The David Knight Show - INTERVIEW Economics Book Fuels Pushback Against Socialism

Episode Date: September 6, 2023

Axel Kaiser, "The Street Economist: 15 Economics Lessons Everyone Should Know" has become the "Common Sense" of Latin America, a best-seller having an effect in Argentina & Chile similar to Thomas Paine's book. Its effect can be seen in the recent Argentine election where Javier Milei came in first in the primary in the country where socialist policies have ravaged the country with 150% inflation and 50% poverty. It explains in a short book (120 pages) simple, math-free examples the problems of socialism. Now translated into English, it's a must for every student and liberty minded adult.Axel also gives us a glimpse of what its like to like in an underground economy necessitated by rampant inflation.Find out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.comIf you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-showOr you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @[e-mail] App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Money is only what YOU hold: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silverFor 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to TrendsJournal.com and enter the code KNIGHTBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

Drive safe and obey the rules of the road. Vehicle owners who receive a red light or speed camera violation can pay or dispute online at toronto.ca.aps. Dear Canadian exporters, what you do matters more than ever. And in the face of uncertain times, Export Development Canada has your back. Whether you're navigating currency fluctuations,

need additional working capital, or are mitigating supply chain risks, we can help you overcome the challenges. It's what we've been doing since 1944. Because the world needs more Canada. Together, let's give it to them. Visit edc.ca slash export for more. And joining us now is our guest.

He has, as I mentioned at the beginning of the program, he's a Chilean-German lawyer with a master's in investments. He is a director of the Friedrich Hayek Chair in Santiago, Chile. He has been a visiting scholar in Stanford University's Hoover Institution. His opinions have been published by the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Quillette, Forbes, Newsweek, Washington Examiner. But he's had a lot the street economist best-selling book in chile spain and many other latin american countries currently being published in five different languages and now it has been published in english and when i saw that i wanted to talk to him about it because it is, um, the street economist, 15 economic lessons everyone should know.

And I really, as we look at this, uh, this guy who just finished in the primaries in Argentina, Javier Malay. I thought, well, you know, it's, um, I wonder if he was, you know, a Ron Paul type of a libertarian in terms of his economics and we've got to get rid of the central bank and the problems that it's caused and everything. And when I saw this, I thought, well, maybe he's one of the many, many people in Latin America that have read this book. You know, when the Wall Street Journal does a piece on Javier Millay, they just talk about his hairstyle. But I would like to know what was on his mind. And regardless of whether or not he was influenced by this,

this looks like a very good book. So joining us now is Alex Kaiser-Berens von Hohenhagen. Thank you for joining us, sir. Thank you very much for having me. It is very interesting to see this, and we really do need to have some economic education in all these countries and i don't know perhaps more so in america than even in latin america because we've been so miseducated and disinformed in our school so it's

great to see something like the street economist but let me begin before we start talking about what's in the book uh do you have any idea if your book has had some influence with Javier Millay, or if I'm pronouncing his name correctly, or certainly perhaps with the people who voted for him? What do you think? Well, actually, Javier Millay presented my book in Argentina last year. Oh, there you go. Okay, well, that makes sense. I could see the connection there. So he presented it, right?

He presented it. He thinks it's one of the best books that has ever been written as a general introduction to economics for the general public. Okay. I have to make a disclosure there. We are good friends, brothers in arms, so to speak. I've been doing the same thing in Chile and other other countries in latin america that he has been doing in in argentina and uh he cites my books in in interviews on television and and so on so i i now have a lot in argentina as well well then my hunch was correct that's good i'm glad to know that because i really would like to know uh what is on his mind and not just uh how he styles his hair that's that's the wall street journal you think that they would want to know what is on his mind and not just how he styles his hair. That's the Wall Street Journal. You'd think that they would want to talk about his economic theories, because they don't want to talk about his economic theories.

We've got to keep people in the dark about that. But you have much to say about what is wrong with our centrally planned economy and why socialism is so ingrained in the younger generation. And how do we fix that? More importantly, how do we fix that? I think the problem is economic illiteracy and it has always been the problem if we remember the great economist ludwig von mises in the early 20th century he was saying that if people understood basic economics you wouldn't have socialists around

because in order to for people to believe all of these nonsensical ideas, which sound very attractive, we have to accept that, you need ignorant people who don't understand anything. You know, I have spent a lot of time in the United States. I'm also German, and I have also been spending a lot of time in Latin America, and I see the same problem everywhere. It's most people don't understand economics, and especially young people. It's seduced by the messages they see on television, by the Paul Krugmans of the world, and by

the Stiglitz of the world. By the way, Stiglitz has done an awful job in Latin America, supporting all our socialist dictators. It's unbelievable. I wrote an article for the Washington Examiner and so I wrote the book because I thought you know I have to do something that people can read about economics without the math without the graphs without all of this jargon that's for specialists and it became a best-selling book everywhere and now even in mongolia they want to publish now in poland now also in russia in different countries so i think i i i you know i hit a nerve like we say in german because there

was we were lacking something like this for explaining very simple terms to to the general public well that's great because you know growing up even being in school 50 years ago or whatever they never taught economics to us we didn't get economics until we got into college and because you said there's things like math involved in it so if you got something there that is accessible to people without math explains the principles to them i always had a big issue where we were taught and when we got economics we were not uh taught mrs or hayek we were taught canes you know the uh the idea that you know the the money that uh the the government spends that there's no basis in reality that it's never going to come crashing down on anybody.

