Yeah, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott and my friend Charles Goyette is on the line.
He wrote this book, The Dollar Meltdown, what you can do to protect yourself from the central banks, depredations, something like that.
I forgot the exact subtitle.
Welcome to the show, Chuck.
How are you doing, man?
Hey, it's good to talk to you, Scott.
Always good to be on the program and back at AntiWar.com.
Yeah.
Well, in fact, let's start with that to make sure that this is anti-war enough that it'll run on the anti-war page, which, what the hell, it's you.
We'd run it no matter what.
But so, hey, Charles, what do you think about war all the time?
Yeah, I'm really anti-war.
Yeah?
How come?
You know, there's nothing really fun about, you know, it's a psychological aberration.
I think it's a lack of psychological maturity in the American people and their willingness to project off on all these foreign devils, you know, the dark, unacknowledged side of their own psyches.
So, when a bunch of neocons stand up on the world stage and say, you know, these people are, these are the evil ones, let's go get them, these are the evildoers, it's like, yeah, let's go, rather than, you know, for people to psychologically mature and realize that, you know, millions of displaced people in Iraq, for example, are actual living, breathing human beings who care about their families, who want to see their sons and daughters well-married, who want to have the family together on the holiday weekends, just like the rest of us.
It's hard for Americans to understand that, and I guess it's a product of our being fairly insulated from the rest of the world, foreign languages, and so on, for so long.
Well, and, you know, it is kind of paradoxical that way.
That's what's great, right, is, at least in the past, people would want to escape from the terrible places they live, come here, be free, raise their family, own their own land, you know, raise some food to eat and sell the rest, and not have to care about the kings of Europe or in another war again.
Who cares?
Why should they have to memorize the politics of Somalia?
You know, the only reason why is because their empire's over there killing people.
But so, you know, I don't know, in a way, it's like, I kind of feel like I'm trying to fight for the freedom to not pay attention anymore, to get things to where I can live that life myself.
That'd be pretty nice.
Well, the truth dawns slowly on the Americans, but it's dawning indeed.
I saw John Boehner, and I think it was kind of a slip by the congressman, the Republican congressman the other day, when he effectively said, you know, we're going to have to, you older Americans, we're going to have to move the retirement age, the Social Security benefit payoff, from like 65 to maybe 70.
Why?
To pay for the war in Afghanistan.
So once this reality starts to dawn on people that these wars weren't actually free, and that they and their children will be suffering the consequences of this for the rest of their lives, then they will slowly start to wake up and realize they've been sold a bill of goods by the Republicans and Democrats.
Man, you know, what it is that, the Social Security thing.
On one hand, you can see why, I mean, I can certainly see these evil corporate George W. Bush types who wanted to so-called privatize it, which meant take it all with their government police power and put it all in the stocks of their favorite corporations, which just imagine what would happen with that stock market collapse if they'd succeeded in pulling that off.
And of course, you do have people like John Boehner, it's the first thing that they want to get rid of while they keep the empire.
But what a scam anyway, 65?
There are a lot of people, Charles, who die before they ever get to 65.
They have to pay into this thing their whole life, rather than just having their own money and doing with it what they want.
You know, and in fact, well, I don't know the exact number because it's been a while, but I think the life expectancy for a black man is like 60.
Or 58, or something like that in this country.
So Social Security could be turned from that perspective as simply robbing black people to pay for wars against brown people.
It was a scam like any Ponzi scheme to begin with, and this generation, I mean, we're at the point now, we're at the point now where all of this, you know, it's the day of reckoning.
That's basically what it is, and all the, to coin a phrase, chickens are coming home to roost.
I saw the number the other day from the Tax Foundation that if the Congress wanted to just balance the deficit, just balance the budget for this one year, just the year 2010, you'd have to multiply every tax rate by almost two and a half times.
So if you were in 10% tax rate, your new tax rate would be about 25%, 15% tax rate, I think, would be about, let's say, 36%, the 35% tax rate would be 70, 80% or something.
I mean, it's all over.
The bills cannot be paid.
It's all over.
And that's basically what the dollar meltdown, by the way, is all about.
But unlike a lot of books, it recognizes the role and the cost of the empire in bringing this puppet show to an end.
Well, now, before we get too far into the current economic crisis as it is and as it's going to be, that's the worst part of it, really, well, let's stick on the cost of the war.
