We know that I guess they've already got statistics about domestic abuse and this kind of deal and all kinds of collateral damage.
[00:14:10]  And I've seen in the news stories, which this happens all the time, but more and more I'm seeing stories of murder suicides of desperate people.
[00:14:19]  This one guy, they said that he was sure that they got it.
[00:14:24]  They got tested, but he killed his wife and himself before they got the results.
[00:14:28]  And then the results came back negative for both of them.
[00:14:31]  This guy was just watching too much TV or reading too much internet and lost in his own head and in his own fear and murdered his wife and himself over the level of stress over having this thing.
[00:14:45]  And then, yeah, like you say, if it's really the case that that many people who have no reason to think that they're sick have it, then once the clampdown is let up, which it has to be eventually, then we're just going to see the same spread again.
[00:14:58]  You know, hopefully at that point, it'll be that there are, you know, more and better treatments available and vaccines coming to market and that kind of thing that'll help.
[00:15:08]  You know, there are treatments, more and more treatments coming out.
[00:15:11]  If you saw this where they said nitrous oxide is, you know, laughing gas from the dentist's office is helping because it opens up your airways in a way that you can get more oxygen out of the air, even with pneumonia and all that.
[00:15:26]  It's a marginal thing, might keep you off the ventilator.

=== Treating the Desperately Sick (11:22) ===

[00:15:29]  And then, of course, there's different anecdotes coming in.
[00:15:32]  There are different studies going on, but the Plaquenil, which is the brand name of the Hydra, whatever the hell Trump's always recommending there, chloroquine, which is the malaria drug.
[00:15:44]  And there are more and more reports coming in that the use of that in combination with zinc, I don't know, zinc oxide or whatever, zinc, this, that thing.
[00:15:54]  And with the ZPAC antibiotics, that working together, those seem to be a pretty effective treatment.
[00:16:01]  So if they can really standardize a treatment for that and come up with a way to really show how effective that is, then that might be, you know, or something else.
[00:16:10]  If there's enough of that and it's proven how effective it is, and that could be a reason to lift the clamp down with more and more treatments available, then it'll become worth it to go ahead and just treat those who are sick.
[00:16:23]  And luckily, that drug, that Plaquenil drug, is out of patent.
[00:16:27]  And so that's probably one reason why they're railing against it on TV because we know who, you know, whose ad money they're dependent on on every TV news channel.
[00:16:35]  But it also means that in reality that every chemical company in America, if they want, can make it.
[00:16:42]  And I read a thing last night that said that many of them are.
[00:16:45]  There are four or five companies in America that are starting to crank this stuff out right now, or at least have made the decision to.
[00:16:51]  So, you know, we ought to see supplies going way up as far as that goes.
[00:16:57]  But then, you know, as far as these unemployment numbers and what this is really going to mean for, you know, the population as a whole, I mean, I think they said it was, you know, 10 million in a couple of weeks and then a couple of, you know, I'm sorry, I'm bad on the numbers.
[00:17:11]  It was, was it 3 million at first and then four more or something?
[00:17:14]  It was like 3.3 million and then there was something close to six point something million more.
[00:17:20]  It was about 10 million people total.
[00:17:22]  And I just, I just want to be like clear for people who listen because sometimes the unemployment stuff gets very confusing.
[00:17:27]  But just try to keep in mind there's like three things that are separate things that you have to differentiate, right?
[00:17:35]  So there are the number of people applying for unemployment insurance.
[00:17:39]  Okay.
[00:17:40]  Then there's the unemployment rate and then there's real unemployment.
[00:17:44]  These are all different things.
[00:17:45]  And the real, so what we're talking about here with the 10 million total is just people applying for unemployment insurance.
[00:17:53]  This is not the number of unemployed people.
[00:17:56]  There are lots of people who don't qualify for unemployment insurance.
[00:17:58]  There are lots of people in the gig economy and the service economy who weren't putting into unemployment insurance.
[00:18:03]  So they can't get that.
[00:18:05]  Then you have the unemployment rate, which is basically determined by government surveys of who's looking for work.
[00:18:11]  But that doesn't count people who dropped out of the labor force altogether and have kind of given up.
[00:18:16]  So what you're looking at here is 10 million just applying for unemployment insurance.
[00:18:21]  The real number, and this was even the New York Times had a piece about this where they, you know, now take that with a grain of commie salt, but the New York Times economists were saying the real unemployment from this is probably in the ballpark of 20 million people that have lost their jobs already just from this.
[00:18:38]  So far.
[00:18:39]  This is going to be, I mean, the damage that, and again, I'm not downplaying the virus, but the hypothetical amount of damage that the virus could cause, we don't exactly know.
[00:18:48]  But we know right now that somewhere in the ballpark of 20 million people already are going to be unemployed from this, in addition to the people who were already unemployed before this.
[00:18:59]  This is a nightmare.
[00:19:01]  And look, on top of that, I mean, we live in a system where because of Congress and the way the law is written, that almost everybody gets their health insurance through their employer.
[00:19:12]  So we already had, I have no idea if this number is accurate, but the one I always hear from Bernie Sanders is that we already had 38 million people, I think it was, without health insurance.
[00:19:23]  And that's with the Obamacare subsidies.
[00:19:26]  And because with the Obamacare subsidies, if you're poor enough, you can get your premium down to one or 200 bucks a month, something like that, even for a family.
[00:19:36]  However, you still got your co-pays and you still got your deductibles.
[00:19:40]  And for really poor people, they just can't do it.
[00:19:42]  And so you already had the structural permanent uninsured rate is in the tens of millions.
[00:19:50]  And now we're adding tens of millions of people on top of that who are going to be not just unemployed, but completely severed from their healthcare benefits right in the middle of a pandemic.
[00:20:01]  And so, you know, yeah, now, if they just said, you know what, we're just going to have to be laissez-faire about this thing and let the disease run rampant and build up immunity and that kind of thing, we probably have a Great Depression from that too.
[00:20:14]  And maybe a lot more dead people.
[00:20:15]  Like, again, I don't know if anybody really knows how to measure and weigh these things.
[00:20:20]  It's a big problem with central planning is I'm sure they're going to, you know, weigh too far on the side of clampdown and collateral damage and make things worse than they would have been otherwise, but can't really know that.
[00:20:32]  But it is the seen in the unseen, right?
[00:20:35]  We know we have every reason to believe that this disease would be spreading and killing that many more people that much more quickly right now if we didn't have all the lockdowns.
[00:20:45]  But at the same time, all this economic damage that's, you know, coming, we don't know how long that's going to last, how severe it's really going to be, how quickly any of these companies are going to be able to pick things up and get going again, assuming that the clampdown is ever truly lifted, right?
[00:21:02]  Or any time soon, you know, it'll be probably incremental.
[00:21:07]  If you can prove you've already had the disease and recovered, maybe you can go back to work and this kind of deal.
[00:21:12]  It's going to be very arbitrary and ad hoc and 50 state governors and not their legislators, right?
[00:21:19]  Just 50 state governors and their advisors making these calls for everyone.
[00:21:24]  And so, yeah, who knows?
[00:21:26]  And it does go to show, though, that for people who have the resources to help other people, that you're going to be desperately needed around here.
[00:21:34]  You know, read a headline about, was it Jeff Bezos, the guy, you know, who's on paper worth like $80 billion or whatever it is, said he's given away $1 billion to food pantries around the country.
[00:21:48]  Well, it's going to need to be a hell of a lot higher than that, Jeff, especially when everybody's depending on Amazon now and they're at all-time highs of revenue right now, that some of that is going to have to be distributed, hopefully voluntarily, by the people who have it to the people who desperately need it.
[00:22:07]  And, you know, I was talking with a friend on the phone and I just came up with this one just BSing.
[00:22:14]  But what if you just made it where, you know what?
[00:22:17]  They already passed the $2 trillion care act.
[00:22:20]  I love that.
[00:22:22]  And, but not only that, if you read your David Stockman, they're monetizing a billion dollars a day worth of debt every day.
[00:22:30]  Or was it 10 or whatever it is, some incredible amount of money that the Federal Reserve is just printing to buy up bad debt and bail out these banks and corporations.
[00:22:38]  So it seems to me like, what if they said, okay, well, that's already over with?
[00:22:42]  You know, any good libertarian would say that we got to stop all those bailouts right now.
[00:22:47]  But you know what?
[00:22:48]  If Boeing and Lockheed and United Airlines and American Airlines and Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, especially these most nefarious and most powerful banking institutions in the country, how about any American wants to pay a doctor or a hospital bill and write it on their checking account?
[00:23:12]  Then that'll be good enough.
[00:23:13]  So everybody take your own checks, cross out your name and address and just write Boeing in the corner and pay your doctor with that.
[00:23:21]  And it'll be federal edict, just like the rest of this stuff, that the banks will have to accept those checks.
[00:23:28]  And as long as it's a corporation that got the bailout, pick the one you hate the most.
[00:23:32]  Goldman Sachs is the one you hate the most.
[00:23:34]  You write Goldman Sachs in the upper left corner of your check, and Goldman Sachs is going to have to honor your check as long as it's going to a legitimate doctor or healthcare organization.
[00:23:44]  And then go with that.
[00:23:46]  They already got the money for free.
[00:23:48]  They already took it.
[00:23:49]  But you know, it reminds me of, I brought this up when I was on, I was doing a Jen's podcast, Pete's wife.
[00:23:57]  I did her podcast last week.
[00:23:59]  And I mentioned this thing that I remember, and this definitely happened.
[00:24:04]  I think it was Ron Paul definitely said this.
[00:24:07]  I believe it was when he was grilling Ben Bernacke.
[00:24:09]  But I looked back and I couldn't find the video, but I promise you this happened.
[00:24:12]  I remember it vividly.
[00:24:14]  But he was grilling them at one point.
[00:24:16]  It was like in 2009 or something like that.
