Dave Smith critiques Keynesian economics and Federal Reserve policies, arguing they inflate money to enrich speculators while punishing savers through distorted housing and healthcare markets. He predicts the Afghanistan withdrawal will involve private contractors rather than a clean exit by September 11th. Furthermore, Smith defends Tucker Carlson against media dismissal, asserting that NSA surveillance of Carlson specifically targets his investigations into the military-industrial complex and January 6th events, unlike spying on pro-establishment figures like Rachel Maddow. Ultimately, the episode suggests mainstream outlets suppress truth to protect the national security state's power. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Welcome to Freedom Fest00:02:03
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, Dave Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I'm Dave Smith.
He is Robbie the Fire Bernstein, the king of the caulks.
What's up, my brother?
How you feeling?
Nothing much, dude.
How are you?
Doing good, doing good.
Thank you for moving this episode a little bit earlier today, earlier than we normally record, because I got to go get ready to go out to Providence, Rhode Island tonight, one night only with Louis J. Gomez.
I don't know why I even bother plugging it because by the time this is out, it's too late.
You missed it.
And it was okay.
We got some other stuff coming up.
Isn't that right, Rob?
That's right.
Out in August.
I believe the weekend is August 26th.
Comedy at the Carlson.
We will be in Rochester.
We also just got a date on the books for Washington, D.C., August 8th.
We're going to be doing a live podcast and stand-up show.
I think 7 o'clock stand-up show, 9 o'clock live podcasting come for the whole evening.
And then I've got some reports tour up in Boston and Nashville.
Hit me up for tickets.
All right.
And you got Freedom Fest.
And of course, I'll be hosting Freedom Fest.
Yeah, come check that out.
I believe there's still some tickets available.
So if you want to come check that out, only a couple weeks away, Freedom Fest, baby.
DC, though, we're going to the belly of the beast.
We're going to change every, we're going to bring the real politicians in.
Nancy Pelosi, she'll be a guest appearance on the live part of the problem.
We do not advocate leading an insurrection while you're there.
Bring your mind.
We'll control you.
Pillow fight.
That's the next insurrection is done with pillows.
Inflation and Wealth Redistribution00:15:16
They'll never see it coming.
The whole Capitol police were just hysterically laughing.
They were rendered defenseless.
Yeah.
All right.
So there are a couple things that are on my mind today.
I wanted to talk about this CNBC article that was just put out yesterday.
And it's about inflation.
And man, it's unbelievable that they're even coming out with this line.
CNBC is bad.
Don't get me wrong.
And they've always been bad.
But they at least, you know, there's this thing that they'll have with CNBC.
And this is true with financial reporting in general.
It's true in the Wall Street Journal and it's true in a lot of these other kind of like mainstream establishment financial, you know, when you read the finance section and stuff like that.
They have a lot of people who are very smart, who know the market very well.
Now, what they don't spend a lot of time in is theory or the bigger picture.
You're never really getting like questioning of, you know, Keynesian economics or questioning of, you know, should we even have this type of crazy, easy money, you know, economy.
It's usually just breaking down the realities of what's happening here.
Like, oh, but sometimes they'll be very smart, people who really know it.
Now, they did all completely miss the 2008 crash.
So I don't want to give them too much credit, but no pun intended.
But they will be, you know, breaking down how the markets are going to respond to what the Fed chairman's going to say tomorrow, things like that.
And they're people who know the markets very well.
But this, so just to be clear, even for them, And I'm not giving them a lot of credit, but I thought this was like a new low.
And it gets at an issue that's pretty damn important.
And that is, of course, inflation.
And I think it's something that particularly free market libertarian types have to really focus on because inflation has become already and is going to become more and more a real issue that people are really concerned about.
This is one of those issues where it's not some abstraction.
It's not something that we care about, that very few real regular people actually care about.
This is something that really affects everyone.
It affects, I suppose, the super rich in a positive way, but everyone else pretty much has affected nature.
How does it help the super, it just helps the super indebted?
How does it help the super rich?
Well, the super rich, we could get into this in a minute, but no, inflation is good for the super rich.
And usually it's because they get the new money earlier.
And so they basically end up buying up assets and then the assets appreciate.
So inflation is good if you own a lot of stuff.
You know, I mean, like there are certain pockets of people who benefit from inflation, but we'll get into that in a second.
But the rising costs of just about everything are a real issue that affect regular Americans.
And just about no one outside of libertarians has anything to say about it.
That's a little bit overstated, but not that much.
None of them really get at the source of the problem, or almost none of them do.
And there are some things like this.
And this was one of the issues that I loved so much about the Ron Paul campaigns was that there were these things that he would do.
And this is, by the way, why I think the Libertarian Party, or a large part of the reason why I think the Libertarian Party is a worthwhile endeavor and that the Mises Caucus LP strategy is a worthwhile endeavor is because much like when Ron Paul ran, you can't necessarily win the White House or win these presidential races.
And it's not that you're going to persuade a majority of the country to be Rothbardian and CAPS.
Like that's certainly not going to happen.
You can persuade more than we have already, and that's helpful no matter what the long-term strategy is.
It's better to have more people.
But what you can do is force other people to address issues.
So when Ron Paul was running in 2008 and 2012, he would constantly be bringing up the Federal Reserve and how the easy money policy created the boom and the bust and how inflation is robbing the middle class and the working class of their wealth and all of these things.
Now, if Ron Paul wasn't on that stage, it's not as if the other candidates would have been like, well, here's what we think about the Federal Reserve, or here's why we think the interest rates should be dictated by the Fed funds rate, you know, or the Federal Reserve should control the discount rate and target the Fed fund rate.
And here's why, they just simply wouldn't have talked about it.
Like, it just wouldn't come up ever.
Like, no one, they're, if they had their drothers, we would just never discuss the central bank.
