Jeff Deist and James Smith dissect the pandemic's authoritarian overreach, arguing mask mandates function as de facto laws enforced by police intimidation rather than statutes. They critique the rise of "Karens" on Nextdoor, cite New York's suspended speedy trials under Cuomo, and reject conspiracy theories about a Chinese bioweapon due to strategic self-harm risks. The discussion analyzes the "Freasury" merger, record unemployment, and predicts an IMF-backed global currency for central banks while contrasting the 25,000 American deaths with historical plagues. Ultimately, they suggest this flawed response tests future liberties, urging individuals to prioritize personal safety over centralized control. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Government Overreach and Unemployment00:15:34
Fill her up.
You are listening to the Gash Digital Network.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
Here's your host, James Smith.
Hey, what's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am one day closer to letting my wife cut my hair, but I haven't quite gotten, haven't quite gotten there yet, but she's getting excited because I'm about to crack and let her do it.
I'm very excited to have our guest joining the show today, who's always one of the most thoughtful and interesting people who I love to read and listen to.
He is, of course, the president of the greatest organization in the world, the Mises Institute.
And if you don't go to Mises.org, then you're just, you need to get your life together because they've got the answers to pretty much every important question regarding the role of government and the history of governments and the correct anarcho-capitalist answer to everything you could think of.
The search engine there is the greatest tool on the internet.
Of course, Jeff Dice, the only president that I acknowledge as our president, is back with us.
How are you doing, sir?
Hey, Dave, you are looking a little shaggy.
You know, I know.
This is what happens when Kennedy is canceled for a month and I'm stuck in a house and all the barbershops are closed.
So things are...
But I mean, what would be the situation if you just left the house and went to the gas digital studio location?
What would, I mean, could you do that?
I mean, I think the studio is closed and everybody there has been has been using Zoom and stuff like that.
So I don't know if the cops would stop me from going there.
But I don't have a set of keys.
So I can't get in.
Well, we're still a little bit out and about in Auburn.
Our governor issued a really dubious directive about essential work and essential services, but it's not really being enforced and there were a ton of exceptions.
So we've been coming in every day to our building, but the police are everywhere.
And since there's so few cars on the road, it's a little, it's just a weird feeling.
And the cops are kind of giving us a stink eye, you know, around our building.
Like we're not supposed to be here.
And so it's unsettling.
You know, it's not a happy time.
It's a very weird thing when the state, whether we're talking about state, in this case, not the federal government, but state governments, when they issue these like directives that aren't exactly laws, you know what I mean?
Like they're like, we're advising, they said this in New York, we're advising everyone wear a mask everywhere they go.
But it's not the same thing as like a friend just telling you, hey, I think you should wear a mask.
There are these men with guns standing around and you're like, wait, does this mean like I have to wear a mask?
Or do you just think it would be better for me to wear a mask?
And then kind of like you were saying, technically they're not saying you have to, but you get this weird kind of intimidated feeling that, you know, you're not.
And then to me, one of the most disturbing trends is all the, what are being dubbed the Karens of the world.
Now there's like all these people out there who are basically, you know, like very happy.
You know, the people who would have turned Aunt Frank in in a second, who are just like, he's not wearing a mask.
We should call the authorities.
And it's like, oof, what a weird, what a weird time to be alive.
Well, and the Karens have a new tool called Nextdoor, which is ubiquitous throughout suburbia, you know, an app to talk about your neighbors and to your neighbors.
So that's not good.
But there's actually a book on what the law is all about called The Bramble Bush, a book I think written in the first half of the 20th century by a guy named Carl Llewellyn.
And he talks about what the law is.
And his point is that what the law really is, is what authorities do about things.
When you say, what's the law?
What is KIB?
That's my governor here in Alabama.
What's KIB's directive mean?
Is it a law?
It's not a statute.
Was it voted for?
Well, at the end of the day, the law is an ad hoc thing that the cop closest to you, what he or she does.
That's the law.
If the speed limit says 55 and nobody gets pulled over until 70, then the real speed limit is 69.
Right.
And so that's what's going on here is that, you know, where there is no sanction, there is no law.
I think that was the famous sentence from Carl Llewellyn's book, The Bramble Bush.
And that's really what it is.
So what's frightening about this is there's so much ad hoc, you know, individual police authority here.
And I just got off the phone with a friend in Toronto, and he was talking about how he can't take his little toddler to the playground at the end of their street because the Toronto city people or whatever have it taped off.
You know, it's just unbelievable that kind of stuff happening.
So there is no law other than what cops or enforcement agencies do, you know, in the instant on the ground to you.
That's the law.
