Part Of The Problem - Dave Smith - The Media Vs Javier Milei
Aired: 2024-01-25
Duration: 01:02:18


=== Rolling Back The State (03:23) ===

[00:00:00]  Fill her up.
[00:00:02]  You are listening to the gas human.
[00:00:08]  We need to roll back the state.
[00:00:10]  We spy on all of our own citizens.
[00:00:12]  Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
[00:00:16]  If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
[00:00:21]  Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
[00:00:33]  What's up, everybody?
[00:00:34]  Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
[00:00:36]  I am Dave Smith, and he, of course, is Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
[00:00:40]  What's up, brother?
[00:00:41]  How you feeling today?
[00:00:42]  I had a nice time out in California.
[00:00:43]  Good to be back out on the road.
[00:00:45]  The Brea Improv was just an excellent club.
[00:00:49]  I'll tell you, that is one of the best rooms we've worked.
[00:00:54]  At least I thought so.
[00:00:56]  Just great.
[00:00:57]  And it's a cool area.
[00:00:58]  Yeah.
[00:00:59]  Thank you very much to everybody who came out.
[00:01:01]  It was a lot of fun.
[00:01:02]  And now we're looking forward to in just a couple of days here, we'll be up in Bridgeport, Connecticut at the Stress Factory.
[00:01:09]  So that should be a lot of fun too.
[00:01:10]  And then we got a lot of stuff coming up.
[00:01:12]  ComicDave Smith.com for all me and Robbie's stand-up gigs and RobbyTheFire.com for Rob's solo headlining shows.
[00:01:20]  Okay, so we are recording in the early afternoon on the day of the New Hampshire primaries.
[00:01:29]  So obviously we'll get those results later on today.
[00:01:33]  And obviously we're all rooting against Nikki Haley.
[00:01:36]  But aside from that, maybe I'll try to do our schedule's a little messed up.
[00:01:39]  So maybe I'll try to do a live stream tomorrow if I can.
[00:01:43]  I'm interviewing Keith Knight later today.
[00:01:45]  So maybe I'll try to do jump on YouTube and just give some like some reactions to that before the our last episode of the week.
[00:01:52]  But anyway, yeah, so within the next show or within the next couple of days, we'll give you a breakdown of what we think of what happened out there in New Hampshire.
[00:02:01]  For today, there was something else that caught my eye that I wanted to respond to.
[00:02:07]  And this was a piece on Breaking Points by Crystal Ball.
[00:02:13]  If you're not familiar with the show, Breaking Points is an independent news show.
[00:02:20]  They started together over on Cigar and Jetty and Crystal Ball.
[00:02:30]  And they were together over on The Hills show, and then they went independent.
[00:02:35]  And I just, I do want to say before getting into it, that I do, I like their show, and it is light years better than anything in the corporate press.
[00:02:45]  They've been really great on the Israel war in Gaza.
[00:02:49]  This is a show that's had, they've had Scott Horton on, Daryl Cooper on multiple times.
[00:02:56]  They've had Norman Finkelstein on.
[00:02:59]  And they themselves, both Cigar and Crystal, are very solid on that war.
[00:03:04]  So I have a lot of respect for them.
[00:03:08]  But, you know, Crystal is a leftist.
[00:03:11]  And when leftists start talking about economics, it's just can get frustrating.
[00:03:15]  So she did, they do.
[00:03:17]  They have uh guests on their show, and then they go back and forth sometimes and then each of them will have monologues uh, sometimes.