Like, we would talk all day long about the economy and never mention this central aspect of it.
Like, that just wouldn't come up.
And you see this all the time with, you know, like, look, when Trump and Joe Biden were in the debates or when they were campaigning against each other, kind of.
I don't even know if you could call what Joe Biden did campaigning.
I mean, we were just coming off this year of these gigantic corporate bailouts.
There's literally no discussion about it.
The discussion was just about who's going to have the more generous package to, you know, like to save the country.
Both of the major party candidates were like, there's this unspoken agreement where they know it just makes both of them look bad because they're both on board with the corporate bailouts.
So they're like, we're just not going to talk about this.
We're just going to talk about this in the narrow window of the economy is bad and who's going to do more for relief.
Well, you say, I want $2,000 checks, or you only wanted $1,400 checks.
And that's it.
They're never going to talk about justifying giving billionaires welfare.
That's not even going to come up.
So there's a lot of these topics where it's like they'd almost, if they had their way, their preference would be to never discuss them at all.
And if they ever do discuss them, they'll discuss them in a very narrow way.
And so what you can do as an outsider in this game is kind of force people to talk about the shit you want them to talk about.
And inflation is one that I think is going to be very hard for them to avoid talking about because people feel it.
And it's a fun one because inflation is the one topic they can't go, well, government just needs to spend more.
If we just spend more, then we can get this thing moving.
It's like, no, that's exactly the issue.
So that's a fun one for libertarians.
Yeah, well, that certainly is a big part of the issue.
But I think more specifically, it's government creating new money, which is really that is the Messesian-Austrian definition of inflation, which we've, you know, we've talked about many times before on the show, but it's worth it just to go over.
Oh, yeah, just turn yours down a little bit.
But just to be clear, right?
The Austrian economists define inflation as the creation of new money, which I think technically mainstream economists still do.
I'm not sure.
They never use it that way in like, you know, in articles and stuff.
But if you take, at least this is what I've been told, I don't know if this has changed in the last few years, but if you take like a Series 6 or a Series 7, what do they call it, license test, the correct answer to like, what is inflation is still more money chasing the same amount of goods or something like that.
It's not prices going up.
Even though, you know, people use the term price inflation, but when people in the corporate press or in government talk about inflation, what they are always talking about is prices going up.
This is why the CPI measures inflation, right?
Because we measure the prices.
And of course, there's other problems with the CPI, like that they don't really measure all prices, but that's how they define inflation.
And it's how I think most laymen think about inflation.
Like, are my prices going up?
But as we've mentioned before, this is a very flawed, limited way to think about inflation.
It's just not accurate.
I mean, the example that I always love to give is that if you were in a situation, let's say where you were about to have some price deflation, right?
Like, let's just say that this awful thing that they're always terrified of, according to the Federal Reserve, right, is always the worst thing that could happen.
But let's just say the price of housing came down a bunch.
Houses were much more affordable.
And education was much more affordable.
And healthcare was much more affordable.
And, you know, go down the list of daycare and say, you know, food and energy and all these things.
They were going to be much more affordable.
Now, a normal person looking at that, you may not see what's inherently a disaster about that.
Now, I'm not trying to pretend that there's no negative aspects to like, okay, yeah, I mean, if you have stock in like an energy company or something like that, then maybe it's not worth as much if the price of energy goes down, you know.
But to most normal people, well, you know, housing, healthcare, energy, food, all being more affordable seems like a pretty good thing, right?
So let's say you were in a situation where all of that was about to happen.
All of these prices were about to come down.
Let's just say, for the sake of argument, they're all, just to make this a clear, easy example, they're all at $10 right now, and they were going to come down to $5.
Make your life a lot easier.
But then the government prints a ton of money, and so they stay at $10, right?
They were going to come down to $5, but they stay at $10 because the government printed all this new money and we have all of this inflation.
Well, if you're just measuring the prices, you would say there was zero inflation, right?
Because it was $10 and it stayed at $10.
If you're just measuring the CPI, of course, leave out for the fact that the CPI doesn't account for housing or energy or any of that shit.
But if you're just measuring the prices, you'd say there's been zero inflation here.
But if you look at the money creation, you'd say, oh, no, no, no, there's been a ton of inflation.
And which one of those would more accurately describe what happened?
Well, obviously looking at the money, because the prices may not have changed, but they were about to be much more affordable and now they've been kept out of reach.
So anyway, that's just one thing to have in the back of your head that anytime you're creating all this new money and credit, especially when it's going directly into the system and not just sitting in reserves at big banks, you've already created the inflation.
So the inflation has already been created and now we're just looking at what the effects of it are.
So just keep that in mind.
The distortion and the robbing of the American people has already happened.
It's just what's...
And the CPI doesn't measure when you pick up your cinnamon toast crunch and there's one piece of toast in there because they got to keep sizing it down to keep it at the same price.
Yeah, it's not a great bowl of cinnamon toast crunch.
That is true.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Okay, so the tweet that CNBC put out, which really is just, I mean, hilarious.
Like, so this is, I mean, wouldn't you just be embarrassed?
Like, even CNBC, and believe me, I'm not holding them up as like some great institution, but even they should have had some people who were embarrassed by this tweet.
Not just the article, but the tweet itself.
Like, I don't know.
It's so dumbass friendly.
It's like it's fun.
You're going to make way more money.
Yeah.
It's like monopoly terms.
All of a sudden you feel like you're rich until you can't buy anything.
It's great.
Yes.
Here you go.
Here's the tweet.
Inflation silver lining, higher salaries.
Inflation silver lining, higher salaries.
And the article is titled, It's Not Certain Rising Wages Will Be Enough to Outpace Inflation.
It's not certain.
Let me rephrase this for you.
It is certain that it's not.
By the way, by that logic, hyperinflation would be really fun.