And when you think about it, I mean, right, like there are all of these things, you know, like what Ron Paul used to always talk about, like all of these things that are written in the Constitution, which you could say technically is the law of the land, but what difference does it make if it's not being followed?
I mean, look, we have a 10th Amendment.
No one cares about it.
The 10th Amendment might as well not be in there.
Absolutely nobody pays attention to it.
And if you think about it, what really is the difference between, say, Donald Trump writing an executive order and me writing an executive order?
Like if I just decide this is the law of the land, it's like, well, I have no means to enforce it and the police aren't going to listen to me.
And basically, that's really, I think, what you're getting at there.
Like, that's what makes the real difference.
It's what is actually, what are the consequences and are they going to be enforced?
Because there's also like, I think Judge Napolitano had a book about this, like all, or he mentioned this in one of his like little booklets where he just like went through all the crazy laws on the state level that exist that just aren't enforced.
Like there's still all of these laws on the book about like how far your chicken coop can be from another chicken or something, but just no one cares.
So they might as well just not be there.
So yeah, it's an interesting way to recognize the reality of laws.
Do you think it's like, isn't it so wild?
The seriousness of this virus aside, isn't it so wild that it only took a few weeks to get to this point that we were just kind of existing in what we all thought was a somewhat normal country, even for people like you and me who talk about what's not normal about the country.
But all of a sudden, I mean, it really only took a few weeks, a few people putting these like models out, which all of which seem to be wrong at this point, but a few, you know, just a little bit of fear about you could get sick and boom, just like that.
We're living in a world where you can't take your kids to the playground or have a catch with them in the park.
It's really blowing my mind.
It was fast.
It was definitely fast.
I mean, look, it's this is a gift for people who have an authoritarian mindset because, and they're not all in government.
They're on next door.
They're Karens too.
They have us living inside self-quarantine in our homes, literally worrying about a floating abstraction in the air.
Floating abstraction made real.
I mean, we're literally supposed to fear the air around us.
I mean, talk about an inchoate adversary.
This isn't even the war on terror, much less, you know, World War II or something like that.
And of course, Trump's trying to posit it as though it is World War II and he's got wartime powers.
And I was just watching him the other day, the Trump show.
You know, two hours every day, he's getting better and better and faster and meaner while Joe Biden is sitting somewhere mumbling or something.
I don't know.
But what struck me was that we could have a situation where the economy is absolutely, you know, mad max in tatters.
Grandma's dead, bodies are stacked up, and Trump still wins.
I mean, that's possible.
Yeah.
And if that happens, you got to say, this guy's unbelievable.
He's just so relentless.
I think that's the key to Trump: just his sheer relentlessness.
You know, it doesn't matter how long he's known you.
It doesn't, none of that matters.
He's too relentless for him.
And, you know, by any measure, he should be losing by 30 points in the fall.
And I don't know.
I mean, I can't say, but it looks right now, he's not.
Yeah.
And just think if Trump gets re-elected, which is a very real possibility right now, especially if it does end up being Joe Biden.
I just don't see any way that Joe Biden can win, just him with the problems that he's having.
And if Trump were to win reelection in November, take us, think about what he endured.
I mean, not just the entire press and all of Hollywood and the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the Democratic establishment, the Republican establishment, a special counsel investigation, an impeachment, now a pandemic, and what's going to be a devastated economy.
If he survived all of that and gets re-elected, I mean, the man is like, who could say what he can't do?
Yeah.
Well, and it almost seems like he won't get coronavirus.
It's just not Trump-like.
He's just, I mean, I'll tell you what, 40-year-olds can't keep up with him.
Yeah.
But what's so fascinating is you know that if you remember on the night of the election, there were these great, there's this great footage of Trump with his kids and Melania in some sort of hotel room watching, you know, and you could tell by Melania's face that it was starting to dawn on her that her very comfortable life as a wealthy Manhattan socialite was going to change, you know, and that she absolutely,
I absolutely believe that she and Trump didn't think they were going to win.
I absolutely believe that.
There's no question in my mind that they didn't really think that they were going to win.
They thought they might, but they didn't think they were.
And so, you know, this, I remember really since the crash of 08, libertarians have been saying, you know, you wouldn't want to be the next president because you're going to inherit this incredible bubble created by the Fed.
And there's this, you know, all these bubbles in real estate and the debt and entitlements are out of control.
And so you really, you know, nobody wants to be the president who's blamed for all this and the party that's blamed for all this.
But yet, and here we are, you know, it's just if this coronavirus hadn't come along, I mean, obviously, from our perspective, there were huge fragilities in the system across the board.
But if it hadn't come along, it's amazing to think that Trump might have just kicked the can down the road and had a second term.
Yeah, yeah, it is.
