Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 8/3/23 Jeff Deist on Recessions, Debt and BRICS

Episode Date: August 6, 2023

Scott is joined by Jeff Deist to talk about both the problems facing our economy and the flawed economic ideas that brought us here. Scott and Deist discuss business cycles and inflation before turning more broadly to global currency markets. They finish with a look at the distinction between free international trade and subsidized international trade and examine the ways that the latter has unfairly discredited the former in the eyes of many right-wingers. Discussed on the show: Peter Schiff Mortgage Bankers Speech Nov/13/06 The chapter on Business Cycles from For A New Liberty by Murray Rothbard Currency Wars by James Rickards Debased Podcast with Jeff Deist Jeff Deist is General Counsel of Monetary Metals. He previously worked as President of the Mises Institute, where he serves as a writer, public speaker, and advocate for property, markets, and civil society and as a longtime advisor and chief of staff to Congressman Ron Paul, for whom he wrote hundreds of articles and speeches. Follow him on Twitter @jeffdeist. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Pools Aaron, time to end the war in Afghanistan. And the brand new, enough already. Time to end the war on terror. and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton.4.

You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. All right, you guys, on the line. We've got our old friend Jeff Dice. He was the chief of staff for Dr. Ron Paul, the greatest American who ever lived, former congressman. and then he was the director, I guess, of the Mises Institute for many years.

And now he's at a company called Monetary Metals, not that we're advertised for them, because we have a monetary advertiser of our own here. But good friend and happy to have you back on the show. How you doing, Jeff? I'm doing good, Scott. How are you? I'm doing real good. And I owe you an apology, man.

I have your book on the shelf, A Strange Liberty. and I know it's great because I heard you talk about it to other people and things like that, but man, I'm up way past my eyeballs writing a book of my own right now. But I swear yours is right at the top of the pile there for getting to when getting to comes. Hey, you know what, Scott, there's plenty of books for you to read. There's, I'm sure you got a whole bookcase behind you, books that you need to read ahead of mind. No, you know what?

I'm actually really interested in what you have to say there and talking with you all about it. We talked a bit about some of the stuff based on articles that you've written in the past. on the show before, but this project has got me just underwater, man. What can I say? Artificial deadlines, you know? What are you going to do? Extend them? Anyway, listen, I have you on for a specific reason or two.

First of all, I want to talk about the bricks. No, that's not first of all. Second of all, I want to talk about the bricks and a new global currency and all these kinds of things. You recently did a very interesting podcast where you interviewed a couple of monetary and economic experts all about that. So I want to talk with you all about that. But first and foremost, what I think is really most important when I have a real expert Austrian economists like yourself on the show

is for the people who aren't necessarily libertarians or aren't necessarily familiar with the Austrian School of Economics, it seems to me, even though there are so many great insights of the Austrian school, the way to really get through to people is the one thing that you guys have over all other schools of economic thought. And you're the only ones who truly understand and can properly explain the reasons behind the boom-bust cycle. And now every American lives through it. Every 10 years, the economy crashes and sucks for a while.

And then it gets really good, and then it crashes again. And everybody knows. But, you know, government schools always just blame the wild excesses of free market capitalism in the 1920s. for causing every problem we have now somehow. And anyway, I already know that you're right but I know, and I like to encourage people to think of it this way that

if you were anywhere on the left or right spectrum of political beliefs and economic beliefs and whatever, that this is still true. Like you could be totally for the welfare state or you could be totally for corporatism in some weird, corrupt

way, I don't know. Still, the Austrians are right about the boom and bust. and it's so important, of course, we're living through it right now. So I was just wondering, thumbnail, can you make it plain form what it is, and especially in contrast to the way they explain it on CNN if you tune in. Well, it's interesting. People refer to it as a business cycle. It's not a business cycle.

It's a central bank cycle. And you talk about people having lived through these booms and busts every 10 years. One of the major selling points of the Fed, more than 100 years ago now, was they just going to smooth these out. We weren't going to have these booms and bust anymore. So I would say by that measure, it's been a significant failure. I mean, right, not too long after the Fed was created, we had the worst depression of the 20th century.

