Dave Smith and Robbie the Fire analyze America's decline, arguing that post-Cold War foreign policy errors, specifically the 1991 Iraq invasion and subsequent Clinton-era sanctions, fueled global instability. They contend that monetary debasement, endless wars, and unsustainable fiscal spending have eroded national stability, creating a rare bipartisan consensus that the American experiment is failing despite deep political polarization. Ultimately, they assert that restoring peace and prosperity requires sound economics through free markets and reduced government intervention rather than further centralization or imperial expansion. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Mocking Independence Day00:06:43
Fill her up.
You're listening to the Gas 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'm Dave Smith.
He is the king of the caulks, Robbie the Fire, Bernstein.
What's up, my brother?
Happy 4th of July weekend.
Happy 4th to you, Davey Smith.
Yeah, there we go.
4th of July weekend.
Just wrapped up.
I had a nice time.
I hope you did as well.
Dude, I had the most fun summer porch tour, dude.
Oh, yeah.
I saw some pictures that you posted.
It looked awesome.
Yeah, people came out.
We partied, dude.
It was great.
Oh, nice, nice, nice.
And you had Chris there with you?
We had BK Chris, Menu and Heart, big time fireworks, barbecue, drinking and sheds, everything you could hope for a 4th of July weekend.
That's really what the 4th is all about, is it not?
Hey, don't forget, by the way, guys, that this Friday, this Friday, the 9th, one night only, one show only, I am co-headlining Comedy Connection, Providence, Rhode Island, with Louis J. Gomez.
Please come out for that one if you can.
We added this show very last minute.
So trying to sell some tickets.
If you guys want to come see us, come see us on that show.
And then, of course, Freedom Fest, the big one coming up in a couple weeks.
And Rob, your summer porch tour is going all over.
Hell yeah.
We got Boston, July 17th, Nashville, August 14th.
And then you and I are in Rochester, August.
What is it, 20 something?
We should look that up.
Yeah, that sounds good.
Maybe for a better plug experience, we should have the date.
But you know what?
We're lost in the clouds here.
We got some ideas that are floating around.
Hey, so for this episode, I kind of thought since we were just coming off of the 4th of July, we would do an episode where we talked about the state of America, seeing as how her birthday just passed.
And there were a lot of these kind of bigger narrative and bigger picture issues that I was thinking about over this weekend, which I did, by the way, I had a really great time, hung out with the family and watched some fireworks and really enjoyed it.
It was great.
And, you know, I got a two and a half year old now, which is a really, really, really fun age, kind of a little bit aware of what's going on in the world.
And she had a really great time and barbecued with some family.
It was great.
And I know there's a lot of people who had a great time.
And I sent off a series of tweets the other day.
And I think one of them rubbed some of the more patriotic members of my following the wrong way when I was just kind of mocking the idea of celebrating the 4th of July.
And I just want to make it clear.
I wasn't mocking.
Like, I celebrate it too.
And I think it's a great day.
And there's all these incredible themes that go along with it.
I was just kind of suggesting that it's kind of funny to see a country that's gone through what we've gone through in the last 18 months celebrating independence and freedom from a tyrannical government.
It's just, there's an irony there that's kind of strange.
And it's particularly strange seeing the people who cheered on everything that the government did over the last year plus celebrate.
Pretty soon the day we're going to celebrate is Fauci Removal Day.
So that's going to be the new July 4th.
And maybe they coordinate it next year where we actually do it on July 4th.
So we can just stick with that one.
But I think the big celebration of freedom in the future is going to be the Fauci Removal Day.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I will celebrate that day till the end of my life.
That would be great.
But I will say that I really do, I like the 4th of July, not just as an excuse to have a barbecue and watch some fireworks and stuff like that, but I like the holiday.
I like the spirit of it.
I like the idea of there's a holiday based around the Declaration of Independence and based around secession and all these things that I really like.
I know there are some right-wingers out there who make the loyalist argument that we never should have had the revolution.
We never should have stayed British?
Yeah, that we should have stayed British.
Who the hell makes that argument?
Those people are idiots.
Well, there's some smart people who make the argument, but I reject that.
They're still loyal to the queen?
Well, they're not, but they think we all should be.
But I will say that a lot of the argument kind of centers around the idea that it wasn't like King George wasn't really as tyrannical as the founders made him out to be and all of this stuff.
But I always kind of fall back on the even if the government, even if you make the argument, which I'm not convinced of, but even if you make the argument that the government isn't as tyrannical as some people are claiming, I think those people still have a right to secede from that government if they don't want to be a part of it.
And that's basically what the Declaration of Independence states.
And go read the Declaration of Independence, man, however you feel.
It is a badass document.
Just a badass document.
Like a group of people telling their government, like, no, we have the right to say no.
You are not our government anymore.
And then, you know, they brought a war to him, which was, you know, that was unfortunate.
But hey, they stood and they fought.
Anyway, I also just like the idea of secession in general.
And it's kind of cool that we have this national holiday celebrating that.
And I think that no matter, I really don't want to downplay this.
And I think this was one of my lessons in 2020 was, and it's a mistake I don't want to make again moving forward in life.
But I think I undervalued what's the term?
Not traditions, but like celebrations and pastimes and kind of like rituals.
And, you know, it's real easy like before 2020 to just be like, oh, Americans spend too much time on sports or on movies or on these like silly things that we do.