[00:24:18]  And he goes, and he goes, something along the lines of he was like, look, you know, I'm against bailouts and all stripes.
[00:24:25]  But like, if we had to bail out the economy, why don't we just bail out homeowners?
[00:24:30]  Like, why don't we just bail out the people who own the homes so they don't have to be, you know, foreclosed on rather than bailing out the banks?
[00:24:37]  Like, why are we bailing out the debt holders rather than bailing out the debtors?
[00:24:42]  Like, why is one obvious of the other?
[00:24:45]  And, you know, he gave some like kind of technical answers.
[00:24:46]  And then Bernanke just busted out laughing, right?
[00:24:48]  Or whatever.
[00:24:49]  Well, he gave, you know, he did Bernanke.
[00:24:51]  He gave some, you know, like technical answer, which, by the way, actually might technically be true, but he was like, well, the Federal Reserve has the authority to extend, we'll be the lender of last resorts to financial institutions, but we don't have the authority to.
[00:25:02]  So it might be true, but Rotten Paul was just making the point that, see, the system's designed so that we never even talk about this.
[00:25:10]  And by the way, of course, you know, Ron Paul and me and Scott Horton, we're all against the idea of bailouts to begin with.
[00:25:15]  But it's interesting that you go, oh, you never even like think about bailing out this way.
[00:25:20]  And of course, even your like proposal here, it's just the problem is when you're dealing with statism, this will never be, they'll never go this direction with it.
[00:25:29]  They'll never be like, oh, yeah, you know what?
[00:25:31]  They justify bailing out the big institutions by the idea that they're trying to help the little people.
[00:25:37]  But it's so obvious that you could just help people and not do any of this.
[00:25:42]  And at least maybe there's, you know, a silver lining in a goddamn tragedy here is that it just becomes more and more obvious because there have been, I've seen a lot of like good videos online going around.
[00:25:54]  John Stossel had a great one recently where he was just going through the pork in this $2 trillion care act thing where he's just talking about the $25 million for the Kennedy Center and that congressional salaries were in there.
[00:26:08]  I didn't even know that until I saw the Stossel video.
[00:26:11]  And there's just all these different things where you're like, oh, yeah, they don't care at all.
[00:26:15]  They're not even thinking like, how can we help these people who are desperately in need?
[00:26:20]  It's really actually, as much as there are these like structural and mechanical issues with statism in general, what's really the worst part about it is not even like the Mississian observation that like, oh, well, there's like this pricing, the price calculation problem or something like that.
[00:26:40]  And that's a very important observation, but the real problem with statism, and I've been reminded of this more and more lately, although really from following your work, I should have known this for a long time.

=== Cronyism and Government Power (13:42) ===

[00:26:52]  But it's just been more in the front of my mind is that the real problem with it is that it's a magnet for sociopaths.
[00:26:58]  The problem is that the people who get in control here, it's not just like, oh, shoot, we can't really figure out the right price.
[00:27:04]  And central planning has this problem.
[00:27:06]  The problem is that the people who get in there and wield power are just monsters who will look at people who are suffering in their greatest time of need and go, now's an opportunity to give my cronies a handout.
[00:27:20]  It's just appalling.
[00:27:21]  All right, guys, let's take a quick second.
[00:27:23]  I want to tell you about our sponsor for today's show, which is stamps.com.
[00:27:28]  There may never be a better time than right now to use stamps.com.
[00:27:31]  I know people are trying to limit the amount of times that they go out and interact with other people to be careful.
[00:27:36]  If you don't know what stamps.com is, it's basically the post office on your computer or your smartphone.
[00:27:42]  With stamps.com, you can do anything you can do at the post office right from home.
[00:27:46]  Plus, stamps.com will give you discounts on postage that you can't get at the post office.
[00:27:51]  All the services of the U.S. Postal Service right to your computer, whether you're a small office sending invoices, an online seller shipping out products, or even a warehouse sending thousands of packages a day, stamps.com can handle it all with ease.
[00:28:04]  Simply use your computer to print U.S. postage 24-7 for any letter, any package, any class of mail, anywhere you want to send it.
[00:28:12]  Once your mail is ready, you just hand it to your mail carrier or you drop it in your mailbox.
[00:28:17]  It's really that simple.
[00:28:19]  And right now, if you go to stamps.com, you can use my promo code PROBLEM, which will get you a special offer that includes a four-week trial plus postage and a digital scale with no long-term commitments or contracts.
[00:28:32]  Just go to stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type in problem.
[00:28:37]  That's stamps.com promo code problem.
[00:28:40]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:28:42]  You know, it's true too that everybody who's screwed up here, it's because of the government, right?
[00:28:47]  The FDA and the CDC and, you know, the entire federal government structure, they're the ones who essentially put off doing anything about this impending crisis as long as they could.
[00:29:01]  I'm not sure if you saw the news today in the New York Times where they leaked Peter Navarro's memos, which had been previously reported, but now they've published it.
[00:29:09]  Axios, you can see the text of the entire memos where Peter Navarro warned that's Trump's trade advisor.
[00:29:16]  So very high-level White House guy.
[00:29:18]  It's not like this is some junior staffer on the NSC.
[00:29:20]  This is his number one economic advisor.
[00:29:23]  And he warned that, man, we could be facing trillions of dollars in losses, hundreds of thousands dead.
[00:29:29]  We got to get prepared.
[00:29:30]  And he had specific recommendations.
[00:29:32]  We need to start stocking up on gloves and gowns and masks and ventilators right now.
[00:29:37]  I mean, this guy really knows his stuff, man, and he was on top of it.
[00:29:41]  And then the government spent months playing it down.
[00:29:43]  And not just Trump, but the CDC and the FDA and the rest of them refused to get their act together until March, right?
[00:29:51]  Until halfway through March.
[00:29:53]  They're behind the NBA by weeks, you know, in taking this thing seriously enough.
[00:29:58]  And even, you know, what, last week, two weeks ago, Trump was still blaming the lame stream media is trying to make me look bad by making such a big deal out of this thing.
[00:30:07]  And we want to have America up and going again by Easter, which is just nuts.
[00:30:10]  It's never going to happen.
[00:30:12]  And he can only see it as a plot against him to make him look bad.
[00:30:15]  So here the government has made the crisis that much worse.
[00:30:18]  And then their response is total lockdown, forced lockdown, no matter how bad you want to go back to work.
[00:30:25]  Doesn't matter.
[00:30:25]  You're not allowed to.
[00:30:27]  The whole place is locked down.
[00:30:28]  So people are in this desperate position where they essentially have no choice but to accept the help that the government's offering.
[00:30:36]  Even though you're $1,200, that's not even a month's rent, right?
[00:30:39]  I saw Thomas Massey goes, well, wait a minute.
[00:30:42]  Let me see.
[00:30:42]  Everybody who's getting $1,200 times the multiplication and carry the three here, so that's $300 billion.
[00:30:49]  Well, how come the bill was $2 trillion then?
[00:30:52]  $1.7 trillion more than the $300 billion in the direct bailout that isn't enough to cover one lousy month's worth of rent.
[00:31:01]  You know, in Austin, Texas, you can't get a one-bedroom apartment for $1,200 a month, man.
[00:31:07]  I mean, and not everywhere has housing prices inflated that bad, but in a lot of places, they do.
[00:31:13]  I mean, and so, but anyway, so then as you say too, everyone is essentially just, you know, in a position for perfect victimhood for those in power who would take full advantage.
[00:31:26]  And they will.
[00:31:27]  I mean, look at the fact that of that bill that they passed.
[00:31:32]  $1.7 trillion they steal while giving you the slightest bribe of $1,000 to look the other way.
[00:31:40]  And talk about breaking your legs and handing your crutches, you know?
[00:31:43]  Excuse me.
[00:31:44]  Last day.
[00:31:45]  Yes.
[00:31:45]  So sorry.
[00:31:45]  I hope you ain't got the COVID, man.
[00:31:47]  You're looking a little shiny there.
[00:31:49]  There's a cat in my in-laws' house.
[00:31:54]  How's that fever feeling there, pal?
[00:31:55]  Yeah, right.
[00:31:55]  I'm feeling good.
[00:31:57]  I don't want to get dragged away on this.
[00:31:58]  No, you're right.
[00:31:59]  And there's the thing that's just infuriating.
[00:32:02]  And, you know, I got to say, and I give him a lot of credit for this.
[00:32:04]  So, as you know, I did Jimmy Doerr's show recently, and then I just had him on my podcast.
[00:32:09]  I saw it was great, man.
[00:32:10]  Both of those were just great, Dave.
[00:32:12]  Oh, thank you very much.
[00:32:13]  I appreciate that.
[00:32:14]  And one of the things that I love that really makes me respect Jimmy Doer a lot.
[00:32:19]  And by the way, here's an off thing.
[00:32:21]  Just a brief tangent.
[00:32:23]  But you know, Jeff Dice said once on the Tom Woods show, and I thought he was right about this, but he goes, he was like, you know, it's like the libertarians who aren't good on economics end up being the worst libertarians.
[00:32:34]  Like they end up just not being good libertarians when they're not good on economics.
[00:32:38]  And then it's funny because someone like you, who most people, my guess is who are who know you and are like familiar with your work, don't even really know that much about you on economics.
[00:32:49]  I mean, that's just your specialty has been the wars and these campaigns, but you're great on economics.
[00:32:54]  And then it's like, there's something to that.
[00:32:57]  But the other thing, like my version of the Jeff Dice rule, is there's something about people who are good on war that it just like trickles down to being better in general.
[00:33:08]  Because once you kind of see the most egregious moral outrage, it's very hard to be fooled with this other, like these distractions.
[00:33:16]  You know, like my friend Ari Shafir, he's just a comedian.
[00:33:20]  He's not super political, but he's really outraged by the wars.
[00:33:23]  Like he's just really anti-war and he's good on those issues.
[00:33:26]  And he would be like on these things where people would interview him and he had this one thing on HuffPo like video.