You know, I saw something, I guess probably most people, maybe, hopefully, are familiar with the economist Joe Stiglitz prediction that the two wars would cost $3 trillion, which he later revised to $5 trillion if we count the long-term costs of caring for the wounded and the interest on the dead and all the things that count in.
The recent headline was that they finally spent now $1 trillion on the two wars in dollars so far already spent.
But the thing I wanted to ask you about was not just that trillion dollars, but the opportunity cost and how many more trillions of dollars in actual productive capacity may have been lost that we don't even know about because we can't go back in our time machine and actually live the counterfactual.
But it seems like, say, for example, if after 9-11 they had decided, like I was talking about with Mohammad Sahimi, my previous guest, to completely end the dual containment policy of Iraq and Iran and become their best friends and limit our enemies to simply, you know, Ayman al-Zawahiri and his friends.
How much have we really lost when we compare it to what the opposite policy could have been?
It's a great question, and it's absolutely incalculable.
I mean, if you wonder what the American people could have done with the wealth that has been transferred to foreign despots over the years in just the fear premium on oil, I mean, during the times of, you know, Bush's saber-rattling toward Iran, for example, there were times that the fear premium on a barrel of oil was $40, you know, just because nobody knew when another war was going to break out and the Strait of Hormuz would get shut or something like that.
And so all of this has been nothing but a huge wealth transfer from the American people to, you know, foreign dictators, to Putin and Chavez and Saudi oil shakes and more.
So it's decapitalized the American people to that extent.
But yeah, I mean, it's, you know, the Chalmers Johnson that we admired calls it military Keynesianism, you know, the idea that we're going to create a big industrial base of long-term wealth for the American people by spending all of our money making things that destroy things and get destroyed themselves.
I mean, it's absolute madness.
There's no telling how much real wealth could have been created for the American people and inventiveness spillover creativity that would have helped actually transform the lives of some of these backwards countries that we seem to be so worried about micromanaging, how their lives could have been transformed too by the consequent spillover of sound investment and unleashing creative genius, not only here in America, but around the world.
And then the problem, I mean, all this stuff is incalculable.
You know, the $3 trillion or $5 trillion war is just, it neglects so much stuff like the Washington Post story on $100 billion in national security spending every year.
Well, for 10 years of the war, that's another trillion right there.
Did that get calculated?
You know, it's just a spaghetti plate, a tangled spaghetti plate of spending.
But the only thing that it really does is decapitalize the American people.
Well, you know, this is why I was such a conspiracy theorist when I was younger was because I read 1984 when I was a kid, you know, I was, I don't know, 13 or 14 or something like that before I really learned much about actual politics.
And there, you know, there's a scene in there where O'Brien, the torturer, when he's pretending to be a nice guy, still, he gives our hero a copy of the book, how we really do it to him by, you know, Goldstein back when he was with the party or whatever.
And what it says in there is, look, the only reason we build the floating fortress, our aircraft carriers, right?
Our modern star destroyers.
And the only reason we're building all these rockets is so that we can take the people's excess wealth and sink it into the ocean or blast it off into space where they can't get to it.
Keep them perpetually on edge.
And always, you know, thank goodness for the ration being lowered and whatever.
And so then how can it be that that's the world I live in, but it's all an accident like all these jerks up there at Harvard and whatever didn't read 1984 and say, yeah, this is perfect.
This is how we'll do it.
We'll take all their excess wealth and we'll dump it into the ocean where they can't get to it.
Well, that's pretty much where it is here in Arizona.
We have a graveyard of generations of military aircraft that just sit out there and you can drive by and you can see where the wealthiest American people would in the defense manufacturers pocket.
All right.
We're going to leave it there for this break.
Charles, we'll be right back.
Everybody with Charles Goyette.
This is the Liberty Radio Network broadcasting the latest Liberty oriented audio content 24 hours a day at LRN dot FM.
You know, it's a fun read.
How to lose your job and talk radio by Charles Goyette and the American Conservative Magazine.
It's a hoot.
He's also the author of the dollar meltdown, surviving the impending currency crisis with gold, oil and other unconventional investments.
Now, Charles, where were we when we went out to break something about how America's broke and there's dead bodies everywhere?
Well, you know, some of the some of the numbers are incredible.
I mean, we're going to issue this.
This federal government can issue more debt this year than all the rest of all the other governments in the world combined.