Reality Check on Incentives00:03:13
But I kind of realized in 2020 when so much of that was taken away from people that actually I think those things are really important.
And I don't think it's a coincidence that you take all of those things away from people and then a few months later you've got riots in your streets.
I don't think that's a coincidence.
And I don't think that actually these things are necessary.
And that libertarians, we never want to be guilty of what the commies are guilty of, where they are working out these plans of how to organize society completely removed from the actuality, from the reality of the beast, you know?
Like the commies used to like make these arguments when people would talk about like incentive problems, you know?
Like they'd be like, well, if everybody's equal and everybody's paid the same, who would rather, like, who chooses to be the garbage man rather than the artist?
Right?
Like, who does that if we're all making the same wage?
Like, the way that the market kind of, you know, manages this issue.
Is that it pays the garbage man way more.
Yeah.
Like the garbage man's going to get like 80K a year plus benefits plus all this shit.
And the artist, you might starve.
Like, you might make money, but you also might not.
So that right there kind of mitigates that, you know, that issue.
That, well, the person who's a really shitty artist, they're going to be like, I don't think I should go into art because I'll probably starve.
So I'm a shitty artist, but I can do this garbage man job and I'm guaranteed this.
And you can Instagram it and do both.
You can be like a super sexy garbage man, cut the sleeves off, be hanging off the thing and make a whole thing out of it.
Garbage art.
That's next level.
This is when we synergize communism and capitalism and make garbage art.
That's where it all comes down to.
But you know what I'm saying?
But so the commies like retort to this would be that, well, this is a flaw of man under capitalism.
So this is the problem is that you even think this.
Yes.
Because they're in the box of capitalism.
Yes, we have to create the new man that won't even care about this and he'll be motivated by wanting to help his community.
And so if there's a need for the garbage to be cleaned, then he will out of the goodness of his soul because he's one with this community.
He will go and do that.
Now, this is once you get into this territory, you're just like, oh, but now you're imagining something that's not human.
So, okay, yeah, I guess if that's the way it worked, like if you are willing to.
Can you have capitalist new man too who just wants to be charitable or something?
I mean, if we're just theorizing new man.
Yeah, sure.
But they don't give that credit to capitalist new man.
Only socialist new man.
Capitalism inherently atomizes people or whatever.
They have their whole academic arguments worked out on this, but they're stupid.
But you never want to be doing that.
You never want to be.
You have to operate within a framework of reality.
Otherwise, your ideas are stupid.
That's just, that's a basic rule of thumb in life.
And so I did realize in 2020, I mean, I realized this a bit before, but it really hit home in 2020, that actually people need these things.
Stamps for Daily Survival00:03:16
And I think that having a day of like these traditions, these celebrations, I think they're really important.
And I don't, I don't, if it came off like I was downplaying that in my tweet, then I apologize for that because I don't want to give that impression.
I think that, you know, you'll read about, you know, societies hundreds of years ago where there was a real, what they would call food insecurity.
You know, people were really like struggling just to get enough food to get by.
And they'd still have these feasts.
They'd have these celebration days where they'd have giant feasts.
And they barely even had enough food to get by.
But it's almost like human beings still needed, in order to do that day in, day out, grueling, backbreaking work, you need something off in the future to look forward to.
Well, in two months, we're going to do this big feast.
You know, like this, these things will get you through the day-to-day grueling monotony.
And, you know, like, so I think there's real value in that.
And you need these kind of like these stories and these traditions and these celebrations.
And there's a reason why everyone has them.
There's no group, no nation, no religion, no, nothing that doesn't have these kind of like, look, we all celebrate this story on this day and this day represents this.
And if you're going to have one, one that's about independence and liberty and all of this stuff, that's about as good a holiday to celebrate as you could have.
So happy fourth.
I hope everybody had a good time and, you know, did the important thing.
Hang out with some people who you love and have fun and unwind a little bit.
All that good stuff.
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The Libertarian Cultural Test00:15:28
All right, let's get back into the show.
I will say that it's on top of the spirit of independence and freedom, celebrating it in a nation where we don't have an excess of either.
One of the things that was kind of very stark and easy to see was the fundamental divide in America.
And I really think that what's become more and more clear in the country is that there is this real, even more so than left and right.
There's a real divide in the country amongst the way people look at the country.
And I think that this falls, there's a lot of overlap with left and right on this.
But I think in many ways, the question that really separates what side of the divide you're on in this country isn't as accurately broken up into left and right as it is broken up into the fundamental question of how you feel about the country.
Like, because left and right can be a little bit misleading.
Like, there could be like a, you know, a Republican who doesn't, you know, doesn't want to touch entitlement programs, thinks entitlement programs are great.
And you could call him a left-winger on economics on that side, but that's not really what the fundamental divide is over.
And I know this sounds like something that a boomer con would say, but what is a boomer con like a baby boomer conservative, an old, you know, okay, a Bill O'Reilly Sean hand.
You're coming up with too many terms.
How do you keep up on all these?
Yeah, the goal is to create so many terms that only I can understand myself.
And then me and five other people, no one else knows what the hell we're talking about.
But I really do think in many ways the fundamental question becomes like, do you love this country or not?
And I understand, I don't mean this so much in a pejorative sense of like, you don't love your country.
You're not a good patriot or something.
I'm just saying it's as an accurate descriptor of what side you fall onto.