[00:33:32]  And they're like asking him, they're like, something about like, oh, but don't you think Obama was this great, you know, like figure or something like that?
[00:33:39]  And he's like, there's children being like weddings being drone bombed in Yemen right now.
[00:33:44]  Like, what?
[00:33:45]  And it's almost like you can see through all their bullshit because you just know it's like, well, no, I mean, kids are being murdered.
[00:33:50]  So I'm not outraged by like a transgender bathroom or something.
[00:33:54]  You can't fool me into that being even an issue.
[00:33:57]  So anyway, just to Jimmy Dore's credit, that he saw through the bullshit of the stimulus package right away and was like, yeah, this is obviously, I think his words were, this is the cheese in the mousetrap that they'll give you a little bit of a handout and then they're going to just bail out all these corporations.
[00:34:13]  And I think he was somewhat disillusioned with the fact that Bernie Sanders and AOC and all these other people were supporting it.
[00:34:21]  And you're like, oh, but you've gotten nothing for the people.
[00:34:25]  And this is like, this is everything I hate, you know, this kind of corporate welfare.
[00:34:29]  So it is, anyway, it is interesting to see that.
[00:34:33]  And one of the other things that I wanted to kind of get your take on just since this came up, because I was talking about this, and I've gotten a little bit of heat for this because people were upset that I didn't give Jimmy more pushback on certain issues that we disagree on when he was on my show.
[00:34:46]  And the fact that he was, you know, advocating for Medicare for all and UBI and things that I'm not for, for sure.
[00:34:53]  I mean, forget the temporary UBI right now, but like permanent UBI.
[00:34:59]  But I just kind of, the place I've been in in my mind right now, and maybe I'm still kind of trying to figure this out a little bit, but I really am much more terrified of the fascism that I think is going to come out of this than I am of the socialism.
[00:35:12]  And I really just, you know, like, I'm against the socialism too.
[00:35:16]  I mean, I really do.
[00:35:16]  I think it's a bad system and it won't work well.
[00:35:18]  I hope we don't have Medicare for all come out of this.
[00:35:20]  And I hope we don't have permanent UBI come out of this, you know?
[00:35:23]  But that's not like what's keeping me up at night terrified.
[00:35:26]  What's keeping me up at night terrified is when you see Google talking about partnering with the government to track people who they think have, you know, fevers or whatever.
[00:35:36]  What fucking terrifies me is, I don't know if you saw, there was that one doctor from the World Health Organization who was saying that, you know, the problem now is that people are spreading it within their homes.
[00:35:47]  And so now we're going to have to start taking sick people and removing them from their homes and putting them in isolation.
[00:35:53]  Like if you're talking about, I mean, like libertarians have thought about for a lot of years, like, what's your line where you're actually like ready to do something?
[00:36:01]  And I will say, man, if somebody's coming in trying to take my wife or daughter away from me because they have a fever, that's going to be like, that's when you guys will no longer be listening to this podcast for, you know, 25 to 30 years.
[00:36:14]  So like that's, that's just the stuff that terrifies me a lot more.
[00:36:18]  And I wasn't super interested in having the argument about cutting people checks right now when at least there's someone on the left who seems to be an ally on the fascism part, which is what's really freaking me out.
[00:36:30]  I don't know what your thoughts are on that.
[00:36:32]  Well, yeah, no, I mean, I agree with all that.
[00:36:34]  I've always thought that the welfare state is essentially your bribe so you don't overthrow the government.
[00:36:38]  I mean, we live in a, it is a crony capitalist imperial state.
[00:36:45]  And these guys have killed in the 20 years since the terror war began, they've killed approximately 2 million people from Timbuktu to Islamabad.
[00:36:56]  And with no shame whatsoever.
[00:36:59]  They're the ones, look at the healthcare crisis that we're in right now.
[00:37:03]  Never mind the virus.
[00:37:04]  But just the fact of the cartel in health insurance, the cartel in the pharmaceutical companies and the patent system where they get to have these artificial monopolies on the recipes for these drugs and keep generics off the market at gunpoint.
[00:37:20]  All the con laws and all of the different limits.
[00:37:23]  And there's no end to the government, the laws and the regulations ruling over the number of hospitals, the number of hospital beds, the number of doctors per hospital, the number of residents, the number of this, the number of that, whatever it is.
[00:37:38]  It's all completely artificial and controlled rather than by the market.
[00:37:42]  And so it leads us to this terrible crisis.
[00:37:45]  And then we're supposed to get our $1,200 and say, well, at least we got our $1,200 and let them get away with the fact that they have this entire system is rigged against us.
[00:37:55]  As George Carlin said, there's a big club.
[00:37:58]  You're not in it.
[00:37:59]  And that's the deal.
[00:38:00]  It's them versus the rest of us, the people who have all the wealth and power.
[00:38:04]  And this is supposed to be our bribe.
[00:38:06]  And then unfortunately, people make the mistake of saying, well, we want a better bribe than if this is the system we're stuck with, then by all means, give us Medicare for all or the UBI or this kind of thing, which I think is the mistake.
[00:38:19]  I think the much better take is that, you know, we absolutely, Jimmy Doerr ought to become a libertarian and every leftist with him.
[00:38:28]  And our first priority is to dismantle the power of the federal government over the economy at all.
[00:38:34]  They shouldn't be able to make any of these decisions at all.
[00:38:37]  And, you know, the worst that they, the worst job that they do, as Mises said, the middle of the road leads to socialism.
[00:38:44]  The middle of the road, meaning government regulation to make it better for you, means no artificially high prices.
[00:38:50]  Now you want the government to pick up the tab for the price that they raised.
[00:38:54]  And so you end up with government ownership and control over the system.
[00:38:58]  But then the worse that gets, the more people rebel against that too.
[00:39:03]  So people are moving further to the left and further to the right all the time.
[00:39:07]  And so it's not just the fascism of the medical police state coming to take your kids and all that, but it's the fascism of, you know, Jonathan Schwartz had a great article about this at the intercept the other day.
[00:39:19]  Now, he's a liberal progressive type.
[00:39:21]  And he's saying, we got to seize this rage and anger right now and not nominate Biden, but nominate Sanders instead and seize the people's rage against the current system.
[00:39:30]  Otherwise, the Republicans will.
[00:39:33]  And, you know, I'm a libertarian, so I'm making that same argument from our point of view rather than the liberal progressive one that we got to push freedom right now as hard as we can.
[00:39:42]  Because if we don't, the Republicans are going to seize that rage.
[00:39:45]  And even though it's Donald Trump who did it to you, still, where else are you going to go, right-wingers?
[00:39:50]  He's your leader, the Republican Party, that's your party.
[00:39:53]  And so they're going to say, look at how corrupt this system is.
[00:39:58]  Look at how what a terrible job these.
[00:40:02]  you know, corrupt crony pharmaceutical companies are doing.
[00:40:04]  Look at, as John Schwartz said, ooh, we caught a Iranian trying to sneak into the country and spread the COVID, you know, and demonize foreign enemies, maybe launch another war, crack down in a real police state in a way that we have not had up until now.
[00:40:24]  And so, yeah, I mean, I think the worst part of the socialists, essentially, is the way they scare the hell out of the right because that just pushes the right further and further toward national socialism.

=== Candidate Weaknesses Exposed (14:53) ===

[00:40:34]  It's weird, you know, right?
[00:40:35]  But it's weird how it all, you know, I haven't even thought about this.
[00:40:39]  Maybe not precisely this way.
[00:40:40]  But, you know, the funny thing about, so I did, I was talking about this on a podcast and I've been predicting pretty much for the last year over that Trump would get reelected.
[00:40:53]  I always said barring some steep recession, like barring something like that.
[00:40:59]  And, you know, as a, as a, you know, Rothbardian guy, I'm always kind of like, and that could come because this whole thing's a house of cards.
[00:41:06]  So it could pop at any minute, you know, but like barring that.
[00:41:09]  And so, but I've been saying I think Trump's going to win.
[00:41:11]  But I did say the first, I remember his first campaign speech when he came out with technical campaign speech.
[00:41:18]  You know, they're all campaign speeches, but the first time it was like, this is his reelection campaign.
[00:41:22]  And he said his new slogan was keep America great again.
[00:41:26]  And I remember I did a whole podcast on it the day after that.
[00:41:30]  And I said, you know, I think there's real weakness there.
[00:41:32]  Like I think make America great again is one of the most brilliant political slogans I've ever heard.
[00:41:38]  You know, however you feel about Donald Trump or anything, there's something so brilliant about four words that can convey so much information.
[00:41:46]  You know, there's four words that you utter and it lets people know right away that number one, I'm a nationalist.
[00:41:53]  Number one, we were a great country.
[00:41:55]  We've lost our way and I believe I can lead you back to things being great.
[00:42:00]  Like there's just a whole, in four words, you convey a really sick, like just brilliant marketing.
[00:42:05]  But keep America great to me seemed like, well, the problem with that is that now that's how Hillary lost.
[00:42:12]  Hillary said America's already great.
[00:42:14]  What are you complaining about?
[00:42:16]  Anybody who's not feeling so great is left out of that equation.
[00:42:21]  Everybody can be a part of Make America Great again, but a lot of people are like, keep.
[00:42:26]  I mean, I don't know, like things kind of suck for me.
[00:42:28]  So that I thought was a big problem.
[00:42:31]  And it's interesting that like a lot of people have said this.
[00:42:33]  I'm not, I'm not the first one by any stretch, but said that, you know, well, Donald Trump got to run as the outsider in 2016.
[00:42:39]  That's going to be a little bit harder when you're the sitting president.
[00:42:43]  But, you know, I'm thinking as you say this, that the establishment really handed him this talking point again.
[00:42:50]  Because if they hadn't, it's like swatting at the B and then missing.
[00:42:53]  Like, you know, you swat at the B and then miss.
[00:42:55]  You might be in trouble.