We've had a bunch of mini and not so many one since. So if you think that that was the job of the central bank, then arguably it has failed in that primary job. So I would say this is a credit cycle. I would say that politicians, and central bankers, not just in America, but basically in all Western countries, get together and decide that they can use some combination of monetary fiscal policy to juice the economy. And by juice the economy, I mean create more money and credit at lower interest rates to increase demand.

This is the media. This is the animating focus of our econ profession today, and especially of bankers, is that we need to stimulate demand. We need to make people want to buy more stuff. That's the Keynesian program in a nutshell, is that a healthy, happy, prosperous society is built on consumer demand. Really up until, certainly in the 19th century, but really up until the beginning of the 20th century, economics was understood to, or economists understood this to be the opposite. They understood that production proceeds consumption. production is how you build a healthy economy.

And so when we say production creates consumption, what we mean is that when people are productive when they work at their job and create a good or a service, that's what gives them the income and the ability then to become consumers, not the other way around. The fact that we all want more stuff, well, I guess I shouldn't say that. We're all not these grubby materialists. But in general, you don't have to coax people into wanting more stuff. You have to coax them into being able to afford it. So we all sort of want more.

That's a natural human impulse. But we can't have more until it's actually produced. So modern economics sets this backwards and uses monetary policy in particular to try to create a lot more credit and a lot more debt as a result, at lower interest rates, and attempts to increase the money supply in a circuitous way by buying back treasury debt that Uncle Sam issued five, 10, 20 years ago. And as a result, a boom of sorts is created. If you give people a bunch of credit at pretty low interest rates, yeah, they'll take you up on it. Maybe instead of buying that modest Ford Focus, I'll go ahead and buy that fancier car. You know, maybe instead

of buying that modest home that's really within reasonable affordability for me, I'll buy that big McMansion. You know, whatever it might be, this manifests throughout the economy. me, not just at the individual level, but at the corporate level. All these mergers and acquisitions, all these giant corporations say, you know, we're supposed to be productive and make a profit, and we're supposed to pay a dividend and all these old-fashioned concepts. But gee whiz, if Uncle Sam wants us to be able to borrow money, that's something less than 2% or less than 1% or almost zero,

but that kind of sounds like gambling with house money. so yeah we'll take you up on that and when corporations do that it creates all kinds of crazy malinvestments throughout the economy when the cost of borrowing money is what i would argue artificially low lower than would be in a free market then all kinds of projects and businesses and joint ventures and mergers and new service lines and new stores all kinds of things start to look good on paper because the cost of capital is so low. But when things start to unravel and interest rates start to rise, Warren Buffett famously said, you know, the tide starts to receive, and we see who's not wearing a baby suit.

So the Austrian term for this is malinvestment. A lot of money and time and human energy gets poured into unprofitable things. And so when all of this eventually goes belly up, we find out that, hey, instead of having production lines for Cadillac escalades, you know, big fancy gas guzzlers, there should have been production lines being created for Ford focuses, little small efficient cars, you know, whatever it might be. And there's a million wage that this cycles through the economy. You know, these really fancy ice cream places where, you know, a thing of ice cream is eight bucks or something instead of three bucks. like it used to be a basket robins, all kinds of things, luxury homes, high-end restaurants, I mean, it's just endless. So all kinds of business combinations happen because of this artificially expanded credit market. And so that's the boom, and it's a happy time, and it really does make some people rich, you know, investment bankers, early investors, early real estate speculators, anybody who gets out and sells before the bus actually is better off

at the end of it all. But that's not average people and that's not the society as a whole. So right now, after all this monetary and fiscal stimulus of COVID, you know, 2020, 2020, 2021, Congress was involved in that, the Fed was involved in that, both sides. Boy, boy, we had a nice narcotic effect there for a couple of years. And a lot of dudes in Austin, Texas were buying $65,000 ginormous Ford F-150s. And now that is starting to come to an end. Interest rates are way up. People are paying 8%, 10% to buy a car.

