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Dec. 24, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:21
December 24, 2008, Wednesday, Hour #2
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And we are back, second hour now up and running on this Christmas Eve 2008.
Welcome to the Rush Limbaugh program.
I am Jason Lewis.
Having more fun than a human being should be allowed, as I always do when I fill in for El Rushbow.
He'll be back in uh 2009.
Much sooner than that sounds, trust me, taking next week off as well as he uh deserves.
Uh we've been talking a little bit about uh the elections.
What kind of power structure we're going to have given the new tolerant, compassionate uh, you know, power to the people, Democrats are in control, and the two examples we've been talking about, of course, off the top were Blogevich and Al Franken.
Not very comforting if you think about it to what's going on.
Franken actually was in New York not long ago at a fundraiser at George Soros' home in order to raise money when this thing goes to court.
They got more I mean, they got more liberals in Minnesota.
Wait a minute, we've already got liberals in Minnesota.
Uh well, they've got even more liberals in Minnesota from around the country helping the uh would-be senator now, so it's really a a battle royale here.
And in speaking of the Soros gang, and speaking of what kind of a country that we are going to have going forward, a country I would argue that the framers wouldn't recognize.
You know what they're also up to?
Uh this is uh a liberal uh bullseye, if you will.
The the the electoral college is in the crosshairs.
Uh, the Soros boys, along with their dad, are trying to push something called the National Popular Vote Compact.
Have you heard about this?
Now, you've gotta you gotta have a little history on this and what the Electoral College is all about.
Remember, we have two senators from every state, regardless of the population of the state.
So people in Wyoming actually have a disproportionate influence given their their small population, but three representatives in Congress, one in the House and two in the in the Senate, then say people in California with only two senators for millions and millions of people.
And that's by design.
There is no way that the small states at the founding would have ratified the Constitution if they would have allowed the big states to run roughshod over them without the Electoral College and weighting the states.
We are a collection of states.
That's the concept of federalism, which is in the final, you know, that is the final guarantee of our freedom.
Thomas Jefferson said the true theory of the Constitution is federalism or states' rights.
The best way to check power is to divide power.
And therefore the Constitution enumerated very few powers for the new central government, the federal government, primarily dealing with matters of war and peace and external threats.
A very limited number of interstate commerce issues, although that clause has now been used as a ruse to let the federal government do anything.
But the point is Jefferson and the and the framers certainly thought the idea was, well, wait a minute.
If we divvy up power and the state serve its laboratories of democracy, people in the final analysis can vote with their feet.
So we relegate criminal law to the states.
Every state has different laws governing murder and rape and arson.
Uh every state has a death penalty or they don't have a death penalty.
This was all by design, and by the way, this is why Roe v.
Wade was such an onerous, pernicious decision.
It's not whether a state should be pro-life or pro-choice, although I happen to be pro-life.
It's who will decide.
And prior to 1973, prior to Griswold versus Connecticut in 65, it was the proper purview of the States to determine the most vexing social issues between citizens of the same state.
And all of a sudden the Supreme Court comes in in the 1960s and says, I think we'll eviscerate states' rights, and I think we'll decide.
Well, the problem, of course, when you consolidate power, Lord Acton was right, you get absolute corruption.
And if the feds get it wrong, if we're governed by the Supreme Court and they get it wrong, there's no voting with your feet.
There's no recourse to your state legislature.
You have absolute power.
And that is the beauty of, quite frankly, states' rights.
It divides power.
The best way to limit the majority, ironically, is to limit their jurisdiction.
And the best way to protect minority rights is to limit the power of the majority, and the Supreme Court will be appointed indirectly by the majority.
So every liberal ought to be in in favor of federalism, but they are not.
Well, the Electoral College is very, very similar to this.
The Electoral College says, look, we are going to designate to the states their electoral college members by the number of senators and the number of House members they have.
And therefore, if if some therefore the s the smaller states have a weighted interest or a disproportionate influence.
But that's the way it should be, my friends, because do you want to be governed by the masses on either coast?
You want to be governed by New York if you live in Kansas?
If you don't have the Electoral College, the presidency is going to be determined by popular vote only, and that popular vote is going to be determined in the major metropolitan areas.
Whether it's New York or Miami or Houston or Chicago or LA, doesn't matter.
