The David Knight Show - INTERVIEW Economics, Work & the Meaning of Life

Episode Date: October 16, 2024

David Bahnsen, author & wealth manager, Bahnsen Group with $5.7B under management)Are Fed rates manipulating the electionWhat are economic consequences of FedThe dollar's reserve status, BRICS, Yellen's sanctionsHis book "Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life"Tariffs floated by both Trump & HarrisIf 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 should have intrinsic value AND transactional privacy: 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.

When you're not weighed down by high interest rates, life lightens up. MBNA TrueLine MasterCards have low interest rates on balance transfers and purchases to give your finances a lift. Find the credit card that's right for you. Visit mbna.ca slash TrueLineCards. Give your finances a lift. Welcome back. Joining us now is David Bonson. He's the owner of the Bonson Group.

It manages $5.7 billion in client assets. And he's the author of many books. He's had one that came out earlier this year, which I'm interested in talking to him about. It's called Full-Time Work and the Meaning of Life. I think that's very important. That's something we all need to think about. Very interested to talk to David. Always was familiar, as I said at the beginning of the program, with his father, Greg Bonson, who was a Christian apologist. And he was not apologizing for Christianity. He was explaining it. That's what apologist means. He made excellent intellectual arguments in support of the existence of God and of Christianity.

So it's great to have you on and to meet you. Thank you for joining us, David. Well, thanks so much for having me. Thank you. Let's talk a little bit first about the economy. And as somebody who manages a wealth fund, I'm sure you're watching very closely, as everybody does, what's happening with interest rates. We're seeing the stock market, of course, is soaring, but that's not too hard, I guess, if you inject money through that from the Federal Reserve. What is your take on what is going to be happening with interest rates?

Well, interest rates are definitely going to be going lower, and the debate is only about the speed at which they lower them. Effectively, housing is the issue. They've frozen the housing market, first by creating a bubble in housing by keeping rates way too low for way too long. And then by hiking them so violently and quickly, you really created a two-tier housing system where there are a significant amount of people paying something around 3% on their mortgage, and they have no interest in losing that low-cost mortgage. And then there's all the people who would organically, naturally be wanting to buy a home right now,

either a first-time home or even just wanting to buy a home right now either a first time home or even just moving to a new home kind of they upgrading whatever they may be doing as their life situation allows for but they uh don't want to pay seven percent for a mortgage so it the feds policies are driven by the fact that they know a lot of debt in our country is going to be resetting. The United States government, in all its infinite wisdom, has chosen not to lock the rates of most of its debt. It's only about 16% of our total debt that is in long-term maturities. Where you recall, the 20-year and 30-year yields, the interest rates a few years ago were 2%. They are now paying 5% on six-month money, one-year money. So all that money is going to come due, and that's really a big portion of

why the Fed needs to be lowering rates, and they will do so. The stock market, David, I don't think is about the Fed putting money in per se. That always helps the valuation. If the Fed is injecting liquidity, it can kind of artificially help prime the pump a bit. But that gets old after a while. And they've been doing that for 15 years. Earnings are very high. I mean, corporate profits are very high.

And the Fed can't really control that. And so I think stocks are largely about growing corporate profits combined with high valuation, and I would argue probably too high a valuation. Yeah, especially when we look at the places where there's been this kind of a feeding frenzy about artificial intelligence. I felt for the longest time that regardless of what happens with it, and you can say there's a lot of very useful things that it looks very much like a repeat of the dot-com bust to me i don't know what what do you think about that yeah i write about it a lot so um i tend to agree uh trust your intuition a little because you're onto something there my friend um the bones of the internet were all that were making money in the 90s the the Cisco's and the people that made the networks the servers the routers they were making all the money but nobody could really figure out how the internet companies

were gonna make money and then and then about 95% of them went out of business and a few of them ended up making a huge amount of money the Amazon's and Google's and eBay's that survived it It's very similar to AI. No one has been able to explain who's going to actually make money from it, how they're going to use it. It's all the back end. The kitchen is making the money, but not the dining room. And that's your NVIDIAs and things like that. I believe it's very overhyped. And even if it isn't, it's so priced in. The assumptions, I think, are very similar to 1999, 2000 tech boom. And I'm quite confident it's not going to end well.

And of course, there's another backroom involved in that that's kind of emerging. And that is supplying power for this massively power-hungry artificial intelligence. And I guess one of the the things it's just an ordinary person i'm looking at this and saying well they're going to make all these small nuclear reactors and they're creating companies as sam altman did to uh to cater to that need but they're going to be consuming all that power even as they shut down our grid i mean we really are seeing kind of a two-tier society here i think and especially we can see it when it comes to energy. But I guess a lot of people are just looking at it as an investment opportunity, and I guess it is an investment opportunity.