All of a sudden, making a million dollars a quarter.
That's literally what I tweeted back in the day.
Oh, really?
That's great.
I said hyperinflation silver lining, crazy high salaries.
Like, just insane.
Isn't this wonderful?
So I like, I mean, that's literally getting paid in cash by the barrels.
Yes.
You know how much fun that would be showing up to the supermarket, barrels of cash?
Dude, I make a trillion dollars an hour.
This is bonkers.
We don't have to, I'm not going to read through the whole article.
You can go read it on your own.
It's really bad, really bad.
But that basically sums up where they're coming.
It's like, well, look, higher wages.
Now, look, I could see where, and this is why CNBC should be embarrassed because come on.
I mean, there's enough people there who are economically literate enough to know what nonsense it is to put something out like that, right?
But let me just say this.
I could understand where for someone who doesn't know anything about this, right?
The Real Cost of Printing Money00:15:39
Theoretically, this is purely in theory, right?
If you printed a whole bunch of money and divided it up proportionally to the money people already had, right?
Because that's key.
You couldn't just divide it up evenly because then you've got a pretty big redistribution of wealth going on.
But if you were to print a whole bunch of money and then you were to proportionally divide it up to what everybody has, right?
So let's just say hypothetically, they doubled the amount of money and then gave everyone the exact amount of money that they already have.
Okay.
And you could theoretically, under some model, have a thing where prices rose and wages rose and essentially everything is basically in the same, you know, in the same balance, right?
Like you're, let's just say hypothetically, your prices doubled and your wages doubled.
Then I guess you're really in the same position that you were in before, theoretically, in some universe that is not the universe we live in now.
But there's a few major problems in real life and how inflation actually works.
And maybe you might want to just ask yourself, I mean, you could look at the empirical evidence.
I mean, we've lived in an inflationary economy for substantially more than our entire lives.
But just look at the price of anything versus wages and see which rises faster.
And yeah, the only things you're going to find that where they either are deflationary or they don't rise as fast as wages are areas that are pretty much left to the market, you know, technology, you know, computers and stuff like that and cell phones and all that, this type of thing, where the technology improves rapidly and you can get a lot more for your money than you could just a few years ago.
Wages are not going to rise at the same pace that these assets rise.
And what happens in real life when you print a ton of money or in our system is it's all about who gets the money first.
Okay.
Because when you print a bunch of new money, prices, it's not like as soon as you print the money, the prices go up, right?
What happens is that more money goes into the economy.
It becomes the value of the dollar goes down and then prices adjust.
So there's always a period in between when you print the money and when the prices go up.
And in that period, whoever gets the new money benefits because they get the new money, they get to buy assets at the old prices and then they get the appreciation or the price inflation as the money comes up.
This is the main reason why rich people benefit from an inflationary system.
If you get the money first and you buy a lot of stuff with it, you buy it at the lower prices and then the prices come up.
So you get your value back as the value is robbed from everybody else, right?
Now, you could also understand where in theory, when you do this, it's perhaps not literally stealing from people, but in effect, it is no different than just taking the money out of your wallet.
If you have a certain amount of money in your wallet, and then the government just goes and prints a lot of money and makes the money less valuable, it's no different in effect than if they just took some of that money out of your wallet.
It's the money, you know, you might still have $20, but your $20 is only worth $15 of yesterday's dollars.
Then they might as well have just taken five from you.
It's all the same thing.
And so the question becomes: who gets the new money?
And who gets it first?
And where is this money that's printed up?
Where is it going?
Well, okay, yeah.
What happened in 2020 and so far in 2021?
They give crumbs to the peons and huge multi-billion dollar packages to big corporations.
So they get the money.
The banks, the big banks all get the money first and then they loan it out.
Well, they're not loaning it out to homeless people.
They're loaning it out to people with really good credit for the most part.
So those are the people who benefit from the new money being created.
It's not this model where it's distributed to everyone proportionally and your wages are going to go up at the same rate as the prices around you.
There's no conceivable way under our system that that could happen.
But there's other things that also throw this off, right?
So in this theoretical world, right, where we said theoretically you could print a lot of money and wages go up and prices also go up and you're basically in equilibrium, like you're in the same place, right?
Well, what do you not have?
Here, let me throw one thing into that mix and then you tell me how this works out.
A progressive income tax.
How does that work?
Now all of a sudden, if you're increasing your wages, right?
Even if prices are going up, but your wages are going up too, oh, you just got bumped up into the next tax bracket.
So now you're paying a higher percentage of your income to the government.
That kind of seems to throw the whole thing off, doesn't it?
Now all of a sudden, it's not an equal split.
Now all of a sudden the government can tax more of your money because it's nominally higher, even though there is no more value.
You're in essence making the same thing, but nominally you're making more, and so the government's going to tax you more.
So the inflationary game with the progressive income tax is just license for the government to steal more of your money.
Maybe that's why the government loves inflation and the progressive income tax so much.
Because it puts more of your income under taxation.
Makes sense to me.
Yeah.
Well, I'm just saying, if like if we use the model before where you go, you know, like if you doubled your income, but prices doubled also.
So theoretically in some market economy or something like that, you'd be like, oh, yeah, I'm in the same place.
My income's doubled, but my rent and food and all my bills are doubled too.
So I'm basically doing as good as I was before.
We'll throw a progressive income tax in there, and that is not true anymore.
Now you've been bumped up another tax bracket, and your new money is being taxed at this marginally higher rate.
So who won there?
The government.
You lost.
You still were robbed the other way.
But if you're a moron, you're like, hey, look, I'm making more money here.
Yes, that's right.
If you don't really think it through.
If you're a moron or at least CNB6.
Those are the two options.
That's when you go, oh, yeah, great.
We're making more money.
Look at that.