I mean, if you think about this, the kind of situation we're in, do you know that banks right now own a greater share of the net worth of residential housing in America than all of the individual Americans put together?
I mean, it's all it's in the hands of the banks and the Fed is helping the banks effectively conceal just how bad their managed their their balance sheets are with all this bad, all these bad loans that they're still carrying on the banks and not recognizing they're not writing them down because it slips the whole banking industry into insolvency.
So we are really living through a surrealistic period here.
Well, where is it going to lead?
Read the dollar meltdown.
I mean, it's it's it's exactly predictable.
This isn't the world's first currency rodeo.
You know, we've we've been on this pony before of of a big government and an insolvent government and trying to patch it over with a fiat paper currency that can be issued at at virtually no cost.
All right.
Now, hold on a second here.
Let me pretend to try to argue with you anyway.
I do it.
I'm not good enough at this stuff to really be effective in arguing with you.
But I'm going to try.
How about this?
The bubble that they inflated up was bazillions, hundreds of trillions or tens of trillions of dollars or something worth of bogus debts.
And there's so much of that bubble to deflate still that no matter how much money they pump into it, they're filling a black hole that empties out in another dimension somewhere.
And so, like right now, they created all these trillions of dollars and they gave them to the banks.
Bernanke just invented this new thing.
I'll pay a couple percent interest, which is still a better bet than making loans to people out there and creating even more new currency through the reserve ratio.
And so the guy's a magician, right?
He figured out how to do it all inflate enough to make all the banks whole.
But I won't cause a bunch of price inflation across the board and and destroy the dollar too much because we won't let all that currency get into circulation.
So really, it's all good.
We just got to wait till the economy really picks back up again and we can pay down all this debt.
Hold your very, very rock solid analysis right there.
You got to wait until the economy picks up again.
How does the economy pick up again if all of that money sits in the reserve accounts at the Federal Reserve and it's not used by businesses to create wealth, to hire people, to expand plant and equipment and so on and so forth because nobody's buying anything and the unemployment rate is 10 percent or probably closer to 22.
And so when you when you talk, that's fine.
I agree with you that your analysis is right.
But at some point, you know, the politicians start acting exactly like politicians.
And what happens when the economy lingers here, this high unemployment long enough and they begin to feel the heat?
Well, I don't know.
You're saying at that point they stop paying interest to the banks to keep the money on, you know, in their Federal Reserve account and try to get them to really stimulate that way through monetary policy in order to try to bring the unemployment rate down.
And then by doing that, they'll drive the cost of wages and everything else up and it won't even work.
Well, we're on that.
We're on a sort of a trident here, a three legged stool that this thing is resting on because it would be it would be one thing if all this were just the problem of the United States and isolated within the borders of the United States.
But we have another problem here in the international reserve currency of the dollar.
So the rest of the world sees our dollar.
They see our mounting debt.
They see one hundred trillion dollars of unfunded liabilities.
They know the propensity of central banks around the world.
And yet they're expected to keep taking down more and more and more American government debt.
Yeah.
But they all have American and British model central banks and phony currencies, too.
Right.
I mean, the euro is falling apart.
Seems like.
Well, that's all.
I mean, all of that's very fine, except nobody wants to be you know, there's nobody wants to be left holding the old bait.
I mean, these guys are constantly eyeing one another nervously.
And you know, as long as the Chinese think that the Japanese are staying in the game and as long as the Japanese think that the the the petrodollar nations are staying in the game, as long as everybody seems to be staying in the game, they keep eyeing one another nervously.
But they began to look for ways to surreptitiously get out without alarming anybody and destroying the value of their of their dollar portfolio.
This stuff is going on all over the world.
It's going on at an increasingly rapid, rapid pace.
I mean, it's talked about openly in the the pages of the Chinese newspapers about how they diversify away from the US dollar into a basket of currencies and so on.
And while the United States is making gold ownership, actually punitive taxation and other regulations on gold ownership here in the United States, the Chinese government's actually encouraging the Chinese people to buy silver, to buy gold, and looking at increasing their central bank reserves of silver and gold.
So it's it's bigger than just what the Federal Reserve does within the United States and the US economy.
It's really a global problem.
And that's sort of what goes on, you know, the great benefits to the people in the United States over the past couple of generations of being a reserve currency.
But there is a great cost to when you realize that the purchasing power of the dollar is dependent on willingness of other people to continue to hold it.