But, you know, from somebody who's just standing on the sidelines, I'm wondering, you know, am I going to have utility bills that are going to be four to ten times higher than they are now? Is it going to be unreliable as well? While the artificial intelligence is um you know powering itself with its own private nuclear reactors what do you think about well i i think i think that there's a couple different things went out once and it's complicated enough that i i hesitate to bore our listeners with the details but i will say this the people need to learn that electricity doesn't grow on trees but it does come from the ground. Oil and gas and, of course, coal,

power, electricity production. The state of Virginia right now, 26.7% of its electricity is being used for data center. Now, that's a high data center state, and other states are not so high, but that's massive. People can say whatever they want. you're not going to get the electricity without natural gas yeah so we're going to either embrace what god has given us in the ground or we're not uh but if people don't want utility bills to go higher the solution is readily available in the beautiful permian basin period well i get to agree more let's talk about the politics though the interest rates uh you know this is a lot of people are saying well okay they're the federal reserve is is uh pumping this uh for the election to make the current administration look good what what is your take on that yeah look i'm a lifetime

movement conservative i've written multiple things both academically and more targeted for layman about monetary policy and the fed i I'm often very critical. But this is one thing where I just want to say to my conservative friends, the political conspiracy theory makes absolutely no sense. You can't help the incumbent ticket, which in this case is now Vice President Harris, you know, a month before the election. If you wanted to help, you don't raise rates 5% in one year, which is what they did in the prior year. The economic narrative is very well baked in, and a half of a percent a few weeks before absentee ballots does and did absolutely nothing to help anybody. I have plenty of

criticism I can give towards Chairman Powell, but he is not a political actor. There's no love lost between him and President Biden. I happen to know that firsthand. I think that whether they're making good decisions or bad decisions, they're not making political ones. So it's just one area where I defend them. And again, if somebody wanted to say, oh, the Fed has kind of hurt the election outcome a bit, it would be the other way. I mean, they you know, it's very hard for a president to get reelected when they tighten monetary policy. That's really what they spent most of the Biden term doing. Yeah. Yeah. And of course, a lot of people, a lot of people I talk to really expected them to make a political move.

So they expected them to lower interest rates significantly much, much earlier in the year. So they would have had an effect. And I guess that was what people were surprised about. And I guess we could speculate about what the intentions of the Fed are, if they're going to withhold that until the last minute and not really have an effect. But let me ask you about this. And that is the current Treasury Secretary predecessor uh to pal janet yellen who was at the fed for a long time you know she has made as one person point out recently

said you you can look at uh the damage and the threat to the dollars it's reserve status from bricks and other things like that but the person who's done more to damage the reserve status of the dollar than anyone else is Janet Yellen because of these sanctions that they impose and other things like that they basically use this power and wielded it in such a way as to effectively destroy it a lot of people believe that's the situation what's your take on that and on the status of the reserve status of the dollar what do you think yeah the reserve status of the dollar by the way is the important part not the trading status so when people talk about BRICS countries utilizing something different something like 0.0001

percent of oil went out of petrodollar transaction and into let's say Chinese one is the great example but it's still then reserve means it gets held in reserves and nobody is going to be holding any other currency and reserves anytime soon in terms of foreign exchange the dollar is still what people want to hold in reserves but transacting in another currency i would encourage every country to do what they think is best for them and that includes the united states very candidly the united states has been doing what's best for it with its currency that's what makes these other countries upset because what we're doing is often not best for them so be it

that's the way it works i don't believe in one world government but um i think you make a great point i don't believe that what they did with the russia sanctions is dispositive i don't think it is going to ruin the dollar's reserve status but it marginally does cause other countries to wonder could this happen to us and hopefully those countries say we don't plan to go invade a free country anytime soon however once you see a country using and weaponizing its currency that way it's not how it's supposed to be and i and i do think it marginally impacted confidence abroad in dollar reserve yes yeah and and and i guess one of the things that we see now happening with the bricks is they're starting to expand it's been around for a while but uh you know in response

to this is they're starting to uh to expand it in terms of currency exchanges and stuff like that they're bringing in a you know most of the oil producers you know we're coming into this now saudi arabia didn't buy into it but they got really close and um so you know what we have done with the petrodollar way we've weaponized weaponized that, I guess, too, could play at that game. You know, that might be turned around. But it almost makes you nostalgic for, you know, oil when you see what is being imposed on us with all of these green regulations that are there. Let's talk a little bit about your book, though. I would really like to get an idea of, you know, work and the meaning of life. You know, how do we balance this thing? This has