Now, this is, and of course, that's not even to get into all the business cycle theory stuff and the problems that the Federal Reserve creates by creating these artificial booms and busts, which is a very real problem.
But just the pure inflation aspect of it.
And then, of course, you can see, right, like people can look around and people were talking about, you know, oh, the price of lumber skyrocketed for a while and all these different prices that have gone up in all these areas.
And you're like, did your wages keep pace with all of that?
No, they didn't.
So why the hell would you think they're going to do that in the future?
What reason would you have to think that this is the case?
But it is, you know, like, and this, by the way, isn't just like some theoretical academic conversation.
Like, this has happened in everybody's lives.
I mean, like, my, I don't think my grandfather ever made more than $30,000 a year in his life.
If he ever did, it wasn't much more than that.
And he owned a home and, you know what I mean?
Like was in the middle class in America and everything.
And I mean, today, to make $30,000 and have a couple kids and have a wife who doesn't work, I mean, this is next to impossible.
You'd have to be somewhere.
I mean, you'd have to be somewhere really, really cheap in order to make that work.
Yeah.
And so it's just not, it's a different world and a different beast.
And it's all because of the price inflation.
And it's a real problem that people don't, you know, don't understand this and don't understand, you know, like I've talked about this before with the right-wing culture war stuff, where it's like so much of their problem is that they don't understand economics.
And they think that economics are almost like this kind of goofy sideshow that doesn't really matter.
You know, and a lot of the right-wing types will kind of be like, yeah, well, you're over there.
And they're not always completely wrong.
Like sometimes they have a point, but they're like, well, these libertarians are off being all autistic in the corner, thinking about like the economy.
We're watching our country fall apart.
We're watching the culture deteriorate and all of these things and Christianity evaporate and the family being destroyed and all of this.
And to some degree, they're right.
That is a fair criticism of some libertarians who are off there in their corner being autistic and almost acting like those other things don't matter.
And they do.
But the point to the right-wingers is that if you don't understand the relation between price inflation and that, then you're not going to solve that.
And so the prices don't just, it's not just randomly that prices inflate.
Like, for example, right, in the 2008 housing crash, when the interest rates were held real low after, I think it was like after 2000, 2001, when they really brought the interest rates down to like 1%, 1.5%.
And this was like the lowest Fed fund rate we had had in forever, right?
And then you see all of these people buying houses.
In fact, I believe the dot-com, double-check me on this, but I'm pretty sure that the dot-com bubble bursting around 99, 2000 was the first recession where housing prices went up by a lot in American history.
Like it was the first time, like usually during a recession, housing prices would stay level or drop a little bit, but housing prices went way up during the recession.
And a big part of this is because the interest rates were so low.
Well, why is it that interest rates would affect housing prices rather than other prices?
And like, well, the answer is because you borrow money to buy a house, right?
Like you don't borrow money to, I mean, I guess with credit cards, to some extent, you do, but not in the same way.
Almost everybody who buys a house borrows money to go buy the house.
So if interest rates are low, you're going to get more people borrowing money.
And housing happens to be a major thing that people borrow money to purchase.
So the same with the inflation, the new money ends up going where there's a lot of government involvement, a lot of government spending, a lot of government regulation, like all of these things.
And this is why, like I said before, you look at computers or cell phones, pretty much left to the free market.
TVs, pretty much left to the free market.
There's no government department of televisions or cell phones.
You know what I mean?
Like they're not really involved in hyper-regulating those fields the way they are with others.
And the prices, the technology improves and the prices either stay level or go down a little bit.
Or even if they go up, you're still getting a lot more for what you buy than you did.
You know, like I could buy an iPhone today for probably around the same price that the first iPhone was, maybe even cheaper than it was when it first came out.
And my iPhone does way more than that iPhone did.
And also the government's probably spying on me from it.
But that's aside.
But so where does the government spend all this money?
Where is the government over-regulate these industries?
Well, education, housing, healthcare, you know what I mean?
Daycare, look at any of these areas where the prices are through the roof.
And to the right-wing culture warriors, you're like, I mean, you can just ignore that if you want to, but then you're not even fighting this battle.
You know, if you want to know why we don't have a society of families anymore or why the rate of broken families is so high, and again, I'm not saying that there's no cultural component to that either.
That would be the stupid libertarian caricature, which a lot of people do fall into.
But it's a stupid caricature to think there's no economic impact there too.
Just take yourself through it.
What can your average 25, 30-year-old man, how is he going to buy a house, you know, buy a house, get health care, provide for his kids' education, make enough money that he can afford all these things and his wife doesn't have to work.
If she wants to have babies, that's going to interrupt it, at least for sure.
And this guy's 25, 30 year old is, not only can he not afford a house because the prices have been so inflated, he's still got to worry about his college debt.
Oh yeah, because that price was so inflated by the government.
So got to learn your economic lesson.
Sounds like the government's going to have to start providing more of these things for free.
I mean, you laid it out.
No one can afford it anymore.
So they're going to have to come through with health care, wives.
They can distribute those.
Give permits on babies.
They're going to have to figure out the free market's not doing it.
So that is to step in.
And that is right there, essentially, the one-two of our whole system, right?
Is the government comes in and wrecks something, and then the calls from the left are to socialize it.
And this is what happens: you blame capitalism for it being wrecked, and then you say, This is why we need socialism.
And it's the one-two punch of how the government always continues to expand its power.
It's like they break something, and then it's the old Harry Brown line: is that government breaks your leg and then offers you a crutch.
And then the debate becomes whether or not they should give you the crutch.
And you have a whole bunch of right-wingers over there who are like, you know, the Ben Shapiro types who are like, no, you don't get a crutch.
Pull yourself up.
That's what I did.
I just walked, put one foot in front of the other and walk.
You don't need a crutch, you know.
And then the left-wingers are like, hey, this guy's got a broken leg.