But you have to manage your own personal stuff, but the government doesn't have to manage its stuff, that kind of nonsense. And that always never really set well with me, even with all the math

and the hand-waving, it never set well with me. But you're setting up with this, as you explained, 15 economic lessons everyone should know. It is really set up without a lot of uh math and general principles uh is how it's explained right tell us a little

bit about that essay on positive economics it means i describe how the world works with zero math and not even a footnote so uh it's in 120 pages i explain for instance price theory in a couple of pages i explain what capital is and how capital is formed and why it's it's good for society to have a lot of capital and rich people and not the other way around i explain you know free trade and why is it why it's important and theory of innovation all of that with very very simple examples it's what means is called crucial economics uh you start with the individual and you know a barter economy and so you can explain for

instance that prices are not formed because you have money they are from big forms because you have exchange and even in a barter economy you would have prices and so this is a very basic idea that many people don't understand really because we know one one teaches uh teaches these things and nowhere i didn't learn anything about economics at school of university i had to learn it after i had you know i was you know uh my masters and phds so um this type of things have been have become very popular also among different social classes which is important as well i i'm in chile this book uh has sold uh over 50 000 copies in a year it's it's the most old book in the economy i mean economics book in

history and it contributed to create a reaction against our current Marxist government. We have a communist government right now in Chile. And it was crucial in defeating the constitutional experiment that we had last year on September 4th. All of these efforts that many people did, including me. And so if you change how people think, then you change the politics of your country. And the problem we have is that universities and media and all of the different instances that, you know, give credit to ideas are controlled by hardcore leftists.

And so what do you expect? I mean, of course, the popularity of socialism is rising in the United States among Yen Seers and also in Germany and other countries. They don't nothing. They know nothing about the history of communism. They know nothing about socialism. I have been spending all of my energy in the last 10 years fighting against socialism in Latin America, where you see Argentina with 150% of inflation rate right now, a ruined country that in 1896,

it was a very liberal country, had the highest per capita income in the world. And now it's a really an example of everything you wouldn't do. It's a disaster, a a complete mess almost 50 percent of poverty rate and it's it's it's one of the richest countries in the world that we can go on with venezuela and other countries i mean and so it's very important for people to understand isn't it that it can happen to anybody anywhere you know especially in america what never happened here and yet it is happening here as you pointed out it's this different social class and i think it really goes back to uh antonio gramsi's idea of the march through the institutions and you know taking over the institutions and it's pretty clear that they've taken over the

institutions educational academic institutions and governmental uh corporate institutions they've all been taken over by these leftists socialists marx Marxists, whatever you want to call them. But it's also, when you look at it, it's like, you know, Pete Boudigais, which is my nickname for him, our Department of Transportation guy, his father spent his entire life pushing the teaching of Antonio Gramsci, teaching it at Notre Dame. So these people really understand what they're doing. We just don't understand what they're doing. And they don't want us to understand the consequences of this. They don't want us to understand economics. And that's a key thing. I think it's interesting you

said that the book is only 120 pages. Is that correct? Drive safe and obey the rules of the road. Vehicle owners who receive a red light or speed camera violation can pay or dispute online at toronto.ca.aps. Yeah, it's correct. I mean, I wrote it on purpose, you know, on purpose, very short. Because people can read 500 pages. But 120 pages, 15 lessons, each lesson like an average of four pages that you can read. And so it's very very easy and it's i have to tell you i mean it's also recommended by very uh important economists in the united

states uh casey mulligan from chicago university jd mccloskey also from chicago then you have uh p.l graham really loved the book uh and you have other stephen moore and other people recommending the book so um well i can't wait to read it. Usually I read a book before I interview somebody. But when I saw your bio there, I figured that you had to have something to do with Javier Mollal, or certainly the people who voted for them would have seen that. And that's the key thing. We talk about being able to condense it to 120 pages. If somebody really understands a topic, that's the difficult thing is condensing

it and explaining it to people concisely. And if you really do understand it, you can explain it concisely. And so that I think that's a really powerful thing that it's such a short book and so many different lessons in that short book without math accessible to everybody. It's something that everybody ought to have, especially homeschoolers, I think should definitely get this for their kids. Yes, I absolutely agree. And I see how this is changing minds in Spain, in Latin America, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and different parts. So now it's in Germany, it's being a success, also the book, because it has been published in German.

And so I think in the United States, it will make a crucial contribution to young people and other people, you know, under basic economics. And it's part of the battle of ideas that Hayek was talking about all the time. And I've read Gramsci in, you know, I've spent a lot of time reading him.