=== Leftists And Economics (09:40) ===

[00:03:24]  So uh, Crystal Ball did a monologue um, on Javier Malay's speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, which we were just talking about on on the last episode, and so anyway, let's get into it, because there's going to be a lot to discuss here.
[00:03:39]  You know, before we even play it, I will say part of the reason why, when I saw this right away, I was like, well, this is, we have to talk about this on the show is because it just kind of like brought me, it brought me back to so much of my roots in this political commentary game, which is like my frustration, my deep frustration with leftists that, because this is what I come from, like I'm not a guy.
[00:04:05]  I'm not like, oh, I was, you know, raised in Kansas or something like that.
[00:04:10]  And I inherited my granddaddy's farm from my daddy.
[00:04:14]  And we're all like, you know, like, I don't come from like a red conservative background.
[00:04:22]  I'm a Jewish kid born to a single mother in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
[00:04:27]  Like I come from the world of liberals.
[00:04:30]  And when I first discovered libertarianism and I got obsessed with it and started reading all types of like libertarian literature and a whole lot of Austrian economic literature, it was so compelling to me.
[00:04:44]  And it all was just so irrefutable and clearly correct.
[00:04:48]  And I remember having this thought that I think a lot of libertarians have this, where you first kind of discover this stuff.
[00:04:55]  And then in some way, you're like, oh, I'm going to tell everybody about this so that they have the same moment that I have.
[00:05:00]  And then you tell everybody about it.
[00:05:02]  And they're just like, ass, what?
[00:05:03]  What are you talking about?
[00:05:05]  But I thought, I thought to like lefties, this would be the perfect situation.
[00:05:12]  Like it's so obvious.
[00:05:13]  You're like, okay, well, look, here, you know, like, here are all your goals.
[00:05:17]  Well, all you got to get on board with is get on board with the program of drastic reductions in the size of government.
[00:05:22]  Because, you know, you guys care about the working class.
[00:05:25]  And this is so clearly how they rig the deck against the working class.
[00:05:29]  And also you, you hate all the evil stuff the government does, right?
[00:05:33]  So like no more wars, no more war on drugs, and the deck isn't rigged against you.
[00:05:38]  And even all of the social safety net stuff that you believe in, you can have all of it.
[00:05:42]  You just got to do it voluntarily.
[00:05:44]  Like you just can't force people into it.
[00:05:46]  And then that smooths out all the problems and there's no issue here, you know, and it's like, oh, this is everybody's going to get this.
[00:05:51]  And the left will love us for explaining this to them.
[00:05:54]  But that's not exactly how it goes.
[00:05:56]  And it's, I don't know, it's just, it's, um, it's shocking still to this day to me and frustrating how little left wingers care to even attempt to think about economics.
[00:06:08]  But anyway, that's just my preface for this.
[00:06:11]  Let's let's in a sign of the vapid, degraded, and pitiful nature of our public discourse, a facile speech seemingly written by a 15-year-old upon their first encounter with Ayn Rand has dazzled the world's billionaire class and quite a few way too online fanboys up to and including their leader, Elon Musk.
[00:06:29]  New Argentine president Javier Malay.
[00:06:32]  Let's just pause already right there.
[00:06:35]  Isn't it just such a like, I don't know, whatever.
[00:06:37]  It's just such an unfair way to discuss this.
[00:06:39]  And like the idea that Javier Malay is dazzling the billionaire class, I mean, I don't know really what evidence there is of that.
[00:06:47]  And to just say the only other people who liked it were these entirely too online bros or something like that.
[00:06:53]  I don't know.
[00:06:54]  I'm a real person who exists in real life and I loved the speech.
[00:06:57]  I thought it was phenomenal.
[00:07:00]  As we talked about on our last show.
[00:07:03]  But yeah, I don't know.
[00:07:04]  So anyway, this is just all of that was just boom girl laying down the diss track.
[00:07:09]  Yeah, it's just like just starting with these kind of petty insults.
[00:07:12]  And then there's something fairly amusing about calling him a child, saying, oh, it looks like this speech was given by a 15-year-old who just came in contact with Ayn Rand.
[00:07:23]  I mean, he gave a pretty detailed speech.
[00:07:25]  It was clearly an economist who was speaking to you.
[00:07:28]  I think it's much more 15-year-old to start your coverage of it this way with these kind of shallow insults.
[00:07:34]  But again, I'm saying I like Crystal Ball, nothing like against her, but it's weird to call somebody else a child while you start this with like the only people who like this were online bros.
[00:07:45]  And this is silliness.
[00:07:47]  So anyway, let's keep playing.
[00:07:50]  President Javier Malay took a break from banning protests, laying off thousands of workers and spiking inflation over 200% to come preach the gospel.
[00:07:59]  Pause it again here.
[00:08:01]  As I've said before, now, as I've said before on the show, I am not like an expert in the domestic, like political climate in Argentina.
[00:08:13]  So I'm not pretending to be one.
[00:08:14]  In fact, if someone wants to recommend, if there is a good expert who really wants to break this down, then fine.
[00:08:19]  But I will tell you right away that I know enough about economics to know that, well, first off, I do know that Argentina has been dealing with crazy inflation for a very long time.
[00:08:30]  I also know that whatever the inflation rate currently is now cannot be laid at the feet of Javier Malay.
[00:08:37]  It's just not how inflation works.
[00:08:38]  And that you're not going to have the guy has only been in there for a very short amount of time.
[00:08:43]  And that inflation is going to be affected by monetary policies that go back for the last few years.
[00:08:48]  And so to lay that at the feet of him is just unfair.
[00:08:52]  I also don't know where the inflation was before this or what, you know what I mean?
[00:08:56]  Like anyway, all of that's kind of silly.
[00:08:58]  And when she says laying off workers, yes, he's been laying off workers, but what specific type of workers?
[00:09:09]  Yes, government employees.
[00:09:11]  And so that's like a big difference.
[00:09:13]  It's between it sounding like he's just going in there and like firing somebody from some factory job.
[00:09:18]  No, he's firing people who are paid salaries in tax dollars, meaning those workers are by definition a burden on the rest of the working class.
[00:09:31]  So just a couple of quick points about that.
[00:09:33]  It's not exactly the same thing.
[00:09:35]  If we were to go, I'm sure even Crystal Ball would agree with me that if we were to go, say, fire a bunch of people who worked in the like at the FBI or the CIA or something like that, that's not exactly the same thing as going and just firing, you know, your aunt at the library.
[00:09:54]  So let's be clear about who he's firing.
[00:09:57]  I think that's worth pointing out.
[00:09:59]  All right, let's keep playing.
[00:10:07]  Okay, pause again.
[00:10:09]  Because this is what Crystal Ball and these left-wingers always try to do is they try to conflate libertarianism with neoliberalism, which are just not the same thing at all.
[00:10:21]  And in fact, if you actually listen to Javier Malay's speech, Rob, I know you listened to at least some of it.
[00:10:26]  His whole speech was basically saying that, look, there is libertarianism.
[00:10:34]  There is capitalism.
[00:10:36]  There is, as he explicitly said, the non-aggression principle and protection of property rights.
[00:10:41]  And then there is everything else.
[00:10:43]  And he was like, whether it's neoliberalism or fascism or communism or socialism or Keynesianism, these are all just different flavors of collectivism and centralized control.
[00:10:54]  And that's what I'm against.
[00:10:56]  And this is what I'm for.
[00:10:58]  And he was very clear about that.
[00:10:59]  So it's already just very sloppy to be conflating this as if he was praising neoliberalism.
[00:11:05]  Who was praising neoliberalism was everybody else there except this guy.
[00:11:10]  All right, let's keep playing.
[00:11:13]  At Davos, the world elite gathers alongside their political pawns, their media enablers and grifter wannabes to see what they can do to further extract global wealth, expand their monopolies and solidify control over world affairs.
[00:11:26]  These deals, which are the real action of the event, occur behind closed doors, while the public face of Davos is a fake do-gooderism, where the very people creating many of the problems of the world from war to hunger to climate catastrophe wring their hands about these very issues.
[00:11:42]  Apparently however, even this pretense of benevolence has become too much for the world's billionaire class, judging by the rapturous reception of Javier Malay.
[00:11:51]  World Economic Forum head Claus Schwab gave Malay a fawning introduction, lounging the quote new spirit he had brought to Argentina.
[00:11:59]  This new spirit, by the way, is just the same old neoliberal shock doctrine that the West has long imposed on developing nations.
[00:12:05]  Malay's message is okay.
[00:12:09]  First of all, Klaus Schwab introduced him.
[00:12:12]  And I wouldn't say he was like heaping praise on him.
[00:12:17]  He said like a couple nice things before he brought him up.
[00:12:19]  He was like, he's brought a new spirit to Argentina.
[00:12:22]  And even though he's a bit radical, like he did capture the spirit of that country.
[00:12:27]  I don't know what this means.
[00:12:28]  And no, he is not preaching the same, the same neoliberal policy.
[00:12:34]  That's just not right.
[00:12:36]  It's just factually, objectively not true.
[00:12:39]  Now, listen, I'm not saying there's never been any Republicans out there who talk about small government before, but in terms of what we've actually done, it's not that.
[00:12:49]  Again, that's just a fact.
[00:12:53]  You cannot argue with me that the U.S. federal government has been drastically shrunk since Ronald Reagan.
[00:12:59]  It's way bigger than it could have conceivably been.

=== Government Size Facts (02:46) ===

[00:13:04]  We're going to spend Rob for fiscal year 2023.
[00:13:08]  We're over $6 trillion.
[00:13:11]  We're just that, we just accepted that we're not going back to pre-pandemic levels.
[00:13:14]  This is how it always works, right?
[00:13:16]  There's an emergency.
[00:13:17]  So we need this emergency spending.
[00:13:19]  Oh, and then by the way, that's the baseline now.
[00:13:21]  That's just what we'll be spending from now on.
[00:13:23]  In 2019, okay, in the year 2019, the year, the last year before the pandemic, the government spent a little over $4 trillion.
[00:13:32]  Now we're over $6 trillion.
[00:13:34]  When we were spending $4 trillion a year, the U.S. federal government was the biggest organization in the history of the world, far bigger than it's ever been in the past.
[00:13:43]  And we just increased it by 50% over the last few years.
[00:13:47]  No, we said it was a temporary COVID thing, but nope, it's permanent.
[00:13:50]  It's here to stay.
[00:13:52]  So don't tell me.
[00:13:52]  And it's the same thing with the Obama levels of spending when he said it was because of the Great Recession.
[00:13:57]  It's the same thing with the George W. Bush levels of spending when he said it was because of 9-11 and the terror wars.
[00:14:03]  There's always an excuse.
[00:14:04]  There's always an emergency.
[00:14:05]  And then we just stay at that level and keep going higher.
[00:14:07]  So no, this is not what I'm not even saying Javier Malay is the real deal.
[00:14:12]  I don't know enough about him.
[00:14:13]  Maybe this is just what he's saying and he's not actually going to govern this way.
[00:14:16]  But he's not preaching the same old thing.
[00:14:18]  He's preaching the opposite of it.
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=== Betting Against Security (15:01) ===