always been a real issue for us. You know, what is important for you to do with your life? As Christians, we always wonder, you know, well, now how should we live now that we're a Christian? What is your take on, your book is full-time, work and the meaning of life. Tell us a little bit about your perspective on that. When you're not weighed down by high interest rates, life lightens up. MBNA TrueLine Master Cards have low interest rates on balance transfers and purchases to give your finances a lift. Find the credit card that's right for you. Visit mbna.ca slash TrueLine Cards. Give your finances a lift. Find the credit card that's right for you. Visit mbna.ca slash truelinecards. Give your finances a lift. Well, you mentioned my late father, Dr. Greg Bonson, who you pointed out

was a Christian apologist, a philosopher. He raised me in the nurture and admonition of the Lord with a biblical worldview. He taught me to think and live like a Christian. He was my best friend, the smartest human being I've ever been around. And this book is essentially, it was dedicated to him. He was a very hard worker. But I've devoted my life to applying biblical worldview and principles in the domain of finance, economics. I'm very, very exhausted by Christians that don't know how to think like Christians economically. And I view all of that as very similar to what my dad did. It's just he was in the field of philosophy and theology, and I'm trying to do it in the field of finance, investment, economics, entrepreneurialism. The idea of work as something we have to balance

with the rest of our life is something I take exception to and have a whole chapter about it in the book. I don't ever hear people talk about marriage life balance or kid life balance. We accept that we're always spouses, we're always parents, and we're always vocationally committed to some sort of useful, productive activity. And what I argue in the book is the reason why is because that's how God made us. That's what it means to be made in the image and likeness of God. That before sin entered the world, God made us to grow the earth, to care for the earth, to subdue it, to produce new goods and services. That's all I mean by work. We have our needs met by meeting the needs of others. I think this is a beautiful principle in terms of creational norms, but it's a beautiful way to

think about our own purpose in life. Of course, it doesn't mean that we work 24 hours a day any more than we're looking lovingly in our wives' eyes 24 hours a day. There's a lot of priorities, but life doesn't work that way. We're just taking hats on and off at different times. All at once, I am embodied as a being made in the image of God, who is to love my wife, love my children and love my career and devote myself to production of goods and services to, to growing the earth, to, to, to fulfilling that created purpose. That's what the book's about. Oh, that's great. Yeah. We often forget that, uh, work itself was not a punishment in the fall. It was that was that work would become much harder.

That was the punishment. Just like childbirth is not a punishment that many in the feminist movement think that it is. It's not. It's just that it's much harder now. And so that's a really good point. Years ago, I remember listening to an audio book by Oz Guinness. It was called The Calling. And it came at a point where I was in a change in my career. And I thought it was very interesting, you know, talking about the importance of vocation, which really means a calling.

You know, God is calling you to do something. And so the real key is for all of us to try to identify what skills God has given us, I think, and then to understand that we have been made for that particular type of thing. I mean, what is your take on that kind of approach? Well, I absolutely loved that book by Oz. And in fact, I talk about it in my own book. Tim Keller used the language, every good endeavor. I think that God made us to go create beauty, to go create efficiency, to extract from the raw materials of the earth. You know, you and I are using technological equipment right now to record. All of it existed

at the Garden of Eden, if you just simply mean the physical compounds, the rubbers and plastics and things that would be, that were derived from the created materials. What happened, and this is what the calling I think becomes about, is human ingenuity, human acuity, human creativity. Back then they learned how to start a fire. They invented the wheel. You know, today they're inventing iPhones and other things. It's gotten more technologically advanced. But in our own calling, the beauty is that because God, this is what the left doesn't understand, the Marxist utopian vision that views all, and it's really quite Rousseauian, that views mankind as all part of a collective.

God doesn't. He views you differently, me differently, my wife differently, this person, that person, and in our individuality. Some people are poets, some people are plumbers, some people are builders, some people are educators, some people are financiers. That individuality is a beautiful thing in the marketplace, but it's beautiful because God made it that way out of creation. And the doctrine of, well, let me put it this way, the concept of each of us having our own calling, there's nowhere that myself or Oz Guinness, who states that the entirety of our calling is related to our vocation, but nor can one ever say that it isn't a part of it. And that's the category error people make,

is to say it's all or none. I would argue that no one's calling is divorced from their vocation, but their vocation is not the entirety of their calling. That's right. Yeah, and he made the point, I think he quoted Martin Luther, who said, you know,

you don't have to be a member of the clergy in order to serve God. God has put you in the farmer who is doing his job and doing it to God's glory and living his life to God. He is glorifying God. That's where God has put him. And that is, you know, that was a real key insight, I think, for me at the time. And I think that's really kind of the way that we need to look at it. I don't know. And Martin Luther would use often an example of a cobbler with shoes. And I happen to know the shoes they were dealing with 500, 600 years ago were not