And I'm glad you're mentioning Gramsci, because not many people in the United States, not even people who are trying to defeat the left, knows about Gramsci. And this is the most lethal Marxist thinker that has ever existed, in my opinion, because he really understood that it was not about the violent revolution like Marx and Lenin thought. It was about, you know, colonizing people's minds. And when you do that through the march, I mean, using this long march through the institutions, then the system will fall apart on its own because people will not want to have the system in the first place. They want to, you know, will want to have something different. It's like what you see now with the woke movement, like they people trying to replace a national

anthem, people hating the flag, hating the ideas of the founding fathers. That's if they are successful with their cultural revolution, then you lose the United States. And if you lose the United States, you lose the whole West. There is no other united states you lose the whole west there is no other place you know where we can go or that could help you know countries uh that are being ruled by socialists and and so i'm very worried about the united states for me it's the key battleground and that's why i was you know so happy that it was published in in english because i want to join the fight and i want to convey this message i've lived in germany and i know how socialists think in latin america and i've seen so many countries being ruined by uh leftist ideas even chile which was the most

prosperous country in latin america yes thanks thanks to the chicago school you know of economics and and people under friedman and harberger and all of them, they came, they made the reforms, and Chile became the most prosperous country in Latin America. And now we have this Marxist regime again that is destroying everything. So why would you do that to your own country in the United States? And we can't afford to lose this nation. Well, it's a constant fight, and you have to know where the things are laid. Let's talk a little bit about, you talked about the fact that in Argentina,

150% inflation that is happening there. So what causes inflation? Well, it's very straightforward. It's the printing of money in order to, you know, fund the fiscal deficit in Argentina. And it's I think it's the same for every country. This is a law of economics. And of course, you have it in the United States. It market institutions a long time ago. And so the problems that they were creating due to this new government intervention, they tried to solve it with more government intervention. And what happened was that the more problems the government tried to solve, the more problems were created. And of this spiral of interventionism and in the end you have

a country that is has completely destroyed its base of its productivity base and then there is no growth and then you have more social problems and then you have to spend more and then you you take a lot of debt in order to give people things for free. And at some point, people don't lend you more money anymore. And so you have to go to a printing press. And, you know, they are running hot 24-7 because... Drive safe and obey the rules of the road. Vehicle owners who receive a red light or speed camera violation can pay or dispute online at toronto.ca.aps. You need to get money from someplace and that's how you end up with a 50% poverty rate and 150% inflation rate. And you have 6 million people who are starving to death because they have nothing to eat

in a country that produces food for 400 million people. Wow. Because Argentina is probably the most productive soil in the world. Yeah. And it's a huge country. But socialism ruins everything. And now Javier Millet, what he's really attempting is sort of a revolution in the classical sense. Going back to the roots of Albertian classical liberalism,

Alberti was the founder of the 1853 Constitution in Argentina. He was a classical liberal who admired the founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. And he was very much inspired by their ideas. And following this American model of freedom, Argentina became the wealthiest country in the world at some point. This idea was work everywhere. And then you had Peron and the collectivists and the Keynesians and the socialists coming in and then they destroyed everything. Yeah, and of course you have to have part Of the business and it's profiting up from this because you know, they get subsidies from government They get quotas for import and exports they get you know, all sorts of benefits from this crony capital system or pseudo capitalist system fascist system they have there and uh they support the uh

peronists and kirchners and this type of course people in the world and this happens everywhere not only in argentina and you know when i look at american culture what most americans know about argentina is avida you know they celebrated it as a like a broadway musical don't cry for me argentina they made a celebrity out of these Marxists that destroyed that country. And that's about the only thing that most Americans know about Argentina. And again, that's because, you know, our institutions have been taken over by the Marxists. And so they're going to celebrate other Marxists there.

You know, it kind of reminds me, you know, you're a street economist. I think you are kind of the Thomas Paine of Latin America. You know, as Thomas Paine changed minds in America at the time of the revolution with his common sense and explained things. I think that's the power of a book, the power of ideas to change things. It really is. Yeah, Thomas Paine is a great inspiration. I mean, his common sense book or pamphlet uh was

so decisive in you know igniting the american revolution and i'm i really believe in the power of ideas i've seen it myself we have created a movement with a million followers in latin america i've become very popular in different countries in latin amer also in Spain. And when I'm in Florida and Miami, walking around, people stop me because you have all these migrants coming from Venezuela escaping socialism or Argentina or different parts, and they all know me. And so it's fascinating to see how you can really win this war if you have enough people

fighting it and you have, you know, you are engaging in this battle of ideas and and and that's why i wrote this book and we have many people on our site on our camp but they write papers for journals that no one reads that's right so and they don't go like that's why i liked milton friedman so much because he would go to television he would do free to choose you know he would go and and face all the socialists and you have now very good free market economists maybe not as charismatic as friedman but they prefer to stay in the ivory tower and write his papers and and that i think is not really contributing a lot to changing how people think we need more public intellectuals uh doing

this stuff and i know that you know professional, if I wanted to get tenure, my book would be useless for that. But I don't care about tenure. I care about having a world where we can live in freedom and we can have prosperity. I've seen too many countries in my lifetime being ruined by socialism. Venezuela is an example of that. I used to go to Venezuela when it was still working. And now look at it. It's horrible.

And Argentina, the same thing. I remember going to Argentina when the peso was one to one with the dollar. And now, like, almost 700 pesos per dollar. Wow. It's massive. So this can happen very quickly. So I hope that, that countries like the United States learned the lesson and don't, don't go down the wrong path.