And so much of the hysterical left-wing stuff is really at the root of it.
It's that we look at America as a bad country.
Like that the world would be better off if America had not existed.
That the story of America is the story of slavery, racism, oppression, imperialism, all of this stuff, right?
Like, that's the story of America.
And therefore, if you look at it like that, it does kind of logically follow that you would need to upend everything about the country if you can.
Well, if America has been a force for oppression, then yeah, we got to completely revolutionize how marginalized people are treated.
That's the only answer.
We got to constantly focus on making sure that we have, you know, more diversity and more awareness and really punish the oppressors and all of this stuff.
However, if you're on the other side and you overall love the country and view it as a force for good in the world, then you're like, well, yeah, I mean, we might want to like work around the edges a little bit.
And it's good if we improve the things we're bad on, but you don't look at it like you need this kind of fundamental, you know, like that you have to apologize or feel bad for the country or anything like that.
And that seems to me to be like right at the heart of this dispute.
Do you love the country or do you not?
And I think from my perspective, that the correct libertarian answer to all of this is that we do love the country and we hate the government.
And that's basically how it all splits up nice and evenly.
And that it's like, oh yeah, like the country has been a tremendous force for good.
This is a great nation.
The government has done all types of evil shit.
And that's been a force for bad.
And so it's, I don't know, you know, I'm not trying to just play this game where it's like, we're neither left nor right, but I'm just saying I think the reality of the situation is that that's where we fall, recognizing that the country is, it's a great nation.
It really is.
And I love the country.
I think there's a big split amongst libertarians too, not just the left and the right, but amongst the left and right of libertarianism, if you will.
Like there's a group of libertarians who are fundamentally counterculturalists.
This is why they believe we should celebrate every alternative lifestyle and demonize traditional lifestyles.
You only really get there if you think that America has been a force for bad in the world.
Because the pure libertarian answer is kind of like, you can celebrate or demonize whatever lifestyle you want to.
You could celebrate transgenderism or you could celebrate traditional Christian families.
You could celebrate either.
You could demonize either.
You just can't enforce your will on either.
That's the only libertarian position.
I would think the position of maybe the there's an alternative position in my head here of the libertarian that just says, I don't like the idea of government whatsoever.
And so it's not so much a hatred for the United States.
It's more of why are we celebrating country?
Let's evolve past country, which I think even some of the ideas of postmodernism falls into that as well, of a theoretical framework of that we could be evolving into the same way you can see past the need for government if you start to understand the way that free markets can operate.
I mean, you don't necessarily have to group this together with postmodernism, but I'm just saying I think that there's a, at least for country, there's probably a third position of not so much a hatred of America as much as a hatred of the idea of country.
Yeah.
And so looking to evolve to something else.
Whereas I think your position is a little bit more, there needs to be some sort of a cultural root in what's come of America in order to even get to that freedom aspect.
So I think there's like a little bit of a debate there of how you can get there.
Well, this is so my view on that.
And look, as long as you're against the, you know, people being forced through the threat of violence and against the state, which is how the state operates and all that, then you're in libertarian territory.
This is all kind of falls into something just like how you personally feel outside of that narrow legal framework.
But my take on this is that that argument starts falling into the commie territory of trying to reinvent man as the way you want him to be rather than dealing in reality.
And so this was the...
They might have a little more game theory on their side of that if you're actually applying open markets, there's incentive structure in place that there's a framework there by which you can kind of draw from evidence and say, hey, with proper incentives, people would actually, you know, behave in a certain way.
Whereas with communism is pretty clearly lacking the financial structure for there to ever be an apparatus or incentive.
You're taking away the incentive structure.
But aside from that, I mean, you can, there are lots of different incentives and you can look at where there's been the freest markets in the world.
It never really eliminated people's love of country, tradition, culture, religion, all of these things.
This was Marx's vision, his prediction of the future was that the workers of the world were going to unite, identify as their class, like identify as the working class, and they were going to overthrow the oppressive bourgeois class, right?
After Marx made this prediction, the workers of the world did rise up and unite under their national banner to slaughter other workers of the world in the First World War.
Now, I'm not for it.
I think the First World War was a disaster and didn't need to be fought, but I'm just saying that dealing in reality here, what you recognize is that people do have a love for on every level going up.
It's like family, neighborhood, city, state, country, like all the levels, like they people have that.
Now, I'm not, I don't particularly take a position on like, yeah, if people stopped having those kind of national preferences, maybe that would be better.
But I don't necessarily know that.
And I don't know that viewing yourself as like a citizen of the world or just kind of a completely like autonomous, isolated individual is necessarily preferable.
All I know is that all I really believe, my strongest conviction, is in peace, prosperity, and stability.
And that to me is what libertarianism is all about.
Like to me, like peace and liberty are the same word.
Like they mean the exact same thing, if you really break it down.
Like peace basically means liberty from violence or the threat of violence.
Like that's what peaceful activity is, is that you're basically being granted your liberty.
On the largest scale, peace is not fighting wars.
On the lowest scale, peace is not enforcing your will on your neighbor and then everything in between that.
But my personal view on all of this is that I am not at all hostile to traditions, to the nation, to religion, to community, to any of these things.
I'm hostile toward the state.
And from my perspective, the way I see it, the state does a tremendous amount to undermine all of those things.
And I don't think that's helpful.
And I think at their best, not always, but at their best, those forces undermine the state.