quite as comfortable as our shoes today. So he had a high view of a cobbler when the feet weren't even all that comfortable. It's called dualism, the sacred-secular distinction, and Martin Luther tore it down. And much of Protestant theology has been focused on this. At the end of the day, the minister has a very important vocation, the cobbler, the educator, the radio host, the financier. There is not a Gnostic higher power for those who call themselves pastors versus those who are serving the kingdom of God in these other vocational fields. And so tearing down that sacred secular distinction is one of the great

legacies of people like Martin Luther. I agree. And it's so embedded in the foundation of Christianity, the idea that we have different gifts, that we have different functions and everything. You know, Paul talks about that in terms of the body, you know, how the body has different members that have different functions. Or talk about it in terms of building, you know, living a church out of stones

and how there's all these different things that are out there. And some people are, you know, living church out of stones and how there's all these different things that are out there. And some people are, you know, given one thing or Jesus talks about the parable of the talents. You know, that's now become part of our vernacular, just like vocation has. But, you know, he was talking about a quantity of money, silver that was given to these people. So, you know, different, we have different quantities, different qualities of things that are given to all of us. But as you pointed out, the essence of all of this is that God deals with us not as some kind of a collective. I say this all the time about public health or public education. It's like that's part of the problem is this collective Marxist mentality towards some kind of a public thing.

Ignoring the individual. You know, public health that ignores the health of the individual. Public education that really doesn't care about the education of the individual. And so this collectivism that is there is really kind of antithetical to Christianity and towards the Christian understanding of what God has given us in the Bible, but his interaction with each of us as individuals, as you just pointed out. Yeah, there's really two grotesque mistakes that people can make, and it's why I believe economics.

I talked about the need for a distinctly Christian understanding of economics, and you're getting to the heart of it. God made us as individuals and as members of a community, and a radical individualism that does not care about the individual responsibility to their neighbor or their family or their community is unchristian and a radical collectivism that views the dignity of the person only when attached to the state or by the way to the church if someone has such a high view of church that they say the human is only important in the way that they're serving the church that's not right either but what christianity does and a biblical anthropology

a biblical understanding of the human person sees just like jesus was incarnate fully god fully man the human person is both individual and social. Their dignity comes from their status of being an image bearer of God, and they also function in a society. They function in families. And so that one in the many dynamic of Christianity is unique in human history, and candidly, it's beautiful. Oh, yeah. It absolutely is.

I remember interviewing G. griffin and he said um you know we get so focused on individual liberty that we atomize ourselves and of course this is before they tried to atomize us with the 2020 lockdown and all the rest isolate each and every one of us uh real hardcore but he said we have to work collectively for individual liberty and that's exactly what you're talking about is that you cannot lose that sense of community. That's something that we were created for. That's something that really fulfills us. And we can't live that out individually. So when you talk about how Christians think of economics, I guess that is really what you're looking at. Are there other aspects of that that you would talk about?

Well, certainly I believe that understanding economics being humans acting around scarcity, how we allocate scarce resources. And there's four or five words in there that seem really simple. But if we have a different understanding of what or who the human person is, how they are to act, what scarcity means and what our aim is to be, defining the goal of economics. So I think that the last hundred years, the central planner, the collectivists, what they refer to as the Keynesian School of Economics,

they believe mankind fundamentally exists to consume. And we need central planners that can kind of steward the affairs in a way, view economics as a math and science, that if you get the formula just right, everyone can consume to their heart's content. But I start with a very different viewpoint from the Bible, that mankind was not made to consume, but to produce. And in fact, we cannot consume until we first produce. And in fact, we generally can't consume until someone else produces because the vast majority of our

consumption comes because of other people's productive activity in this interconnected economy in fact it happens so quickly we just take it for granted all the time that we're sitting here using microphones and equipment and and that other people built from their own technical expertise not our own um the the the distinctly christian understanding of economics does not only view the efficiency of allocation of resources as important but the morality the the um shalom that we're after for human beings to flourish. And I think a lot of Christians over-spiritualize it to say all that matters is the spiritual domain, and other materialists make it only about the physical domain, but God makes it about both, God, Son, incarnate. And economics has to address all of this.