[00:42:56]  You might get stung now.
[00:42:57]  You better get him.
[00:42:58]  So they went with the special prosecution, then you went with the impeachment.
[00:43:01]  You went with all these people in the executive branch, you know, ratting him out and leaking and doing New York Times articles.
[00:43:08]  None of this really affected him.
[00:43:10]  And now it's actually fairly easy for Trump to say, yeah, I know this establishment sucks.
[00:43:15]  I mean, look what they've been trying to do to me for the last three years.
[00:43:18]  So they actually handed him a talking point of being like, yeah, see, you can still see I'm the anti-establishment candidate because look what they've been trying to do to me.
[00:43:27]  This may all backfire in their face.
[00:43:30]  And yeah, the whole media, everything that they do is, you know, our two minutes hate, our chance to get him.
[00:43:34]  Oh, we can get him with this.
[00:43:36]  And then they fall flat on their face all the time.
[00:43:38]  I saw someone on Twitter said, isn't that funny?
[00:43:40]  How no matter what this guy says, the New York Times says without evidence after that.
[00:43:45]  But they don't ever do that when we get a pronouncement from President Z in Beijing.
[00:43:51]  They don't say without evidence.
[00:43:53]  We're supposed to take what these guys say every time.
[00:43:56]  And I'm not trying to drum up hate against China by all means or anything like that, but I'm saying in terms of the liberal media swinging at the king and missing, that's all they do.
[00:44:06]  And it just makes him look good.
[00:44:08]  You know, every day is a two minutes hate and every day it falls fat.
[00:44:11]  In fact, what's the brand new one?
[00:44:12]  Aha, Trump has a financial stake in the company that makes Plaquenil.
[00:44:16]  Uh-huh.
[00:44:17]  Until you take one moment's look at it.
[00:44:20]  Oh, he owns a mutual fund.
[00:44:23]  And that mutual fund has a tiny investment in this company.
[00:44:28]  And their patent ran out 20 years ago or something.
[00:44:32]  And so, yep, another one.
[00:44:34]  But boy, they come at him hard.
[00:44:35]  Oh, my God.
[00:44:37]  Look, Trump and his conflict of interest.
[00:44:39]  He's so corrupt and all this.
[00:44:41]  But meanwhile, it's so obvious.
[00:44:42]  Why is Trump on the Plaquenil thing?
[00:44:45]  Because he wants his problem to go away.
[00:44:47]  And he's going, look, they found a miracle cure because that's what he wants to believe.
[00:44:52]  And it seems like there's some pretty good reason to believe that it does work, that it is pretty effective.
[00:44:58]  But again, they swing and they miss and they make him look like he's the good guy.
[00:45:03]  And so, yeah, I think that's right.
[00:45:04]  And it depends on how many people die this spring and summer, frankly.
[00:45:08]  But look who he's up against.
[00:45:09]  Instead of running an outsider, Bernie Sanders, who could say, yes, I'm a longtime senator, but come on, I'm not even really a member of the Democratic Party.
[00:45:17]  I'm an independent and I'm an outsider.
[00:45:19]  That's why they hate me.
[00:45:20]  You talk about the Republican Party, never Trumpers who hate Trump.
[00:45:24]  Look at the Democratic Party, never Sanders's who hate me.
[00:45:27]  They're even worse.
[00:45:29]  And it's an obvious reason why they hate me.
[00:45:31]  It's because I want to help you and they don't.
[00:45:34]  And he has that whole make America great again type of an outsider thing about him.
[00:45:41]  And he doesn't have the courage that Trump has to really use it and really go after his enemies or anything.
[00:45:47]  But if the Democrats really wanted to win, they'd give it to him.
[00:45:51]  Instead, they're running Joe Biden.
[00:45:52]  Well, Joe Biden's career is what Donald Trump ran against.
[00:45:56]  Every single thing that Joe Biden ever supported, all of the trade deals, all the immigration, all the wars, that was Trump's biggest talking point.
[00:46:05]  The only thing he didn't do was attack him for the war on crime, which Biden was one of the worst guys.
[00:46:10]  He was, you know, there's this book, Yesterday's Man by Bronco Marchteach.
[00:46:15]  Oh, we talked about this last time, where Biden spent his entire career attacking Reagan and Bush for not cracking down hard enough on the war on drugs and the war on crime.
[00:46:26]  He was the one who authored, was a primary author of the 1994 crime bill and the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and all the parts of it that didn't get passed that became the Patriot Act later.
[00:46:39]  That was Joe Biden's bill, the Patriot Act.
[00:46:42]  All of this stuff.
[00:46:43]  I mean, this guy is absolutely the worst.
[00:46:45]  And he's completely losing his mind.
[00:46:48]  Yes.
[00:46:49]  He's got a terrible track record, but fortunately, he doesn't remember any of it.
[00:46:53]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:46:54]  But so when Trump confronts him on it, he's just going to be like, I don't remember that.
[00:46:58]  He tried to lie in the debate with Sanders.
[00:47:00]  He's like, I didn't write the bankruptcy bill.
[00:47:03]  And Sanders is like, yeah, you did.
[00:47:05]  Everybody, look it up on YouTube.
[00:47:06]  Biden and the bankruptcy bill, you know?
[00:47:09]  Joe Biden might actually not be lying.
[00:47:11]  Like he might pass a polygraph test.
[00:47:13]  Like be like, you wrote the bankruptcy bill.
[00:47:15]  You go, what are you talking about?
[00:47:17]  I was on my mother's porch all that time.
[00:47:21]  I was in jail for trying to visit Nelson Mandela when that happened, you know, which again, he might actually think that.
[00:47:27]  Like, does he even know he's lying?
[00:47:29]  You know, it's that's the way he remembers it.
[00:47:31]  Why not?
[00:47:32]  I know Joe Biden's just up there where they should be like, you know, when you were in the Senate, you voted for X, Y, and Z.
[00:47:36]  And he's just like, nice try.
[00:47:38]  I was never in the Senate.
[00:47:39]  So I don't know what you're talking about, but I've been a governor.
[00:47:44]  Trump's already proven that he's willing to destroy Biden on the mental health issues.
[00:47:49]  You know, they said, did you see at the press conference the other day where the lady said, well, Joe Biden just tweeted and Trump like interrupts.
[00:47:56]  He didn't write that.
[00:47:57]  He didn't tweet that.
[00:47:58]  He had some Democratic Party operative tweeted because he doesn't even know how to use Twitter.
[00:48:02]  And you know what?
[00:48:03]  If he's watching this right now, he doesn't even know what he's watching.
[00:48:07]  He doesn't even know what's going on.
[00:48:09]  Like, man, he's already laid down the line.
[00:48:12]  He is going to attack Biden on the dementia issue.
[00:48:16]  And meanwhile, the Democratic voters of America in the general election are going to be amazed and surprised to find out that Joe Biden is completely senile and can't string a sense together because there's a total media cover-up.
[00:48:29]  MSNBC and CNN and the nightly news and PBS, you know, the news hour, they won't cover it.
[00:48:36]  They won't cover it.
[00:48:37]  And so when it comes to, you know, it's like them pretending that Jeb Bush is this really strong candidate to take on, or Hillary for that matter, to take on Trump.
[00:48:46]  And then their constituency is surprised to find out that actually that's not true.
[00:48:51]  Everyone who doesn't love Hillary hates Hillary.
[00:48:56]  They would never support her ever.
[00:48:59]  And so, geez, but CBS didn't make that clear to me.
[00:49:02]  And I really was, they told me she was the one who was the most electable candidate.
[00:49:07]  And that same thing here with Biden.
[00:49:09]  They're going to be surprised to find out that, boy, you thought Donald Trump was incoherent.
[00:49:13]  He's sort of deliberately incoherent in a way.
[00:49:16]  He's not senile like Joe Biden.
[00:49:18]  Joe Biden has dementia.
[00:49:19]  You know, I'm not a doctor, but he is losing his marbles.
[00:49:22]  There's no question about that.
[00:49:24]  You know, and whether it's just, you know, really bad memory problems kicking in.
[00:49:29]  But he can't keep a train of thought through one sentence.
[00:49:31]  No, it's not literally he's incapable of answering one question without fumbling around.
[00:49:37]  Not one.
[00:49:38]  He can't get one.
[00:49:39]  And then sometimes he does this thing that I've never seen any other, I've never seen a politician.
[00:49:44]  I've never seen a leader.
[00:49:45]  I've never seen a good podcaster do, where he will oftentimes just stop in the middle of his tracks and give up.
[00:49:54]  Like he's fumbling around for the sentence and he just goes, and then I'm whatever.
[00:50:02]  You're like, holy shit, dude.
[00:50:04]  Like I've never, I mean, I'm talking about just like I've been in a world of, you know, I know a whole bunch of stand-up comedians and a whole bunch of like podcasters and authors and things like that.
[00:50:11]  And I've never known one of them who will not be able to recover, like losing your train of thought or not knowing where you're going at all, just implode into themselves.
[00:50:22]  Look, I've said since this whole campaign has been going that there was no question, it was so obvious to me that Bernie Sanders was a tougher challenge for Trump than anybody else who was in the race.
[00:50:32]  With the exception maybe of Tulsi, if she had gotten in, I thought on a national level, she would have a lot of crossover appeal, but she never got anything going.
[00:50:39]  But Bernie Sanders of the viable candidates was the one who was his toughest matchup.
[00:50:43]  I always thought this because we live in a populist moment, an anti-establishment, an anti-establishment moment, and he's the one who can actually speak to that.
[00:50:50]  But man, now that you're starting to look at it, and Bernie Sanders has no shot of getting this nomination at this point, he can't beat Biden and the delegates at this point.
[00:50:58]  And there's no chance in hell that the DNC is going to choose Bernie Sanders.
[00:51:04]  It's just not, it's not going to happen.
[00:51:06]  But only have said they would rather lose to Trump with Biden than win with Sanders.