All these Ponzi schemes eventually end, and I can't give you the date, but I can assure you that it will end.
Well, when you talk about the date, I mean, are we talking about it could be another generation from now or two?
You know, I thought that the dotcom bubble was such a gigantic thing that when that thing fell down, that was going to be the giant Great Depression, whatever, whatever, which I guess I've learned a hell of a lot more about economics since then.
But I had no idea that they'd be able to just say, oh, no, that's all right.
We'll just inflate housing and put this thing off and have a bunch of wars and do whatever we want for another decade.
And they pulled it off kind of until the whole thing came crashing down.
But now they're saying, no, no, we'll just keep we'll do the same thing again and again and again.
And I agree with you about that, too, is that these things can always be stretched out.
Capitalism, what there is left of it, is always a little stronger, a little more resilient than people realize.
And so they're able to stretch these things out a little further.
And, you know, bull markets seem to run to higher highs than anybody ever really expects as bear markets go to lower lows.
And so they can often stretch these things out in ways a little bit longer than anybody really expects.
But they can't stretch it forever.
I mean, the laws of economics ultimately can't be repealed.
And so, you know, when the bill comes due, when the boomers begin to retire, as they are now, somebody has to pay for those retirement benefits.
And the only way to pay for those retirement benefits is either to repudiate them, you know, to change the retirement age, as we talked about earlier, to pay for the wars in Afghanistan and so on, or to pay them back in cheaper dollars.
I mean, there's simply no other way left at this point.
There's no other way.
Americans already have suffered something like $20 trillion in the destruction of purchasing power of the dollar in the last couple of generations.
And there's got to be a lot more coming.
All right, everybody, it's Charles Goyette.
He's the author of The Dollar Meltdown, Surviving the Impending Currency Crisis with Gold, Oil, and Unconventional Investments.
Can I keep you another segment here?
Sure, absolutely.
Okay, good deal.
We're going to talk about the banking bill and about how people can survive the impending currency crisis.
So, everybody hang tight, Charles Goyette on Antiwar Radio.
You can sign up for the Liberty Radio Network email updates at updates.lrn.fm and join us on Facebook at facebook.lrn.fm.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott, and I'm talking with my friend Charles Goyette, and he wrote the book The Dollar Meltdown, Surviving the Impending Currency Crisis with Gold, Oil, and Other Unconventional Investments.
It seems like every time I get this mic hot, a helicopter flies over my house, but that's part of living in L.A.
So, Charles, talk to me a little bit about this banking bill.
Sure.
It seems like if the Congress did something, it's probably horrible, but Dear Leader said on TV that this means no more bailouts ever again, so I guess there will never be any more bailouts ever again, right?
Well, look at it this way.
It's like we're talking about $100 billion in hidden national security spending and that whole tangled spaghetti plate.
How much tangling in a spaghetti plate of fiscal and monetary interference do you think you can get out of 2,300, 2,400 pages of monetary or financial reform?
It's unbelievable what these guys have done.
I will confess to you that I haven't read it, but then nobody else in the country has read all 2,400 pages either.
So nobody really knows what's in there except the people that inserted provisions that benefit them directly, and they're very well aware of it.
But I mean, would you go to people like Dodd or Barney Frank?
Would you go to Timothy Geithner, who has never held a private sector job in his life to construct this huge overhaul of the financial world?
Of course you wouldn't.
So you can be assured that the thing is utterly destructive.
I'll tell you what I really think of the financial reform.
Yeah, you're talking about the too big to fail.
They use that to sell the bill to the American people to the extent that they're paying attention on the six o'clock news or something.
They use the too big to fail policy, we've got to do something about that, we've got to have financial reform.
Well, they didn't do anything about that.
You know, there was nothing in there about too big to fail.
In fact, what you saw in contrast was the failure of Congress to pass a measure to audit the Fed, and even people who co-sponsored the bill didn't vote to audit the Fed.
So how serious are any of these people about financial reform?
I'll give you a better example that shows how transparent all of this stuff is.
It's just more wealth transfer.
I'll show you another example is when they took over Bear Stearns.
Both Bernanke and Geithner, at the time the New York Fed President, traipsed off to Congress and they gave sworn testimony in Congress that all of these assets they were picking up from Bear Stearns were investment grade.
Well, guess what?
They knew at the time that they weren't.