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[00:16:07]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:16:09]  All right, let's keep playing.
[00:16:13]  In three words, greed is good.
[00:16:15]  To governments, get out of the way and let the world's oligarchs extract wealth to their heart's content.
[00:16:20]  To the billionaires who he described as heroes, keep doing what you're doing.
[00:16:24]  You can see why they loved him so much.
[00:16:26]  Who wouldn't want to hear their vice lauded as virtue?
[00:16:29]  Therefore, in concluding, I would like to leave a message for all business people here and for those who are not here in person but are following from around the world.
[00:16:42]  Do not be intimidated, intimidated either by the political caste or by parasites who live off the state.
[00:16:48]  Do not surrender to a political class that only wants to stay in power and retain its privileges.
[00:16:54]  You are social benefactors.
[00:16:56]  You're heroes.
[00:16:57]  You're the creators of the most extraordinary period of prosperity we've ever seen.
[00:17:04]  Let no one tell you that your ambition is immoral.
[00:17:07]  If you make money, it's because you offer a better product at a better price, thereby contributing to general well-being.
[00:17:15]  Do not surrender to the advance of the state.
[00:17:18]  The state is not the solution.
[00:17:20]  The state is the problem itself.
[00:17:22]  You are the true protagonists of this story.
[00:17:25]  And rest assured that as from today, Argentina is your staunch, unconditional ally.
[00:17:31]  Now, his message.
[00:17:32]  Okay, let's pause it there.
[00:17:34]  Because I think it's clear because if you actually listen to the speech, he did make it very clear at least one or two points that he's talking about like capitalists under a laissez-faire capitalist system.
[00:17:50]  And that in that system, the only way you can get rich is by producing a better product or a product at a better price and therefore helping your fellow man.
[00:18:01]  And so it's not clear at all that he was saying that like anybody who's a billionaire at all right now is one of the good guys.
[00:18:09]  And the fact is that, as I said before, he very clearly like delineated between what he's saying, capitalism or libertarianism and everything else, which is just some form of collectivism, some form of central control.
[00:18:23]  And that's what he made this point explicitly, that whether you're talking about like neoliberalism, whether you're talking about, you know, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, or you're talking about, you know, Keynesianism, or you're talking about fascism or Nazism or communism or socialism or democratic socialism or anything like that, those are all just different forms of collectivism and central control, and they're always a disaster economically.
[00:18:48]  And he made it very clear that the only system that provides prosperity and the only system that is consistent with morality is libertarianism, capitalism.
[00:18:58]  So he's very clear about that.
[00:19:00]  So I just think this is not, it's not accurate the way she's splicing that clip.
[00:19:05]  Anything else you want to jump in here, Rob, before we start to get into more of her argument?
[00:19:10]  Even that standalone clip at the end, he did say, go create wealth.
[00:19:14]  Like you got to, if you can go create items of value, people will pay for it.
[00:19:17]  So go relentlessly pursue it.
[00:19:20]  Yeah.
[00:19:20]  And don't, and he's saying, and don't give in to the bullying of the government.
[00:19:25]  Like don't give into that.
[00:19:26]  Yes.
[00:19:26]  Well, yeah.
[00:19:27]  And he literally says that that's just you're being a parasite if you're just, you know, trying to extrapolate wealth through the power of government.
[00:19:34]  Right.
[00:19:35]  Exactly.
[00:19:35]  Exactly.
[00:19:37]  Okay.
[00:19:37]  Let's let's play a little bit more.
[00:19:39]  Now, his message was both radical and completely supportive of the status quo because the status quo ideology of the ruler class is in fact quite radical.
[00:19:47]  As a politician, he's telling the powerful he will be their lackey.
[00:19:50]  He will strip the power of the state, an imperfect but theoretically democratic institution wherein citizens at least have a shot at exerting influence and hand it to multinational corporations.
[00:20:00]  All right, just pause it here.
[00:20:02]  Do you understand where I find that?
[00:20:03]  It's just so goddamn frustrating.
[00:20:06]  It's so frustrating because you're like, it's just like, no, no.
[00:20:11]  Like read one book from the other perspective.
[00:20:14]  There's so many good ones.
[00:20:16]  Read one of them.
[00:20:18]  This is just so objectively wrong.
[00:20:20]  First off, this thing where like you go within the state institutions, so he's doing the oligarch's bidding by tearing apart the state because at least there's some democratic control in the government.
[00:20:33]  Like that's just, first of all, there's been studies that have come out and like disproven this.
[00:20:39]  It's just not true that the people really have any democratic control over our government.
[00:20:44]  And I don't know how any honest lefty at this point can even say that.
[00:20:48]  Like the people overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama because they were, they agreed, close Guantanamo Bay.
[00:20:56]  So they voted for that guy.
[00:20:59]  Guantanamo Bay is still open.
[00:21:01]  You know, there's a million examples like this.
[00:21:03]  Like it's just, it's not true that the people just get what they want.
[00:21:07]  And it's also not true that there's no like democratic control within private businesses.
[00:21:14]  I mean, I don't know.
[00:21:15]  Look at what happened with Bud Light and Target this year.
[00:21:17]  However you feel about those issues even from the left-wing point of view.
[00:21:21]  I'm just saying the people did exercise some control over that.
[00:21:24]  And in fact, like, yeah, like the bigger things are, the less control you're going to have over it.
[00:21:29]  And that's true, whether it's a company, right?
[00:21:32]  Like your one purchase is not going to mean that much to a giant company.
[00:21:36]  It might mean a lot more to a smaller business.
[00:21:38]  And that's also true with governments.
[00:21:40]  The bigger it is, the less you count.
[00:21:43]  Okay.
[00:21:44]  But it's just not true at all to say, well, you know, at least the people have some control over the government sector, but they have no control over the private sector.
[00:21:53]  That's just, that's so oversimplistic and stupid.
[00:21:57]  I mean, look, be honest.
[00:21:59]  What do you think?
[00:22:01]  Where do you think you have more control, let's say, as a parent?
[00:22:04]  Do you think you have more control at a public school or at a private school?
[00:22:10]  So at a private school, you're going to like, do you think I have more control as a parent when I send my kids to a private school where I pay a ridiculous amount of money so that my kid can be in a class of 13 people and they need my money?
[00:22:26]  And I can choose to leave anytime I want to.
[00:22:29]  I can pull my kid right out of that school and stop paying them money.
[00:22:33]  If I have a problem there, I go down and I speak to the principal of that school and I speak to them and they take your meeting because they really need your money.
[00:22:43]  Or I can go to a school board meeting for a public school where they don't give a fuck what you have to say.
[00:22:48]  And it doesn't matter how many parents are outraged about what's going on in the school.
[00:22:52]  And you know why?
[00:22:53]  Because you have to pay your property taxes, whether you want to or not.
[00:22:56]  You have no leverage.
[00:22:58]  You can't opt out of the system.
[00:23:00]  No, I mean, you could pull your kid out, but you got to keep paying them.
[00:23:03]  So what leverage do you really have there?
[00:23:06]  So this is just totally not true that, oh, the people actually have some say in government, but they have no say in the private sector.
[00:23:12]  That's just not true.
[00:23:13]  But the other thing that's just so damn frustrating for leftists, it's like, okay, so as I, there's no argument.
[00:23:20]  This is just objective reality that George W. Bush spent more money than Bill Clinton and Barack Obama spent more money than George W. Bush and Donald Trump spent more money than Barack Obama and that Joe Biden is now continuing that.