Yes. You were saying that, you know, 50% poverty rate. Do you have any idea what the median income is in Argentina or even the average? Uh, do you know? Average? I don't, I'm not sure, but I can tell you that for instance if you are a lawyer working for a big law firm in Buenos Aires one of the best law firms you are make probably $500 a month Wow Wow yeah so it's very cheap and I go to

Argentina a lot and because they And because they have capital controls, you have to bring cash with you. And so you exchange it in the parallel market, the black market. They call it the blue market. Yeah, they call it the blue market. It's very funny. And to pay for services is so cheap. I mean, it's insane. Other things are expensive.

But services, people, you can have someone, you know, a cleaning lady or someone, you pay like $5 per hour, $3 per hour. Wow. And they are going to Europe. Many of them have Italian passports. So they're going to Italy, Spain, and a lot of them are coming to the United States. If you go to Florida, for instance, Miami, you go to all restaurants, many restaurants. You speak to people, and there are all Argentinians who are working as waitresses or bartenders or whatever. They have to study architecture or law or economics, and they are working there because they make more money doing that than working in Argentina. So it's very sad to see whole generations being destroyed

by these very harmful ideologies. Yeah, when you talked about the downward spiral of, you know, the government comes in and creates a problem, and then people turn to the government to create the solution of that, and it just creates this downward spiral. One of the things that concerns me is what I've seen in my lifetime. That used to be a hallmark of the left, to think that the government is going to solve our problems. That has now been embraced by conservatives

and by the right as well. And so now with all this focus on, it's this mindset of centralized control. And we just need to, it's not a problem to have centralized control. We just need to have the right people pulling the levers in Washington. So we need Republicans. We need Trump in power instead of Biden or whatever. And that's that's what the Republicans have have bought into. And so you can't even have a discussion with people anymore about policies or about the flaws of a particular candidate or president, because it's a who do you want to to uh to be president in other words who do you want to do centrally controlled uh command control economy you know and that's a very scary thing that's one of the reasons why a book like yours is so necessary people have got

to get out of this mindset that uh we're looking for the benevolent dictator no we're not looking for a dictator at all we don't want to have a czar who's going to control our economy from washington doing yeah that's what you have in russia by the way and china like that and i think that's the problem uh because the the lesson of the founding fathers has been forgotten they tried to devise a system of government that would not enable good people to do as much good as they wanted if they had power but that could prevent evil people or stupid people from doing all the harm that they could do if they had a lot of power and this should be at the heart of all um you know i would say conservative or classical liberal people because or movement or philosophy because as you say this has been forgotten and now we are in the in in in a world in the worst world because you know if you create

structures that enable the concentration of power once you are not in power you have loaded the weapons for your enemies you know it's unless you you you you think you are going to remain in power forever which is impossible and even if you if you could do it it wouldn't be healthy it would be horrible at some point you would generate problem into a tyrant then unless you believe that you will have this weapon slotted for your enemies once they come into power yes and and so that's why it's so dangerous this mindset of centralized um planning and control and it's getting worse and worse with the war against cash and the cbdcs and the new technologies of that are being put in place in order to control us all. We are resembling China more and more in the West.

And no one seems to care a lot about this. And that's horrible because we will end up living in a, you know, sort of dictatorship, digital dictatorship with a human face. That will be the difference. In the end, it will be the same thing. Yes. Yeah, all these people pushing this agenda, the same thing yes and you are yeah all these people pushing this agenda the world economic forum and all and others yes i agree that that's

the big threat cbdc central bank digital currency it is a it's not so much a a a form of economics as it is an open-air prison which is the way they designed it but i like what you had to say about a system that designed by the founders that a good person can't do as much good as they possibly could, but it prevents an evil person from doing that. That's kind of a corollary to what I've often said about the justice department, a justice system, that you want to make sure that whatever tactics you use against really bad people, you you got to be careful about that

because those same tactics will be used against good people. Those two things kind of work as a corollary. That's a great one. I'd not heard that before about the power of the presidency, but that is absolutely true. Talk a little bit about the idea of social justice because it seems to me like this is fundamental to the marketing of marxism today

yeah i i wrote a book many years ago it's called the tyranny of equality which was a best-selling book in different countries it's only in spanish but um social justice it's a mirage that that's the expression that i used it's a a fallacy and is being used by politicians all over the world in order to justify the growth of government that means the growth of their own power um with the pretense that they're helping uh other people it's a fallacy because it is you know it's based on the assumption that the results that you get in a free market system, where people make decisions on their own about how they want to spend their money and where they want to work and things like that,

that these results are somehow unfair or unjust. But since justice is an attribute of human action, when you have a spontaneous order, like the market producing certain results, the results cannot be unjust, by definition. I can be unjust if I attack someone and I destroy someone's property, for instance. But if you have a lightning that destroys your house, this is you can't say that that's that's unjust, you can say that's that you know, bad luck, maybe, but not unjust, because there is no human intention, or action that created this or causes