The Fed knew, it was widely known they weren't, and now we're starting to get a close-up look at this stuff and all the high-risk junk, all the toxic paper, all of the trash securities that are in that thing that they testified before Congress were investment grade.
So if you want financial reform, don't you think that somebody should be, particularly people in positions of authority in the monetary and fiscal situation of the country, should be held to account for their duplicitous sworn testimony in that regard?
I mean, even people in Congress, even one of the Senators, Senator Brown of Ohio, says, hey, they attempted to obscure the facts.
They were trying to hide the nature of the assets they were buying.
So here they pass financial reform.
Have they looked at the real financial reform?
No.
Have they held Bernanke and Geithner accountable for any of this stuff?
No.
Have they agreed to audit the Fed?
No.
In fact, what they did with this bill was actually put more power in the hands of the Federal Reserve and other regulators.
So you've got the Federal Reserve, who were obviously brain-dead, I mean, you had Bernanke as far back as 2005, he didn't see a housing bubble.
In 2007, he said, oh, the subprime market problems are contained.
And his predecessor, Greenspan, was as clueless before him in the course of a couple of bubbles and a couple of recessions.
So you give these same people more power?
I'm thinking, all right, they marched us into this morass.
They marched us into this state of virtual economic collapse, this quagmire of financial deceit.
And now the Congress is going to buy a new map from these same guys to lead us out of this mess.
So they set up a new bureau in the Federal Reserve to regulate mortgages and credit cards.
What, the people that didn't see the mortgage bubble?
I mean, mortgage money outside tripled in Greenspan's years, and he didn't see a bubble in formation.
They create more federal regulators.
All they really do is create more impediments to small businesses to make it add to the cost for small business to compete with the larger, established, and well-protected financial services firms.
I mean, this whole thing is an absolute joke.
It's exactly what you would expect from the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank and Harry Reid.
Never mind an audit.
It seems to me, and okay, I might be an extremist on this issue or something, but any financial reform that doesn't include the wholesale repeal of the Federal Reserve Act couldn't possibly have, as any part of its motive or effect, the abolition of the bailout.
That's what the Federal Reserve Act is.
It's the institutionalization of the bailout, and if it's not a giant trillion-dollar-at-a-time thing, it's still the discount window every night, right?
It's one of the biggest fleece jobs in history, this central banking business.
I mean, it means if I own a bank and I make a bunch of bad loans all day, then I just go to the discount window and get free money at night, unlike any other business can do in the country.
Well, I guess more and more can, but not through a discount window.
They've got to get a special different subsidy, but that's how the whole banking thing works, right?
It's the lender of last resort, a bailout every day.
They sell these bills to the American people as though these are measures to protect the consumers.
Obama said, oh, this will lay a foundation for a stronger and safe financial system, but it's the selfsame regulators and central bankers that are concealing from the American people right now the true value of, look, the whole point of the SEC and public registration of securities is purportedly, I mean, it's all very transparent, but it's purportedly for full disclosure, for people to make informed investment decisions, the Fed is moving heaven and earth right now to keep the banks from having to recognize the bad real estate that they've got on their books.
They don't want to let, they don't want the banks that, you know, what did we lose, 107 banks last year?
They don't want to lose any more and recognize the financial realities, the fact that these people have a balance sheet made up of trash.
Well, if you think that people that bought Goldman Sachs derivatives got hosed, wait till you see, wait till you see the mystery meat that's on the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve now, as they reliquified these banks and made the banks solve it at the expense of the American people and took up, you know, whatever it was, $2 trillion of this trash paper, and by the way, it was months ago that the Fed was supposed to start winding this down.
Does anybody remember that?
The Fed was telling us months ago that, no, we're going to start unwinding this balance sheet at the beginning of the year.
Instead, you get Bernanke before Congress saying, well, things are highly uncertain right now.
You exploded the balance sheet of the Fed by $2 trillion, took all this toxic trash on and potentially destroyed the value of the dollar in the course of having done so.
All of this for two years, you've been doing this, starting with Bear Stearns over two years ago, you've been doing this, and after two years, all you have to say for yourself is things are uncertain, then why the hell didn't you do it?
And the unemployment rate is still as high as it ever was.
Unbelievable.
Wow.
It's exactly like the wars in the Middle East.
They come to you six years into the war in Iraq, and they go, well, we can't leave now.
We can't leave Afghanistan, we can't leave Iraq, because if we do, then all hell will break loose on this, and all hell will break loose.