[00:51:13]  And I understand why.
[00:51:14]  I mean, it's pretty obvious why, because Donald Trump is not the threatening wild card that he was in 2016.
[00:51:21]  At this point, Donald Trump has presided over the status quo for the last three years.
[00:51:28]  So, really, you know, they'd go like, look, we're all still raking in money.
[00:51:31]  We've got him pretty boxed in.
[00:51:33]  I mean, who knows like what's really going on, like whether they have dirt on him or something like that.
[00:51:37]  But they've figured out a way to box in Donald Trump, whether they've stopped him from being able to really do what he ran on, which was make a deal with Russia.
[00:51:46]  Even if he was completely exonerated over all that shit, he still can never really make a deal with Russia because to most people, if he did that, it would be like, ah, proof.
[00:51:54]  He was a Putin puppet all along.
[00:51:56]  And so they've kind of got him figured out.
[00:51:58]  And also because of Donald Trump's personal and intellectual shortcomings, that he just really doesn't know any better.
[00:52:03]  And so he will put all of these people around.
[00:52:06]  And you know what?
[00:52:07]  Like, Donald Trump is just flat out wrong and in the corporatist ruling elite's favor on a lot of these issues.
[00:52:16]  I mean, he's like, let me be the most hardcore pro-Israel guy there is.
[00:52:20]  Let me be the most hardcore anti-Iran guy that there is.
[00:52:24]  But Bernie Sanders now, think about it now.
[00:52:27]  How much tougher.
[00:52:28]  I mean, Bernie Sanders, who the fuck knows what this country is going to look like by November.
[00:52:33]  I mean, I'm talking 20 million unemployed right now.
[00:52:36]  Who the fuck knows how high this unemployment is?
[00:52:40]  You're going to have more unemployed people than in the Great Depression probably by the time.
[00:52:45]  Now, I'm cheating a little there because we have a much bigger population and stuff like that.
[00:52:49]  But you're going to be looking at percentage-wise.
[00:52:51]  Yeah.
[00:52:51]  Yeah, but you're going to be looking at a ton of unemployed people that Bernie Sanders will have a very clear message to.
[00:52:56]  You know, like he will have a very, here's what I'm running on.
[00:52:59]  I'm going to give you something.
[00:53:00]  Are you tired?
[00:53:01]  Would you rather nothing or something?
[00:53:03]  And I mean, that'll be very easy.
[00:53:05]  Bernie Sanders could flip red states blue in a way that no other presidential candidate has had the opportunity to in my lifetime to go going into November this year.
[00:53:15]  And, but he won't be the guy there.
[00:53:17]  But there's no question he would be a real danger to Donald Trump.
[00:53:22]  Whereas Donald Trump should get on his knees and thank whatever God it is he believes in, whatever like gold-plated billionaire God Donald Trump believes in, he should thank him that Joe Biden is the guy.
[00:53:35]  Your prediction of Joe Biden not making it aside.
[00:53:38]  He could not have caught a better matchup than what they, because he's actually even worse overall as a candidate than Hillary Clinton.
[00:53:45]  Even as unlikable, he's more likable or has historically always been more likable than Hillary Clinton.
[00:53:52]  But he is, he looks like he's 90 and he talks like he's 95.
[00:53:58]  Like there's no weaker candidate than this guy.
[00:54:01]  Well, you know what's funny too is when you talk about whatever God is intervening on his side here, it's the Israel lobby.
[00:54:07]  They hate Bernie Sanders, the bald old Jew from Brooklyn.
[00:54:10]  They can't stand him.
[00:54:12]  The irony.
[00:54:13]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:54:14]  Because, you know, and he even lived in Israel for a while when he was younger.
[00:54:19]  But then that gives him credibility to say, look, I'm Jewish.
[00:54:23]  I even lived in Israel for a little while.
[00:54:25]  Get the hell out of the West Bank.
[00:54:26]  I mean it.
[00:54:27]  I wish somebody was the prime minister instead of Netanyahu.
[00:54:31]  Whatever.
[00:54:31]  And he's the kind of guy who would talk like that.
[00:54:34]  If he was the president, you know, he's an old line enough sort of a socialist that he's really not an identity politics guy.
[00:54:41]  He's an economics kind of guy.
[00:54:43]  And so the Palestinians, they're the poor and the downtrodden, which they are, you know, and so he just by default he takes their side.
[00:54:51]  And he hasn't traditionally been very good on Israel-Palestine, but he's gotten better.
[00:54:57]  And, you know, he has advisors who are pretty good on it.
[00:54:59]  You know, Matt Duss is, he's a liberal Zionist.
[00:55:02]  He's not a one-state guy, but he's, you know, certainly is against annexation, which they, you know, they just announced.
[00:55:09]  I have here that Bernie Gantz, I mean, Benny Gantz, after submitting to Netanyahu, he finally had a coalition together.
[00:55:17]  I love this.
[00:55:18]  Benny Gantz had a coalition together to get rid of Netanyahu.
[00:55:22]  He was going to beat him by one vote in the Knesset and be the prime minister.

=== Neocons and Israel Policy (03:32) ===

[00:55:28]  But the problem was he had to ally with the joint list, which is the Arab Christians and Muslims who are the citizens of Israel, the Arab citizens of Israel's parties.
[00:55:38]  And so he decided, no, he would rather give up and let Netanyahu stay prime minister and support Netanyahu rather than for the first time ever form a government.
[00:55:51]  with the cooperation of the Arab parties.
[00:55:54]  And so, you know, he decided he was more of a racist than he ever wanted to be prime minister.
[00:56:00]  And so he's now joined with Netanyahu.
[00:56:03]  And then they've announced they're moving forward.
[00:56:04]  It was in Haaretz yesterday.
[00:56:06]  They're moving forward with annexation because they're going to seize all the outright annex, the Jordan Valley and certainly majority of the settlements all over the West Bank and preclude and all of Jerusalem and, you know, of East Jerusalem as well and preclude even the possibility of an independent state in the West Bank ever.
[00:56:26]  It's so, this is what's so infuriating to me.
[00:56:29]  And I know that sometimes people would, I've gotten shit from this, particularly from like left libertarians or whatever they want to call themselves, like that kind of group of people.
[00:56:39]  But I'm sorry, it just fucking drives me crazy.
[00:56:42]  And I almost feel the need to catch the back of the far right in America, whether that's the alt-right or whatever other group, when the neocons go after them for being these racist, nationalist, horrible people, because they're every bit that just for Israel.
[00:56:58]  They're every bit the same exact thing.
[00:57:01]  They are, they literally are, the neocons are alt-writers just for Israel.
[00:57:06]  It's everything, down to the T, down to Richard Spencer's wet dream of an ethnostate, of a fucking, like everything that they want.
[00:57:14]  They're just that exact group and they're appalled by the idea that you would be that for America, but they're perfectly fine being that for Israel.
[00:57:23]  I understand.
[00:57:23]  You know, this happened at A ⁇ M where Richard Spencer got in an argument with a Jewish rabbi at Texas A ⁇ M University and said, well, are you for open immigration into Israel?
[00:57:34]  And the guy shut, he couldn't even answer.
[00:57:36]  He didn't even say a word.
[00:57:39]  And he got completely shut down by this ridiculous Nazi because his answer was, yes, I'm a national socialist for this state.
[00:57:48]  That's different.
[00:57:49]  But yep, you're exactly right.
[00:57:52]  I mean, that's exactly what it is.
[00:57:53]  It's what they denounce here is exactly what the policy is there.
[00:57:59]  And, you know, it's not even like, hey, they already seized the 78% and they'll be happy with that.
[00:58:09]  Nope, they got to seize the entire West Bank too.
[00:58:12]  And, you know, the epitome of the neoconservative movement, the Kagan family, on the day of the September 11th attack, Donald Kagan, the father and fat neck Fred, the author of the Iraq and Afghan surges and Robert Kagan's brother, Victoria Newland's brother-in-law, Kimberly Kagan's husband, fat neck Fred, he was on there with Donald Kagan on the radio.
[00:58:36]  And on the day of September 11th, they said America should invade the West Bank and kick all the Palestinians out.
[00:58:43]  You can find that on YouTube or wherever now, as though the Palestinians had had a thing to do with that.
[00:58:49]  But that's their policy.
[00:58:50]  That's what they believe in.
[00:58:52]  And at the expense of every other thing, that's all they care about, the neocons, is seizing this property that doesn't belong to them.

=== Libertarian Populist Messages (14:10) ===

[00:59:00]  You almost on a on a really sick and evil level.
[00:59:03]  So don't take me, I'm saying this comedically, I don't mean this, but you almost have to admire like the chutzpah for nothing else.
[00:59:12]  It's almost kind of like a certain bravery to it, isn't there?
[00:59:14]  If you were sitting there and you were like, well, you know what the lesson of 9-11 is?
[00:59:19]  You need to shoot my boss.
[00:59:21]  You're like, wait, what?
[00:59:22]  How does that relate to this at all?
[00:59:24]  You're going down, but he's such a dick.
[00:59:25]  Like, come on, seriously.
[00:59:27]  I just think you should shoot my boss.
[00:59:28]  Like, just the self-serving.
[00:59:30]  Oh, my God.
[00:59:31]  It's unbelievable.
[00:59:32]  All right.
[00:59:32]  Let me let me try to because I know it's funny.
[00:59:36]  We were talking before we started the podcast, and you were like, hey, what do you want to talk about?
[00:59:40]  And I was like, I don't know.
[00:59:41]  We'll talk.
[00:59:42]  And then, of course, we'll just talk about a million things.
[00:59:43]  But I do, let me try to bring it back to the moment we're living in because there's so much craziness going on.
[00:59:49]  And I do kind of want to pick your brain about this a little bit.
[00:59:54]  And that's, and I know this is just speculating, but what do you see?
[00:59:59]  Like, what is your best guess?