Who knows?
Like, do you think that this is going to be the thing that pops that bubble?
Or like, what do you think?
I mean, we already are starting to see just the unbelievable, you know, cost of shutting down the economy and the numbers that have been coming out.
I mean, the amount of people filing for unemployment insurance is more than we've ever seen.
And that's just people filing for unemployment insurance.
That's not counting huge swaths of the economy where people don't even think they have a reason to believe they could qualify for that.
I'm pretty freaked out about what this is going to look like.
Yeah, like Uber drivers.
Imagine what they're thinking right now.
Taxicab drivers, waitresses, is just unbelievable.
And a lot of people are just invisible.
They won't file for unemployment.
You know, immigrant workers, people like that.
I think I don't think they're going to be able to reflate this one.
I think there's just too much debt this time around.
So I don't think it's going to work.
I think that there's a new term called Freasury, which stands for the Fed melding with the Treasury.
And, you know, okay, maybe they've created through loans, promises, stimulus payments, so-called, and Fed buying assets off banks, balance sheets.
You know, put all that in a blender and call it at the moment anyway, about a new $6 trillion worth of liquidity in the economy worldwide.
Yeah, that's, you know, there's probably 50 trillion of damaged assets as a result of this.
And so, you know, I was reading today that there are about 7 million new unemployed people.
A lot of them are going to lose their health insurance, which will cause far more harm to their health than the coronavirus ever could, of course.
And the bottom line is the states are not going to have the money to pay unemployment insurance.
They're going to need a bailout, whether that's from the Treasury or the Fed or some middle path between the two.
There's no way that, especially states like Florida, big states are not going to be able to maintain their unemployment insurance coffers at these levels.
So that's coming.
So we're just seeing the beginning of this.
And any article that you write or read, it becomes obsolete in a week because they're going to create some new facility or Congress is going to consider some new stimulus.
It's bizarro world.
And so basically, it's the suspension of monetary policy.
If you've been studying monetary economics in life, then it was all for naught.
There's no longer such thing as monetary policy.
It's just completely blown out of the water.
And now it's all just an article of faith and a matter of whether the world will continue to accept dollars as a reserve currency and whether the world will continue to provide a ready market for U.S. Treasury debt.
And those two questions, I think the answer to those two questions is no.
And we're going to find it out sooner rather than later.
And of course, but we put our pedal to the metal here.
I mean, all these things were baked into the cake.
But I think this, from my perspective, personal opinion, the coronavirus shutdown is insane, totally unwarranted, wildly beyond the scope of the harm or potential harm of the virus.
You don't shut the world down over even a million deaths worldwide.
I think there's about 22,000 deaths in the U.S. so far.
We don't even know, for example, whether January 1 through April 1, just total morbidity in the United States from all causes, car wrecks, old age, you name it, cancer.
We don't even know if overall morbidity is up relative to 2019 or 2018 or whatever.
We don't have that data yet because it's compiled annually, et cetera.
But so my sense is that it's not up or not much up.
And what's happening is that a lot of the deaths being attributed to coronavirus are cannibalizing deaths, comorbidity deaths in other categories, heart disease, whatever it might be.
Supply Chain Scarcity Reality00:04:12
So we have made huge decisions based on hugely imperfect knowledge.
And that's what government does, and it ain't working.
Yeah, and very clearly, some of the models that were used to justify this whole shutdown of the economy have just been flat wrong.
And even the people like the IHME are readjusting.
It seems like every week they're readjusting and the death toll is going down, even though they were already taking into account all of these social distancing and home isolation policies.
And man, I do wonder, this is trying to find some silver lining in all of this.
I do wonder if maybe there could at least be, with all the tragedy and all the ruin of all these people, all these businesses who have just been destroyed, maybe some people will wake up a little bit when they see that, you know, like if this turns out to basically just be about the amount of death that we get in the flu season, and we all tolerate that pretty much every single winter.
And yet now we've got, you know, tens of millions of people out of work because of this shutdown.
I mean, who knows how long it's going to go for?
I wonder if maybe some people will kind of wake up and go, you know what, the next time they try to say something like, well, here's the climate change models that we're working with, they go, you know what, I'm not really buying that this is necessarily going to be as bad as you experts say it is.
Maybe, maybe something good will come out of this.
Well, I hope so.
I hope it makes people begin to question things a lot more.
And, you know, what will really make them question it is when the grocery stores start getting really thin.
You know, the idea that we're just going to be able to order whatever we want from Amazon and it's going to come because somebody produced it, manufactured it, assembled it, boxed it, shipped it, brought it to your front door.
You know, that's going to come to an end pretty quick.
I mean, there's a few weeks built into all this supply chain around the world, but not much more than that.