And so allocation of scarcity is an important topic. I think public policy matters, but it isn't the definition of economics. The proper view of economics does not have this tax rate over that tax rate, but tax rates matter. But it gets first principles right. And those first principles have to view mankind as a being made in the image of God who has an eternal destiny has been tainted by sin because of the doctrine of the fall and now we have to look at the there are imperfectible systems on this side of glory and where freedom comes in and freedom of exchange and working with one another optimizes the conditions for human flourishing that's my aim in christian economics oh that's very interesting

uh well said and you talked about uh keynesianism of course now we got something which is really a a fitting for our society right now a very very dumbed down version of Keynesianism called modern monetary theory. You must have something to say about MMT. I call it the magic money trick, as you know, deficits don't matter. And there's nothing at all in terms of, they don't even try to come up with some kind of a mathematical justification for it. They just kind of throw it out there. That's where we are in this idiocracy, I guess. When you're not weighed down by high interest rates, life lightens up. MBNA TrueLine MasterCards have low interest rates on balance transfers and purchases to give your finances a lift. Find the credit card that's right for you. Visit mbna.ca slash TrueLineCards. Give your finances a lift. Yeah, Keynes would have been appalled by

MMT and frankly, the most famous Keynesians today, Larry Summers, who I respect a great deal, even though I disagree with him a lot, and Paul Krugman, who I don't respect a great deal, but he's certainly a leading voice there vehemently against MMT as well. MMT is essentially just a delusion that we can allow unlimited amounts of liabilities to be printed without impact and that the government can reverse inflationary effects via taxation. It's not really taken seriously by credible economists, but fundamentally I would suggest that it doesn't come from a flawed economic theory. It comes from a flawed moral idea of the relationship between the citizen and the state. Why do we need unlimited MMT?

We only need unlimited MMT because we apparently have such limited self-government as human beings that we need a king. need unlimited mmt because we apparently have such limited self-government as human beings that we need a king we need to pay for a larger and larger messianic state so going back to first samuel and all the way through human history mmt is just a way to pay for uh statism and statism is itself a sin that is caused by human beings not taking enough responsibility in their own lives. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, I think of the personification of MMT as the two that I call first Lala Harris and Alexandria Occasional Cortex. I look at the two of them as the personification of that kind of argument because it's simply about, you know, I'm in charge here and I'm going to give you a handout.

And of course, as I look at some of the things on the horizon, some of the things that the technocrats have pushed very hard, it seems to kind of fall in line with a lot of globalists talking about a universal basic income. To me, that is a universal global kind of Marxism. But we've got the technocrats like Elon Musk, jumped in on that very hard when Andrew Yang made that the centerpiece of his campaign. He gave him millions of dollars for that. We had Bloomberg, when he was running for president, said, well, we've had the agrarian society, the industrial society, and now the smart ones of us are trying to figure out how we're going to take everybody's jobs. And we've got to just figure out how we're going to pacify them so they don't come after us with guillotines.

That's what he said. And so that's really what the UBI really is, is it's kind of a pacification. What do you think about this trend? And I thought we got a taste of it, and I thought we got kind of some conditioning to move the overturn window with the lockdowns and the stimulus checks and stuff like that. What are your concerns about that? It is the antithesis, I think, of what Christians want to see in a society and in economics. Well, UBI is definitely the antithesis of what christians want to see in the society but i just think it's very important that we're clear as to why we're against it and and i fear that many of my conservative friends and christian friends are going to oppose ubi on

the basis that oh we can't afford it and that's very well true but that's not the fundamental reason i'm opposed to it i'm opposed to it because it robs human beings of their god-given dignity yes um i don't necessarily see it as a globalist plot because this can be ubi unfortunately can be done very domestically country by country can attempt to implement it and in musk's case his fallacy is the sort of dystopian fears that various digital progress, AI and so forth, is just simply going to make it impossible for a large segment of the population to work. And he's wrong about that. The digital revolution has been going on for 50 years, not for 50 weeks. And the industrial revolution for 130 years. And out of the Digital Revolution, we've created 51 net, 51 million net new jobs.

Obviously a lot of people get displaced when their skills are no longer needed in a certain task. And on a micro level, I vehemently support retraining, labor dynamism, mobility, having to move around into new fields. People that used to sell typewriters for a living do not sell typewriters for a living anymore. And I don't say it lightly. I think it is difficult. But UBI trying to be a stopgap for that basically ignores that God made us all to be producers, to have dignity, to overcome challenges, to be creative.