[01:00:01]  What does your gut tell you about how this whole thing is going to shake out?
[01:00:06]  Like, we're going to have to come out of this lockdown at some point.
[01:00:12]  We're going to have to, people are going to have to go back to work.
[01:00:16]  What do you think the ramifications of all of this are going to be?
[01:00:22]  Do you like obviously the economy is going to be in trouble?
[01:00:24]  I really, I wish I heard David Stockman on your show, and I had Gene Epstein on my show, and they were both not nearly as pessimistic as me.
[01:00:33]  And it made me feel better for like 24 hours that I was like, well, these guys who are way smarter than me, who are professional economists, they seem to not think there's going to be a Great Depression.
[01:00:41]  And then it lasted for about 24 hours.
[01:00:42]  And I was like, nope, I don't think they're right.
[01:00:44]  I just, I think this is going to be a goddamn nightmare.
[01:00:47]  But I'm really, really worried about the level of, you know, we already live in this with this spying apparatus on us.
[01:00:57]  I think this is going to be increased to a creepy level that we can't even picture.
[01:01:01]  I think America is going to be psychologically affected by this, like in some mass social psychology sense, where people are going to be more germaphobes and weird about getting together with other people.
[01:01:12]  But what do you think, like, do you have a feel or a guess of like what America in six months is going to look like?
[01:01:18]  Yeah.
[01:01:19]  Well, I mean, I'm really hoping that the curve, you know, we they flatten the curve and then what by the end of this month or into next month, that you know, they start lifting the restrictions and people can start going back to work, more and better treatments and that kind of thing.
[01:01:33]  So that this summer we can kind of get back.
[01:01:36]  You know, as we talked about last time, and all libertarians know, we were already at the height of the bubble anyway.
[01:01:42]  We were due for a massive popping anyway.
[01:01:45]  And so, you know, exactly how hard all that is going to hurt along with the deflationary pressures of the virus and all of that.
[01:01:55]  But then somewhat ameliorated temporarily inefficiently by the bailouts and the so-called soft landing, preventing everything from crashing too hard by bailing out certain sectors and that kind of deal.
[01:02:10]  You know, I don't really know, man.
[01:02:11]  I'll tell you, in 08 and 09, Robert Higgs, the great libertarian economist Robert Higgs, he was the one who pointed out that essentially it's impossible to have a Great Depression anymore because there's so much real wealth.
[01:02:24]  There are so many highways, so many trucks, so many warehouses, so many machine tools, so many university engineering departments, and so many brains full of what those engineering departments teach.
[01:02:37]  And so much, you know, in turn, doctors and all the professionals that we need, you know, on that level, that, you know, it would take a nuke or a few to really cause a Great Depression with that much wealth is destroyed, where we can't really pick up from where we were.
[01:02:55]  Now, and that was him saying no bailouts back in 08, 09.
[01:02:59]  That was saying, go ahead and let the economy crash now as far as it needs to go, wipe out as many bad debts as possible, and then we'll be okay again.
[01:03:07]  You know, the skyscrapers are already built.
[01:03:09]  You know, the office towers, the computer power is already, you know, the Intel chips are already on your desktop.
[01:03:15]  So there's plenty for everyone to go back to work with.
[01:03:20]  And so, you know, I'm hanging on to that.
[01:03:22]  I can't ever get Bob on the show anymore.
[01:03:24]  He's as retired as can be.
[01:03:25]  He won't talk to me no more.
[01:03:26]  But, you know, I'm hoping that that's really right.
[01:03:30]  And I'm hoping that people recognize that all the ways that the government prevented the free economy from solving these problems for us, restricting the importation of masks from China, restricting people from coming up, you know, companies with coming up with their own tests, restricting doctors from attempting to use these and those medicines.
[01:03:49]  Yeah.
[01:03:50]  And add into that, which the one that's just my favorite is just restricting the masks being produced here.
[01:03:57]  Like that's the one that I've, I've been talking about this on the show a lot.
[01:03:59]  I can't harp on this enough, but does isn't it just common sense to anyone if you were to go, okay, so we're America, the strongest economy that's ever, you know, existed, this huge country with this huge productive capacity.
[01:04:12]  And you go, okay, we don't have enough ventilators.
[01:04:14]  Well, I could kind of wrap my head around that.
[01:04:15]  I mean, a ventilator is a fairly sophisticated piece of equipment.
[01:04:18]  You got to kind of be ready to produce that.
[01:04:20]  But when they go, we don't have enough masks.
[01:04:23]  Don't you kind of wouldn't just any normal person scratch their head at that and go, wait a minute, masks?
[01:04:29]  You're saying there's this tremendous market demand for masks right now, and we haven't found a way to produce enough of them.
[01:04:36]  And then you go like, oh, look, it's a regulated medical device by the FDA, and you need FDA approval to create any new mask.
[01:04:45]  And that takes on an average of like seven months to three years to get one.
[01:04:50]  And oh, yeah, that's why.
[01:04:51]  And man, this is why it's really, it's the most important time in my, and I, I never thought I would say this because I thought after 9-11 and then after the 2008 crisis, there would never be another time that you'd say, this is the most important time to have a liberty movement, to have a libertarian voice.
[01:05:07]  But this is it right now, man.
[01:05:08]  Like this is the most important time because people need to like understand that, you know, there are these messages that we can put forward in like a libertarian populist fashion, where it's like everybody should get on board with this besides billionaires.
[01:05:24]  Everybody should get, and with this virus, maybe even billionaires, where you go like, look, I'm sorry, even right now, the fact that when you were talking about these drugs that might like the malaria pill and the antibiotics, which they say there's some optimism about and all this, how easy would it be to just argue right now for libertarians to say, isn't it obvious that if you're a 90-year-old with the coronavirus and you want to try to save your own life and maybe help a lot of other people,
[01:05:52]  you should be allowed to experiment with whatever you want to.
[01:05:55]  You shouldn't need permission from your government.
[01:05:57]  And for that matter, if you're a 30-year-old with coronavirus who just wants to help out, shouldn't we be allowed to experiment with different drugs?
[01:06:04]  It doesn't mean you're meeting some pusher in an alley who says, hey, I can cure coronavirus.
[01:06:08]  You're talking about what brilliant doctors and scientists are saying, hey, we think maybe this could help.
[01:06:14]  So there's that argument, of course, and then all the other ways that government is just fucked up.
[01:06:18]  But I think the major reason why the libertarian, the liberty movement is so important right now is that this is, I mean, man, if we thought, if guys like me and you thought we had lived through the age of big government and corporate handouts and just looting the American people to bail out and that mixed with authoritarian crackdowns on a level like we've never seen before, like straight up governments telling people it's illegal for you to go to work.
[01:06:46]  That's something that I've never even, none of us even really thought that would be a possibility.
[01:06:51]  Like why would that even be in their interest?
[01:06:53]  We're their tax livestock.
[01:06:54]  Why would they want to stop us from going to work?
[01:06:57]  But so all of these things together, man, there's room there for libertarians to point out quite a lot.
[01:07:03]  Well, and seriously, you know, I mean, right now people are afraid and they'll believe anything.
[01:07:07]  I don't know if you've seen this thing at The Atlantic.
[01:07:10]  First of all, The Atlantic, they ran this thing.
[01:07:12]  Everybody needs to read this entire article.
[01:07:14]  Okay.
[01:07:14]  Don't just look at the headline.
[01:07:16]  Read this entire article at The Atlantic.
[01:07:19]  It's called Beyond Originalism.
[01:07:23]  The dominant conservative philosophy for interpreting the Constitution has served its purpose and scholars ought to develop a more moral framework.
[01:07:30]  It's by Adrian Vermule, who is a professor of constitutional law at Harvard.
[01:07:35]  And what he's saying is the only, and this is what, you know, even liberals never went this far, you know, in my education, but essentially they're saying, look, the general welfare clause and the necessary and proper clause, that's all you need.
[01:07:50]  Never mind any other part of the Constitution.
[01:07:52]  Never mind the Bill of Rights.
[01:07:56]  To provide for the general welfare, the goals in the preamble to ensure domestic tranquility.
[01:08:06]  That's all you need for the government to then now do anything.
[01:08:11]  And there should be no limits.
[01:08:13]  And it is a call.
[01:08:14]  This is not hyperbole.
[01:08:15]  You read this thing.
[01:08:16]  Beyond originalism in the Atlantic.
[01:08:19]  And it is a call for essentially implementing a totalitarian fascist dictatorship in this country where no one has the right to resist the leaders who know what is good for our common good, where liberty is this ridiculous and stupid and outdated old-fashioned idea.
[01:08:36]  Only completely backwards conservative crazies and libertarians believe in freedom anymore.
[01:08:42]  Freedom's got to go.
[01:08:43]  And the American hang up on the, you know, the founding era jargon about self-determination has got to be broken.
[01:08:52]  And it just goes on.
[01:08:53]  It's incredible.
[01:08:54]  It is absolutely incredible.
[01:08:56]  I mean, it is, it's like Carl Schmidt in Germany justifying the Nazi regime is exactly what it is.
[01:09:03]  It's saying, let us have a constitution in name only and release all restrictions on government power.
[01:09:09]  The chains of the Constitution, yeah, right.
[01:09:12]  And it is really something else.
[01:09:14]  But then, so this started a big debate.
[01:09:16]  And they've got, you know, other people, Randy Barnett wrote a thing who I hate Randy Barnett.
[01:09:21]  But anyway, he wrote a thing saying, you're crazy.
[01:09:23]  No way.
[01:09:24]  You know, constitutional originalism is the only thing keeping people like you at bay, pal.
[01:09:28]  And so they're having a debate over it.
[01:09:30]  But this is the thing I wanted to show you was they did a survey.
[01:09:35]  These law professors did a telephone survey of Americans and they proposed just to test, they weren't pushing this.
[01:09:43]  They're alarmed.
[01:09:44]  Okay.
[01:09:44]  They're on our side here.