[00:23:33]  And maybe he didn't quite top Trump in his last year because that was COVID and they had those huge bills, but he's topped Trump in his first three years compared to his first three years, right?
[00:23:44]  The spending is higher than it was.
[00:23:46]  And who knows?
[00:23:46]  They released his EZ X. Who knows?
[00:23:48]  Yeah, really.
[00:23:49]  Well, I'll tell you that we still might in this next year.
[00:23:52]  He might top 2020.
[00:23:53]  I don't think that would be crazy.
[00:23:55]  But so objectively, the government's getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
[00:23:58]  And left wingers will sit here and go, the government is run by the billionaires.
[00:24:05]  So what's going on here, Crystal Ball?
[00:24:08]  Put these two pieces together.
[00:24:11]  Big business owns government and government gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
[00:24:17]  Is this because the will of the people is for government to be bigger?
[00:24:22]  And even though the billionaires own the government, they just can't out fox those rascal people and they just keep getting the best of them.
[00:24:30]  No, big business loves big government.
[00:24:35]  Think about that.
[00:24:36]  Put it together in your head.
[00:24:38]  That's why you already have all the pieces here, right?
[00:24:41]  You already have all of the pieces.
[00:24:43]  It's the powerful private interests own the government and the government keeps getting bigger and bigger.
[00:24:50]  What explains that?
[00:24:52]  It must be because all those billionaires really want the state to be destroyed and reduced, right?
[00:24:59]  This is just, it's madness.
[00:25:01]  It's so obvious.
[00:25:02]  It drives me nuts because they like to pretend like the state is protecting us from big corporations where it's the tool of the big corporations.
[00:25:09]  And look at every industry.
[00:25:11]  I mean, look at, you think the COVID vaccine would have been great if it was just, hey, I could go purchase it.
[00:25:15]  Might have worked or we wouldn't have had it.
[00:25:17]  But because of government, they lobbied us, they forced us and they made us take the thing.
[00:25:22]  They shut down off of the backs of a six feet rule that apparently just sort of appeared out of nowhere.
[00:25:28]  Or look at the war, look at the war machine.
[00:25:31]  I mean, on both sides of it, if you're pro this green energy nonsense, it's government working for some big corporations to try and create legislation for windmills and other bullshit.
[00:25:40]  Or even on the oil side of it, we fight wars for oil.
[00:25:44]  Or look at the military-industrial complex.
[00:25:46]  Yeah, no, I'm sure.
[00:25:47]  I'm sure Lockheed Martin and Raytheon just want to cut the defense budget, Rob.
[00:25:51]  Yeah.
[00:25:52]  That's what they'd love to do.
[00:25:53]  It would help them so much, right?
[00:25:55]  Or do you want to know who keeps the big banks in business and all these financial people you don't like?
[00:25:59]  It's the Federal Reserve.
[00:26:01]  It's the biggest branches of business have hijacked our government to make sure that we can't compete with them and to keep competitors out of the market and to basically, you know, carve their little niches where they're protected by governments so they don't have to actually compete, create value and can just steal from us.
[00:26:17]  Yeah.
[00:26:17]  Look, their biggest transfers of wealth from the America's middle class and working class to the ultra-rich happened in the years of the biggest government spending.
[00:26:29]  That's a big part of how they transfer your wealth.
[00:26:32]  They tax you and inflate your currency and take your tax dollars and take those newly printed dollars and give them to their friends.
[00:26:40]  Their friends like that system.
[00:26:43]  That's why they keep this system in place.
[00:26:46]  This has nothing to do with the drastic reduction in the size of government.
[00:26:50]  Look, as we all know, if the entire billionaire class wanted drastic cuts in the size of government, guess what we would have?
[00:26:59]  Drastic cuts in the size and scope of government.
[00:27:02]  We don't have that.
[00:27:03]  We have drastic increases.
[00:27:06]  That's because that's what they want.
[00:27:10]  Okay, let's keep playing and get angrier.
[00:27:14]  Interested billionaire class.
[00:27:15]  I'm struck by the childlike fairy tale nature of the story he tells and what it says about our infantile rulers that they lap it up like hungry puppy dogs.
[00:27:23]  Malay paints a picture of extraordinary men made wealthy by creating, innovating, designing products to benefit the whole world.
[00:27:30]  When in reality, every year, if you take a look, the most new billionaires come from the finance sector.
[00:27:36]  People who are only skilled at new creative methods of extraction and mathematical trickery, whose innovations are designing new exotic financial instruments like credit default swaps that eventually blow up the entire world economy.
[00:27:49]  In Malaysia.
[00:27:50]  All right, let's just pause it right there.
[00:27:52]  I mean, man, it's just so frustrating that it's like, Crystal, you got to know the first thing about what you're talking about.
[00:28:01]  I mean, like, you, it's just so irresponsible to like get on a big show and start talking about this when you don't know what you're talking about.
[00:28:09]  First of all, the credit default swaps did not blow up the economy.
[00:28:15]  This is ridiculous.
[00:28:17]  Do you know what, for anyone listening, if you don't know what credit default swaps are, it's not as complicated as they make it sound.
[00:28:22]  It's basically betting against a security.
[00:28:26]  So it's kind of like can serve as an insurance, as an insurance against a security.
[00:28:33]  So even if that sounded a little bit complicated, basically where they rose in the lead up to the Great Recession in 2008, it was people betting against the economies, more specifically betting against subprime mortgages, basically betting that people aren't going to be able to pay their mortgages.
[00:28:51]  And those bets won, but they won by so much that the banks didn't have any money to cover the bets and then they got bailed out, right?
[00:29:00]  But betting against the economy is not what wrecked the economy.
[00:29:05]  You just made the right bet that it was going to, that it was going to fail.
[00:29:09]  Those are just the people who actually saw it.
[00:29:11]  Actually, go watch, what was it, The Big Short?
[00:29:14]  Which is actually a pretty good movie about it.
[00:29:16]  But it was actually the good guys who were putting their money into the credit default swaps.
[00:29:20]  They were the ones who realized there was a huge bubble.
[00:29:22]  But you can't understand essentially in this context, what credit default swaps were was betting that there's a bubble.
[00:29:30]  And that bet turned out to be correct.
[00:29:32]  And when the bubble burst, it destroyed the economy.
[00:29:34]  And Crystal Ball is saying, well, they came up with this tool where you could bet that there's a bubble and that's what made it a bubble.
[00:29:40]  Like, no, it's not.
[00:29:41]  That's not what wrecked the economy.
[00:29:43]  What wrecked the economy was the real estate bubble, which would have been there even if there had never been a credit default swap.
[00:29:49]  Even if no one had ever bet against the or had bet that there is a bubble, there still would have been a bubble.
[00:29:55]  This is like, you know, if I bet that you're going to lose a race and then you blame me for you losing the race.
[00:30:02]  Well, no, I just picked right.
[00:30:03]  I just bet that, you know, and then of course the big banks got bailouts from who?
[00:30:08]  Oh yeah, the federal government.
[00:30:09]  Like that's the problem here.
[00:30:11]  But look, even before this, she's just, again, it's like they just don't, they just don't understand it at all.
[00:30:18]  If you're going like, hey, this is a nice thing to say that if you had a libertarian society based on non-aggression and property, that the only way people would get rich was by creating great things for their fellow man.
[00:30:30]  But look, under our system, it's all just people coming up with new financial instruments that don't improve the lives of their fellow man at all.
[00:30:39]  It's like, yeah, because we don't live under that system, because we live under a system of the largest government in the history of the world.
[00:30:46]  And we've lived under 10 straight years of zero interest rates.
[00:30:50]  So yeah, that's right.