That's who will determine the vote for the citizens of Wyoming and Kansas and Minnesota or wherever.
That was not the framers' design.
Their design was to say the states will elect the president.
The states will elect the central government in that fashion.
In fact, as you know, you know, the state legislatures appointed the senators for many, many years until the 17th Amendment, I believe.
But the point here is get this.
Well, the Soros boys are advocating.
The National Popular Vote Compact would allow state legislators to agree amongst themselves, and by the way, that's a violation of the compact clause.
Individual states cannot enter into a compact that will determine federal outcomes.
But be that as it may.
State legislatures would agree amongst themselves to choose their electors based on the winner of the popular vote in America.
Now think about that for a moment.
You're sitting there in Salt Lake City.
You're sitting there in in South Carolina.
And in the last election, you vote for let's just say you vote for well, you vote for George Bush.
You vote for George Bush, but the popular vote went for Obama.
So your electors would have to go for Obama.
The exact opposite of what the state voted for.
That is how nefarious this whole thing is, and that's why surprise, surprise, the Soros boys are behind it.
I just wanted to get that out because there's just much more than quote-unquote stealing elections or pay-to-play.
There is turning this nation into something the framers would not recognize with unchecked mob rule.
That's what the liberal left is all about.
And how ironic that they would be opposed to federalism and states' rights and the Electoral College when that is the best guarantor of our liberty by limiting power, by limiting the jurisdiction of government.
I just wanted to get that out there.
Remember, remember, we are a republic.
We are not a democracy.
We don't have a monarchy, minority rule, although some might say the Supreme Court comes close.
We don't have pure mob rule.
We are in the middle.
And a constitution, a constitutional republic, is a filtered or deliberate democracy with coequal branches, separation of powers, and checks on government.
And the best check, the best check is divided government or dual sovereignty federalism.
Don't ever forget that, especially going forward, because it's going to be up against the wall, as they say.
What did I read in the New York Times today?
My my, if our old uh energy dilettante, Thomas Friedman, isn't back at it again.
Thomas Friedman is a guy that agrees with the incoming Secretary of Energy, Mr. Chu, that was appointed Stephen Chu by uh Barack Obama last week.
They both agree that in order to get America moving again, the price of gas ought to be four dollars a gallon.
I'm not making that up.
They both think that we've got to raise the cost of gasoline at the pump in order to disabuse you of this notion of cheap energy.
So today, Friedman, the energy dilettant, says, oh, time to reboot America.
Why are other people living so much better than us?
He asks.
We've indulged ourselves for too long with tax cuts that we can't afford.
Thank you, Thomas.
Well, you know what?
Write a check to the Treasury, Thomas.
I don't know why it is you're so obsessed with uh with what other people do with their money.
I don't know why liberals are so obsessed in raising taxes for you.
If you want to if you want to bail out the Treasury, bail them out.
George Soros, you want to fund something, write them a check.
This is a little bit like during this charitable Christmas season, walking down the street and seeing Some poor some poor guy down in the snowbank, needs help, and you're walking down the street with Thomas Friedman, and you say, Oh, we ought to help that guy.
We ought to help that guy, says Thomas.
And I said, Well, I don't know.
I I got another charity I'm working with.
Maybe you want to help.
Oh, I'm not going to help them if you don't help them.
That's that's their idea of compassion, being compassionate with other people's money.
Well, we can't have, you know, a safety net unless you contribute.
Well, what about you?
Well, I'm not going to contribute unless you contribute.
What stops these people, these rich rich liberals from funding the government if they think it's so important?
It's not about them funding the government.
It's about getting you to fund the government.
Anyway, he goes on in this piece talking about uh uh you know, talking about what we need to do to jumpstart, and he does say I have some skepticism over the stimulus plan, which of course any sane American would.
I think I think this particular passage is um we can't uh engage in these bailouts and we can't spend the stimulus on pork, which proves in Friedman's case that even a blind squirrel finds an acorn every now and then.
The point being, of course we can't.
The stimulus package is never going to bail us out because it's make work jobs.
It's make work jobs and make work projects.
Last week, James Oberstar, the powerful chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee proposed shifting spending away from highways and bridges in the forthcoming $800 billion stimulus plan to, are you ready for this?
Mass transit and light rail.