So communities taking care of each other undermines a welfare state.
And religion undermines people looking at their politicians as if they're gods.
And that, like, I mean, when you see that, you see the people like worshiping Fauci and that shit, it's like, oh, that's a lack of religion in your life.
That's what that is.
That's now you've made this guy a religious figure instead.
Because the desire to worship is hardwired.
So that's kind of how I look at these things.
But really, as Jeff Dice, the president of the Mises Institute said, I think the best libertarian test is just, would you roll the dice with freedom?
Would you say, well, I'll give people liberty and what comes out of that, I'll accept.
You know, like if people, without being forced into it, don't identify by their nation or their traditions or any of these things, then okay, fine.
And if they do, then okay, fine.
Like that was his test was like, if you could abolish the state, but the culture that would arise would not be the one that you supported, would you still do it?
Like that's the ultimate libertarian test.
So if you prefer a traditional, you know, like Christian, conservative culture, but you knew abolishing the state would lead to less of that, would you still be down to do it?
And if you prefer more of a libertine kind of hippie culture, but you knew abolishing the state would lead to a more conservative Christian culture, would you still do it?
That's kind of the ultimate libertarian test.
Or at least a very powerful thought experiment.
Anyway.
Isn't that kind of lack?
Because either way, you'd have the freedom to do what you wanted to do.
So essentially, you're saying that you might live in a world where the market doesn't really like what you like.
And so people are congregating differently.
So what kind of a person wants to force everybody like?
Well, that's why you just passed the libertarian test.
That's the essence of it.
Is that would you accept that you're free to go do this with your small community, but you can't enforce your cultural preferences on everybody else?
So that's it.
It seems so obvious to you because you passed the libertarian test, but that's the true test of how libertarian you are, that you don't get to force your preferences on other people, right?
You get what I'm saying?
Okay.
Okay, so on America's birthday, one of the other things that I was thinking about was just the state of the country.
How we're doing.
How we're doing on this birthday.
A little time for a little health checkup.
I was just talking to Ari.
I'm going to be recording the State of the Union with him soon.
So that might also be.
Oh, that's a January event.
No, we usually do it in the summer, but then I think last year we like, maybe he was traveling or something.
I don't remember, but it got put.
Oh, I don't know.
I always thought that was end of year.
No, no.
Usually, I think usually we've done it in the summer.
I think so.
Anyway, we're about to do another one soon.
But that, when we do that, we focus on, yeah, always, always a great time.
But when we do that, we just focus on the last year.
And I was thinking more about just the state of the country in general.
And we could go back many years for this discussion.
But I got to say, it's an interesting place that the country's in right now.
And it's not good.
You know, it's it's and I mean, on one sense, it is very good.
And in one sense, it's very good.
We really still are an incredibly wealthy country, even with everything we've squandered recently.
We're an incredibly wealthy country.
Our people are, compared to the history of the world, just in a state of absolute luxury compared to everything that came before us.
Possibly not compared to the future, but compared to everything that came before us, I mean, we have objectively a higher standard of living than kings had.
I mean, you know, like maybe not, maybe not as big a palace or something like that, but things that really, really matter, doing much better.
I mean, like, you know, if you get an infection, you can go get an antibiotic and it takes care of it real quick.
That is a huge thing that even kings and queens did not enjoy for.
Or a vaccine that will kill your teenagers.
You can do both those things.
Pretty cool.
We can.
You can get an enlarged heart from a vaccine.
You couldn't do that in the past.
But and just tremendous resources and wealth and things.
You're sitting around in air conditioning, watching Netflix.
I mean, these are luxuries that like, you know, past generations couldn't have imagined.
And even though it's easy to take those for granted and dismiss them, we shouldn't.
You know, you should keep that in mind.
However, if you look at the basic metric of like peace, prosperity, and stability, and I'm using peace interchangeably with liberty here, there's some concerning signs for the country.
Vaping Risks and Real Threats00:02:47
The level of prosperity right now, like I said, is very high, but it's under real threat.
The level of peace, not great.
Really not great.
And the level of stability is terrible.
It's a very unstable country right now.
And so much of this is because of the damage done to the economy during the COVID regime.
And the real problem, to me, the real threat to stability is the fiscal and monetary underpinnings of what we did during COVID and for a few decades before that.
But so that's where to me the real danger is, is that all of the money printing over the last year, the artificially, insanely low interest rates, all of this stuff, also a culture that's completely pitted against each other and a warfare state that's still trying to dominate the world, the empire, essentially.
So it's hard to look at America having this birthday and go, man, we're in a pretty precarious position.
Okay, let's take a quick second.
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And then the next question that kind of comes up after that is like, how the hell did we get here?
Empire Begins with Free Markets00:12:31
How did this country, like, doesn't it still a little bit like, because I don't know, Rob, I mean, honestly, like, I assume you don't, but do you, do you disagree with any of that assessment?
That America is in a seriously risky place given the monetary, fiscal, and foreign policy of the country.
That this is really, we're playing with fire here in terms of something really bad happening to the country.
Yeah, I don't get the sustainability of the money printing over the last couple of years, the debt levels, but I've been, I mean, who knows?
Maybe I'm just wrong about how the world finance works, that the Ponzi scheme can actually go on.
But it's looked for a while, like, how sustainable of a model is this?
Yeah, yeah, right.
So I agree with all of that.