New lines of work, new positions get created out of constantly new and evolving technologies. This is by God's design. Virtue cannot be disintermediated away. There is a market for people of virtue, capability, competence, industry industry i think that ubi is fundamentally not an economic error though it's that too it's fundamentally an anthropological error it doesn't understand the human person yes and i think it seems to come from uh these people who seek to consolidate everything and to monopolize everything. There's that kind of backing behind it that concerns me. I understand we always have these different technologies that come in and impact things,

and people use that to then work in a different way. It's just that at the core of this, what I'm seeing from this class of billionaires is, as Bloomberg said, we're working very hard to make sure you don't have anything to do. And that really is a it is something that is just going to destroy human nature. And and it's against our nature, as we were just talking about, you know, work and the meaning of life. It absolutely destroys that if we allow them to impose this on us. And that's the thing. It may not be organically there from the technologies, but it can be something that if they combine that technology with politics,

it might be something they try to impose on us. But you're absolutely right. We've got to attack it from the standpoint of this is really what being a human is about you know giving us some meaningful uh work to do and the liberty to choose that and and whatever our vocation is and that's the thing is you can't change human nature and so when they go about trying to do something that is intended to alter human nature or even and it may be um many of the advocates of ubi i do not think are being sinister some are but some are just very naive they think they're helping people and they're not helping them because you can't alter the human nature that god made us to be productive so if you take away someone's need

to be productive and they become a ward of the state you dull their senses and they become an opioid addict they become an alcoholic they become a melancholy they become uh removed from society they become antisocial so you create a worse result by taking people away from what god made them to do if they could just alter human nature they can say we're taking away productive activity from you and we're reprogramming your soul so that you don't need it. Well, that would be great. But unfortunately, only God can do that. And these people ain't God. That's right.

Yeah. And those are the types of things that we see always as a part of rehabilitation, you know, giving somebody a meaningful line of work and that type of thing. So, yeah, that is what we have to push back against. And I think that is really what we have to offer as Christians, one of the many things we have to offer with that. Well, let's talk while we're talking a little bit about politics and some of these other issues. I guess it came up yesterday,

the Republicans are doing high fives after Trump's performance at the Chicago economics club. Uh, it was, it was, uh, entertaining to watch him slap down this guy, but I didn't know that there was really anything much of any substance.

And I guess in the bigger, uh, scope of things, uh, what, what do you think in terms of the, there, there hasn't been much in terms of policy at all that has been put forth?

We haven't had debates by the major candidates. They haven't debated each other. When they do, it typically devolves into both Trump as well as a Democrat, of course, mimicking his policies, saying we need to have more tariffs at the border, that type of thing? We've had a free trade structure to our economy since the early 1900s. Prior to that, it really was very protectionist. That seemed to be what the industrial societies were all doing. And we had kind of a free trade zone and taxes were collected at the border. Then we started doing internal taxes with the internal revenue and

the central banks were created about that time. What is your view of the bigger picture there? Regardless of whether or not any president could come in and unilaterally and immediately impose a 60 percent tariff, for example, which that number has been thrown out there. What do you what how do you see that, you know, how the government should be organized in terms of its impact on the citizenry, you know, tariffs at the border uh free uh trade inside or should we go continue to go down the same system that we have with basically free trade but internal taxes well there's other options that could be on the table too but they aren't but uh the first thing i'll

say about what you brought up at the very beginning it has been the most substanceless campaign for president in human history and and that's true that both candidates have deemed it in their political best interest to be very shallow on depth and policy and details. Both have a different agenda running with a different strategy. But no, for those of us that are really kind of issue oriented, policy oriented, this has not been the campaign for you. And so that is what it is. My own view on the tariff side is that I'm vehemently against the government needing to tell buyers and sellers the terms of such exchange and that countries do not trade with countries. Companies trade with companies. And if in fact, an American importer is being hurt

by the terms of trade with a foreign exporter, the American importer doesn't need Donald Trump or Kamala Harris or anyone else to set a tariff to come level the playing field. They can simply say, I don't want to trade with you. That's what we've done forever. And that's what those of us who defend a market economy and freedom of exchange believe in. That's what all of us do domestically every day. I go to a store. I don't like what they're charging. I don't have to shop at that store.

I can go somewhere else. There is national security issues that can come up, but that's not what we're talking about when we talk about protectionism. And one of the greatest evidences of the weakness of some of these arguments is that people change the argument in the middle of a sentence. That it can go from human rights to national security to protecting jobs in Ohio all in the same sentence. And it's got to be one or the other. What are we really talking about here? Ultimately, I believe that people have to understand when you talk about a 19th century economy,

tariffs are certainly allowed in the Constitution. But if anyone believes that we're talking about tariffs instead of an income tax, instead of tariffs plus an income tax, I got a bridge to sell them. That's right. it's always been that case when they talk about flat tax or fair tax or whatever it's like okay but let's see let's see you stop the other one first before you replace that or as you point out it's going to be both of them it's going to be an addition yeah it will that's right and and you could not gender because of the size of government now, because of the annual expense, the amount of imports that we generate, you would have to have something like 300 percent tariffs on everything to generate that. And of course, you wouldn't then generate it because nobody would be importing.