destruction of property. And it's the same with the market. It's a little bit a complex idea but social justice in the end is being used uh in order to redistribute a lot of wealth and to make government grow and grow and destroy the um free market system with the excuse that you are bringing fairness and justice where you cannot find it. And in order to achieve that, you have to restrict economic freedom and personal liberties. In the extreme, if you go all the way with a social justice, you know, you would have a totalitarian system because because and there are actually people who have written this how we equalize all opportunities for instance if you really argue

that it is and unjust that you have unequal opportunities because some people have more money to pay for better education and things like that how will you equalize, for instance, the inheritance that you have from your parents in terms of, you know, I was taught German since I was a kid, so I had an advantage over other kids that weren't taught a second language. And this is being studied by many neuroscientists that if you learn a second language since you are a kid, you have an advantage, a cognitive advantage over others. How would you equalize that, for instance? What about the idea? There are actually some scholars writing papers about the selection of partners, that we shouldn't have the freedom of selecting the partner that we are going to marry and having children because we tend to select people who are alike. So elites tend to select people who are in the elite and so on.

And that creates an unfair advantage over others. So if you go out of social justice, you end up destroying freedom completely. And you have a totalitarian system in the end. And Hayek warned against this and so I believe it's a fallacy and it's interesting you mentioned this because because I'll be a million Argentina. He openly speaks against social justice in the media on television He has been doing so for

If after four five years already, I mean already and and and he says he says it's the excuse that politicians use in order to control people's lives and to steal a lot of the money that they are also confiscating via taxation in order to redistribute it. But in Argentina it's extremely corrupt. This happens everywhere. Argentina is extremely corrupt this happens everywhere argentina is extremely corrupt corrupt so um you you give the money to your friends or to the interest groups that are helping you so i think it's um it's a myth and we have to get rid of it all together

because it's a fallacy and it's creating a lot of harm and it sounds real it's it's a we call it in german a kampfbegriff a kampf it's like a fight and begriff it means concept it's real it's it's a we call it in german a camp a camp it's like a fight and begriff it means concept it's a it's a fight concept it is very useful for the left in order to destroy your arguments and to move forward with their power agenda but we have to fight it back because it's it's it's creating it's creating enormous harm to people, especially the poorest people. In America, they're very clever about the terms that they use,

and they confuse it in people's minds. They talk about equity versus equality. And so you could talk about equality of opportunity. They want to talk about the equity of results and redistributing it and it's taken a lot of different forms you're talking about a fight concept oh they got reparations and of course a lot of that goes back to the mid-century marxists like bill ayers who started pushing this white privilege thing because they realized as the old-school marxists and as opposed to, you know, the Gramsci guys,

they, they, they wanted to have a conflict. They were not having success with class warfare. So they wanted race warfare. And so that's a big part of what is happening in America. I don't know if that is, is that something that's been done in Latin America,

different people groups, put pitting them against each other by the government? I imagine it has. It seems like that would be a technique that the tyrants would use. Yes, but, you know, we don't have this race issue, despite the fact that we had even more slaves in Latin America than, you know, in North America. It's not an issue in Brazil, for example. And they had, I think only Brazil had more slaves in the united states and and no one cares no one speaks about this and uh so so traditionally in latin america the divide that the populace tried to to create is between

the wealthy and the rest you know and oligarchs and the rest um not so much along along this identitarian type of uh of issues which i think are even worse because uh once you establish that the relevant thing is not the content of your character and that you know i judge you by your actions and the content of your character then you create a tribalist society which is completely i mean it's incompatible with the promise of the uh declaration of independence and the founding fathers and the whole american experiment yes because because the united states is about one idea basically which is moral equality we have the same dignity as human beings and we are all equal in the sense that we are we are all individuals who share the same dignity and we have each one has an all a consciousness and we are responsible for our own decisions

and acts. I can't speak with someone who is black or who is gay or whatever and I see someone who is equal to me because I can see that despite the fact that we have these obvious differences

we are the same in terms of dignity and in terms of uh the way we uh we behave in the world in the sense that we have a consciousness and that we are responsible for our for our own uh decisions and acts but the minute you say it's not relevant that you are an individual with your own consciousness but the color of your skin is the relevant issue then you create tribes and these tribes are in existential opposition to the other tribes so it's blacks against the white people and against the Latinos basically the white heterosexual guy oppressing everyone else that's that's more or less the idea. And when you start with this rhetoric,

then of course you end up hating everything that white heterosexual people have created historically, which is basically a question of civilization, including the American experiment. And so,

curiously enough, this was the way that Carl Schmitt, the famous legal scholar from, you know, that was would see the other group as someone who would threaten your existence and you would have to get rid of the other group. And this is the return to fascism. And people are not aware of this. American society unless you have a powerful story that unifies everyone. Unless you have common principles upon which everyone agrees on. And that's why

Martin Luther King, Frederick Douglass, all of them said, yes, the principles of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are the right principles. But we want them to be real also for us. That's right. Which is perfectly fair, and it's an obvious development of the ideal of freedom.