Yeah, maybe they can keep this Ponzi scheme going longer than we believe they can.
Maybe not.
But it is kind of interesting to look back over the course of our lifetime.
And part of this might just be because we were kids and we were in a state of blissful ignorance, but it's still kind of, it's a bit amazing, I think, for kids who were children when we were.
You know, like 90s kids in that broader kind of time frame.
You're a few years younger than me.
But that you really, the state of the country being what it is today seemed just seemed wildly different than what the perception was when we were growing up.
That America was just the most successful country in the world.
That was kind of just a given.
That obviously this country ain't going nowhere.
We're not splitting up.
We're not doing, you know, like I've said this.
You felt like number one.
You felt like winners just by being in America.
Yeah, that's right.
And to some degree, that was true.
It's not, it wasn't like made up.
It was like, well, yeah, by every metric, we're the most successful.
And you also had that feeling.
I think this is universal, but as a kid, when you saw on your toy, like Made in China, you're like, why the fuck did I got to get something from China?
Oh, little did you know.
Everything was going to be made in China soon.
Yeah, but that is, that is, that was a real feeling.
And I think it was, it, in many ways, it made sense.
And that this is when you were kind of growing up in a country that, you know, was the country.
And it's not just that we were the most powerful country or the richest country or anything like that, but we were the country where like, you know, like our culture, our music, our movies were what everyone else in the world wanted.
Basically, you know, maybe not the entire world, but a large chunk of it.
You know, Michael Jackson could go tour anywhere in the world and just everyone wanted to see him.
And it was because he was the, you know, thing in America.
And same with our movies.
If you ever went to like Europe, you know, it's probably still true.
I don't know, but it'd be like our movies with some different weird French name and French subtitles over them or maybe French like voices dubbed in or whatever they would do.
But they would just want to see our shit.
And it's hard to not grow up with that and have some sense of like you were saying, like, yeah, we're number one.
The old, you know, American kind of pride.
And that, that, you know, not that the pop culture influence changed necessarily.
I don't really know.
I'm just so removed from it today.
But this sense of America being number one, I don't think we quite have that swagger anymore.
I think now we're really kind of viewed both inwardly and outwardly as a country that's kind of fucking up.
Well, China and Russia will sit down now at negotiation tables and go, you're not that powerful.
Fuck you.
Don't tell us what to do.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's right.
And there's a lot of reason for that.
And it's funny because a lot of even like these right-wingers, which we talked about in that whole episode about China, but a lot of these right-wingers will be like, well, look, China, they have this whole long game.
Like they see America as a collapsing, crumbling empire, and they want to build up and take over.
So we got to like fight this battle against China.
But even if you believe that to be true, like the real thing you would want to focus on is like, well, why are we crumbling?
Well, the other, the other irony of that perspective is China also has risk on its plate of collapsing because of their centralized government spending and the bubbles that they make in these ghost cities.
And who knows how, like, there was a time in this country where we thought, hey, we got to compete with Russia and they collapsed under their own weight because it didn't work.
You know, they moved all their farmers into the cities.
There's a big economic bust from doing so.
At some point, you run out of the human capital labor and it falls under its own weight because you've made bad centralized, like it's almost like taking steroids or doing coke or something.
It's like a burst where you're like, hey, this is really working.
So to look at China and go, hey, look, the centralized government is doing a great job here and look at all the economic bust of it.
I mean, the idea that that can't collapse under its own weight or that we should be doing the same thing is just a very flawed analysis.
Yes.
Well, I remember you saying once, and I thought was a really great point.
This was probably, I gotta say, probably around 2017.
I think it was when the first Charlottesville march happened and there was all this talk about, you know, neo-Nazis, white nationalists on the rise, these hate groups or whatever.
The Southern Poverty Law Center was flipping out.
And you said on the show, I thought it was a really great point, is you went like, and again, this goes back to Jeff Dice thing.
The best libertarians are always the ones rooted in economics.
But you said, you were like, hey, look, if you really think this is a problem and you're really concerned about it, then the most important thing is to protect the economy.
Because none of these movements ever take off unless the economy is trashed.
When the economy is trashed, that's when people start giving radical groups a look.
And they start going like, oh, okay, we've been screwed over.
I'm losing my livelihood.
I'm losing my prosperity.
Who has answers for me?
And then it just opens the door for some radical group to blame.
For the FBI to come into your local town and say, hey, who wants to do something about this?
Yeah, well, that's that too, I suppose.
But it makes people more likely to listen to that FBI agent when he's trying to provoke some type of attack.
But that is the truth is that if you want to avoid these demagogues who scapegoat one group and rally people around these radical ideas, then what you really want to do is protect your own economy.
And to me, that same point that I think was spot on then, that's ultimately the answer to this kind of like this battle with China.
And in the situation with China, the fact that we've all got a whole bunch of H-bombs just makes that so much more obvious.
I mean, even if you set aside the moral issues of a war, when everyone's got H-bombs, what are we doing here?
We're not fighting a hot war with them.
So if you're really concerned about China gaining dominance on the world stage, which I would be the first to admit, I am.
I mean, I think the Chinese Communist Party is creepy as shit.
I think they're a brutal, authoritarian, fascistic government.
Even though the party's communist, they're more of a fascistic model.
And I don't want them having a lot of influence on the world.
I maybe don't see that as as big a threat as some right-wingers do, but I certainly don't want that.