And so you have no revenue to government at all. So, you know, President Trump, to his credit, does not really talk about tariffs. Sometimes he'll say, oh, they're going to generate this revenue. But then other times he says it's a negotiating tactic. I'm not really going to do it. And it can't be both at once. And so, yeah, it's probably the biggest area where I have disagreement with the president in terms of economics. But I also understand that he likes to negotiate. And so if that's part of the deal, that's a little different than actually implementing it. But fundamentally, I believe in buyers and sellers

setting their own terms of exchange. And I do not believe a disinterested third party like the government has to do it. And if people understood the retaliatory nature of tariffs and the history of Smoot-Hawley and the depression, uh, it is not good. And so we will see where this goes from here. And every time they try to protect a particular industry or something, uh,

with, with tariffs, what happens is, uh, whoever was using that raw material, that's now only going to be sourced because of tariffs by some domestic supplier. Now those people are going, wait a minute, we can't get enough of this and we can't afford it at that price.

So it always has these unintended consequences, these secondary, tertiary issues like that. It's a really complicated thing. But I think it, tell me what you think our fundamental problem is i think we are so focused my fundamental perspective is that we're we're so focused on government as a solution it's inevitable that it's going to continue to grow and it's inevitable that people are going to continue to be more divided and more partisan and more paranoid that this is the most important election in our life and it's the most important thing in my life

and this is worth fighting for. I see it as a path to civil war as well as to financial bankruptcy because what do we do as Christians to try to get people away from this mindset that everything needs to be done by the government, especially the federal government? Well, I believe that there's no chance that we get out of this mindset that everything must be done by the government, let alone the federal government, until we increase our own personal responsibility. So, I do not support the growth of Leviathan. I do not support the expansion of the federal government where there is going to be governmental jurisdiction. I'm a real 10th amendment guy that generally believes in federalism coming out of a sort of

doctrine of subsidiarity. Things are done best at a local level where there's most accountability and proximity and things like that. Not exactly rocket science, by the way. But I believe that we have larger government because we have declining families, because we have a declining church, because we have declining mediating institutions, stronger local communities, and all of those types of things, they are basically the corollary to the size of government. So if we want the Woodrow Wilson and FDR and LBJ expansion in the 20th century of government did not come by forcing it down our throat it came from us willingly ceding greater responsibility for social safety net for for all these different programs to the government so i am one who disagrees vehemently with my conservative friends

that the problem we have is a bunch of politicians that want to make government bigger. I believe our problem is a bunch of people that want the politicians to make government bigger. Yeah. Oh, I agree. It's very much, I think, really, as I look at this election, it really struck home. As we get close to the election, everybody who was kind of sitting on the sidelines, maybe, well, I don't like either candidate or this or that. Now they're coalescing into these two different camps. And after they make that decision,

they start really becoming cheerleaders for that. And I would like to see these people become cheerleaders for, as you point out, the family, or for voluntary organizations, or for taking direct action, as we saw in North Carolina with the destruction there from Hurricane Helene. We saw the people starting to come together and realize the power of the community, helping their neighbors and coming together. That's the sort of thing we've seen little bits and pieces of that, I think, with homeschooling. And yet you'll still see people say, well, yeah, but I want to have this subsidy.

I want them to pay for my books or my pencils or whatever. You do that and you do that at your peril because now you're starting to buy into a kind of dependency. We have to desire to have our own independence and we have to desire to get the job done and we have to also understand and look towards God. That's why I think it's really Christians that have the answer here, that they're not going to find anywhere else,

because we see the power of God in these things, and they see politicians as God, in a sense. I've said over and over again, I said it again today, that I think that they want to give Trump credit for Roe v. Wade. I think he didn't expect that to happen and he ran away when it happened. I think we give the credit to God and we give the credit to prayer and we look at things like that as Christians. I think that's really where our strength is and I think that's what we have to offer people is to say that with us and with our work, as you point out, our meaning, our purpose in life, and with God there and our families and our focus, that should be where we're directed, not misdirected to something that is thousands of miles away and a different worldview. I don't know.

I think that we have a great deal to offer as Christians in that regard. Well, I completely agree. There's a lot of different applications of the same thing that you're saying in a lot of different areas. You know, one of the great examples is even just in this political season when people say, well, how many jobs did Biden create? How many jobs did Trump create? Who's's gonna manage the economy better paris or why are you asking these people to manage the economy who creates jobs are buyers and sellers producers and consumers free exchange people out of their own economic incentives now now presidents and policy and congress can impact those things for sure tax Tax rates, regulation, energy.

But I'm not saying it's completely separate, but we give a sort of imperial view of the presidency when we talk that way, and I'm very uncomfortable with it. Yeah, they don't really create jobs, but they can inhibit jobs. Yeah, they can. And the other part of it, as we saw with this latest jobs report, first they told us it inflated at over 800,000 jobs. They'd lied to us about that. Then they come back with this one, and it turns out, if you look closely, there's a record increase in government jobs.