So, you know, if you want to go down to CVS or you want to go down to your grocery and just expect everything to be there, I think unless we end this shutdown pretty soon, you're going to see that it's not.
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I think that there's a real, you know, it's something that libertarians talk about a lot, Austrian economists and not that mainstream economists would, if pushed on this, disagree.
But one of the things like that it seems like a lot of people, particularly like the kind of neocon neoliberal world order types, don't really understand the idea of scarcity and the idea of like, you know, that there is some, like there is real costs to suspending production.
And you know, the kind of Elizabeth Warren worldview, where I think most of them just think like, well, the business owner is somebody we would never have to worry about.
I mean, that person's just sitting on piles of cash.
I mean, if you own a business, you're basically a billionaire, right?
Rural Anger at China00:12:37
Like there's no doubt.
And now for people to start realizing how thin the profit margins for so many of these small and mid-sized companies were and how many of them are going to go out.
And as you were saying, production is delicate.
And if you start throwing these huge wrenches in the economy, it's not a guarantee that, oh, we can just open things up and everything will pick up right where we left off.
And this is only from a few weeks of it being locked down.
I can't imagine if we had to, you know, Bill de Blasio, the mayor in New York, was talking about maybe things will get back to normal in September.
And it's like, I really don't think he understands what that would look like in real human terms.
I don't know if anybody really does.
No, and it's getting warmer now.
It's April and the days are getting longer.
And I think as North America heats up, I think a lot more people are going to be getting restless.
And I really think May 1st is it.
I think after May 1st, people just need to go out there and do what they got to do.
I think some Irish democracy is called for in about two more weeks because I don't see how we continue with this.
I mean, it's a flu-like virus.
And it apparently is a little nastier, a little rougher, maybe more deadly.
We don't know that.
And that doesn't justify this.
So the question becomes, you know, why, what does justify this?
You know, what's the real goal here?
What's really behind all this?
And I think part of it is that it just came out of nowhere.
I mean, it's kind of like Trump.
I absolutely don't believe that the Chinese created this as some sort of bioweapon or released it intentionally or something like that.
And there are people who are so psychologically invested in the story that this is World War III and that it shows Trump's complete incompetence and depravity.
And that it just, you know, we all have our own psychologies.
And some people just need, I think we all need to have our worldview confirmed or seek to have it confirmed.
And so I think for some people, this has to be the worst thing ever because that's how you get rid of Trump.
This has to be a shutdown.
This has to be an absolute lockdown.
You know, there can't be any exceptions and that anyone who questions this is somehow wishing death on others or causing deaths to others or something.
And it's a really dangerous mindset.
And what it shows you is that it doesn't matter whether you have a constitution or sort of a national mythology.
Anytime, any society, any time in human history, everywhere you go, a certain segment of the population is just authoritarian.
It's just the nature of the beast, you know.
Yeah, I think that's right.
And it's been a really interesting thing for me to observe the psychological dynamic of people, not even just politicians or people in the media, just people who get very invested in how terrible this thing is.
And they've like made it a thing where it's like a third rail.
If you even compare this to a flu, like somehow that's an evil thing to do.
If you even compare this, if you even mention, you know, like, okay, well, you know, we lose hundreds of thousands of people to cancer every year, or we lose tens of thousands of people to roadside collisions every year.
You know, like you're not even allowed to contextualize this.
It just has to be the worst thing ever.
It's a very strange dynamic to see people invested in that.
And the other thing that you touched on, I agree with you.
I don't think that there's any evidence I've seen to suggest that this was like a bioweapon by China.
But I did find that one Chinese paper that said it was most likely came from a Chinese lab to be plausible.
And what do you think? about the kind of, you know, there's been, obviously, it's kind of a ridiculous argument between the media and Trump over whether you call this the Chinese virus or not.
I thought that Lou Rockwell, of course, the great Lou Rockwell, who's the founder of the Mises Institute, I thought his piece was like spot on that he wrote a few weeks ago, where it was really important to like remind people that the Chinese people are not your enemy.
And in fact, there was this doctor who tried to blow the whistle on the whole thing who was silenced by that evil authoritarian government.
But I think the Chinese government is certainly the enemy of the Chinese people and probably of a lot of people.
So I don't like, how do you feel about, you know, China's role in all of this?
It seems like it's an easy thing to convince a lot of people that like, hey, you know, China messed up and now our whole freaking economy is shut down because of it.
So we should be kind of mad at them.
Yeah, there's definitely a flavor of that in the Twitter sphere.
There's kind of an analogy to the Karens.
There's kind of a male version of Karen.
I don't know what the word is, but they're definitely, you know, have a real hard on for China right now.