But now you have all these people telling you that these principles in themselves are racist and have created systemic racism in the United States and therefore equality before the law is just an illusion it doesn't work because you have all of this all this invisible ways that the system is racist

and therefore you have also to get rid of equality before the law because it's giving you the impression that the system is fair so it's deceiving you that the system is fair. So it's deceiving you while the system is really unfair and systemically racist. And and when you start down that road, you destroy a country completely. You destroy the American experiment and you end up in civil war or you end up in permanent strife between groups and uh the destruction of annihilation of freedom

i mean authority a diverse american society will never work with identitarian politics in an identitarian philosophy it would it would collapse into chaos i i assure you that uh so we have to be very careful and have fight back against this um woke left which by the way are all inspired neo-marxist ideas coming from france and germany right from the french school in germany it's all marxism cultural marxism basically yes yes that's a big part of the franklin school and entertainment uh the rest of that you know as you're pointing out that really has been uh that idea of equality and uh it's very well said you know the idea that we're going to take that principle and we're going to expand it to everybody what frederick douglas and martin luther king wanted and yet we have joe biden

the one thing i remember about him uh going back decades when it was a confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas, Joe Biden was absolutely outraged. Clarence Thomas would have written about natural rights, which is the fundamental basis of this. You know, from Thomas Jefferson to Martin Luther King, it was about natural rights. And so, you know, Joe Biden has been an authoritarian. He's been opposed to those fundamental principles of America for decades. I don't know who's running his administration now. It doesn't seem to be like he's running it. But, you know, he's the perfect person for this because it is what they are using to pull down America. America, the pillars that have held us up have been the ideas of individual liberty and equality before the law and equality of opportunity, that type of thing.

You know, when you talk about it'll pull America down into civil war, are you familiar with the works of Strauss and Howe in terms of the fourth turning and things like that, in terms of the guys who coined the term millennial, they see that we they had predicted back in the 90s that there would be about every they went back a long time through history, about every 80 years, about every four generations, there'd be a major restructuring of society. So they went back to, you know, World War Two and the Great Depression. Prior to that, they had and the great depression prior to that they had the civil war prior to that they had the american revolution but they went back like 500

years and identified this pattern they predicted that the mid 2000s there'd be some kind of a worldwide economic crisis and they would start this chain that we were all essentially at this point time we're all synced together globally in the same cycle, that it would kick off this global push that would be completed just before 2030. I've always thought that it was very interesting that they picked the year 2030 for this. And I think they're very cognizant of this cycle of history. And you look at what people are doing in Silicon Valley, pushing universal basic income, pushing central bank digital currencies and all the rest of this stuff it seems to me like they're cognizant of this and

they want to have this kind of chaos that makes it easier for them to restructure society in the same way that things happen with the industrial revolution or the agrarian revolution what do you think about that in terms of time where times that we're in you You know, I'm not sure because you have so many technological innovations coming, like artificial intelligence, and you have a crypto sphere, and you have all of those things in robotics. No one is really sure what is going to happen. Is artificial intelligence going to be able to control us all? It's a debate we are having now um so it's very hard to make predictions in that sense with a time framework although some people like elon musk i think i've read that he said in five years or seven years we

will have artificial general intelligence and it will take over if i'm not will be the end the end game for us probably i'm not sure i hope it doesn't come to happen but but what i think um it will happen for sure is that polarization will increase and now we have the new technologies where you have the deep fakes and so you can't even know if someone who is i don't know really now i couldn't know if i'm i'm speaking to you because you could be about our artificial intelligence you know it happened to the major of berlin in germany that she believed that she was uh some years ago she was speaking to um to of Kiev in Ukraine, Klitschko, the former boxing champion. And when she left the meeting, her advisors came and told her it wasn't Klitschko.

And he was speaking with the same voice. It was is same in russian because she spoke russian and and you know so so this is going to be have dramatic effects on the public sphere and and uh it's going to polarize i think even more the our societies like social networks like facebook and instagram and in twitter played a huge role in creating a divide that didn't exist before. So not everything has been positive. And I think this is going to get even worse. And that's why I worry so much that the immortal and eternal principles that inspired the American independence and experiment, if you want to call it like that, remain alive. Because the only thing that will save us is people with clear ideas in their heads and the right values. Otherwise,

all these different factors will play a role in destroying us. Or turning us into something like China or Russia. will play a role in destroying us and, um, or turning out, turning us into something like China or Russia, because if you have an autocrat, probably it's easier to control everything. Um, so,

yeah, you know, when you, uh, George Gilder has looked at the, uh, the, uh,

technological, um, uh, people in control and Silicon Valley, and he's referred to them as neo-Marxists. And I think it's not a coincidence that these people are pushing universal basic income. When we had Michael Bloomberg running for president, he made that same statement. He said, look, we've had people who used to do farming.

We can replace them with machinery and technology. Then we had the Industrial Revolution. And then he says, now the smart ones of us are looking how we're going to take everybody's job. And now we're just going to figure out how we're going to pacify people to keep them from grabbing guillotines. That's what he had to say. Keep them from grabbing guillotines and coming after us. So there is a sense that they want more and more centralized control. And that's why it is so important for us to understand the importance of decentralization and understand, as your book points out, economics and human values and not accept these substitutes.

I mean, we look at how artificial intelligence is being used. Perhaps we need to change it from artificial to authoritarian intelligence because it's increasingly being used to monitor and to spy on people. Now it's being weaponized for censorship in real time. So these are just tools of bad human nature. And I think we have to fight that with understanding human nature, understanding the systems, and understanding why things were set up the way they were in America, because human nature hasn't really changed.