=== Free Market Answers (15:41) ===

[00:30:51]  Oh, that's what happens in that environment.
[00:30:54]  But to turn around, I mean, think about how much you got to twist yourself into a pretzel to go, you have this 10-year run with artificially, not artificially low interest rates, artificially held interest rates at 0% while you have record high government spending.
[00:31:09]  And then the result of that, you go, you know, whose fault this is?
[00:31:14]  Small government and free markets.
[00:31:18]  That's who's to blame for all of this.
[00:31:20]  As if that has nothing to do with the Federal Reserve and the Federal Treasury.
[00:31:26]  This is just silly and ridiculous.
[00:31:30]  Go ahead.
[00:31:31]  It's just, it's so comically aggravating to hear people criticize the financial sector while completely overlooking the Fed and the bailouts and all the government money that empowers them.
[00:31:43]  Yeah.
[00:31:43]  And even just all the government regulations.
[00:31:45]  I mean, the government regulation, it's one of the most regulated sectors in the economy.
[00:31:50]  And what the regulations, which are all totally supported by the big banks, and why is that?
[00:31:56]  It's not because they want to chain themselves, right?
[00:32:00]  It's because they make the regulations create a barrier to entry for competition.
[00:32:05]  And this is why we only have a handful of banks.
[00:32:07]  And this is why with the increase in regulations that came after 2008 with the, what was it called?
[00:32:16]  What's the bill I'm blanking on?
[00:32:17]  Dobbs.
[00:32:18]  Dodd-Frank?
[00:32:19]  Dodd-Frank.
[00:32:20]  That's right.
[00:32:21]  With the Dodd-Frank, what happened?
[00:32:22]  We saw consolidations of banks.
[00:32:24]  So now we have fewer, bigger banks.
[00:32:27]  This is a result of this.
[00:32:28]  This is why, and this is true all over the place.
[00:32:30]  This is why Walmart lobbies for a minimum wage.
[00:32:34]  How do you not see that?
[00:32:35]  How do leftists like not see this?
[00:32:38]  Are they willfully ignoring it?
[00:32:39]  Do they never just ask themselves this question?
[00:32:41]  Why is it that the biggest companies in any given sector are on board with over-regulating that industry?
[00:32:49]  Is it because they're really great people who care about helping their fellow citizens?
[00:32:55]  Or is it because this makes it more difficult for other companies to come in and become their competition?
[00:33:01]  Isn't this so obvious?
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[00:33:49]  All right, let's keep flying.
[00:33:52]  There is no such thing as market failures.
[00:33:54]  He says this explicitly.
[00:33:55]  So any and all regulation is both unnecessary and wrong.
[00:33:59]  He specifically argues that even one of the classic examples of market failures, the monopoly, is actually a good thing, not to be messed with.
[00:34:08]  Given the large number of monopolists in attendance, I'm sure this message was like chicken soup for their greedy souls.
[00:34:14]  Anyone, of course, with a basic grasp of reality outside of an imagined libertarian fantasy world can see that this attack on literally all market regulation is insane.
[00:34:24]  Unless, of course, so here's the thing, right?
[00:34:28]  It's like, Crystal, you got to make a point.
[00:34:32]  Make an argument.
[00:34:34]  Just saying this is insane or this is your libertarian fantasy or something like that is not an argument.
[00:34:39]  It's just an insult.
[00:34:41]  You haven't demonstrated your point at all.
[00:34:43]  Like what we're doing here is talking about the situation we're in and what actually creates this.
[00:34:47]  We're making arguments.
[00:34:48]  You're just insulting.
[00:34:50]  What is that?
[00:34:51]  Oh, this is a fantasy.
[00:34:52]  Well, no, it's not.
[00:34:54]  And the point that Javier Malay was making is that he said, and he was very clear about this, where he goes, look, under a true system of voluntarism and private property rights, people are trading voluntarily and that this is a laissez-faire free market.
[00:35:11]  And he said in that system, there's no such thing as a market failure.
[00:35:14]  And his point is that if a company goes out of business, that's not a market failure.
[00:35:21]  That's that they were other people were saying, we don't like your product at the price that you're selling it at.
[00:35:26]  We don't think that's going to improve our lives.
[00:35:29]  And as for this thing with monopoly, it's just the goofiest thing ever.
[00:35:33]  So what are you saying here?
[00:35:35]  So monopolies are bad.
[00:35:37]  Okay.
[00:35:37]  Well, again, in truly free market conditions, why exactly is that?
[00:35:43]  Why exactly is it a given that monopolies are bad?
[00:35:46]  Like let's say that there's free competition and everybody picks the producer A and nobody picks producer B. Why is that necessarily a bad thing?
[00:35:58]  Maybe it's because the producer A is just doing a better job of producing than B.
[00:36:03]  I don't know.
[00:36:04]  Look, if you invent something new and start selling it, that first day you did it, you have a monopoly over it.
[00:36:12]  You're the only one selling it.
[00:36:14]  Okay.
[00:36:15]  But that's not necessarily a bad thing.
[00:36:16]  You invented something new and took it to the market.
[00:36:18]  Maybe people really like it.
[00:36:19]  Maybe it improves their lives.
[00:36:20]  So no, monopoly, given a free market, is not necessarily a bad thing.
[00:36:25]  It's very hard to find examples of it.
[00:36:27]  There's very few, if any, examples of monopolies in a free market.
[00:36:31]  But if you're just saying monopoly is a monopoly is bad on its face, well, then let me tell you about government.
[00:36:40]  It's the biggest monopoly around.
[00:36:43]  So which one is it?
[00:36:44]  You're defending a violent monopoly against a theoretical monopoly that got there from people liking it more.
[00:36:53]  This is ridiculous and childish.
[00:36:55]  All right, let's keep playing.
[00:36:59]  Style child labor, indentured servitude and poisoned food and water.
[00:37:04]  I'm not sure I've ever seen this particular fantasy deflated as quickly as in this infinite.
[00:37:08]  So let's pause it right there for a second.
[00:37:12]  That all that stuff is just ridiculous.
[00:37:15]  Like the just, oh, you're talking about child labor and poisoned water and all this shit.
[00:37:21]  And believe, you know, you want to talk about poisoned water.
[00:37:24]  I mean, we've had several examples where the government's controlling the water, but all of that stuff about going back to child labor, like it just evokes these images.
[00:37:33]  Like, what are you even really talking about when you talk about child labor?
[00:37:37]  Like, it's funny because I have to sit in school for free.
[00:37:42]  Yeah, that's right.
[00:37:43]  Instead, we lock our kids in literal prisons, but I guess, yeah, we wouldn't want to talk about child labor.
[00:37:48]  But of course, they it creates this image of thinking about like child labor in the 1800s or something like that.
[00:37:57]  But child labor was the norm for all of human history.
[00:38:03]  For all of human history, as soon as you were able-bodied, you worked.
[00:38:06]  And the reason was pretty obvious.
[00:38:08]  It wasn't because they were such bad parents back then and we're just much better people today.
[00:38:12]  And all of a sudden we decided like, oh, let's like love our kids.
[00:38:16]  It was because if every able-bodied person wasn't working, you were going to starve to death.
[00:38:20]  So that's why for all of human history, as soon as you could, you started working.
[00:38:24]  And yes, that continued.
[00:38:26]  And so you think of like, you know, children working in factories in the late 1800s or something like that.
[00:38:33]  But it's not as if that was a change.
[00:38:34]  They had been doing backbreaking agricultural work before then.
[00:38:38]  Now they were going and working in a factory.
[00:38:40]  Okay.
[00:38:40]  So it's not as if the point is that man is born into the world naked.
[00:38:46]  We started from nothing.
[00:38:48]  We had nothing.
[00:38:49]  It was just us and nature.
[00:38:51]  And we had to have to produce and produce and produce to get to a level of wealth where you could even start to think about children not having to work.
[00:38:59]  That's the, that's the truth.
[00:39:00]  And the idea that like if regulations went away tomorrow, what?
[00:39:04]  We're all just going to send our kids into coal mines, even though we don't have to is ridiculous.