But the antidote to that is that you'd want the American economy to be as sound and stable as possible.
You'd want the American workers to be as prosperous as possible.
That's what's going to keep us in the driver's seat of influence.
And I mean the soft influence on the world, not the empire.
I mean, like, you know, just the fact that we're a country that's doing very well.
And to do that, what you want to do is free up our market.
You want to have a seriously free market.
You want, you know, if you could abolish the Federal Reserve and have market interest rates and drastically cut government spending and cut taxes and let everybody here be more prosperous, stop this constant upward pressure on price inflation, stop making it so expensive to own a home and to, you know, whatever, get health care and all these other things.
That to me would really put us in a situation where we had real power in the best sense of the word as a country.
But that, you know, so in the same point you were making about, you know, preventing radicalism at home, it's the same issue really with, you know, protecting the country as a whole.
Yeah, no, I think a lot of the reason why it all comes down to economics, the reason why people work with China is because they're making investments in their country and they're willing to trade with them and there's financial incentives to do so.
And one of the biggest X factors here is just the dollar reserve currency status and whether or not we inflate to the point that more countries are like, hey, fuck this.
Yeah.
No, that's right.
Because we lose that and then things can come tumbling down awfully quickly, especially when your whole economy is built around being the reserve currency of the world.
The other thing that's interesting, right, is that if you look at like if you look at America in the 21st century, I think it's pretty hard, even when I was speaking earlier about that divide of the people who love the country versus the people who don't love the country and all that.
I think it's pretty hard for anyone on either side to say we've handled this well.
That the 21st century, that America has, no, I don't see any mismanagement there.
I think we've pretty much done a good job.
I think George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, I think they all really handled the country in a good way.
You know, like that's, that's almost impossible for rational thinking people to say.
It's pretty clear, I think, to most people on both sides of that line that it's been a bad first 21 years of this new century.
I guess the new century is almost a quarter over.
And for people around our age, it's interesting to look back and go, oh, well, how did this really get established?
How did this kind of like this world order or this chapter of it really get established?
Because I think that that whole spirit that you were talking about of America's number one was really something that came out of the post-World War II environment, where that was, I mean, we won the biggest war ever.
And I also think that there was something, as I've said before on the show, I think there was something about winning World War II where we were able to be the dominant victors, win the war of the world, and feel like the good guys.
That could be sold and sold effectively.
And a lot of that is because the Nazis were so bad.
It did not take a lot of propaganda.
I mean, there was a lot of propaganda, but it was very easy to convince people that the Nazis were a truly evil regime for obvious reasons.
And that's also the start of dollar reserve status and our ability to spend a shit ton of money.
Yes, that's exactly right.
So we come out of that with.
That's the beginning of empire.
I'm saying that's the beginning of, look at this, that's the spoil of war.
It's when the empire was sealed.
Like that this was truly an empire that was the dominant force in the world.
We won the Second World War and then dropped a nuke on Japan.
And then we're like, okay, now we're carving up the world as we see fit.
And of course it grew and grew from there.
But then you had the create of the national security state, all of this stuff all kind of grew out of World War II.
And then just tremendous prosperity in the decades that followed.
CNN vs Fox Perspectives00:17:33
You know, biggest, you know, most, the highest level of prosperity in human history.
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And then, of course, like, you know, you got into the Bretton Woods agreement and becoming the world's currency.
And this was an agreement that was kind of doomed to fail from the beginning.
But in 1972, 73, whenever it was, when we went off the Bretton Woods standard and just went off the gold standard, we broke the Bretton Wood agreement and went off the gold standard.
That was really setting the stage for what was to come.
By the way, this also led to a few things in reaction to going off of the gold standard and breaking with Bretton Woods.
This was what led Ron Paul to run for Congress.
And this is what led to the creation of the Libertarian Party.
Both of those were in response to this.
And credit to those really brilliant free market thinkers, the true serious ones, who saw the writing on the wall of that, that they went, we know what this means.
When the government goes off any type of commodity standard or any type of limiting of currency production, then you're going to be in trouble.
This is a very bad prospect for all the things we care about, peace, prosperity, and stability.
And so that was kind of in the background.
And this happened before me and you were born, but not that long.
You really think about it, really not that long.
I mean, like, I was born in 83.
What year were you born in?
88.
88.
Okay, so I'm five years older than you.
So I was born in 83.
This is 10 years after we went off the gold standard, and you were born 15 years after.
So it's not like there's that long a period of time in between these things, right?
So we still enjoyed a lot of this kind of the windfall of all of what had come before us at that point.
And of course, America really, you know.
And then we lost wars.
That's the problem.
We're losers now.
At least if we won them and walked away with some spoils, we could keep the thing alive.
But, you know, three losses, you lose your USC contract.
So we're going to have to step it up on the next one.
Yeah, America has to fight a war in Bellator next time.
We got to get a few wins in Bellator.
And we're not.
And we're picking easy opponents.
Like, this was in Russia or China.
It was Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq.
Yeah.
We're going to have to go for Peru or some really shitty little nothing next.
We got to fight a war against really just shit tiny countries.
It just goes, Iraq was too much of a superpower for us.
We got to really pick on someone else.
Or we got to just own the droning and be like, hey, guys, we've quietly been winning a whole bunch.
I know we haven't wanted to tell you about it, but yeah.
Yeah.