Our tools have changed radically, but human nature has remained the same, and the nature of tyranny and the nature of freedom has remained the same too, hasn't it, Alex? Yeah, and I believe that's why freedom is more important than ever, that we all endorse this cause for individual liberty, because technologies make it very easy for centralized authority to destroy our freedoms. I mean, if you really read the classical books Orwell's 1984, or Redbury's Fahrenheit, or Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. These are all totalitarian dystopias where technology plays a crucial role.

Without technology, you couldn't have these surveillance states, know absolute control over people's lives so uh i'm very worried because i see a trend in the west of using these technologies um in order to destroy privacy in the sense the government will know everything i mean the last thing that we i mean that they will come up with is like putting cameras in our bedrooms and things like that it's just the only thing that you know that they have not done yet but uh at some point they will have big data working on us and they will know exactly where we are at any minute you know and what we are doing what we are buying what we are doing, what we are buying, what we are selling, what illnesses we have, everything they will know.

And that's the minute when we have lost our freedoms. Yes. Because it will be very easy for them to control us when they have all this information and the machines will do that for them. And we have to stop it somehow. No, let me ask you, so, and say, you know, and, and, uh, you know, while we're talking about Liberty and we're talking about economics, of course, the crux of that matter is the push for central bank digital

currency, and we know that that's being pushed in every country of the world. It's some level of development. Um, and, uh, you know, a couple of questions, first of all, what, what is the, uh, uh, status of that in, um, Chile and in Argentina, Brazil, Latin America, what is the status of a central bank digital currency there in those areas? Well, the Chilean central bank has come out with a project in order to create a digital peso. Uh, so I've been told that this is just a plan and they were not they are

not going to do it but i i don't i'm not sure once the european central bank wants to do this and when they start doing that all the central banks will follow because they they all uh meet every year press the presence of the central banks in the world and they went all to MIT Harvard or this school so they are sort of from the same you know background and their friends more or less and they meet and they push the same agenda everywhere I just are there issues to deal with? But I'm sure that at some point it will be also something that they will want to try over there. But if the United States does not get on board with it, because there are states like Florida saying, no, we are not doing doing it then it's harder for the whole world western world of this to to implement the central bank digital currencies there will be countries that will do

it i think europe will do it but europeans don't really appreciate freedom so much so they don't care yeah uh and and some like us will try to do it, but not all of them. But if the United States gets on board with this, and you have a digital dollar and so on, then I think the whole world will follow. It's very hard to stop it then. Yes, it sounds like they're telling the people the same type of thing that they're telling us, that, you know, don't worry about it, even though we call it Fed now, it's not really happening now. It won't happen until Congress gives us the okay or whatever and as you have people try the other

part of it is we know what they want to do regardless of what they say we know what's really in in their plans and in their heart but the other side of this is the awareness of the people and that's the thing that concerns me about it uh when we have polls in america and they ask people about cbdc you know it's not really a lot of opposition to it but if you go down the list and you talk about the different things you know uh rationing uh people's food usage based on their carbon credits and all the rest of stuff stopping people from being able to buy stuff preemptively tracking everything they do being able to confiscate money, putting time limits, putting

geolocation limits on where they can spend money and all the rest of the stuff. People hate it when you explain it bit by bit, but there's not much awareness of the thing itself. And even when you had DeSantis take it on, as you mentioned, and said, well, we're not going to allow it. We're going to prohibit it being used in commercial transactions by changing the UCC code and saying that a CBDC is not going to be allowed, not an American CBDC,

not a foreign CBDC. Uh, he does this press conference calls a big brother, digital money and the mainstream media at the end of the press conference, all they want to do is ask him questions about Trump's indictment. So I mean, you have to shut this stuff down. That are the key issues. And, uh, and so I guess Trump's indictment. So I mean, you had to shut this stuff down.

That are the key issues. And, uh, and so I guess that's a question. Is there any awareness? Cause there's not enough here in America about the evils of CBDC. Is there much awareness in Latin America by the population there about the CBDC? You know, I think nine in 10 people have no idea what cbdc's are and this is even in europe or united states latin america more or less the same no because we have not developed as much it's harder in latin america to get rid of cash altogether you have huge sectors of the economy that are informal. People live out of, you know, being able to pay with bills, physical bills. And so it will be hard for them to get

in Mexico, for instance, or in Colombia, or even in Chile, to completely get rid of physical money. And that's an advantage of not being as advanced, probably. But in Sweden, for instance, they have already gotten rid of cash, more or less. I don't think they have a CBDC, but it will come, I'm sure. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And so we have to explain this because people are not aware and most people don't even know really what money is all about and i have a lesson about that in the book you know um but what is money um and how it comes into existence but we have to speak about this again and again i think the scientist is doing a great job but we have to um

you know bring more people into this because only that change only cbdc's if that were successfully introduced in the united states would destroy most of your freedoms yes i mean it would become really a surf of the state and and we we can't allow that to happen and and as i say if the united states states doesn't do it then it's much harder for other countries to to follow so to to do it um because the financial system the core of the financial system is the united states the financial system is the United States. The reserve currency of the world is still the dollar. So it will be harder for our central banks in other parts of the world to do it. It's not impossible.