So they can create those kind of jobs, and they can fill up the labor statistics with those types of jobs. But, yeah, you're right. It really is. I roll my eyes every time I hear a Republican say that because they ought to understand at least that much about the market if they're a Republican, I guess. I don't know. The problem is everybody does it now, and so then the next person is going to do it to counter what was done before.

And if the economy is good during a Republican president, they're going to take credit. And if it's bad during someone else, they're going to take credit. And if it's bad during someone else, they're going to want to go after it. So it's just become low hanging fruit for political expediency, but it's all economically incoherent. That's right. Absolutely. You've got another book that you have written, Our Cultural Addiction to Blame and How You Can Cure It. Boy, do we not have a finger pointing everywhere about everything? As we just saw this last week, you know, Christopher Columbus.

And I don't think it's really about criticizing Christopher Columbus's life. I think that's really about resetting the culture. But how do you see this addiction to blame and the cure for it? Yeah, so that was the subtitle of the book. The title was Crisis of Respons, um, our cultural addiction to blame and how you can cure it. And that was my first book. And, and I'm thinking right now about a updated kind of follow-up. I'm talking with my publisher about my next book being a sort of extension of that. Um, it's probably the most non-partisan passion that I have, wherein I think most on the right today

are finding a way that the government or the man or some foreign actor, somebody's doing something to make their life miserable. And most people on the left believe that Wall Street or business or, or, you know, polluters in the environment, you know, they have a different boogeyman for who's trying to ruin the world. And I just think we've gotten really disconnected from an ethos of individual agency, individual responsibility. I believe there's a lot of bad people out there, but I don't believe there are any bad people out there that take away my agency, take away my responsibility and my ability to create a fulfilling life for myself, to impact my loved ones, my family, my friends. It's a mentality. There must be a mentality that even through affliction, even through difficult circumstances,

we have it in our ability to overcome. It's a very Christian understanding of the human experience. And our responsibilities are do not get left at the door when there's a bad trade deal or a bad immigration policy or bad tax policy or bad regulation. We're to continue fighting through it it seek to change the things that are wrong uh but never under any circumstances throw in the towel give in to defeatism and and fatalistically say well what was i supposed to do life is too hard it's never too hard yes oh i agree oh something that used to always be a hallmark of the left right uh don't blame that mass murderer he got spanked as

a child you know that type of thing but now that's been internalized i think a lot by the right i'm reminded as you're talking about that of gk chesterton who famously said uh what's wrong with the world i am yeah and he took well that's right he took the responsibility for it and he said and that's a christian thing you know, to recognize your flaws and to work on them. Yeah, it's one of my favorite lines. I have a number of lines like that throughout the book, but that's the ethos that I'm going for, that looking in the mirror. And sometimes avoiding a victimhood mentality, even when you were a victim, even when there was injustice done to you, just saying, I'm not going to let that injustice define me. And overcoming those difficult times, I think,

is really where we derive a lot of the human flourishing that we're all after. Oh, I agree. And I said so many times just people are looking for reparations and all that. That's the ultimate type of blame thing. Well, you know, something was done centuries ago, and because of your skin color or whatever, you need to make this right with me. I said, no, the Christian perspective

in terms of reconciling things is to understand that the things that we have done wrong, we leave at the cross, and the things that were done wrong to us, we also leave at the cross. And so I think we have so much that we can contribute to this to heal. That's why I wanted to get you on it and about this, because you've got some excellent books.

The Case for Dividend and Growth Investing in a Post-Crisis World. Now, that would be economics. And another one, There's No Free Lunch, 250 Economic Truths. But this newest book is especially, I think your first one and this newest one, Full-Time Work. I'm sorry, Full-Time Work and the Meaning of Life that was released earlier this year. I'm interested to hear that book now after we've had our discussion. And thank you for doing that.

And again, I've always enjoyed listening to your father and the debates that he had with people over the existence of God. It truly was amazing. And a great loss, I know, to you especially, but to everyone, I think, that he died at an early age. Again, our guest is David Bonson. He has the Bonson Group, wealth management, and he's got a lot of wealth that is there, $5.7 billion in client assets. But I think that the real wealth that we've got

are the Christian values that you're putting out there to help people along to understand their purpose in life and how they can move forward. Thank you so much for what you do. Thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it. Let me tell you, the David Knight Show you can listen to with your ears. You can even watch it by using your eyes.

In fact, if you can hear me, that means you're listening to The David Knight Show right now. Yeah, good job. And you want to know something else? You can find all the links to everywhere to watch or listen to the show at thedavidknightshow.com. That's a website.