[01:09:46]  But they decided to ask Americans about what, here are eight possible policy responses to the outbreak, all of which would be obviously on their face unconstitutional, including forced quarantine in a government facility, criminal penalties for spreading misinformation, bans against certain people entering the country, including Americans who've been stranded abroad.
[01:10:14]  And Dave, conscription, that is the enslavement of healthcare workers to force them to provide for people even at their own risk.
[01:10:27]  And check it out.
[01:10:29]  A majority of respondents supported all eight of these policies, most by considerable margins.
[01:10:36]  The proposals with the lowest support were seizing businesses and banning all citizens and non-citizens outside the country from entering.
[01:10:47]  But those policies still had 58 and 63% support, respectively.
[01:10:54]  That's on keeping Americans from coming home and the government just outright seizing any business they want, like Truman tried to do with the steel mills and was told no by the Supreme Court back during the Korean War.
[01:11:08]  And making news that is, quote, wrong illegal.
[01:11:12]  It's like real deal Nazi shit.
[01:11:14]  Oh, yeah.
[01:11:16]  The proposals with the highest levels of support were banning non-citizens from entering the country, 85%, and conscripting healthcare professionals to work despite risks to their own health, 78%, Dave, think that the federal government has the right to enslave doctors and nurses, and then I guess healthcare business administrators as well.
[01:11:45]  to force them to work to provide health care to other people.
[01:11:51]  And then, so they say here, but you know what?
[01:11:55]  It's understandable that that's a minority of Americans, healthcare professionals.
[01:11:59]  So sure, enslave, you know, this small number of us, not including the people who are answering the question, that, yeah, sure, enslave somebody else, no problem.
[01:12:08]  But then, and they say, so that's not surprising, but then they say criminalizing speech based on its content, 70% of respondents supported it.
[01:12:19]  That they, that people should be arrested for saying something that may qualify as misinformation.
[01:12:25]  And then get this, 77% of respondents support suspending all religious services and gatherings.
[01:12:34]  And yeah, they say, oh, and even when explicitly told, they told half of their respondents explicitly that these policies would be unconstitutional, that they all supported them anyway.
[01:12:51]  Doesn't matter.
[01:12:52]  The Constitution that made this government does not limit it.
[01:12:55]  So when this Nazi from Harvard University, Adrian Vermeule, who thinks that the very last restrictions on government power in the Constitution should be ignored to death and erased, the American people agree.

=== War Criminals and Lockdowns (06:31) ===

[01:13:10]  And it's because they're afraid.
[01:13:12]  Okay.
[01:13:12]  I mean, they're afraid, but that's the whole point of, you know, having a constitution is that this is the law and you can't just override it because there's a crisis.
[01:13:21]  But well, yeah, so if anybody, if anybody didn't agree with me when I said we really need a liberty movement in this country right now, like there has to be some type of movement that starts pushing people, that starts pushing back against this stuff.
[01:13:34]  And I know people are very scared right now, but you know what?
[01:13:37]  As this just becomes the new normal or whatever they call it and people set, you know, like a deal with it over time, people will start being more open to some, at least some people will be more open to the arguments, just like in the same way that right after 9-11, everybody was like, you know, there's like people, what was it, Howard Stern right after 9-11 who said, we should just bomb a Muslim country.
[01:14:00]  It doesn't even matter which one.
[01:14:01]  We got to go bomb them.
[01:14:02]  And that was the type of thing that you could say with 100 million listeners and people would be like, yep, I'm going to go to bomb a Muslim country, you know, and then, but now looking back at that, people are like, that's insane.
[01:14:12]  And even he's apologized for that a million times since then.
[01:14:14]  So it's just people will kind of wake up, try to be optimistic about that, but we really need to make our case.
[01:14:21]  Hey, let's do this in closing here, because that's, it's terrifying me.
[01:14:27]  And I know there's a lot of people who are listening who are, you know, maybe going through a tough time and who are probably anxious and a little bit worried about the future.
[01:14:36]  So I don't want to just leave on a completely terrifying note.
[01:14:39]  Maybe there is something that, and I wanted to ask you about this.
[01:14:44]  I was talking about this on another podcast the other day where it came up that on some level, and don't let me just disclaim all of this, that both me and Scott think that every president's a war criminal who should be thrown in jail.
[01:14:58]  We hate Trump.
[01:14:58]  We hate Obama.
[01:14:59]  We hate George W. Bush.
[01:15:01]  They're all terrible, just terrible, blood-soaked monsters, awful human beings.
[01:15:06]  But there is some, You know, on some in some way, you have to give maybe Trump a little bit of credit in the fact that he's getting these people who are pushing him to try to institute some national lockdown.
[01:15:19]  And he seems to at least be like, I'll let the governors choose for now.
[01:15:24]  Like there seems to be, and somebody mentioned this the other day to me.
[01:15:28]  And I was saying, I was like, well, actually, I mean, you could even give George W. Bush a little bit of credit that after 9-11, he quite possibly could have gotten through a lot more than he did.
[01:15:41]  And I remember you had been telling me, and I couldn't remember the specifics, but you had been telling me that actually there were a lot of people who were pushing George W. Bush to straight up like really even consolidate more power than he did.
[01:15:53]  Now, obviously, it was terrible.
[01:15:54]  He got us into wars.
[01:15:56]  He enacted torture.
[01:15:57]  He built the spying apparatus.
[01:15:59]  But isn't it true that probably after 9-11, he could have made a push to suspend the Bill of Rights or declare martial law or something like that and didn't?
[01:16:07]  Do you think there's maybe some first tell me about the Bush thing?
[01:16:10]  And then do you think maybe there's some silver lining with Trump not going as far as some are demanding of him like this crazy broad?
[01:16:17]  Sure.
[01:16:18]  Yeah.
[01:16:18]  So after September 11th, a couple of examples of important examples would be that he could have nationalized the guard, which he did to send them off to Iraq.
[01:16:28]  But in terms of putting them out in the American public, he asked the governors, would they please have guardsmen stand around at the airports?
[01:16:38]  Which they looked like soldiers.
[01:16:40]  They're in full camo and carrying an M4s and all that, but they were still under the control of the governors.
[01:16:46]  And they were basically a few here and a few there at the airports for security theater only, essentially.
[01:16:52]  Now, he could have gone much further than that.
[01:16:54]  And then the best example, and you're right.
[01:16:56]  I mean, he did legalize torture.
[01:16:58]  He ordered people to be tortured and over 100 of them were tortured to death in CIA and military custody.
[01:17:05]  And thousands and thousands of Iraqis were tortured during that war.
[01:17:10]  But here at home, one thing was, you might remember the first drone strike in Yemen was in 2004.
[01:17:16]  And it was against an al-Qaeda guy.
[01:17:18]  And one of the guys who died in that was an American.
[01:17:21]  But he wasn't the target.
[01:17:23]  And so the attitude was, eh, that's what you get for riding in a car with a bunch of Al-Qaeda guys.
[01:17:29]  You know, whose fault is that, pal?
[01:17:31]  That's yours, not ours kind of thing.
[01:17:33]  Well, that same guy was tied to a bunch of guys at a place called Lockawana, New York, close to Buffalo.
[01:17:40]  And Dick Cheney wanted to send, they call them the Lockawana Six, I think at the time.
[01:17:47]  And Dick Cheney advised Bush to send the U.S. Army to arrest them.
[01:17:52]  And John Ashcroft, the attorney general, said, don't worry about that.
[01:17:56]  Let me and my FBI guys handle it.
[01:17:59]  And Bush told Cheney no and let the civilian attorney general and the FBI handle the case.
[01:18:04]  And they went and arrested the guy.
[01:18:06]  But, you know, on in the case of Jose Padilla, he did.
[01:18:10]  The FBI even arrested him on American soil at O'Hare Airport, where in their blue parkas and everything.
[01:18:16]  And then Bush had the government essentially seize him and turn him over to the military.
[01:18:20]  And they held him in a brig in South Carolina and let the CIA torture him with plaquinol and other drugs.
[01:18:27]  One of the side effects is like crazy dreams.
[01:18:29]  And they did this to people at Guantanamo Bay too, and give them a massive overdose of Plaquenil in order, like essentially to cause bad acid trips as, you know, MK Ultra type, no-touch torture, and that kind of deal.
[01:18:44]  So yeah, I mean, George W. Bush is going to burn in hell if there is one for what he did.
[01:18:48]  But it is true that he could have, he could have pushed much harder as far as restricting the rights of Americans.
[01:18:58]  And at the time, I think they were more worried about an economic crash.
[01:19:01]  And they knew they were lying to us, but they knew that we did not have al-Qaeda sleeper cells throughout this country.
[01:19:07]  You know, they knew that there were not likely to be any more major attacks anytime soon if they could just keep them out at the airports and keep them out on the other side of the airports before they get on the plane to even get here and that kind of thing.
[01:19:20]  So they did take advantage.
[01:19:22]  But, you know, in this case, we have a situation where it's just absolutely ridiculous that the liberal argument against Trump is that he has not invoked the Defense Preparedness Act to just demand, to force that gunpoint with police power to force every company to make whatever it is the liberals think we need more of.

=== Civil Disobedience and Liberty (09:25) ===

[01:19:42]  Now, as you talked about, it's illegal for you to make a mask without jumping through all their hoops as of just a couple of weeks ago and all that.
[01:19:49]  Well, the only law should be, don't make the mask out of asbestos, dude.
[01:19:53]  Okay.
[01:19:54]  And then otherwise, it's fine.
[01:19:55]  Go ahead and do your worst.
[01:19:57]  You know, it's better than nothing.
[01:19:58]  And then for the specific, you know, N95 grade or whatever, here's how it has to be to qualify to be that level of grade.
[01:20:07]  But even, you know, a surgical mask is not an N95 mask.
[01:20:11]  That's the respirator mask to really filter out virus particles and that kind of thing.