[00:39:09]  Now, child labor in today's day and age would probably look something like having a summer job or like for a teenager or like, you know, working at your parents' business or something like that.
[00:39:24]  Like that this idea that if it wasn't for the government, we would all be like, think about it.
[00:39:30]  If it wasn't for the government, we'd all be really awful parents.
[00:39:33]  We'd all send our kids to go work in the coal mines if it wasn't for Nancy Pelosi, you know?
[00:39:38]  But because of her, thank God she's there and won't let us.
[00:39:41]  It's just ridiculous.
[00:39:45]  All right.
[00:39:45]  Let's let's play this clip.
[00:39:47]  Educating Dave Rubin on the need for building codes.
[00:39:50]  Just take a listen.
[00:39:51]  What problem would you have everything you're building here right now, right?
[00:39:55]  Do you want the government to tell you how to do all these things and all the regulations that you got to have your electric thing this far from this?
[00:40:02]  Regulations like that for construction are important, though.
[00:40:05]  You do have to make sure that people don't do stupid shit.
[00:40:07]  But make sure you have a power line.
[00:40:09]  It's near a water line.
[00:40:11]  There's a lot of.
[00:40:12]  But I would put most of that on the builders, though.
[00:40:14]  They want to build things that are good.
[00:40:15]  Now I get hype.
[00:40:16]  Oh, that's not true.
[00:40:17]  Listen, people are going to build corners all the time.
[00:40:20]  Like you have to have regulations when it comes to construction methods or people are going to get fucked.
[00:40:24]  They cut corners when there are regulations anyway.
[00:40:27]  They do.
[00:40:28]  They would cut a lot more if there weren't regulations.
[00:40:30]  I'm not totally third world countries and look at construction methods.
[00:40:33]  They're fucking dangerous.
[00:40:34]  That's why schools collapse on kids in foreign countries sometimes.
[00:40:37]  Listen, man, I was in construction my whole life.
[00:40:39]  My dad was an architect.
[00:40:40]  I've been in construction since I was a little kid.
[00:40:43]  You fucking need regulations.
[00:40:45]  These guys, a lot of people that are in construction, they'll do whatever the fuck they can to make money.
[00:40:51]  And it's not good for the people that have the house because they might have that house for five, 10 years before that problem manifests itself.
[00:40:58]  The people who are establishing these codes are licensed builders or people that have been involved in construction for a long fucking time.
[00:41:06]  And they know what's safe and what's not safe.
[00:41:08]  That's why those codes exist.
[00:41:09]  All right.
[00:41:10]  Let's pause it here.
[00:41:11]  All right.
[00:41:11]  First off, crystal ball.
[00:41:13]  How dare you throw my beloved Joe Rogan at me?
[00:41:16]  Okay.
[00:41:18]  Beautiful man can say no wrong.
[00:41:21]  Look, yes.
[00:41:22]  So she finds a clip where Dave Rubin did a really bad job arguing his point because it's, yes, obviously the way he was arguing this, and I remember watching this when it happened, and it's just like, oh, dude, please no.
[00:41:34]  Dave Rubin argues for libertarianism in this case.
[00:41:37]  And he goes, well, the builders want to build a good building.
[00:41:40]  Why would they cut corners?
[00:41:41]  And Rogan's like, what are you insane?
[00:41:43]  Of course they would cut corners because people cut corners all the time.
[00:41:46]  Okay, there is a free market answer for this.
[00:41:49]  I don't know how in depth we have to go.
[00:41:51]  And it's called insurance.
[00:41:54]  This is how the market controls for these things.
[00:41:56]  So yes, you do want a third party there who is making sure buildings are being built to some standard, but there's no reason why that has to come from a violent monopoly, centralized government.
[00:42:09]  It's just completely unnecessary.
[00:42:10]  So yes, you can have all of these standards.
[00:42:12]  And what the standard typically would be is you have to get this building insured.
[00:42:16]  And then there's a third party, the insurance company, whose money is on the line now if this building is to collapse.
[00:42:23]  And they're not going to insure you unless they make sure that your building is up to standard.
[00:42:28]  So there can be a whole standard of codes and regulations, if you want to call them that, that come from private sources.
[00:42:35]  So anyway, that's essentially the argument that Dave Rubin should have been using, but instead he walked right into and he happened to walk into an area that Rogan knew a lot about.
[00:42:43]  And yeah, it didn't look good for him.
[00:42:45]  Doesn't really prove Crystal's point, but whatever.
[00:42:48]  Let's keep playing.
[00:42:51]  The consumers.
[00:42:52]  Perfect example there.
[00:42:54]  I could give you thousands of similar instances from the regulated Titanic submersible to kids getting sucked into meat grinders to the Great Depression and the Great Recession to the old company towns where workers were paid in script and forced into permanent debt so they could never leave their brutal jobs until they died from blacklung at age 40.
[00:43:14]  And the big picture of no regulation just looks like an acceleration of the absolute worst of what we've got right now.
[00:43:20]  Governments which are even more corrupt and undemocratic, wild inequality, where billionaires construct multi-million dollar bunkers to escape the apocalypse they are helping to usher in while the vast majority of the- Okay, let's pause here.
[00:43:34]  Yes, under current, again, under these situations, we have this happening.
[00:43:38]  But yes, when we're doing the exact opposite of what Javier Malay is advocating for, look how bad things are going.
[00:43:45]  And we have all of these problems.
[00:43:46]  Again, this is just like, it's, it's, again, it's just the same point.
[00:43:51]  Again, it's nutty if you can't just acknowledge the reality.
[00:43:54]  So if you, if you're starting places that, which basically it's kind of like what Tucker Carlson said a few weeks back that we were, we were criticizing him for.
[00:44:02]  It's like, if your starting point is almost like we're living in a libertarian society, then okay, but you're just ignoring the objective metrics of like how big the government is.
[00:44:14]  And that, so this is ridiculous.
[00:44:17]  But in terms of some of the stuff, I don't exactly understand what her point was, but if she was, she was trying to tie government regulation to the Great Depression and the Great Recession, like as if that was the issue and that's what caused it.
[00:44:31]  I mean, I'm sorry, this is just ridiculous.
[00:44:34]  This is ridiculous.
[00:44:36]  Like Woodrow Wilson created the Federal Reserve and the income tax in 1913 and 1914.
[00:44:45]  And then our government fought in the World War.
[00:44:48]  And when we came home, they had an easy monetary policy throughout the 20s, but then really accelerated it in 1926, 27, 28.
[00:44:58]  They built up a bubble and the bubble burst in 1929.
[00:45:03]  Then FDR didn't come in until 1933.
[00:45:08]  And you can go read David Stockman, who's great on this, and he covers this in real detail.
[00:45:13]  But basically, he's saying that it's clear that the Great Depression was basically over by the time Roosevelt got in there and that basically all of the bad debt had been liquidated.
[00:45:24]  And then Roosevelt came in with his, you know, his whole New Deal and prolonged the thing till the end of World War II.
[00:45:34]  This is the highest unemployment numbers, I think, were in 1936 and 1937 or something like that.
[00:45:40]  It was still in high double digits by 1938, 1939.
[00:45:44]  This is what all that government intervention is the government caused the artificial boom, then it crashed, then the government came in and did all types of interventionist policies and it just prolonged the whole thing and made it worse.
[00:45:57]  And in the Great Recession in 2008, like, yeah, it was all look, man.
[00:46:03]  What's that guy, Jimmy, who he made the movie The Bubble?
[00:46:10]  And if you've never seen it, it's a great documentary on the crash in 2008.
[00:46:16]  And he goes back to Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and all of them bragging, bragging about how their policies have made so many Americans homeowners who never would have been able to be homeowners under market conditions.
[00:46:30]  The Community Reinvestment Act, all this stuff.