People are paying 7, 8% to buy a home. And so we're starting to feel the pitch. We've seen some tremors like some bank failures. We've seen some tremors like this Fitch's downgrader the US credit rating earlier this week. And the BRICS currency proposal, which you mentioned earlier, I believe, is another tremor. So I fear that we are facing another very unpleasant episode in American financial life that might well be on par with 2008. And let's pray it's not any worse than that. Okay.

So this is so important. And this is one of things that really, you know, help to make me anti-government as a young man. Because I knew about inflation. Everybody knows about inflation. Everybody talks about all the time. Prices are going up. Price is going up. Everything's more expensive.

It's so old cliche. Jay, you know, what's going on or what's up? The cost of living. You know, and the rich get richer and the poor can't afford to live inside a house anymore and have to live in their car. You know, everybody's familiar with that. But then it's worse. What you're telling me is that same inflation of the money supply that causes the rise in prices for everybody all the time. It also causes the rise in prices in certain sectors way out of control, like housing and the stock market. And as you were saying, the You know, major firms, they're speculating on land that they need for, I don't know, clear-cutting or quarrying or whatever it is, mining or whatever it is. Everybody starts making bad bets based on that same inflation that drives the prices up for everyone. And then that's what leads to the crash. So like for regular people just living their life with working jobs and living through this and watching the TV version of this, the TV version of this, whether it's 99 or 2008 or coming up here real soon when the crash comes, when it does. come is, oh, how do you like that? The economy was humming along, and then all of a sudden it wasn't. And then, but so what you're saying is that, no, it was kind of a big fake, you know, boom, before the very real bust. And that to me is the great insight that even has a teenager.

It was like, ah, see, that's how they get you, you know? And then, of course, the biggest corporations and the wealthiest individuals, they get to buy up everybody else's bankrupt property, intellectual and physical, who go bankrupt, who are really doing all the great innovating and everything. So, you know, it's arguable how purposeful this all is. I do give a lot of credence to the idea that the people in charge never read Mises and don't care and don't want to know what a criticism of their policy would look like in any real sense. But I think it's just so important. And then I'm always trying to figure out, so where on the cycle are we?

and going back to my and you know my limitations on this Jeff as an economist I'm a great anti-war guy so I take much more of the kind of layman's introductory sort of level of view of this stuff like for example I think it's chapter 11 of

Murray Rothbard's book for New Liberty where he talks about inflation in the business cycle and he says that whenever they try to they go oh oh we kind of got a little carried away there dude and then they try to prick the bubble and let a little bit of air out slowly, but that never works.

It always pops. There's always a giant crash. And in fact, this is what I was going to say earlier that I forgot. You probably remember that Peter Schiff, who I know you're familiar with, he gave this famous speech in 2006, I think it was, to the mortgage bankers out west, out in Las Vegas,

where they had these huge bubbles, right? In Phoenix and in Las Vegas and in L.A., is the worst of the housing bubbles, right? And what he told them, he goes, he, like, drew a line. I don't know if he even had a graph or something. But he, he, like, drew a sign wave. And he goes, look, as much as it goes up artificially from what real productivity would be, what real GDP would be, as much as it's artificially up,

that's how low it's going to go, bro. And then one of the guys in the audience at the question time, the guy says, so what are you saying? I should just slit my wrists. And he goes, I'm saying you should sell every house that you own right now, fool, before it's too late because and so is that really does that make sense to you that's essentially right that

as much as it's a giant fake boom that's how low it's going to bust because I've got to tell you man I've seen some charts that compare the housing bubbles and prices now to 2008 and if that holds true then we're looking at the end of the world here pal

yeah it is scary and especially for younger people who are trying to maybe buy it home for the first time now with you know the same house at 3% mortgage rate versus 7 or 8, you know, the monthly payment doubles on the same house. And you end up paying way more interest relative to principal over the length of the mortgage, especially if you take all 30 years to pay it off. So that's discouraging to me. I will say that lending standards have not been as loose as they were in that period that's

featured in the big short, the movie, which is basically from about 04 to 07, there was a real period of casino mortgages. There are a lot of fly-by-net companies, a lot of what they call liar loans with no documentation. You know, and that movie sort of made famous the idea of strippers or tax cab drivers having, you know, seven or eight houses and leverage to the Gills because it doesn't matter because never go up. And then when number go down, everybody goes bankrupt and you have a lot of harm spread across society. So I don't think this housing bust is on par with that, simply because the lending hasn't been that profligate. But I would say the commercial side of that commercial real estate scares the living daylights out of me because, you know,