[01:20:18]  But the surgical mask, those things could be mass produced by a thousand different companies.
[01:20:23]  But all you have to do is let them.
[01:20:25]  As you were saying earlier, the liberals are saying Donald Trump, who's literally Hitler and who they're worried is going to create an American fascist state, well, he won't seize control of the means of production.
[01:20:38]  And it's driving them nuts.
[01:20:40]  And so that's the kind of pressure that he's getting.
[01:20:42]  He's being attacked from the right in all the very worst ways that that means, you know, is hurry up and make America more fascist sooner.
[01:20:51]  And so, you know, I don't know.
[01:20:53]  And you're right.
[01:20:54]  I mean, he has refrained from doing that so far.
[01:20:56]  He's put pressure on companies, but he hadn't even really needed to.
[01:21:00]  You know, GM and Ford immediately started making ventilators or tooling up to start producing them as fast as they could and that kind of thing.
[01:21:07]  It's totally unnecessary for him to seize anything.
[01:21:10]  If he would just get up on his bully pulpit and say, boy, I wish some more clothing companies would make more masks or whatever, they would do that.
[01:21:17]  And you know what, too?
[01:21:19]  Forget subsidies.
[01:21:20]  All he's got to do is announce tax breaks.
[01:21:23]  We're going to come up with ways where companies who fulfill healthcare needs right now aren't going to have to pay income taxes at all next year.
[01:21:30]  How do you like that, everybody?
[01:21:32]  That's, you know, there's plenty of carrots without using sticks in order to, you know, to just loosen up on the economy and let people fill the demands.
[01:21:41]  So, and now on the question of martial law, there's, look, there's been in some place, I think, in Indiana, where they're using the National Guard to harass people in their homes.
[01:21:51]  I don't know.
[01:21:51]  I forgot exactly what it was that they're doing.
[01:21:53]  I know that in Rhode Island, they're looking, you know, hunting around for New Yorkers to kick out of Rhode Island.
[01:21:59]  You know, this is a really big deal.
[01:22:01]  I forgot exactly what they were assigned to do in Indiana.
[01:22:04]  They're still under the control of the state governors.
[01:22:07]  And, you know, real martial law means that the civilian leadership is either incapacitated, steps aside or is pushed aside.
[01:22:17]  And you have military, you know, army commanders or Air Force.
[01:22:20]  Right now, the head of Northcom is an Air Force general named Terrence O'Shaughnessy.
[01:22:26]  You know, that's, well, but even on the state level, it would be the, you know, the Army or the military coming in and saying civilian authority is suspended.
[01:22:36]  Your state constitution is suspended.
[01:22:39]  Your state's Bill of Rights is suspended.
[01:22:41]  Now there's only one law, obey orders or be shot, just like in the middle of a looting riot, that kind of deal.
[01:22:50]  And we're not anywhere near that.
[01:22:52]  And, you know, you probably heard on my show a couple of weeks ago, I interviewed William Arkin, who's a reporter for Newsweek.
[01:22:58]  Oh, we talked about this before.
[01:22:59]  So, you know, he wrote this article in Newsweek all about the military secret plans in case they have to intervene in the crisis.
[01:23:06]  And he's got all of the code words and everything else.
[01:23:09]  Very well-reported story.
[01:23:10]  And one of the things that he was emphasizing is that the military has no desire to do this whatsoever.
[01:23:16]  Thank God.
[01:23:17]  Yeah, it's it, you know, their job is killing Iraqis, not locking down Kansas.
[01:23:22]  They don't want any part of that.
[01:23:24]  And yet they could if it came down to it.
[01:23:26]  And luckily, it looks like it's, we're not going to be anywhere near that level of crisis here.
[01:23:31]  But, you know, the fact that people are even kind of overreacting in fear against that to me is just fine.
[01:23:39]  That, you know what, like you should be, in the words of James Madison, the father of the Constitution, your highest obligation as a citizen is jealousy of your own liberty, that you will not let these people get away with a single thing.
[01:23:53]  You give them an inch, they'll take 10,000 miles.
[01:23:56]  And so it is up to us to resist every bit of this as much as we can.
[01:24:00]  And it's perfectly consistent, as listeners and viewers of this show can tell.
[01:24:05]  It's perfectly consistent to take the virus seriously and to take civil liberties and economic concerns extremely seriously too.
[01:24:13]  That, you know, you don't have to deny the level of the crisis in order to insist that what the government is trying to do here in so many ways is just far beyond their scope.
[01:24:26]  And look at the advantage that the sheriff in Los Angeles tried to take in shutting down gun shops.
[01:24:31]  And you know what happened there?
[01:24:32]  For people who aren't aware of this story, it's a huge story.
[01:24:35]  The gun shops of Los Angeles and the gun shop customers of Los Angeles refused to obey.
[01:24:42]  And it was simple civil disobedience.
[01:24:44]  They kept opening their stores and their customers kept coming.
[01:24:47]  And then, and I think they sued about it and fought about it.
[01:24:51]  And the governor and Newsom had given in his executive order, he had given the sheriffs leeway to decide for themselves in their own counties how they wanted to do it.
[01:25:01]  And the sheriff of L.A. County said, we're locking down all the gun stores.
[01:25:05]  And the people of LA County said, no, screw you, man.
[01:25:08]  At the end of the day, there are far more of us than there are of you.
[01:25:11]  You know, really?
[01:25:13]  And we're talking about gun shops here.
[01:25:15]  So, and gun shop customers.
[01:25:17]  So are you really going to lose X number of sheriffs fighting running battles in the streets of Los Angeles this week over trying to deprive law-abiding citizens of their right to protect themselves and their families?
[01:25:30]  Try us, the people of LA County said.
[01:25:34]  And the sheriff of L.A. County backed down.
[01:25:36]  And that's L.A.
[01:25:37]  And that's LA.
[01:25:38]  He's got firepower.
[01:25:40]  Yeah, he's got SWAT teams, man.
[01:25:42]  He has the power to kill people in huge numbers.
[01:25:44]  We've seen it done.
[01:25:45]  And he said, you know what?
[01:25:47]  Okay.
[01:25:47]  And back down.
[01:25:48]  So that is a great example for the rest of us to follow.
[01:25:51]  That, you know what?
[01:25:52]  I'm staying home anyway.
[01:25:54]  So, you know, I got a wife with lupus and I got to make sure that this thing does not get inside this house.
[01:26:00]  That's it.
[01:26:01]  But that doesn't really equate to respect for the law or the rule of the Texas governor or the Austin mayor and their edicts.
[01:26:11]  And I am in no way would I say that, you know, my neighbors and fellow citizens should obey because they're told, you know, they should do the right thing because they're smart and because they care about other people, you know.
[01:26:24]  But the government here, as soon as this thing is over, for sure, we need an absolute full court press by all libertarians on the economic issues, but on especially on the civil rights and civil liberties issues, that every bit of authority that they've seized here must be pushed back.
[01:26:45]  Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more.
[01:26:47]  I think that was that was very well said.
[01:26:49]  And one other little piece of like nice information, something that I read the other day that I really liked.
[01:26:56]  And don't, again, don't get this twisted.
[01:26:58]  I have no fan of the police.
[01:27:01]  I know Scott's not either.
[01:27:03]  I've been very critical of police for the last decade, and I stand by every word of it.
[01:27:08]  But there was this sheriff, and there are some good sheriffs throughout the country.
[01:27:13]  And there was this guy in Maine.
[01:27:15]  I don't have the article in front of me, but the guy in Maine who straight up the governor ordered a shelter-in-place order.
[01:27:22]  And he just said straight up, like he was like, he goes, hey, if you want to suggest people stay in place, shelter in place, sure.
[01:27:29]  That's a good suggestion, but I will not enforce this.
[01:27:32]  Like, I took an oath to the Constitution.
[01:27:34]  And this, he said, this is not Nazi Germany, and this isn't Soviet Russia.
[01:27:38]  And I am not going to demand people show me their papers or arrest someone for the crime of going outside.
[01:27:43]  He said, I'm not going to do that.
[01:27:44]  And hopefully we can see some more just sheriffs around this sheriff's office and things like that around this country just saying like, yeah, no, I'm sorry.
[01:27:53]  Push comes to shove.
[01:27:54]  You are not turning us into a fascist or communist state or whatever it is that you're looking for.
[01:28:00]  Like I will not arrest people for the crime of leaving their house.
[01:28:03]  So there are some bright spots like that.
[01:28:05]  And, you know, anyway, I got to wrap up here, but it's always, every time I talk to you, Scott, it's always a pleasure and I learn a lot and I think the audience benefits.
[01:28:14]  And we'll do this again soon because we're both staying inside and not going anywhere.
[01:28:18]  So there's lots of opportunity.
[01:28:20]  Lots of opportunities to have conversations and record them.
[01:28:23]  All right, everybody, make sure you go check out the Scott Horton show, scotthorton.com, anti-war.com.
[01:28:31]  Org.
[01:28:32]  ScottHorton.com is a newspaper man from Oklahoma.
[01:28:35]  Sorry.
[01:28:35]  Scott Horton.org, antiwar.com, the libertarian institute.org.
[01:28:40]  There we go.
[01:28:40]  Got him right there.
[01:28:41]  And if you got some time on your hands and you're like, hey, I'm going to be staying at home for the next few weeks.
[01:28:46]  If you haven't already, go read Fool's Eren, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
[01:28:50]  It's available on audio book.
[01:28:52]  You can get it online.
[01:28:54]  You can order it.
[01:28:55]  You can order the great Ron Paul and order Coming to Palestine also.
[01:28:59]  You can get that over at the Libertarian Institute.org.
[01:29:01]  An excellent book.
[01:29:02]  Highly recommend it.
[01:29:04]  And then, okay, we'll talk again soon.
[01:29:05]  Thanks, everybody, for listening.
[01:29:06]  Thank you, Scott, for joining us.
[01:29:08]  Goodbye.