You're going to tell me we lost?
Tell Lockheed Martin they lost.
They seem to be doing pretty good.
You got to be honest about it.
You got to turn it around and cut one of those really good promos where you're cutting all like, you know, all of a sudden it's like, look at all these targeted strikes and really claiming some victories.
Yeah.
Well, I just, I think that if we are going to, what people need to be aware of, because it's funny that, and this is kind of, I guess, what we're in the business of, is like trying to wake people up to what the real problems are and what the root of all of this shit is.
And, you know, trying to be entertaining while we do it.
But I think almost everyone now on both sides of the divide that I mentioned earlier understand that like, yeah, this 21st century has not gone well.
There's a lot of real problems in the American experiment.
And you'll see this from every group, right?
Like almost the only thing that unites all of these different groups of Americans is that understanding.
Things are going bad.
That seems to be almost the, you know, when you look at, you know, you'll see these things where even just going like Fox News, MSNBC, where there'll be like an event that happens and you look at Fox News' response to it and MSNBC's response to it.
And this is kind of like a hack, obvious observation at this point.
But they'll be like, they're living in just two different realities.
Like they see a completely different event and they see a completely different, like, and they're both looking at the same thing.
And that's just the cable news channels.
Then there's all these different, you know, subgroups and outside groups, you know, online and just in communities and stuff like that.
But you'd see like how many people, you know, like the story of 2020 and the response to COVID, if you go to like some, I mean, I'm talking about like, forget politics, forget the internet.
If you just go talk to people in your neighborhood, in your town, depending on whether you live in a little red town or you live in like a big city or something like that, the story is completely different.
I mean, there's one side whose story is like, okay, everyone freaked out.
The Democrats shut down.
Like if you'd go in like a red Trump supporting rural town, the Democrats freaked out.
They wanted to tank the economy to get Donald Trump out of there.
I don't need no stupid masks.
These masks don't even do anything.
They're trying to force the vaccine on people.
They destroyed all of these jobs.
This is what the disaster was.
The other side, you go talk to left-leaning people in a big city.
It's like Donald Trump mismanaged the crisis.
We didn't act enough.
If only we had followed the science.
If only more people would get vaccinated.
I mean, they have absolutely completely different narratives about the reality that we're all living in.
They see it in completely different ways.
CNN will give you a version of reality that is completely different from what Fox News will give you.
Commentators online, the left ones, will have a completely different view than the right-wing ones, right?
Even though we're talking about the same thing.
But what is the one thing that binds everybody together?
That it was a disaster, right?
That's almost the only thing that everybody is in this together.
If you ask the most conservative right-wingers, they will tell you why this country has been lost, why everything has been destroyed.
It's the ruling elite.
It's critical race theory.
It's blah, blah, blah, blah.
It's pedophiles in Washington, and that not enough people are sleeping on my pillows to ward away the demons.
Well, that is, it doesn't hurt.
Okay?
So they have a point.
That's why people have neck pain.
It's the demons.
They come into your house at night and they infect your mind and tell you to go touch kids.
And the more power you have, the more powerful the demons are.
So you got to buy my pillow.
And luckily, it's not August yet, so Trump still might be coming back.
Yeah.
Well, that's right.
Trump could be back in everywhere.
Trump might be back in by the end of this podcast.
I check every time we get off the air to see.
Is he back in yet?
All right, not yet.
So anyway, so they've got their story about why the country is lost, right?
And what does the left wing have?
A story of racism and blah, you know, whatever.
But it's all bad.
Like, almost no one, I shouldn't say no one, but none of these groups are actually stepping up and like making the argument that the country's great and like everything's going well.
And there's no, you know, and then, of course, libertarians, although we have our own narrative, which I'm the most sympathetic to.
It's like, you know, the rise of big government and the wars and the debt and all these other things.
But everyone's story is about how this isn't going good.
So that's at least something that everybody can kind of say.
No one is really making the argument that the 21st century has gone really well.
That this country is in a really stable, great place.
That just doesn't really seem to be.
I don't see anybody pushing that narrative.
And if they are, they're probably not taken very seriously for good reason.
But I guess what's interesting to look back on it is to try to focus on what it is that actually caused this mess.
And one of the things that's kind of about people around our age is that we were really, we were kids through a lot of this stuff being laid down.
Now, of course, the big one that I said happened 10, 15 years before we were born, going off the gold standard.
But, you know, when you think about it, cable news was kind of created in our childhoods.
I think CNN might be a few years older than us.
CNN might have been created in like 1980, 1979, something like that.
But people weren't really watching it.
Not that many people had cable.
And then like MSNBC and Fox News, they, I'm pretty sure, were both created in the 90s.
These were like, this was a new thing when we were kids that the kind of The corporate press as we know it came onto your TV all the time.
Not just like for an hour at night, but all the time.
Yeah, CNN was 1980.
Okay.
And then I'm pretty sure the other two, MSNBC and Fox, would have been in the 90s.
But so this was a very new thing.
And we had that.
And we also, and this is really what set the stage for ruining the 21st century, was George H.W. Bush after the Soviet Union fell.
And this is what, like, where, to me, the conservatives really lost their way, where the Republicans, I mean, they've lost their way through the whole Cold War, but when they had the opportunity to regain their way and did not, is that after the fall of the Soviet Union and the Cold War is over, George H.W. Bush decided, instead of declaring victory and having a peace dividend and saying, okay, we can come home now, he decided, no,
we got to go fight a war in Iraq because Saddam Hussein had some slant drilling conflict, you know, with Kuwait.