It will be harder. But if the United States does it, then automatically everyone will do it. I agree. Yeah, let's talk a little bit about the state of the black market economy, as they call it, the blue market. You know, because that is the sort of thing that I think increasingly Americans who are concerned about this, who do understand about CBDC, we look at it and we say, well, you know, what is our fallback position if we lose politically in this? And that's really a black market economy. A black market economy where will there be paper cash? Is that how it is operating, I presume, in Latin America? Is gold, silver, is that a factor there in Latin America for people to,

or is it, you know, how do they, give us some idea uh, the black market or the blue market economy looks like. It works. It really worked with a dollar everywhere. It's it's in Venezuela. It's the dollar. And Venezuela has a dollarized economy basically now, uh, not officially, but you know, everyone, and we use the dollar Argentina as well, actually Argentinians have, I think it's the second country in the world with more dollars in cash after the United States, because everything is dollarized.

You go, you buy a house and you bring, of course you do not declare a real value that you are selling it for, because then you have to pay very high taxes. So you declare a much lower value that is paid to you in peso, but 80% is paid to you in cases with dollars. And so you get like a million dollars and you have it under your mattress at home. And this is literally the case. You have it, well, in a safe at home or whatever, but you have the cash. But that's because the dollar is still working and it's not a CBDC. It has not become a CBDC type of currency.

The day it becomes a CBDC type of currency, probably we will start using gold or something like that. I guess silver. And the same will happen maybe with people in the United States. I mean, you would have your own currencies in different states, probably based on silver, like going back to the past, like it used to be the case. Because I don't see a way around that. You don't want politicians to control how you spend your money when and where. And to know everything you are doing, you will not be able to buy something from a pharmacy without the government knowing that you are ill, you know, of cancer, for instance. Or you know, I mean, they will know everything.

And so I guess there will be a reaction against it. And probably will be a big issue in terms of states versus the federal government so it can be dangerous as well that is a key thing i think for americans because americans have never had really much experience with a black market economy at all and so we're at a disadvantage i've talked to people who've lived in other countries and it's like oh yeah you know they uh there's always this underground black market economy of barter or, you know, American dollars or things like that. Jim Rogers years ago wrote a book, uh, uh,

investment biker and he went around the world on a, on a motorcycle and talked about what he saw. And he said, one of the ways that you could measure, uh, the corruption in a given government was by the difference between the official exchange rate and, uh, between the official exchange rate and the the exchange rate on the street so i imagine that's pretty big in argentina right the the difference between those two exchange rates right yeah yeah a hundred percent different or more difference or more it's like uh it's insane yeah but this is this is true we are used to in latin

america we are used to i call the official economy, which is the politicized economy, where politicians make rules and interview all the time. It's the politicized economy. And so we go around that, and we use the... And Argentina is very funny. It's like, I mean, it's sad on the one hand, but it's very funny on the other hand, because you go to the best hotel in Argentina and you pay in cash like chunks, chunks of cash, like really a kilo in peso.

Because the the the highest I mean, the highest denominated bill they have is like a thousand peso, which is like two dollars and so if you go to a good hotel and you you stay there for a week i've done it many times and you have to pay like two thousand dollars in the end for instance you have to to call for a guy who operates in the blue market he comes to the hotel in disguise and he brings you the cash you give him the, so you have like a ton of pesos, and you go to the reception at the hotel, and they have these machines where they can count the pesos, like in the banks, you know? Yeah.

And you don't pay with your credit card. So everyone, and this is even at the Four Seasons, like it's, you know, everyone accepts the fact that you cannot play by the rules of the game because otherwise everything would be destroyed. And so everyone tries to survive. And we are people who we are survivors in Latin America to some extent. So we we are more used to that. But I wonder what will happen in the United States because used to doing that and also in Europe

What would happen when you have? Politicians controlling everything in the end Would you just say oh, it's okay like now like a Chinese citizen. I don't care. I don't think so I think there will be a rebellion. It's going to be very difficult because people have been weaned into this idea that we're just going to pay with plastic for everything. And that's what's happened with Sweden. They just wanted to not carry cash at all. Once you start going down that road to cashlessness,

that gets to be a really dangerous thing because now you don't have the option of that. But yeah, that is amazing. That's an amazing story about what that looks like. It has been so interesting to talk to you. Thank you so much. And again, the book is The Street Economist, 15 Economics Lessons That Everyone Should Know, only 140 pages, no math in it. Folks, this is a book that everybody needs to educate themselves on because this is how they exploit us through our ignorance. Alex Kaiser Behrens von Hohagen. Did I say your name correctly? Is that correct? Yeah, it's pretty close.

OK, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure talking to you. And I hope people do pick up this book. We really do need that education here in America desperately. Thank you so much, sir. Thank you. The common man. They created common core to dumb down our children.

They created common past to track and control us. Their commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing. And the communist future. They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary. But each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God. That is what we have in common. That is what they want to take away. Their most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation. They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us. It's time to turn that around and expose

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