Of course, give him a crutch.
What are you heartless?
You know, and that's the debate.
Now, libertarians are the only ones who come in and go, like, whoa, whoa, whoa, who broke his leg?
Like, stop breaking legs.
That's the answer here.
And it's really that, like, that is the whole ballgame right there.
Is the government breaks your leg, and then they sit there and they go, well, only government can give you a crutch.
And you'd have to be heartless to not want this poor guy with a broken leg to get a crutch.
Hot Dogs, Beans, and Broken Legs00:02:41
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Now, there probably is a reasonable debate about after the guy's leg has been broken, whether or not he should get a crutch and how exactly he should get a crutch.
Should it be the government?
Should it be like private charity?
Whatever, you know?
But the obviously most important thing is to stop breaking people's legs.
And I think it's also important to point out that since last year, the price of baked beans are down.
That's officially from the White House.
So if you're concerned about price inflation, a lot of the 4th of July barbecue items, don't look at the gas price having to get to the store, but specifically hot dogs and beans for the ultra-poor.
You'll be okay.
Yeah, she goes, hot dogs, she went out of her way.
This Jen Sackey lady or whatever, she went out of her way to make the point that she was like, well, just so you know, 4th of July parties are down 4 cents or something.
Was it that she said?
They're down 4 cents from last year.
And then I think it was Peter Doosey.
It was one of the Fox News guys.
We're like, yeah, but like, I mean, gasoline is up and all these other things are up.
And are you really saying Americans are going to care that their hot dogs are four cents?
And she was like, well, maybe you don't like hot dogs, but you know, a lot of people like hot dogs and they're down four cents.
Like, wow.
We're getting calls from beans eaters nationwide who are celebrating their savings on beans.
But I'll tell you, there has been, and it goes back, I believe, to all the stuff we were saying before, that with the progressive income tax and with just the kind of elite class that basically own the government, they all really like the inflationary economy.
Why Debt Favors the Rich00:07:37
And I understand why.
I mean, it benefits them.
Well, they're also holding the most debt.
We should point that out as well, that, you know, they've got the most debt of anyone.
Who in the world has more debt than the U.S. government?
So, of course, they want to be able to pay you back in dollars that are worth less than what they borrowed.
No, that's an excellent point as well.
So it benefits them as well for that reason as well.
But of course, they like this inflationary economy for all of those reasons.
And like, whatever, okay, fine.
But the fact that they've actually convinced the American people that this is also better for you, like that you like that, that it's, oh, oh, it would be a real disaster if we had a deflationary economy.
Again, what free markets will bring naturally is a deflationary economy.
And this is a good thing.
This is the natural economic realities when you have free markets is that things become cheaper and cheaper.
Because as productivity improves, you can make things for less of a cost.
That's just, that's the way things work.
If you come up with a better production model, then you make things for cheaper.
Or you make them better at the same cost or something like that.
That's how it always works.
And that's literally the process of people getting wealthier.
That's it.
I mean, if you think about like whatever it may be, if you think about someone digging, you know, with like a spoon versus shovel, right?
You can dig a lot more effectively with a shovel.
With the same amount of energy, you could dig a much bigger hole.
So as technology improves, productivity improves.
And therefore, the same one guy with the same amount of work can do a much better job.
And so the job is cheaper.
You might need 10 guys to dig with spoons, that one guy, probably a lot more than 10.
But you get the point, right?
And so if you look at, and this is where America really still does have some history that has a value to it, which is not surprising why, you know, the left claims to just paint all of American history as like racism.
There's nothing else you need to learn about it, you know?
But as Milton Friedman used to say, and it was a really great point, he would point out that from 1865 to around 1910, so broadly speaking, between the Civil War and the First World War, okay, America had the freest economy in the history of the world, just economically speaking.
We had other problems, but economically speaking, you had no income tax, no central bank, almost no government spending.
I mean, like very, very low.
The federal government spent like, I forget what it is exactly, but it's like 2% of the national income, like nothing compared to what modern governments spent.
No regulatory state, no welfare state, none of this stuff.
I just try to imagine a world with no central bank, no income tax, no welfare state, no regulatory state, all of that.
And what you had in that period of time was the greatest rise in the standard of living for the average person in the history of the world.
And it built the wealthiest country that's ever existed.
Those are just facts of our history.
And in that time, you had price deflation.
Things got much cheaper because technology was improving and industry, agriculture, factories, all of this shit.
We had an industrial revolution.
It was a time when we were producing far more than ever could have been imagined before.
And so it was a lot cheaper.
And that's, you know, so all these people who try to scare you over, you know, the threat of a deflationary economy, it's all bullshit.
It's all a big fat racket that keeps the super rich rich and keeps the government more and more powerful.
On top of that, just like, you think the CNBC thing where you're like, it's like, oh, don't worry, you'll make up for it with rising wages when there's all this inflation.
Or you might, I guess, is their, you know, you might.
At least your wages will go up.
It's like, oh, how about how about people who are retired on a fixed income?
Like, yeah, it sucks for you.
Well, oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Sorry.
Forgot about you guys.
Yeah, that sucks.
You worked your whole life and put away some savings.
And oh, yeah, now the savings is worth half of what it was worth.
And that's the other thing that's so like insidious about these inflationary policies is that it punishes people who did the right thing.
You know what I mean?
Like it punishes the people who like saved.
Well, it's sensitive compulsive and spending and consuming because the most favorable thing you can do for yourself is basically be highly leveraged and in debt.
Because think about it.
I don't like being in debt.
It's just not something I enjoy.
I don't like that lifestyle.
I probably wouldn't even want to take, I know this is dumb, but I don't like the idea of having a mortgage on a house.
Like you're in the system.
I know that that's weird, but it's like when you got debt, you're in the system.
Like you don't, you're obligated to make X amount of money every single month.