Now, friends, mass transit and rail only has over 10% of the commuting public in four cities Washington, New York, Boston, and Chicago.
Every place else, such as Minnesota, about 2.83% of the statewide commuters use rail or mass transit.
Why would you spend 40% of the stimulus?
$800 billion to a trillion dollars on something that isn't going to work any place west of the Ohio River, Chicago accepted.
And even in those cities I mentioned, they run billions of dollars in deficits because there isn't a rail system in the country, there isn't a mass transit system in the country that doesn't rely on billions of dollars in subsidies over time.
There's a 12-mile Hiawatha line in the Twin Cities.
Light rail's gonna save our community.
We're gonna just be just like New York on the Mississippi.
They sold us this boondoggle that would cost 400 million dollars.
When the final thing was done, it was three quarters of a billion.
It is now running $10 million operating deficits forever.
Forever.
This is going to be your stimulus package.
This is not going to jumpstart private investment, which leads to increases in productivity, which is the only way out of this morass.
This is going to literally take people to defer their consumption, defer their own savings on something important, give it to the government, whether they buy treasury bills at zero percent or its taxes, and then the government's gonna take that money.
They're not going to invest it, they're going to spend it on special interests.
You know, the UAW now says they're not going to give up any of their benefits, they're not going to make any wage concessions, even after the White House mistakenly bailed them out.
Surprise, surprise.
Here's the fundamental problem.
Governments don't invest.
They consume.
They consume investment, they consume consumption, and then they turn around and give the money to their special interests, whether it's light rail contractors, mass transit subsidies for union labor, or quite frankly, the UAW.
None of which is going to jumpstart the economy.
We don't have a spending crisis.
We spent 1.1 trillion dollars of extra government over the last eight years.
The federal budget is now $3.1 trillion.
If spending could get us out of a malaise, we wouldn't be sitting here right now.
What we have is an investment crisis.
We have people unwilling to invest in the economy because they don't know the balance sheet of other people.
As I said before, the greatest analogy that one wag put put down was you got people in a poker game, and you're the fifth guy.
The other four players are broke.
They can't pay you.
Are you going to stay at the table?
No.
That's kind of that's kind of like the the way the credit markets are.
Nobody's lending anybody because they don't know how healthy they are.
If we allowed the market to work, and that means bankruptcy, the healthy companies survive, credit would thaw, and those companies would prosper, and we wouldn't be in this mess.
Right now we are relying erroneously on people buying treasury bills at zero percent for a negative return that's gonna fund make work jobs.
Well, guess what happens?
Sooner or later, people are not gonna keep buying dollar denominated investments because the Federal Reserve is devaluing the dollar.
China's gonna dump the dollar.
You can't have trillion dollar spending deficits.
You can't have the Federal Reserve creating money out of thin air by buying Treasury bills or even other securities now, without people on the foreign exchange market saying, I'm not so certain I want to invest in the dollar because its value is going south.
And when that happens, the day of reckoning will be here.
When people no longer want to give the government money for zero percent or a negative return, the incoming president is going to be faced with two things allowing interest rates to skyrocket to attract foreign investment, or two, raise taxes massively.
Both will then kill the economy and we'll be right back where we started from, except your 401k will be wiped out by a devalued dollar then.
This is all a con.
This whole notion of a stimulus is an absolute euphemism for more big government and more special interest favors.
That's it.
I'm Jason Lewis, in for Rush Limbaugh on the Excellence and Broadcasting Network.
You know, one more thing on this stimulus nonsense.
We've got uh because of the bailout, because of this nonsense that's going on, you know, we bailed out Bear Stearns, AIG, let Lahman Brothers fall.
So nobody knows who's gonna get bailed out, who isn't, and that's one of the reasons the credit markets are frozen, a recession of uncertainty, if you will, which is quite frankly the same thing that happened with Hoover and Roosevelt.
Hoover was this big government spender, tax racer, you know, protectionist, and Roosevelt just doubled down, and by 1938, we still had twenty percent unemployment.
And I'm afraid that things are looking awfully similar here, although I don't think it's going to get that bad, but it's going to be stretched out longer than it otherwise would be if we just took our medicine.
Interest rates ought to be going up when people are defaulting, but they're not.