And, you know, I've read some stuff about Chinese labs, you know, in both in China and in Iran.
And obviously we've all read about some of these animal markets and how this thing may have originated and transmitted to humans.
I don't know how that happened.
But the reason I don't suspect China intended this and that that's a serious stretch is because it's just not in their interest.
There's kind of a neocon real politic book about China that's been going around that's very, very popular called the 100-year marathon.
I don't know if you've heard of this book.
It was written by a guy named Michael Pillsbury.
And it came out, I think, just before Trump was elected, so 2015.
So it's a little dated now, but it really is kind of the current go-to Bible among foreign policy establishment types on what China is really up to.
And so the premise of the book is that China's playing us like a violin and that they think in terms of some sort of thousand-year worldview.
And from that perspective, America is only a couple hundred years old.
It's a startup.
They're not even sure if it's going to make it.
And so what they do since the collapse of the Soviet Union, they've sort of re-rejiggered their view of global power and shifted it more towards economics rather than military might.
And so the Chinese strategy has been to pull us into their lair by sharing all of our technology with them and opening our markets to their products and basically doing things that feel good and that are in our short-term interest, but that ultimately doom us to being inferior to China as China becomes the unipolar force in geopolitics.
And so all of this is maybe a bit of a stretch, but nonetheless, this is what a lot of neoconservative types think, what a lot of foreign policy establishment types think.
And so this Michael Pillsbury guy, I mean, you got to understand, this is the kind of guy who he went to, I think, Stanford and Columbia.
He has served in eight presidential administrations.
He's been in the CIA.
He's been at the Defense Department.
He's been at the RAND Corporation.
You know, people need to understand there's a zillion guys like this all over Washington, D.C.
And they're all in, they all live in Potomac, Maryland, and McLean, Virginia, and Georgetown.
And they're just unbelievable.
And they do not care at all what you and I think about foreign policy or geopolitics.
I mean, they consider themselves part of an elite and enlightened class that's there to run things.
You know, the public is almost the public is just something there to be directed and shifted so they don't get uppity and create a problem with a vote or something like that.
So this is, you know, the guy who wrote this book is one of those types.
And everything in this book, The 100-year marathon, is basically refuted by this notion of this virus being intentional on the part of the Chinese because it would expose all of their subterfuge.
It's damaged them hugely in terms of international standing with the world community.
It's absolutely damaged them in terms of outsourcing manufacturing from Western countries where I think there's going to be a lot more trepidation there when it comes to things, pharmaceuticals, et cetera.
If anything, autarky is going to be back in style.
Not that that's a good thing, but you can understand why people become more cloistered when something like this happens.
And if you really think the Chinese are these incredibly deep thinking, long-range thinking strategists whose ultimate goal is to bring the U.S. to bear, it really doesn't fit.
This really doesn't fit that narrative.
And so, you know, I don't like foreign policy belligerence in the first place because, as you said, the average Chinese person is, of course, no enemy of yours or mine.
And so I'd hate to see this virus used that way.
Does that mean I worry about someone saying Chinese virus?
No.
And did you see Trump's initial press conference where he said China?
And, you know, that, you know, so you got to enjoy the theater.
But conspiracies are getting tougher and tougher, I think, in a global world.
Yeah, I agree with that.
And it's, I mean, I just literally enjoyed for the comedic value, Trump in the media going back and forth.
And I don't really care if he calls it the China, the Chinese virus.
And I think it's batshit crazy that that is what the press is concerned about in the middle of all of this.
Like that's your big concern.
I actually, what I appreciated about the moment is I thought it was just one more thing that really exposed the corporate press.
And it's unbelievable that they don't understand why Trump voters are out chanting CNN sucks and fake news and all this stuff when you're looking at by the tens of millions, people's lives just being decimated.
And they're standing up there going, but when you say Chinese virus, then that could be racist.
And it's like, wow, that is the only thing you guys are capable of being concerned about.
You can't for a second think about anybody who's not a minority.
I mean, it's like the only thing you're allowed to be concerned about is like, this has a disproportionate effect in the African American community and Asians might be having mean things said to them.
By the way, both fair concerns, I suppose.
But Jesus, if you're like some white guy in the middle of the country who's in some rural area that's already been decimated for the last decade or maybe three decades, and now you have this coming and you see your representatives in the media up there upset that some Chinese guy had something mean said to him, it must just be a kind of red pill moment when you're like, wow, these guys just do not care about my plight at all.
There is no one in that group willing to stick up for us.
And I understand why they would feel that way.
Well, they can't let it go.
They can never, ever, ever let it go.
Even in a pandemic, you know, they still have to be who they are.