The most ridiculous of reasons to go to war.
And so we go to war in Iraq.
And then, of course, the war continues essentially under Bill Clinton, who's bombing Iraq, putting on these brutal sanctions.
And throughout this whole process, and of course, we're getting involved all over the Middle East.
We're getting more involved.
This is because of the bombing campaigns under Clinton.
This is when we start expanding the bases in Saudi Arabia in 1979, earlier than preceding this, is when the Iranians had their revolution.
We're funding both sides of that war.
And we get ourselves locked into this situation that really fucking pisses off.
This is the bombing campaign of Iraq in the 90s and the sanctions and all of that and the bases on Saudi Arabia.
And well, right there, you've got two of the reasons that Osama bin Laden listed for 9-11.
So we really pissed off Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan's Afghan fighting force.
And then we end up dealing with 9-11.
We go into all of these wars and the wars that are still persisting today that Joe Biden is saying he's going to end on September 11th.
But count me as skeptical.
And I think that this, mixed with the growth of government, has really been at the center of why everyone knows something's wrong.
And that this really just did so much to destroy the backbone of this country.
And that's the state that we're in now.
So on America's birthday, you look around and it seems like the only thing that there's consensus on in the country is that we are on a bad path.
And it's a shame.
You know, it's like a sad thing because, like I said before, I'm really not, I'm not in the group of people who hate the country.
I love this country.
I really do.
One of my favorite things about my line of work is that I've gotten to travel around this country a lot.
And I really love it.
I think it's great.
I think it's filled with a lot of great people and a lot of great traditions and communities and towns and cities.
And there's just so many great ways to live your life in this country.
And it's a real shame that on this country's birthday, you look around and you go, man, I think the only thing that we're united by is our agreement that this whole thing is going in a real bad direction.
At the very least, I think people should realize the role that monetary policy and foreign policy and just government intrusion in general play in all of this.
Because from my perspective, that's the driving cause, the driving cause of all of it.
It's the reason why we all know something's going wrong.
Anyway, any thoughts?
No, other than I think it's all financial, which we've already said.
That's it.
But what's interesting is that so many people look at it and think we just got to be spending more.
And they don't realize that it's strange to be spending as much as we are and being as socialized as we are.
And if you're not happy with this, I mean, how much further are you really looking to push it?
Yeah, that is, it is pretty unbelievable that people can always think the problem is that we just haven't gone further, further in this direction.
But yeah, that's a wild take.
But some people very sincerely believe that Joe Biden, you'll see like Joe Biden, the spending levels already that he's already going to get.
And then he'll push for a little bit more.
And people will be like, the progressives will be complaining, he can't get anything done.
And you're like, I mean, what more do you think he can do?
You're looking at you're like, but we still don't have universal basic health care and the free government childcare doesn't take them right when they're born and the retirement's not good enough.
And it's like, well, you know, at what point, like, what would we have to spend that you think you'd be happy?
And that all presumes that it's not a Ponzi scheme, that none of this was actually affordable and the bill is going to come due at some point.
Well, isn't it like a weird way to look at it?
Because you almost always, and this is the nature of progressives, is that they always, like, they're always going for a little bit more, right?
Like, whatever you have, it's this, it's, they're not the outright socialist commies who are saying we want the revolution right now.
The progressives are saying we want a little more, a little more, a little more.
And so it always has a veneer of moderation to it, right?
Because all we're asking for is a little bit more, you know?
But if you take a step back and zoom out and you see it, you're like, Jesus Christ, at what point would you say we have enough of this?
I mean, even if you think about like, if you really zoom out, like on like a hundred year intervals and you were to say like, so there were these people like around the time of like Horace Mann or something like that who are pushing the idea of government school, right?
Like this is what we should have.
We should, every state should have public schools and the government should be in the business of educating the children.
And when you see these people like now who are like, well, we need universal pre-K or whatever that they're trying to push.
And you'd be like, you got universal K through 12.
Like you got government schools for five-year-olds through 18-year-olds.
And then after having that, you'd be like, you know, if you were looking at it from the perspective of before there were public schools, if you're a public school advocate, this is the biggest victory you could imagine, right?
Universal Education to Age 1800:01:26
You got everything you wanted.
And then they're like, make it four.
Five to 18 is not really enough.
We need four to 18.
And so it always has this kind of illusion of being reasonable, but they're always asking for a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more.
And yeah, when you start to see, you know, where we're at with interest rates and money printing and fiscal policy, government spending, you're like, dude, how much more do you think you can ask for?
And that's kind of the point we're at now.
How much more of this can we actually sustain?
Anyway, I hope everyone had a good 4th of July.
Hope you had some burgers and dogs, watch some fireworks, and celebrate the good things about this country because there still are a lot of really great things about the country.
And I love this country.
God bless America.
There you go.
Christian Conservative Podcast, number one.
Let's plug that Rochester date.
It's going to be August 26th to the 28th.
It's called Comedy at the Carlson.
It's up in Rochester.
And then I had Boston, July 17th, and Nashville, August 14th.
Hell yeah.
And don't forget this Friday.
Come out, see me and Louis J. Gomez co-headlighting at the Comedy Connection in Providence, Rhode Island.