The Fed has been trying to keep interest rates low by injecting liquidity, buying commercial paper, buying mortgage backed securities, buying treasuries, expanding since August, the Federal Reserve has expanded its balance sheet by over a trillion dollars.
That's a a you know, code for they've just they've just thrown a trillion dollars into the economy.
Now, sooner or later, that money is going to find its way into the economy and bid up the price of goods everywhere.
But that bailout trillion that we're talking about now, we've got the Federal Reserve's action, you know, trying to get interest rates to zero, and now, I mean, putting all of these non traditional assets on their balance sheet.
They're the lender of first resort, not last resort anymore.
The Fed ostensibly can prevent a run on the banks by buying any paper they issue, but they can't prevent a run on the dollar.
And that's what they're risking right now.
On top of that, you've got fiscal policy that is spending money like drunken sailors, but of course that isn't fair to drunken sailors with the bailouts.
We bailed out Fanny and Freddie, which literally started this thanks to Barney Frank and Chris Dodd.
Uh so you've got all of this, all of this profligate spending and creating of money going on.
And the only reason we're not seeing an absolute flight from the dollar, um, skyrocketing inflation, is because we're in a recession and people are weary, and and this is key, people right now are so terrified they're willing to buy treasury bills at zero percent.
Now that's a negative, that's a negative return.
When you get the money back from the Treasury, prices will have gone up somewhat.
So in addition to getting zero, you're actually getting less in inflation adjusted dollars back.
That is not going to last forever.
As soon as people decide there are better places for their savings than zero percent treasuries, the whole stimulus game is up.
The day of reckoning is here.
If China dumps the dollar in the face of trillion dollar deficits, sending the dollar's yield south on the foreign exchange markets, because China's looking at this and saying, do I want to own dollars here?
They're creating money out of thin air.
That means they're gonna be worth less vis-a-vis uh the one or the yen or the euro or anything else, and the dollar is sliding now, and therefore anything I invest in that dollar will be less after I exchange it back into my host currency.
Do I want to own the dollar?
And then they're running trillion dollar deficits.
We got a trillion dollar deficit this year.
Barack's gonna add to that with another trillion dollar spending program called a stimulus.
How are you going to pay for that?
Well, guess what?
If you and I decide there are better places for our savings than zero percent treasuries, you know, here's how the Federal Government's going to pay for that.
They're going to have the Federal Reserve write a credit on their books and they're going to inflate, devaluing the dollar.
And when that happens, you are going to see interest rates skyrocket.
You're going to see inflation like you've never seen it before, and we will be right back to where we started from because Barack won't be able to fund the stimulus package.
He can't raise taxes that much.
And if interest rates go up, as they should, that'll kill off the economy.
And we're back to square one, except your 40K will be worth half of what it was.
You know, come to think of it.
Uh you know, I I may be wrong.
Could it could be.
I mean, I was told by many people, many people, Republicans and Democrats, that if I did not support the bailout of Wall Street and the bailout of Detroit, why if I didn't support that, the economy would go in the tank, unemployment would go up, income would go down, businesses would fail.
And true enough, I didn't support it, and all that happened.
So who knows?
It just oh, I guess enough people did support it where that might have been the cause, huh?
1 800 282, 2882, back to the phones uh we go, Jim in Port Huron, Wisconsin.
Hi, and welcome to the Rush Limbaugh program.
I'm from Michigan.
Excuse me.
I should have known that.
I you know, if you go back in history, you're explaining exactly the way Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton wanted this.
He wanted the elitists to rule.
And that's what we're getting.
He wanted the banks into the government to so they borrow, get in debt, and have and have bust and boom and bust and boom and keep the surfs down.
Well, except and basically when you explain what you were explaining, you were explaining exactly what Hamilton dreamed of.
You sound like a true Jeffersonian.
The agrarian folks uh were very, very skeptical of the of the big city merchants uh at the time of the uh founding.
You had the Federalists and the Republicans, and they had the this great divide.
Hamilton wasn't even as bad, however, as what we've got today.
I mean, Hamilton's national bank plan was in large part to take over the debts from the uh revolutionary war from the states.
That was his excuse.
Well, that was his excuse.
That would that was not his plan.
His plan is to make an elitist government.
Look at the guys that are getting elected.
There there is some truth to what you're saying, no doubt.