So, you know, it's a good time for people to turn off the media.
I think there's so much great alternative media out there.
There's so many interesting voices you could be reading or listening to.
You don't need these people.
And that's how and why Trump won is he did an end run around the gatekeepers.
And it turns out that the gatekeepers are, you know, no better than you and me, no more informed, no smarter, basically self-appointed.
And, you know, people are tired of it.
And honestly, I'm surprised that they've let open internet go as long as it has.
You know, sometimes I'm still surprised by the fact that we can mostly say what we think online and nothing too bad happens to us.
I mean, obviously there's some deep platforming and that sort of thing, but for the most part, and maybe that lulls us into a false sense of freedom.
They sort of give us enough rope.
But yeah, the media has not done its job.
Electric Toothbrush Habits00:03:05
Its job right now would be to say things like, well, Governor X, what gives you the authority to shut down businesses?
What gives you the authority to self-quarantine people?
Where's your proof or evidence that social isolation works?
We don't know that that's absolutely true.
In fact, getting herd immunity quickly across the community might, it turns out, be better.
We don't know yet.
We don't even know, Dave, whether asymptomatic people carrying the virus transmit the virus.
That's an assumption.
That's not a proven fact.
So God bless Sweden.
God bless Japan.
And I'm really looking for an entrepreneurial, ballsy governor to be the first to say, hey, you know, enough.
We have a much smaller population per square mile, less population density, far fewer COVID cases.
And this doesn't justify what we're doing to our economy.
And we're going to be open for business.
And we're going to try some things with older people.
Let's say we're going to get a huge supply of masks for our population, whatever it is.
But, you know, the governor that does that first might find out that some businesses notice.
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Libertarian Oversimplification Critique00:14:50
I, you know, I've mentioned a few times on the show just because I thought it was, it really stood out to me, and I thought it was great, but there was this one sheriff in Maine.
I'm blanking on the name of the town, but there was this one sheriff.
And after the governor of Maine, he issued like a shelter-in-place directive or one of these versions of that.
And the sheriff straight up said he won't enforce it.
He was just like, look, this is not Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia.
I'm not going to arrest people for the crime of taking a walk.
Like, I'm just not doing that.
And if you want to suggest to them that they stay inside, that's fine, but we still have a constitution.
And it was like incredible to see.
But then at the same time, you're like, how are there not more?
I mean, how is there not one?
And that's a big lesson of this whole thing.
If nothing else, we can try to learn lessons from this.
And what you said about the press, the fact that the press is not asking, it's not like it takes a genius to think that maybe the role of a journalist would be to ask, where do you derive this authority?
I mean, that's like journalism 101, the first question you would obviously ask.
You're hearing silence on that front.
And then why is there not one of these governors who has the courage that that sheriff had to just say, look, well, I'm sorry.
I swore an oath to the Constitution.
And this is just not going to happen in America.
We're not punishing people for the crime of going to work or going for a jog or taking their kid to the park.
I mean, that's it.
We're not doing that.
And the silence is deafening.
And again, I mean, I remember I also mentioned this on the show, but the thing that I found maybe the creepiest moment that I've seen in this whole lockdown was Cuomo, the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, was having a press conference.
And one of his people said just very casually that they were going to suspend speedy trials in New York because, you know, they go, well, I mean, a lot of people who are guilty would get off on a technicality because we can't handle the trial.
So that's suspended.
And it's a room full of press.
And nobody, everybody just swallowed that.
Like, oh yeah, okay.
Well, obviously, can't do that.
Better a bunch of innocent people sit in a cage than a few guilty ones go free.
Okay, we just all accept that.
You know, just kind of the reversal of everything Western civilization was supposed to represent.
No big deal.
Not one push.
I mean, it doesn't, it doesn't take like, you know, like, how much bravery does it actually take or integrity does it actually take for someone to say, excuse me, wait, what?
Isn't that a constitutionally guaranteed right?
Like enshrined in the Bill of Rights?
Shouldn't that not go out the window?
And this was the first week.
This was the first week of the lockdown.
He said that.
So it's, if nothing else, there's a lesson to be learned there from what we're dealing with.
Well, I hope every one of those people incarcerated who are not getting a speedy trial.
I hope they all get lawyers and sue whatever county or city or state is incarcerating them.
And also, let's not forget the last place you want to be during a virus, a communicable virus is in a prison, is in jail, without bail.
So that's obviously terrible.
And if we think about this, we have to understand that bad things happen.
The idea that bad things happen and sometimes life is just unpleasant is not a constitutional infirmity.
I'm not a fan of the Constitution, but sometimes bad things happen.
And so what would due process even look like in the face of a pandemic?
I mean, Judge Napolitano talks about this a little bit.