COVID, there was already a work from home movement. Let me stop right there on housing real quick. It's just the prices have gone up so much. So I understand what you're saying that there's less fraud in it, but that's still all those payments are being made by people who the booming economy, they're depending on the booming economy me to keep them in those mortgages all the same, right? Absolutely, 100%. Yeah. Okay, and I'm sorry to interrupt you.

Go ahead. So it's a scary time for commercial real estate. You know, even before COVID, there was a huge work-from-home movement. And now, since COVID, downtowns across America that used to be full of office workers are really empty. San Francisco, in particular, is just remarkable. New York City's not back in terms of its commercial occupancy. I was in Pittsburgh recently. It was really sad being downtown.

It was a weekday, the middle of the day, to see how empty that was. And you can watch YouTube's about how empty San Francisco is. Market Street, which is a major artery there, all those vacant storefront. So I think commercial real estate is going to be the really rough ride. And that bubbles through the economy because there's so many lenders involved in that. There's so many big players involved in that. in that. Yeah, you know, especially in time, all those skyscrapers full. I mean, these are huge investments, bazillion dollar buildings that it's that intervention. I mean, it was already the case

that everybody's phone and PC made their office job obsolete, right? But you still had to come to work because that was the way it was. But once they changed all that with COVID, I don't know what percentage of the people are not coming back who kept their office jobs, but get to work at home. But It's a lot. And I could see how, from the point of view of the market, of holding up all of those extremely expensive buildings that must rely on absolute tons of cash flow constantly to keep them, you know, maintained and clean

and every other thing to keep them available for anybody else to even try to move into. I can see a real collapse coming there, you know, and then what are they going to do? A bunch of giant empty skyscrapers? Well, also retail storefronts, office parks, there's a lot of examples of this. So it's shopping malls, restaurants have had a rough go as well with hiring, especially. So it can be a very interesting time, and we're going to have to repurpose so much of these buildings.

And again, that shows you my investment. It's not so easy to repurpose a skyscraper built for business into, let's say, low-income housing for homeless or something. It's not so easy. Yeah. Sorry, hang on just one second. Hey, y'all, Scott Horton here for Tennessee Hot Sauce Company. Man, this stuff is so good. They get all different flavors.

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and for a limited time, you can explore select occupation records for free. Imagine finding your great-grandfather's RCMP records or discovering your ancestors' name in the UK and Ireland nursing register. Don't miss out. Free access ends August 24th. Visit Ancestry.ca for more details. Terms apply. There's so much at stake here and so much going on. So let's talk about the rest of the world being entirely sick of the American Empire. And, you know, Fiona Hill, who is, you know, the Russia Hawk and features in Trump's phony first impeachment and all of that. She gave a speech recently where she said, look, it isn't just that, you know, we pushed Russia away and all that. She says this huge percentage of the earth, at least as represented by their sovereign government,

They are taking the opportunity of the war in Ukraine to essentially try to get to side more or less loosely with Russia, but more importantly, side against the United States and the Western dominated world order, which is somehow, I don't know, exactly all underpinned by American money. And ever since World War II, instead of having gold bricks, all the sovereign governments keep American $100 bills in their vaults. And that underpins all of their debts and this and that and whatever and how they handle all kinds, not just oil, but all kinds of international exchanges and dollars. And at the very least, Jeff, I know that there is a hell of a motive on the part of a lot of countries, as even Fiona Hill was fretting, to find a way out from under. American domination and particularly dollar domination. On the other hand, every central banker in the world only knows how to do one thing, print money. So why would anybody choose their crappy currencies over our crappy currency? And I've heard it said by rich people who seem to know about these things that, hell, you think America's money gets debased and we got problems with inflation all the time. Look at X, Y, and Z, man. They're an absolute disaster. So you're supposed to come up with some kind of market basket of currencies. I think they talked about that. after 08 right said we're going to come up with a market basket of some kind of new global currency to undercut the dollar but nobody was willing to invest in it because it wasn't going to pay off so um oh wait one more thing about this before i forget i thought it was funny i saw a tweet