And I will say this we didn't go off the international gold standard until the thirties, and we didn't close the gold window until 1971.
And uh Hamilton hadn't proposed that.
Uh I mean I I I understand where you're coming from.
We we've got this real problem in America where we don't have frankly any opposing parties.
We've got Republicrats in in many ways, and you've got two fundamental dichotomy of uh political classes, if you will.
You've got the political class, uh members of both parties, elected office holders, consultants, people who work for the government at very, very comfortable jobs, I might add, and take a look at their pensions.
And then you've got the working class, the rest of us paying the bill.
And that does seem to be the divide these days, and I understand your frustration.
Eric in Cincinnati is next on EIB.
Hi, Eric.
Hey, Jason, how are you doing?
You're doing a great job.
Thank you.
Um I'm, you know, fresh out of college about two years now, and I'm a four I'm a financial analyst at a Fortune 50 uh company.
And there's there's one thing that, you know, oftentimes I'll do financial analysis of uh of a capital investment, and the very last thing that I evaluate is the tax rate.
And, you know, depending on your state, you know, 35 to 37 and a half percent.
Right.
So these Barney Frank and these guys, I mean, they but granted they're smart guys, but they have no understanding that if you just lower that rate, the amount of investment that a company can make, uh it's the the numbers are insurmountable.
But they are not looking when you talk about Chris Dodd and Barney Frank and those long standing members that got us into this mess and now have been anointed by sixty minutes in the New York Times as getting us out.
That ought to make you think.
They don't care about economic growth.
They care about political growth.
Everybody has got to know that if you make something more costly, Eric, people are going to do less of it.
It goes back to rational man theory.
I mean, that's econ 101 for crying out loud.
And so I don't believe they don't know like you, but they don't care.
They would rather have a stagnant economy where you've got an equal distribution of poverty than the unequal distribution of wealth, which is ris you know, which is natural in a natural aristocracy, as many people have more talents, more initiative, more energy.
Absolutely.
They would rather live in a country where maybe I'm just throwing this example out there where the top person makes ten thousand dollars a year and the bottom person makes a thousand dollars a year versus an economy where the bottom person makes a thousand dollars a year and the top person makes, let's say a million dollars a year.
Well, they don't they they have no clue that you know it it's investment and it's you know tax policy that that stimulates growth in the economy and that stimulates uh employment in the economy.
Well, indeed, to the two trouble factors we're we're facing now, as well as inflation.
Well, we don't have inflation now, but we will.
You can't you cannot put this much money into the economy.
The Federal Reserve is not going to snatch the punch bowl when things start roaring to limit inflation.
They're gonna let it go, and we're gonna have a Jimmy Carter style stagflation in my view.
Now it's it's not gonna be tomorrow, it's not gonna be six months from now, but down the road.
But you're right on this nonsense over income inequality.
This is the most fatuous uh slogan of the left I've ever heard.
If you really want to close the income gap, have a Great Depression.
Because in a depression, the incomes at the top fall much more than the incomes at the bottom, and incomes gaps close.
Uh if you want growth, however, you're going to have to put up with an income gap.
And as you point out, it's much better to have a you know an economy where the top earn a lot of money, but the bottom also earn more than they otherwise would, than to have an economy where the top don't earn much, but the bottom are even poorer than they would be in an income inequality scenario.
That is absolute insanity, which is why it's a Democrat notion.
Dave in New York City, thanks for waiting.
You were on the Rush Limbaugh program with me, Jason Lewis.
Jason, now why are you doing a great job, pal.
Thank you.
Okay, this Friedman article, this article is so stupid you could do a whole show on it.
If you're talking about an airport, a gleaming airport in China, does he think that maybe that's why half the people are starving there because they're spending billions on airports?
I gotcha.
Then Penn Station, the escalators, I I live nine blocks from there.
I know like the back of my hand he's whining about the escalators, so he wants to spend millions on escalators.
Tom, there's uh there's elevators and there's stairs if that's not happy for that's not good for you.
Friedman Friedman is an elitist.
Who do you think I mean he's going to benefit from these quote unquote investments, isn't he?
Yeah.
It's just you you read this article, if you were living in a cave, you would think America is a third world country.
I I know the man's the man is a dilettante on so many uh uh so many issues, whether it's energy or economics, and and why people worship at the shrine of Tom Friedman, I'll never understand.