Like you, you owe it.
Listen, I get it.
I'm probably going to buy a house in the near future.
But like there's, yeah, you owe a bank for 30 years.
You've entered into an agreement.
There's something to be said for that.
And but the flip side of that is you get to enjoy the house.
And if it's an inflationary environment, at the end of 30 years, your house is probably going to ride whatever that inflation was.
So it favors you to be indebted.
But that's the, you know what I mean?
That's the same thing where the system wants you to have to live that in-debt lifestyle.
Well, and just in general, as you said before, right?
I mean, if you, just any type of debt, you're going to benefit at least to some extent from the inflation, that your debt is going to be nominally the same, but in terms of actual value, you're going to have less debt that you owe.
So it's rewarding someone who goes into debt.
It's rewarding someone who's spent because they spend their money with the value still maintained and so they can buy enough assets that then the assets are more expensive later and the money is worth less.
And it punishes the people who save.
Like, who, who thinks that's wise, right?
Like, name these old, what was the old story of the ant and the grasshopper, the one where one of them saves?
I don't think I know that one.
No, one of them saves for the winter and one of them squanders all his stuff, you know?
And it's like, I don't know, in that story, the one who saves for the winter is the good guy.
Like, that's the smart thing to do.
Like, and now, so we've just decided that we're in the business of punishing the people who do the right thing.
And of course, the low interest rates have a major effect on this too, having low interest rates.
It's like, okay, so you're just, you're going to reward speculators and punish savers.
I mean, who would honestly look at the American economy right now and say, you know what the problem is?
So we just have too many people saving their money and not enough consumption and speculating.
That's the real problem in the U.S. economy right now.
We just don't consume and speculate enough, but we save.
We're such savers.
And the other thing that's infuriating is that the critique oftentimes from the far left and the far right of capitalism is that it creates this consumption, consumer economy.
Punishing Savers in America00:02:28
That's the critique.
It atomizes people.
It makes us into nothing but individual consumers.
And this is directly done by government policy that the free market types are opposing.
It's absurd to lay this at the feet of the free market.
The same way they try to lay like, or at least the hardcore, like the tankies will, try to lay the wars at the feet of capitalism.
Oh, look at capitalism.
It, you know, killed all these people in Iraq.
And you're like, well, I mean, it doesn't seem very laissez-faire of, you know, a government spending a trillion dollars a year to maintain an empire.
Like, no, that was the state killing force that went and did that.
That's not a voluntary exchange between two private firms, you know, like this is government involved.
Like that old NASA registry, but it's for killing one brown person in Iraq.
Yeah, there you go.
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Let's get back into the show.
All right.
So moving on.
There was a couple other things that I wanted to get to.
Alex Jones and Modern Propaganda00:15:24
Maybe I'll just say it quick because we probably won't have enough time to get to this too, but it does look like Joe Biden is serious about ending the war in Afghanistan.
I'm just going out on record.
I don't believe it.
I could be wrong.
He sounds like he really wants to end the war.
I don't believe the war will really be ended on September 11th.
I'm just having a tough time imagining that.
It's going to be something like either he'll make some move to pull some troops out, but leave some behind.
Or you just type in.
You just switch the spending.
You switch the spending from army troops.
They say, hey, we brought all the army troops home and then you pay the private military people instead.
It'll be that.
It'll be private contractors go in instead.
Or he'll leave some behind, some presents.
Then there'll be some type of excuse why we have to send people back in.
That's my guess.
I hope I'm wrong and I will give him credit if I am.
But I wanted to talk a little bit more about this Tucker Carlson versus the NSA versus the NSA.
People always give me shit for that.
I say verse instead of versus.
Tucker Carlson versus the NSA.
So as you remember, we did a show on this a few weeks ago.
Tucker Carlson came out, announced pretty explosive accusation that the NSA was spying on him and that he had this confirmed because he had a whistleblower within the NSA.
All he said was someone in the position to know And that they had read him his emails back.
Like, so they have my emails and they're monitoring them.
The NSA responded in a very strange way by saying, no, that's not true.
Tucker Carlson is not the target of any of our searches.
But as we mentioned, that's NSA language for not denying it because they could say someone else is the target and we just scooped up all of your information, you know, incidentally, as they refer to it.
But that doesn't mean, so in other words, they did not come out and say, we haven't been reading your emails or we haven't collected any information on Tucker Carlson.
They just said he wasn't the target.
But the media reaction to this, which really was just incredibly revealing, that you would think, no matter what the difference is from, say, CNN to Fox News or the Washington Post or New York Times, however different they might be from Tucker Carlson, even back in my day, you know, in the 80s and 90s or something like that, just to save face,
they would feign a little bit of outrage over that.
They would say, well, the government shouldn't be spying on journalists, even if they're journalists we don't really like.
But no more of that.
So the first phase was Tucker Carlson is Alex Jones.
This was the first phase of their response.
And our favorite little piggy did a nice little segment on that.
So we'll play a clip from that now.
Choose your own reality culture is pervading every corner of American life.
Choose your own reality.
If you want to believe that the pro-Trump riots of January 6th were instigated by the feds, you can choose a show that claims that is true.
You can choose a TV star that claims it's real.
If you want to believe the NSA is reading your favorite TV stars' emails, go right ahead.
He claims it's true.
The NSA denies it, of course, but for Tucker Carlson's fans, that's just further proof of the plot.
Carlson is a conspiracy monger, but he's far from the first.
As my colleague Oliver Darcy pointed out this week, Carlson is sounding more and more like InfoWars.
Let's pause it for a second.
So just already, right, it is this like choose your own reality, but I mean, it's really something.
They're just not even good at it anymore, which is really what's incredible.
They're not even good at propaganda.
They were good ones.
They were.
They were good at doing it.
It worked for a different culture.