=== Great Recession Lessons (05:30) ===

[00:46:33]  They were all pushing legislation to get people to buy homes.
[00:46:38]  And at the same time, in the early 2000s, after 9-11, Alan Greenspan brought interest rates down to 1.5%.
[00:46:48]  And so it sucked all of these people into these adjustable rate mortgages that they could only afford to pay if the rates didn't adjust and go up.
[00:46:56]  So they could afford it at 1.5%.
[00:46:58]  And then they all got sucked into it.
[00:47:00]  And then when rates went up in 2007, it brought down the economy.
[00:47:06]  It was a boom bust, a classic boom bust.
[00:47:08]  And this is why so many of the Austrian economists predicted it.
[00:47:11]  They were all looking at it like this is a bubble that we're looking at here.
[00:47:14]  And this has got to burst.
[00:47:16]  So that's what happened.
[00:47:17]  It wasn't a failure of deregulation or a failure of the laissez-faire capitalism.
[00:47:24]  It was all a failure of government intervention.
[00:47:26]  But again, you think credit default swaps took down the economy.
[00:47:29]  So you don't know what the hell you're talking about.
[00:47:31]  This is all ridiculous.
[00:47:33]  Basics of food, shelter, and healthcare.
[00:47:36]  And a deep moral rot that would place human worth, creativity, and flourishing below the demands of the profit margin and the needs of Malay's billionaire heroes.
[00:47:48]  Now, Malay is, after all, a man who would buy and sell human organs.
[00:47:52]  So he is perfectly willing to literally put a price on humanity.
[00:47:57]  In a particularly nonsensical part of his speech, Malay equates communists, Nazis, fascists, socialists, social democrats, national socialists, Christian Democrats, Keynesians, neo-Keynesians, progressives, populists, nationalists, and globalists, saying, quote, in the end, there's no substantive difference.
[00:48:16]  Pause it.
[00:48:17]  The preposterous nature.
[00:48:19]  Pause it here.
[00:48:20]  Okay.
[00:48:20]  Listen.
[00:48:22]  It's not that there's no substantive difference.
[00:48:26]  And if those were his exact words, then that's not fair.
[00:48:29]  There are some substantive differences between those groups.
[00:48:32]  What we're saying is that you're all different types of commies.
[00:48:37]  It's just what level of commie you are.
[00:48:40]  The point is that they're all just different forms of collectivism and central control, which he did say over and over again.
[00:48:47]  So if he said no substantive difference, maybe that's a little bit unfair.
[00:48:51]  Maybe that's a little bit sloppy.
[00:48:52]  But the point is that you're all of you are endorsing the same principle, which is that people's lives can be forcefully centrally planned.
[00:49:03]  And that, what Malay is saying and what me and Rob would both say is that that not only is immoral because people ought to be free and have a right to pursue the life they want to pursue, but also it does not lead to prosperity.
[00:49:18]  It leads to poverty.
[00:49:20]  And to whatever degree you implement it, you're going to have a higher degree of poverty.
[00:49:25]  That's the point.
[00:49:26]  So yes, I know that sounds crazy because you kind of exist in this like confined world.
[00:49:34]  And we're stretching out here and saying, yes, essentially, you're all different types of statists.
[00:49:40]  But yeah, it's kind of the same thing.
[00:49:42]  Like think about it, right?
[00:49:43]  Even though like there are differences between, say, like the commies and the Nazis, think about how many similarities there are.
[00:49:53]  It's incredible.
[00:49:54]  The similarities are, and to a point, you get there and you're like, yeah, okay, like whatever philosophical differences Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler may have had on paper, I mean, yeah, they were basically both just tyrannical dictators who and what were the results?
[00:50:13]  Disaster for their country, the slaughter of millions of people or the starvation of millions of people.
[00:50:19]  You know what I mean?
[00:50:19]  Like they all had these kind of similar results.
[00:50:22]  And so yeah, there's a whole lot of similarities there.
[00:50:25]  And likewise, if you want to go further and compare them to like the progressive Democrats of the days, there were actually a lot of similarities between the Nazis and them and the commies and them and the socialists and them.
[00:50:34]  They all had all types of like overlap.
[00:50:38]  So yeah, there's something to that point.
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[00:52:02]  All right, let's keep playing.