This is a great con.
He doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to energy, he doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to the economy.
Yeah, I will grant him he's got some Middle East expertise, but the the the point is uh this is look, he's writing an apology for big government.
That's what he does for the New York Times on a on a routine basis.
Well, he won he big's not good enough.
He wants it bigger, then he goes on to rambash the schools in this country and talks about foreign students.
Well, if the schools are so bad, why are all these people in a rush to come over to school year?
It's just nothing.
There's a converse to every one of his points, and he just ignores them and no nobody calls him out on him except, you know, the guys like us.
And it's just really sad.
It's a great point, Dave.
Thanks for checking in.
Look, he's a guy that thinks your price of the pump ought to be four dollars a gallon, and that's going to make us wealthier.
No, what we're going to do if the price of the pump, the government adds a carbon tax, which is really what cap and trade is, and now you pay four dollars instead of a dollar fifty or even two bucks, is you will be paying twice for a product you could otherwise get for half that cost.
How does that make us richer again?
Oh, but it will create green jobs.
And that gets back to the to the stimulus nonsense.
What we're going to do when Barack gets his stimulus plan done is we're going to have a growing public sector.
But the problem is when you start building bridges to nowhere, that was part of the stimulus package.
When you start building light rail for you know Ogden, Utah, when you start doing those things, they are not efficient because there's not a demand for them.
You don't get a return.
It's as if the government hires people to dig ditches and hires other people to fill them back up again.
Hey, we increased employment.
We're going to count that in the GDP.
And you'll see increased employment, and you'll see a little GDP bump, but you'll see no increase in investment that would make us all more productive so we can all earn more money.
That's real investment.
The stimulus package, having government supplant private investment, is no way to grow.
If it was, Eastern Europe would have been an economic juggernaut.
And I'm telling you, this whole House of Cards, stimulus package, pre creating new government jobs, most of them union jobs, surprise, surprise, doling out to special interests, UAW come to mind.
When we create all of these government jobs, greening of the schools and light rail and James Oberstar, the potentate of pork in Minnesota, you know, he he brings bicycle paths back with earmark spending.
Does that make you wealthier?
When we do this, what's going to happen is the House of Cards will collapse just as soon as you and I decide we are not going to fund it.
Remember, the government, there's only three ways to fund government.
You can tax, borrow, or inflate.
And right now they're borrowing like nobody's business.
Trillion dollar deficit this year to fund the bailouts, another trillion for the stimulus package for Barack next year.
Now the only reason they're able to do this is because people are willingly giving the government their money by buying horrible investments, zero percent treasuries.
Sooner or later we're going to decide, and the f and the foreign markets already have, that the dollar may not be the currency to own.
Because this money is going to have to be paid for, if you will.
And it's going to be paid for by repudiating debt.
That is printing the money, doubling the cost of goods, the prices.
And so as soon as we decide to quote unquote dump the dollar, what's going to happen?
The day of reckoning will come due for President Obama.
And his only choice if he wants to keep going.
Now remember, this is key.
They say the stimulus package, just like the bailout of Detroit, is going to keep people employed.
We're going to create more gross domestic product.
Well, employee doing things that are non-essential, make work jobs.
But they're going to count it as employment.
Okay, when the day of reckoning comes due, and people are no longer letting the government borrow money from them at zero percent, and they decide to invest in something else.
What's going to happen?
The day of reckoning is due, and Barack Obama has a choice.
And the Democrats have a choice.
They can a let uh uh tax rate or I should say interest rates go way up as a way to attract people to buy treasuries once again when they quit, but raising taxes is gonna kill the economy.
They can be tax you directly to to fund the stimulus package, the ongoing stimulus package, but raising taxes and interest rate hikes will kill the economy.
The only thing left he's gonna do is say the stimulus bubble is burst, we are going to cut all those government make work jobs, cut all those programs, and as I stated earlier, then we're right back to where we were.
A high unemployment, a devalued dollar, and nothing's been done.
The only way to get out from under this malaise is to encourage the private markets to invest in private activities.
You do that by making certain there's transparency and making certain there's a return on savings, cutting taxes.
I'm Jason Lewis, in for rush on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
On the cutting edge of societal evolution, the excellence in broadcasting program up for uh Christmas Eve 2008.