I think our culture, even like when I was a kid in the 80s, okay, I use this sometimes as a measure, a measuring stick of culture of just how like how much more cynical we are now, how much more like prone to like irony and these kind of different forces.
So in the WWF, WWE now, but it was called WWF when I was a kid.
If you wanted a wrestler to be the good guy, the heel, you'd have him carry an American flag.
And if you wanted him to be the bad guy, you'd have him like some other flag.
And that was enough.
That was enough to get 30,000 people in the stands to go crazy chanting USA and the other guy was the bad guy.
And you remember how that flipped at some point in the WWF?
Like all of a sudden they started cheering for the bad guys.
I think it was like Stone Cold Steve Austin.
Like something flipped in our culture where we were like, yeah, how about we root for the bad guy?
You know what I mean?
Like there's just like a different, a more cynical thing going on.
And for the 70s and the 80s and even the 90s, the corporate press kind of was in touch with what would move the average American.
Like, how do we do propaganda?
Well, we do it like this.
You know, we've got to go see about national security issues in Iraq or whatever, blah, blah, blah.
And people kind of buy it.
Yeah, I've got to do that.
Nowadays, they're like, oh, these people are all lying to me.
It's just kind of, they're more cynical about it.
I think it's good.
Whether it's good or not, it might have its bad aspects, but it's the reality.
And so we got to work with it.
But this stuff where he comes out and it's just like, choose your own reality.
If you want to believe that the feds led the January 6th, you know, insurrection, and you want to believe that Tucker Carlson's doing this, I mean, the NSA denied it, but whatever.
You know, he's a propagandist and he's a conspiracy theorist.
So there you go.
And you're like, okay, yeah, but Tucker didn't just assert these things happened, right?
Like, he at least had a reason for asserting them.
Now, maybe he's wrong about both, but Brian Stelter doesn't even attempt to take it on.
Like, I'm not even going to try to take this on and explain to you why not.
It's just like the fucking, like, nope, the feds didn't do that.
Obviously, on its face, that's ridiculous.
And you're like, okay, but Tucker was making the point that they were claiming that there was law enforcement involved and that certain people haven't been prosecuted and the feds do have a long history of doing this.
So again, I'm not saying that's proof, but you have to at least deal with that if you're going to try to debunk it.
And then with the NSA thing, you're like, oh, no, you fucking liar.
They actually didn't deny it.
They didn't deny it.
A denial would have been, we have not read any of Tucker Carlson's emails.
They specifically didn't say that.
But anyway, this is the next level of propaganda now.
Look at this.
This is the state of the corporate press.
By the way, this is a huge white pill.
This is a reason to be optimistic.
Look at this is what they're reduced to.
Let's play the clip thing, including in getting a vaccine.
Everybody's got family that got killed or got sick from a vaccine.
So FBI operatives were organizing the attack on the Capitol on January 6th, according to government documents.
It is overwhelming.
The evidence that criminal elements of the federal government provocateur and staged January 6th.
All right.
Oliver Darcy is back with me.
I think the sound speaks for itself.
Is it a stretch to say that Tucker Carlson is the new?
I mean, it speaks for itself.
I mean, look at that.
I mean, here's two sentences from each of them.
And they're similar.
They both had a tie on.
I think that speaks for itself, doesn't it?
Like, what?
That is your level of discrediting someone?
Is just playing one isolated sentence from one and from the other that are kind of similar.
You could do this with any two human beings who have ever lived.
This is literally like going like Hitler was a vegetarian.
And so is your sister.
So I'm just saying.
I mean, I think the evidence speaks for itself.
No, that's not evidence.
That was nothing.
Literally nothing.
This is what they're reduced to.
If you got footage of Alex Jones going, Harvey Weinstein shouldn't have touched those kids.
And then all of a sudden you get Brian Stelter saying the same thing.
Oh, look, he's getting his talking points from Alex Jones.
They're basically the same.
They're both against kid touching.
Oh, look at that.
You both said you love America.
Ooh.
Yeah, right.
Like, I mean, you could, if you felt like doing that, go through all day long and find things that and even more specifically political things.
You can find things that he said about George W. Bush and absolutely, you know, say all of MSNBC is the same as Alex Jones.
By the way, use selective editing for Alex Jones.
You can get a hell of a highlight reel of him being right about stuff.
Yeah.
That guy does a lot of talking.
You want to just start cutting highlights and random sentences to make him look like an oracle.
Yeah, but it's so like it's not even, you know, like most reasonable thinking people know that guilt by association is bullshit, right?
So to just say that you're like, if you worked with someone else who does bad things or you were friends with someone else who does bad things, that doesn't make you guilty of anything, right?
Like guilt by association is bullshit.
That's like some fucking, like, you know, what the left would claim was a McCarthyite tactic or something like that, right?
Like that, at least the left back in the day would have claimed that.
But this isn't even guilt by association.
They're not even saying like, oh, Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson are friends or they work together or they're colleagues.
They're literally just saying they said some things that sounded alike a couple times.
And again, as you pointed out, I mean, look, Alex Jones has been right about a lot of important things.
You know, he's been wrong about some things and made some pretty wild claims.
But he's been right about.
Blizzard's calling causing 9-11.
He called that one.
He did call that one.
And that turned out.
And on the record, I'll say I was skeptical at first.
But when you're right, you're right.
But to just have this thing where you go like, so we've all obviously, right, smeared Alex Jones to the point that he is just toxic.
We've all decided this person is the worst human being in the world.
And so now all we have to do is link one guy to him.
Isn't that like an interesting tactic right now?
Like, right?
Like, so that's the new thing now.
You put the pieces together.
So you're just like this guy who we've all established as bad guy.
It's a very weird tactic.
And then he's going to open it with like there's just no self-awareness with Brian Stelter.
Or he's just, you know.