i don't know who it was some guy gets credit random guy gets credit um the news story was the russians the indians tried to pay the russians with rupees for some i don't know gas or metal or something and the russians told the russians told the indians told the indians the indians told the indians them, yeah, no, we'll take whatever, rubles or dollars or whatever it is, but we won't take rupees. And then so somebody in a smart Alec tweet said, yeah, everybody's

multilateralist until somebody tries to settle their account with rupees, and then all of a sudden not so much, you know. So anyway, I wonder what you think of all of that, because it's obviously huge moves on a planetary scale. I wonder

what you make of the so-called threat of it all, and then And what really would the result look like for America? Is that a threat that this would hurt the American people if somehow the dam broke and everybody left the dollar for something else? Well, absolutely, that would hurt the American people because we've enjoyed for many, many decades now what the French finance minister called our exorbitant privilege, which was allowing us to export inflation, essentially, and buy cheaper bits. from abroad because the whole world needs dollars. It has since Bretton Woods, and has especially needed them since 1971.

And so international trade, the SWIFT system, buying oil, clearing transactions across borders. These mostly take place using US dollars. So if you look at central banks around the world, if you look at fiscal treasuries around the world, they have all got lots of dollars. Most of them have lots of treasuries as well. And it's just the nature of things.

So while it's certainly in much of the world's interest to see the U.S. dollar to throne in the long term, in the short term, they'd be hurt too because they've got lots of dollars in dollar denominated treasuries. And if those devalued quickly, you know, unless they got out first like musical chairs, they'd be holding the bag. So it's very, very interesting. And I think we have to understand this two ways. First, there's the economics of it, but in the monetary system, which is quite complex. you know, eight billion economic actors around the world. But the other overlay is the geopolitical element of it.

And there's lots of ways to wage war. You can wage war through litigation. You can wage war through currency. You can wage war militarily. You can wage war culturally. So, you know, war isn't just always armies and planes and aircraft carriers. And I think Jim Rickards deserves credit. To my knowledge, he came up with the term currency wars.

and he wrote a book titled that. I can't recall what year that was maybe early 2010s. And so the idea that the BRICS countries would try to move against us form some sort of currency amongst themselves is certainly rational. Jim Records has written about, very recently about what the mechanics of that would look like. So I encourage people interested to Google him. Also, Alastair MacLeod in the UK has written some great articles about about what he thinks would be the mechanics of a bricks currency.

I'm not sold because first of all, the whole thing's been pretty sketchy. It was announced at a Russian embassy in Africa that this proposal would be entertained at the upcoming August meeting of the bricks in South Africa. But it was never really confirmed out of Moscow. The Indians have denied it. I think the Chinese and the Brazilians,

I believe, have been silent on it. And of course, none of these countries have been, let's say, frugal with their own central banking. I mean, they all have huge fiscal and monetary policy problems of their own. And Russia's got, you know, problems with sanctions and a declining population and all kinds of things. But nonetheless, it's an intriguing idea that they might form not necessarily a currency that individuals or businesses would use amongst them, each other, and then redeemable in gold. So they're not really talking about a redeemable currency. the way you and I might like a gold-backed currency. But I think what they're talking about is a trading currency,

just between those nations, member nations, settling international transactions between their central banks. And then they could all basically pledge their gold as backing for this. And if they didn't trust each other, which they probably don't, they could actually keep their gold at home, not ship it to some central vault, and just have an accounting arrangement between them, you know, what they've pledged. That would probably show less dedication to this new idea. But nonetheless, again, the world has been bullied by the US dollar.