=== Populist Movement Failure (08:12) ===

[00:52:03]  This nature of erasing the clear differences between a very wide range of ideologies goes without saying unless you are a literal child or a member of the oligarch class, which Malay services.
[00:52:16]  But there's a reason why these elites are so excited to hear all of this and to see moderate reformists like progressives equated with radical evils like Nazism.
[00:52:25]  And it's because they feel themselves under siege by some of these name-checked movements.
[00:52:30]  After all, the greatest good radical libertarianism that Malay espouses and which had been ascendant in America since Goldwater and forced on much of the rest of the world since Reagan has been repeatedly rebuked by regular people all around the world.
[00:52:45]  Look at the wellspring of radical billionaire friendly market radicalism, the Republican Party itself, and you can see how these ideas have been rejected.
[00:52:55]  In practice, Trump has largely continued the Reagan-like policy of the past with a few exceptions, but he became the lodestar of American politics by advocating for a clean break from that neoliberal market radical era.
[00:53:08]  Young Americans who have been thoroughly failed by Malay-style market radicalism are even more clear in their rejection of this model.
[00:53:15]  The speech also arrives at a moment when a decisive conflict is brewing between the needs of humanity and the needs of the market and owner class with the advent of super intelligent AI.
[00:53:25]  It is clear that in this potentially existential battle, Malay's view is to hell with the humans.
[00:53:31]  It is therefore a diseased mind, which could with a straight face call any of this freedom as Malay does.
[00:53:38]  Free to work all your days for global monopolists who set all the terms of your exploitation?
[00:53:44]  Okay.
[00:53:44]  So I just, we can stop it there because now it just becomes the thing that they all rely on, which is just telling you how awful it would be.
[00:53:51]  Oh, you would be a slave to global, you know, corporate.
[00:53:55]  And like we've already kind of dealt with this.
[00:53:57]  It's like, okay, well, if that's true and these transnational corporations have all this power, then how come they're not hacking away at the state?
[00:54:06]  How come they're not, why are they not putting politicians in there who want to hack away at the regulatory system and the managerial state and government spending?
[00:54:13]  Why does that never happen?
[00:54:15]  And in terms of this break with Reaganism stuff, this is just all wrong.
[00:54:18]  Ronald Reagan grew the size of government every year that he was in.
[00:54:22]  Yes, he gave some tax breaks to his rich friends and said a lot about small government, but he grew the size of the government every year he was in, just like Trump.
[00:54:30]  So yeah, in that sense, Trump wasn't that much of a break from Reagan.
[00:54:33]  But there's this thing, and this is why you just got to read Murray Rothbard because it just totally like the power that Murray Rothbard has in not only like, because he's not only like the best economist, but he's the best historian also.
[00:54:48]  And he just like kind of, I don't know, he, he just like inoculates you against this awful way of thinking and helps you understand the world.
[00:54:58]  But it is, and I do think that part of this is because so much of our modern self identify, like our self-identity is based on the civil rights movement, for better and for worse.
[00:55:17]  You know, there's good parts and bad parts about that.
[00:55:20]  But so it's almost like, and this happens a lot when you'll hear the way left-leaning people talk about history.
[00:55:29]  And they'll kind of talk about how, like what she just said here, that you're trying to bring back the system that's been rejected.
[00:55:36]  The people decided they didn't want deregulation, which is kind of interesting because it totally contradicts her point, which is that we're living under a deregulated free market economy.
[00:55:46]  Like the whole basis of her argument was that.
[00:55:49]  And then at the end, she just pivots to like, yeah, we tried that and we decided it was wrong.
[00:55:54]  As if that's what happened.
[00:55:56]  But when you read Rothbard, it's just so clear that you're just like, oh, look, you can go trace back the history of any of these regulations.
[00:56:03]  And it's not because there was this overwhelming demand of the people that they were rising up and taking to the streets and saying, we want more power concentrated in Washington, D.C. to regulate individuals' lives.
[00:56:14]  It's like, no, go, this is just like history that you can actually go read.
[00:56:19]  And it's almost always, 95% of the time, it's that powerful interests within that sector lobbied for those regulations.
[00:56:30]  We don't have a Federal Reserve because there were just like, you know, house moms and merchants and college professors just got out there and they were like, hey, you know, we have all figured this out.
[00:56:42]  And this would be much better if we had a private public arm of the government that could print money whenever they wanted to and that could smooth out the business cycle and they could have a dual mandate and blow.
[00:56:54]  Like that's not what happened objectively.
[00:56:56]  It's not what happened.
[00:56:57]  A bunch of rich, powerful bankers got together on Jekyll Island and planned out what they were going to do to create a monopoly through government power.
[00:57:09]  That's what happened.
[00:57:10]  That is the objective history of what happened.
[00:57:13]  And to this day, like, what do you think?
[00:57:15]  It's like the thing about this is that it totally flies in the whole like lefty progressive worldview.
[00:57:22]  Are you telling me that the people really have control of this government and not the powerful billionaires?
[00:57:28]  So what do you, how do these measures actually get passed?
[00:57:31]  They don't get passed because the people rejected them.
[00:57:34]  They get passed because powerful people use them to rig the system in their favor.
[00:57:40]  That's what's going on here.
[00:57:42]  And this is, I'll tell you, man, this is the whole reason why the populist left and the populist right is doomed to fail if they don't understand their libertarian lesson.
[00:57:51]  That it is the concentration of power.
[00:57:54]  But the same way you worry about that in the private sector, it's also true in the government sector.
[00:58:01]  It is the concentration of power.
[00:58:04]  And right now, that power is in Washington, D.C.
[00:58:07]  And yes, of course, that power is used by private interests, but there's a reason why they want to use that power because that's what rigs the game in their behalf.
[00:58:19]  It's not, you know, all this stuff about like the old school John D. Rockefeller plans for fucking, which he did have plans for trying to create a monopoly and they always failed.
[00:58:30]  They always failed.
[00:58:31]  When they back with the Sherman Antitrust Act was first used against Standard Oil, I forget the exact numbers, but it was like he had like 90 something percent of the oil market at one point or the oil refining market.
[00:58:46]  And by the time the suit went to trial, he was already down to like 70%.
[00:58:53]  Because the market was already taking on it himself, because the market has this natural tendency where if somebody ever does, like what his goal always was, this John D. Rockefeller, his goal always was that he would undercut prices to put his competition out of business.
[00:59:09]  And then he wanted to take over the whole thing and have a monopoly.
[00:59:12]  And then when he had a monopoly, he could raise prices.
[00:59:15]  Like this was his plan.
[00:59:17]  And it failed over and over and over again.
[00:59:20]  You know why?
[00:59:21]  Because when he'd raise prices, that would just be a market opportunity for a competitor to come in and undercut him.
[00:59:29]  And so then their share would grow.
[00:59:30]  And then he'd have to cut prices back down to cut their share down.
[00:59:33]  And then if he raised prices, they'd come back in again.
[00:59:36]  And you know what he figured out?
[00:59:38]  After all of that, I'll just buy some congressmen because that's easier.
[00:59:45]  I'll just start making political contributions to presidential campaigns and Senate campaigns.
[00:59:51]  And now I can just rig the thing in my favor.
[00:59:54]  And that's what he figured out.
[00:59:56]  And that's the whole game.
[00:59:57]  And if you don't get that, you're never going to drain the swamp.
[01:00:00]  You're never going to work toward more equality for the working class or a better life for the working class or what the populist left or the populist right care about is that the corruption is in big government and big business loves big government because they rigged the system on their behalf.

=== Buying Congressmen (02:02) ===

[01:00:16]  That's it.
[01:00:16]  And Javier Millay was right.
[01:00:18]  And don't pretend like Javier Millay, what his speech was had anything to do with what every other speech out there at the WF was.
[01:00:25]  Every other speech was about having total control.
[01:00:28]  Klaus Schwab himself said libertarianism is the enemy of what we're trying to do.
[01:00:33]  So I don't care if he said a couple nice things before he introduced Javier Millay to speak.
[01:00:38]  He told you this is this is against everything I'm trying to do.
[01:00:42]  They're talking about how they're going to have control over everybody's lives and what the rules are going to be.
[01:00:47]  And Javier Millay is saying we should give people their freedom and government should be reduced to next to nothing.
[01:00:53]  I'm sorry, he's right and Crystal Ball's wrong.
[01:00:57]  All of this, this whole critique was nothing.
[01:00:59]  It's completely removed from reality.
[01:01:01]  Like she says, we're being childish because we're just living in a libertarian fantasy land or whatever, but not really.
[01:01:08]  I'm talking about the world as we actually see it.
[01:01:11]  I'm talking about the world we're living in right now.
[01:01:13]  And if you think that is an experiment in small government, you're the one living in a fantasy land, not me.
[01:01:21]  You're the one who's talking about economics when you clearly haven't read up on this shit.
[01:01:25]  Again, I like Crystal.
[01:01:27]  Thank you for having Scott Horton on.
[01:01:28]  Thank you for having Daryl Cooper on and Norman Finkelstein and all those guys.
[01:01:33]  Your coverage on Israel has been great.
[01:01:36]  Man.
[01:01:37]  Hey, her going, there's some outsized threat, and that's why we need government to step in and protect us.
[01:01:43]  Sounds like the exact sales pitch of the WEF.
[01:01:46]  Yep, it sure kind of does.
[01:01:49]  Anyway, Crystal Ball gets it wrong.
[01:01:51]  That's okay.
[01:01:52]  She gets it right on other stuff.
[01:01:54]  Guys, come on out.
[01:01:55]  Come on out to Connecticut this week.
[01:01:59]  What's it called again, Rob?
[01:02:00]  What's the term?
[01:02:00]  Yeah, Stress Factory in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
[01:02:02]  Bridgeport.
[01:02:03]  Bridgeport, Connecticut.
[01:02:04]  Stress Factory.
[01:02:05]  Come on out.
[01:02:05]  Me and Robbie the Fire, Bernstein.
[01:02:07]  Got a bunch of shows out there this weekend.
[01:02:10]  And then, of course, check out Rob's excellent solo podcast, Run Your Mouth, and comicdavesmith.com, RobbieTheFire.com.
[01:02:17]  All right.
[01:02:17]  That's our show for today.
[01:02:18]  Peace.