You know, so if the government said, we're going to shut your business or we're going to require you to be at home, obviously both of those are deprivations of liberty.
So what would due process look like?
Well, first, it would require at least some kind of hearing, administrative hearing, if not an outright trial.
The government would have to identify a specific person, right?
With some degree of specificity, Dave Smith.
They'd have to show potential harm, which would be like, hey, we know Dave Smith is carrying the virus.
We've tested him.
And then show or demonstrate that you're out there, you know, walking around getting on the subway or something.
I mean, and you can't do that for 320 million people.
You know, obviously due process, just as a pragmatic matter, you can't have some sort of generalized due process for society.
Well, as a general measure under the, you know, under the commerce clause or under the general welfare clause, we're going to allow states to just apply generalized due process and say there's a generalized harm or potential.
And so, you know, that's not how due process works.
So the plain fact is that a virus might come along and infect and kill a bunch of people in America.
And constitutionally speaking, there's nothing much the government can or ought to do about it.
And honestly, you know, people are looking for simple libertarian answers.
They're looking for satisfying one-size-fits-all market answers too.
You know, we say, oh, my gosh, we're libertarians.
If there was just no FDA, all these drugs would be available and we could all be taking hydrochloroquine and ZPAC over the counter.
And, you know, okay, and that may be true.
And, you know, we could, you know, if we allowed price gouging, ventilators would, you know, immediately come onto the market and be sent to where they were most wanted relative to market demand, that sort of thing.
That may well be true.
But, you know, those still aren't simple, easy answers.
And we fall into a trap when we try to say that there's some sort of utopian market answer to every human ill.
There isn't.
Humans just do best when they have freedom and markets to try different approaches and to have skin in the game and put their own money or capital into things as opposed to badly spent taxpayer money.
They just have the right incentives in their private lives, where in democratic system, politicians do not have the right incentives.
That's all it means.
But if someone says, well, what would you libertarians do when a virus came along?
You say, well, some people would probably die just like they do now when we have government.
And then we'd figure it out.
So I don't like this mania for simple or immediate answers.
It's childish.
It's beneath us in a sense.
And it does an injustice to the much tougher generations that came before us.
Yeah, I completely agree with that.
And I think that sometimes it's like when libertarians do that, when they try to give these kind of oversimplified, everything would be fine because of this libertarian solution, it's almost like they're mirroring exactly what I hate when defenders of the state do this.
And I remember getting in an argument with a minarchist.
He's a prominent minarchist.
And we were just casually arguing anarchy versus no, but in our world, anyway, I won't name him right now.
But he said at one point that he goes, the whole reason why you need a government is because rights have to be guaranteed.
And that was his argument, that you need a government there to guarantee rights.
And I remember saying to him, I go, but that's just some fantasy talking point.
Like, no one guarantees anything.
I mean, the fact that murder is illegal doesn't guarantee you won't be murdered.
Nobody can get, but it's almost like this, this kind of magical thinking that, well, there's this, we will guarantee that you can't be murdered.
And no one can actually do this.
The truth is, people will be murdered with or without a state.
And now let's just have a discussion about what would probably be best and how we would mitigate against that.
And I agree with you that probably, you know, viruses are nasty little, essentially invisible things that can cause real damage.
And even without an FDA or a CDC, we could still have a problem with viruses.
And I'm sure we would.
That's why what I like to focus on more is just what the state is doing as a response to all of this.
And I also think that that's where the libertarian populist message should be, especially seeing as how we live in the age of populism, which I think is just going to be ramped up after all this is over.
And to just point out to people, like, well, you know, maybe I'm not going to convince you exactly how a market would work in a libertarian society dealing with this whole situation, but I can definitely show you that the government is extending trillions of dollars to the big banks just using this crisis to rob people in their most desperate hour, even more.
Like we should probably be able to agree.
Even Jimmy Dore was on the same page as me on that.
Like, yeah, that's outrageous.
That's outrageous that AOC and Bernie Sanders are supporting it.
And maybe they're claiming, well, we don't like that part of it, but they're still voting for it.
And I really appreciate Thomas Massey, who I also had on the show a couple weeks ago, because I think it does something very powerful to show who are the people who actually have the courage to stand up against this.
It's really easy to be against the Iraq war now, but it was really hard to be against the Iraq war in 2002, in 2003.
That took some real courage.
And I think, you know, in these moments, we find out who actually has the courage, because right now is the difficult time to stand against so much of this government authoritarianism and bailouts and craziness.
And anyway, it's going to be, it's interesting.
I heard you say, we're really going to be living in the age of the bailout now.
And I think that's true.
I thought I already lived through the age of the bailouts and the age of big government and all that stuff.