Hey, maybe Alex Jones is getting some press.
Yeah.
Maybe the CNN listeners forgot about him and they're like, oh shit, he's making some good points too.
Yeah, there you go.
But just to like start by saying, it's choose your own reality.
It's like, well, yeah, I mean, it kind of is.
It kind of is.
Like, you get to just choose this reality where this is some type of journalism.
So anyway, that's all I kind of wanted to play from there.
But so this was, it's really funny.
This changed so quickly.
Okay.
So this was the press response to Tucker Carlson.
This episode.
Well, I'm done with the video.
So this was the press response to Tucker Carlson's accusation that the NSA was spying on him.
And you see already like the difference between our response to it and the corporate press, you know, response to it.
But so that was their response was that, well, this is, okay, you're, oh, that's lad.
Okay, you're in Alex Jones territory now.
You know, use like the idea, oh, the government's spying on me.
Yeah, okay, sure.
The government's spying on you.
That's, that was the response.
This was, it was about a week and a half of that.
You're just insane.
This is Alex Jones conspiracy BS.
Two, just a couple days ago now, two days ago to be specific, Axios is reporting.
Axios journalist Jonathan Swan, Tucker Carlson was talking to US-based Kremlin intermediaries about setting up an interview with Putin shortly before he accused the NSA of spying on him.
U.S. government officials learned of this outreach, but that's where the details get cloudy.
So if you read the article, it's on Axios.
According to, as always, sources familiar with the conversation, Tucker Carlson was talking to US-based Kremlin intermediaries about setting up an interview with Vladimir Putin.
In other words, yeah, they were spying on him.
Oh, yeah, they were reading his emails.
Oh, no, it's not Alex Jones conspiracy anymore.
Now it's just justified spying on a journalist because he tried to do journalism.
So it's really unbelievable how in just the span of a week, it goes from, oh, look, I mean, he said this sentence and Alex Jones said this sentence to a week later being, well, yeah, I mean, okay, obviously they are spying on him, but Russia?
So now is that okay?
So all of a sudden now you're going to say, are you really reduced to the point where you're going to argue that, yeah, the government shouldn't just be spying on journalists who are trying to do journalism, right?
Because we'd all kind of see the problem with that.
But if that journalism includes interviewing a foreign leader, then yeah, sure, spy on that guy.
Wouldn't that be like kind of the most important journalism to not want the federal government to spy on?
You know, he's talking to the other guy who between our two countries have like 90% of the nuclear weaponry in the world.
So we're going to have to have the national security state spying on that.
I mean, look, who the hell knows about this?
Who even knows, you know, all this sources familiar, you know, reporting.
But it does seem at least like it's an admission from some sources familiar that like, yeah, yeah, we know the NSA is spying on them, on Tucker Carlson was reading his emails because they probably know that he's probably got some evidence of this and that they're not going to be able to just call him Alex Jones forever.
I wonder if Republican senators might take that up at all.
I know I saw Matt Gates and something yelling about it, but he's an idiot, so that doesn't mean much.
Gates would be like one of the guys who would, if anyone would.
But yeah, if it that the kind of more right-wing nationalist-y type Republicans might be the ones to my boy Jim Jordan.
Yeah, maybe, maybe even Jim Jordan, he'd probably be the most establishment Republican you could get.
They'll say some stuff and never do anything.
And then when it comes time to vote on it, probably most of them will vote the wrong way, you know, which happened all the time.
Calling Out Justin Amash00:02:51
And, you know, I gave Justin Amash some criticism for his handling of the Mueller situation and his calls for Trump's impeachment afterward.
And I, you know, I stand by everything I say there.
But he did have a completely fair point, a completely fair counter to the kind of like Devin Nunes and some of these other Trump loyalist Republicans who would call him out for siding with the deep state.
And Justin Amash, my words, not his, but Justin Amaj would basically be like, hey, motherfucker, I voted against it.
You voted for it.
So there is like people like me and you, other libertarians, can call out Justin Amash and say, hey, man, like in that moment, you really shouldn't have sided with the deep state who was just spying on a duly elected president and like lying to the American people and sabotaging his campaign and his presidency, especially when his stated goal was to end wars.
You know what I mean?
So like I still stand by that criticism.
But Justin Amaj has every right to say, hey, listen, Republicans who voted to expand NSA spying and Donald Trump who signed it into law, get off my back about criticism.
If it was up to me, if there were 500 Justin Amashes in Congress, we wouldn't have any of this to begin with.
So there's a very fair point on his side to be made with all of that.
Anyway, all I'll just say at the end of this, too, is that like, look, you can never remove this from the point that I've made over and over again, right?
Tucker Carlson is the biggest guy on cable news, and he is the biggest outspoken critic of the national security state.
So when the national security state is spying on him, that means something.
They wouldn't be worried about Rachel Maddow interviewing Putin.
Because she's just going to ask him a million questions about, was he in bed with Donald Trump or something like that, you know?
Those interviews are boring anyway, because it's like watching a kid just go, I know you are, but what am I?
He just sits there with the, no, that's what you do.
You kill people.
You don't kill people.
But Tucker Carlson, a critic of the entire military-industrial complex, that interview with Putin, first off, they don't like.
They have to do something to try to stop.
But more importantly, might actually be interesting, might actually be useful.
Might actually be good journalism.
Tucker will sit there and go, so we committed a bunch of these murders.
What do you think about that?
He'll be like, I don't like you, my dear.
I don't like it.
The sirens are coming for us right now.
It's a great, great timing for sirens to be there.
You go, and that's where we crossed the line.
And all these years, all these hundreds of episodes, that was the one where they're like, all right, you guys are over the target now.
We got to bring you down.
All right.
We got to wrap the show up there.
Thank you guys very much for listening.
Thank you, Robbie the Fire Bernstein, for always being the king of the caulks.