It has been a tool of empire. It has allowed us to force the rest of the world to dance to our tomb. And it has also financed all kinds of military adventurism and wars in the sense that we're able to sell Treasury debt. debt very easily at very low rates of interest, or we haven't until the last couple years, to people all around the world, knowing that worst-case scenario, our own central bank will back it up. So we can go back to the Civil War and see before the Fed and see that that was financed by bond issuance, by debt.

Certainly World War I was financed by Treasury debt. World War II was enormously financed by Treasury debt. And then, you know, we ran deficits during Vietnam. when we ran huge deficits under George W. Bush with our Middle Eastern adventure. So one thing often unremarked that our U.S. dollar domination has allowed us to do is spend beyond our means on not just welfareism, but also warfare. So there's no question that the U.S. dollar has been weaponized. I know that's kind of a goofy, overused term, but it's true.

And the rest of the world, even our so-called allies in Europe, I think have been harmed by that. And in a certain sense, the American people have been harmed by that, because even though it's awfully nice to go to Walmart, and there's lots and lots of incredibly cheap stuff there, we get a lot of for our dollar, not so much food anymore, but flip-flops or, you know, whatever you're buying at Walmart. part. But, you know, it's made us lazier at home. It's made us less productive at home. It's given us a false sense of material comfort at home. It's given us a false sense of how wealthy we are. And I think in the long run, that is never good for a country or an economy. We pride ourselves here in America. Oh, we're so productive. Our workers are so productive. Our economy is so productive. We're so wealthy. We can bail out the rest of the world we can get foreign aid to everybody and if they won't take that we can bomb them you know the carrot and the stick so much of this hubris i think in the american psyche is fueled by a false sense of our own wealth yeah live well you know that reminds me of um the way how do you like this metaphor um david stockman says you know when we talk about all these bubbles the 99 bubble the the 2008 bubble, our COVID crisis aftermath that we're living through now.

These are the little bubbles on top of the great big dollar deformation bubble since World War II. It sounds like that's what you're describing is getting away with murder ever since Bretton Woods. Absolutely. It's been a privilege, but it's also been a curse. And the rest of the world is realizing that. And they're making moves. This BRICS proposal, this I mentioned the credit downgrade, by Fitches earlier this week of the US credit. These might just be little tremors, but you put enough these little tremors together.

And I think we all feel that the world order is changing and shifting. And I'm not sure Americans are prepared to have a 21st century, which is not the American century. Yeah. So in the last few minutes here, I want to talk about China. This is something that came up in your great interview on your podcast about this.

And I'm sorry, what's the name of your new podcast, Jeff? Well, we do a Twitter space every Friday, but then we turn it into a podcast, which is called debased, which is a, which is, you know, not just the currency, but the ways in which it, it I think, hurts us as a society. Right.

Okay, so you guys have this great conversation about China in there. And this is so interesting to me already, and I wanted to talk to you about it, but plus you just brought up some points there about the inflationary money, kind of making all this outsource possible. So this has been a huge project, the globalist project, especially since the end of the

Cold War, to create at least a de facto world government run out of D.C., right? And with these free trade agreements, I think Rommando, just Ramondo at antirewar.com, did such a great job of explaining the division of labor here, where, like, in Korea and Japan and in Europe, we put our military there, and we're in charge of your foreign policy, but we'll give you free and open access to our markets to sell all your crap, even if that undermines

working people here. So we're not talking about but then there's two different questions. In fact, I'm making a tangent, but hopefully it'll make sense. I was really into this kind of John Bircher, anti-New World Order, anti-globalism stuff in the 1990s, and yet I never really was a right-winger.