But I guess that was all just a test run for where we're going after this.
Yeah, it's pretty scary.
I think what's happening at the Fed is even more scary than what's happening at the Treasury Department.
There's going to be an IMF meeting this week coming.
It's their annual meeting.
They're holding it online.
And I suspect what they'll be talking about is how to create a backstop for central banks.
So the IMF has always wanted this.
They've always wanted to be the central bank for central bankers.
And they've talked about creating a global currency, not a currency that you and I can spend, but it's called an SDR, a special drawing right that only central banks can avail themselves of and to sort of prop them up.
And you can just imagine what the finances of some countries are going to be looking like in the very near future.
I mean, places like Spain and Italy, people forget that tax revenue is plummeting.
And so all of the calculations that people make in your town, you know, your mayor, your city council, your public swimming pool, whether the grass gets cut, all those things come from taxes.
And everyone's having to rejigger those expectations right about now.
So, you know, this, I think we can start by saying we did this to ourselves.
This isn't a crisis.
I don't like that term.
The crisis is our response.
Let's say 25, 22,000 Americans have died so far this year.
Well, sort of allegedly died from the coronavirus.
It's not so clear, but let's just accept the figure.
And let's say 50,000 die ultimately throughout the year.
That's not a crisis.
Okay, that's that's a deadly virus that afflicted some people, especially old people and people with some pre-existing conditions.
That's not a crisis worthy of shutting down the economy and going into an absolute tailspin.
And so, even in the past, you know, during the plague, during all kinds of instances in world history, people still went to work.
People went to work in London during the London bombings, during the Blitz.
You know, the idea that you would shut down the economy for this, I think, one, it shows that we've become accustomed to being ordered around.
And like you said, it happened so fast, there didn't seem to be a lot of resistance to it.
And two, that government has the audacity to just imagine it can do these things.
And they're right.
They can do these things.
That, you know, their calculation is correct, that people will largely accept this as long as they're in fear.
And so the media is doing a good job of treating this like bubonic plague or something, which it's not.
And here we are.
But, you know, all we can do right now is act as individuals.
I wish I had some rosier projection for how we come out of the other side of this, you know, with maybe some sort of new currency using Bitcoin or some sort of breakup of the United States, some secessionary impulse or whatever it is.
And I certainly applaud those potentialities.
But, you know, at the moment, it's day by day.
And I think you got to worry about yourself.
Yeah, I completely agree with that.
You got to take care of yourself, your family, and do what you can.
And maybe, you know, sometimes, unfortunately, it seems to be a dynamic with human history that sometimes it takes some real darkness to get a silver lining out of it.
And I just think about how the, you know, like the Ron Paul moment and how many people he was able to wake up and kind of convince that liberty is the way to go.
I mean, that probably doesn't happen unless you had this disastrous war in Iraq and this disastrous economy and this bubble that burst and destroyed so many lives.
And it's only in the wake of that that then people kind of start to realize what's happened.
And in the same sense that, like, on every level, you know, like somebody's got a kind of overdose from drugs to convince other people who are using drugs to be like, oh, I better slow down because I just saw that disaster.
And that.
So I'm just, I try to remain optimistic that maybe, if nothing else, it'll wake some people up to what just happened here.
There will, at some point, we will go back to maybe what they're calling the new normal or whatever, but we will go back to life at some point.
And people will look back at this and say, what the hell happened here?
And hopefully some people realize just how crazy this got, how quickly, and maybe something good comes of that.
So there, I tried to pull an optimistic message out at the end.
What would you give to just go to like the crappiest restaurant on your block right now?
Oh, man, I would love it.
I would die to just sit down and have somebody else cook me food and clean it up.
I'd pay whatever they want.
I'd be like, what is this?
What does this dinner cost?
Optimistic Message for Los Angeles00:01:04
$5,000?
All right, whatever.
Let's do it.
Yeah, well, all those, you know, all those cramped flights from Atlanta airport, I'll take one today anywhere.
I'll fly to Des Moines.
You know, I said, I said the other week, I was looking just for the sake of it of like what flight prices were.
And it was like, I forget exactly, I think it was like $62 round trip to Los Angeles.
And I said, that's when the real inner Jew came out of me.
And I was like, baby, we got to go to Los Angeles.
It's $62.
But my wife put the kibosh on that pretty quickly.
Anyway, Jeff, I know you got other media appearances that you're doing today, so I'm going to let you go.
I always really love talking to you.
You always have an interesting perspective and a different perspective and a thoughtful perspective on all of these things.
So thank you for taking some time with us.
And let's do it again sometime real soon.
And best of luck through this whole thing to you and your lovely family.