Great to be in for Rush.
Once again, El Rushbow taking a few days off, as you all know by now.
I am Jason Lewis, Minnesota's real anchor man with talent on loan from Rush, and this is Bradford in Hot Springs, Arkansas.
Welcome to the big show.
Thank you for taking my call, Jason.
It's good to talk to you.
Sure, thank you.
And Merry Christmas.
Um What I wanted to talk about is I saw on Larry King Live a couple of weeks ago, Michael Moore being very, very passionate about the government Actually taking over the auto industry.
And how what the government needs to do is basically be the CEO of the auto industry, telling them what to make, as in green cars, electric cars, public transportation, and that the you know the government needs to be in charge of all this.
And I just he was so passionate about it.
And I wanted to just reach through the TV screen and slap him and say, aren't you thinking?
Because no, he hasn't been thinking for many, many years.
And not only has he not been thinking, he's been prevaricating about his uh common man labor roots.
I mean, the guy cannot be believed simply.
But imagine you and I, for years calling Michael Moore a socialist.
Where do we get off calling him a socialist?
Oh, I'm sorry.
Now he's saying the government should run American business.
Well, I guess he is a socialist.
Exactly.
And the thing is is he doesn't realize he's all about, you know, if we're gonna do this and that and that, the government needs to run the companies.
And they need to make X, Y, and Z. And it's like you were just talking about.
When you run something like that and you make them produce things that nobody wants to buy, they're still gonna be in the same position they are now.
Yeah, but look at it this way.
If we allow the government to take over our agricultural and uh food distribution industry, uh, we'll all have less food, and that may be the only way Michael Moore could lose weight.
It's just a thought.
The guy hasn't missed too many dinners.
The point the point, of course, here is is quite simple, and that is you're spot on.
But government spending can never replace private investment, nor can they predict what private investment should be.
For every dollar the government spends on a green school, a green car, a light rail boondoggle that is one dollar less than I have or you have, Bradford, to put into a venture capital fund that goes into creating the next great software program.
Now, how are a bunch of bureaucrats in Washington going to figure out what the next great software program is going to be?
They're not.
And that's something I think Rush was talking about not too long ago with the government.
You you cannot allow the government to choose what's going to happen on Wall Street when everybody looks to the government as to, well, are we gonna buy or are we gonna sell or things like that?
It gets all tied up and it doesn't work.
The one thing that everybody seems to forget is the government is this nebulous thing.
I mean, it it it's not a real solid thing, and it produces nothing.
The government pr the government is not an investor.
It consumes, it doesn't invest.
Anything it invests in has already re been re um deducted from the private economy.
So it comes down quite simply to the to this.
Would you rather have you make the decision on where your money should be invested, or do you want to hand it over to Barney Frank and Michael Moore and let them make the decisions on where your money and when you do that, the decisions made are always for political considerations, never for economic considerations.
And and therein lies the big problem here.
But we're gonna find out soon enough when the stimulus package gets going.
The ironic thing about this is none of this is a failure of unregulated capitalism.
This is the failure of regulated capitalism.
We had regulated housing.
We had Andrew Cuomo and HUD demanding the government insure bad loans and subprime mortgages.
That has nothing to do with capitalism.
That's regulated capitalism.
We had the government mandate cafe standards in Detroit, putting the most popular SUVs out of business.
That has nothing to do with capitalism.
That's regulation, that is government control.
So government has created the mess we're in, and now these idiots going on on Larry King are suggesting they're the very ones to get us out from under it.
Please, I'm Jason Lewis, and you're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Getting into the Christmas cheer here on the program.
Welcome back, everybody.
Another hour coming right up, but we'll have a few more topics, maybe lighten things up a little bit, have some fun.
Christmas Eve 2008 on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Now, just to just to summarize here, real quick.
The point is only increases in productivity can make us all richer.
And that comes from private investment.
If I get a new tool on the assembly line, if I'm a truck driver and I get a new truck, that's gonna make me more productive.
Therefore, I can have a larger salary without taking any money from anybody else.
If you sell more, you get more money.
You're not taking money from other people.
Government investment is the opposite of that.
When government decides to spend, they take money from you to give to somebody else.
That doesn't increase productivity.
It's a it's a zero sum game.
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