I always was more of a Harry Brown and a Ron Paul guy. And Ron did write about this kind of stuff at the time. But I remember when I first read Lou Rockwell.com, I think maybe the first thing ever read by Lou. It was obviously, here's the guy who leans right for a libertarian. And yet here he just, in no uncertain terms, denounced all right-wing protectionism against China and was in favor of free trade with China and in favor of ultimate free exchange between our society and theirs in every way in order to,

undermine war and these right-wingers, they don't know what the hell they're talking about when it comes that kind of stuff. So these things are obviously in conflict in our modern society where the globalization trade comes with the globalization to government, comes with the globalization of the American Empire. You know, a lot of empire is in the name of what they call free trade, which is a lot of these kind of rigged imperial type agreements and all of that. But so then a huge part of what's going on in American politics now is the aftermath of all of this outshoring of American manufacturing to China and Mexico to, but especially to China, over the last 30 years, really, right, since H.W. Bush and the end of the Cold War, especially, and I guess under

Clinton and that whole regime there. And so, but instead of it being what Lou Rockwell was talking about, where it's just free market capitalism, buddy, and prices and things, we're talking about these massive projects, right? This is the David Rockefeller's dream in his memoir. I was like, this was to create this giant global interdependent government slash

pseudo free market system. What Bill Clinton calls free markets and democracy, right? And so, now we have this huge reaction against that because we didn't have like the what the market would have determined to be the proper amount of

outsourcing before it costs so many Americans, their jobs, that they're too poor to buy the crap that the company's importing anymore, right? At that point, you got to stop outsourcing, and the market is pushing back. But they rigged it so that now 30 years later, they kind of got away. They caught the whole rust belt and everything, right? They just closed everything down. And so it's, you know, anyway, I'm going somewhere with this, right, which is like the discrepancy between what a real libertarian and a real free trader wants in terms of global trade. and capitalism versus what we've had with this neoliberalism instead of libertarianism

for the last 30 years here and the effect of that and look at how much the right i think i don't know about the republican party but i know right-wing people overall are over what they call libertarian free market capitalist economics because of this enough of the free traders we're all buchananites now this kind of thing so i'm sorry for rambling on so long but you're nodding at me like you understand that I'm sort of making a point. So what do you think about all that? That's interesting how there's been a reaction to this neoliberal capitalism. And what people talk about is the new right, whether that's the Patrick Dineen types or the Warren Cass types. I think that's reactionary. I mean, that's the idea that we've hollowed things out. And I'm not sure

that all of that so-called free trade that occurred was really market-based. I think a lot of it was machinations like NAFTA, machinations like the, you know, between the OECD nations, machinations like gas and some of these other big treaties that libertarian groups like Cato supported, but the people like the Mises Institute and Ron Paul did not support because they saw them as basically cronious type agreements. And, you know, we've seen the effects of this. Look, I'm a free trader, but I can also acknowledge challenges. I remember Pat Buchanan, And after the Fukushima event, there was a period of six to 12 months where all the Japanese car dealers in America, like Honda, didn't have enough cars and parts because they were all reliant on just-in-time delivery systems from Japan operating just in time. And then something like Fukushima happens and they're not operating.

Pat Bekin had said, aha, see, I told you, we're too dependent. that we outsourced all of our Honda parts. And more recently during COVID, when we had all kinds of supply chain disruptions and shipping disruptions around the world, it turns out that Taiwan is the overwhelming manufacturer of chips, chip technology for all kinds of applications, computers, but also refrigerators,

and the aforementioned Ford F-150s. Cars don't go anymore unless they have a chip. And so we had all these cars that were basically done sitting on lots rotting just waiting for the chip and we couldn't get it and so that's the sort of thing that gives protectionist ammo i think in this in this unhappy uh divisive society of ours but how utopian and crazy is it then to think of what you know it would have been if ron had one had one harry brown and one in 96 and we'd had instead of bill clinton and w bush neoliberalism we'd had actual libertarianism where the principle was absolutely we want free and open trade with

China, but also absolutely we won't do anything as a national government to help corporations bear the cost of outsourcing and getting away with firing entire towns worth of American people. Well, I think it would be a happier and more peaceful world. That's all I'll say in closing. There you go. Well, fair enough. um okay well thank you jeff for your time i learned a lot i really appreciate it um everybody you can follow jeff diced on twitter at jeff dice and he's at monetary metals that's monetary dash metals dot com really appreciate you man thanks scott horton show anti war radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7

fm in l a psradyo dot com antiwar dot com scott horton dot org and libertarian institute institute.org.