Then why did you go in?
Yeah, well, and then they just say, basically, we lost, in their terms.
We have to change our strategy, which in both wars, they've done repeatedly, and completely, too.
I mean, they really had to turn around on a dime and do the exact opposite thing from what they were trying to do before.
As Gareth Porter was saying, if Petraeus had a victory, it was a victory over George Bush.
He told George Bush, look, we're not going to defeat the Sunni insurgency.
That's no longer even the policy, okay?
Defeat them?
Hell, we're going to put them on the payroll.
So, anyway, hey, hang out and talk with me more on the show.
All right.
All right, good deal.
Hey, everybody, it's Charles Goyette.
He used to do anti-war radio.
Go back through the archives of anti-war radio, and way down on the list now, there's a whole ton of great Charles Goyette anti-war radio interviews.
Did you know that?
Dollar Meltdown is the book.
It's big, and it's yellow.
It's got a melting dollar on the front.
It's at your local bookstore.
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All right, everybody, welcome back to the show, it's anti-war radio.
Wrapping up the third hour here.
Charles Goyette on the phone, and he's talking about the state's war against your economic health.
By the way, I'd like to just say one little comment myself here, and you can just skip right on to what you want to say, or you can say something about this.
One thing about macroeconomics, Charles, is they're macro, and people, regular folks living their lives are most of the time unable to understand these forces working against them, and they internalize their failure in business, their families fall apart, their kids go to foster care.
I read the AP all day, every day, man.
I'm telling you, they stick guns in their mouths, and the thing is that what I'd like to tell people is, yo, it's not your fault, man.
Listen to Charles.
Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan and their cronies that they work with to steal all this from us, they've done this to us.
The Pentagon has done this to us.
It's really not your fault.
It's not.
Here you have, it's a terrible period, man.
My heart goes out to these people.
You have an unemployment rate for adult males in this country.
The prize demographic we talk about in radio, the 25, 54-year-olds, is a post-World War II high.
I mean, you've had, we've had now, I think, seven extensions of unemployment benefits.
You know, there are a hell of a lot of unemployed people in this country.
I mean, the thing is, it's just like, and somebody did this to us.
In other words, and what even compounds the problem, it's not so much that somebody was a moron and made moronic decisions, but we have entrusted the very same people who got us into this mess to chart the way out.
This is what blows my mind.
Did they ever talk?
Have the monetary authorities, have the fiscal authorities, how about the people in Congress that want financial reform and pass this bogus bill?
Have they ever thought about talking to the people who warned of the housing bubble while it was building and predicted exactly what would happen?
Did they ever consult Ron Paul or any of the Austrian school economists at the Mises Institute about what to do?
Okay, you got, now let's see.
We were wrong about what was going to happen.
We were wrong about the consequences of our policies, and you guys were right.
Maybe we should, like, you know, talk to these guys who were right about what we should do now.
But they don't do it.
And this- That's un-American.
It's unbelievable, too.
You're a terrible person.
No wonder you got fired from your talk radio all the time, contradicting people.
You're supposed to pick one side or the other and like it, Chuck.
Yeah, I know.
But now, in this so-called financial reform, I mean, think how much damage can you do with a clandestine budget of $100 billion for national security, spending, and intelligence, a hell of a lot.
Well, how much damage can you do with 2,400 pages or so of financial reform?
So they've created in there all kinds of stuff, like Wall Street death panels.
And you're going to have federal bureaucrats, you're going to have guys like, you know, like Paulson and Geithner and stuff in new government panels that are going to create orderly liquidation for problem companies.
And they're going to be authorized to seize companies and to liquidate the companies.
And if there are losses when they seize a company and they liquidate it, if there are losses, they'll be able to charge other firms to raise the money for those losses.
I mean, what this thing sets up is unbelievable, Scott.
Wow.
So, okay.
So give me a comparison.
You know, I always like to refer to Garrett Gourette, and he talked about the revolution within the form.
All the revolutionaries were inside the White House, and all the old schoolers were outside the gate saying, stop, stop.
And that was in the 1930s.
But so how does this compare to that?
I mean, this isn't a whole Roosevelt Revolution type scale thing, is it?
It sounds pretty stupid, but it sounds pretty far-reaching.
I think ultimately that the fiscal future will unwind to the empire, and the central state and all the apparatus of the central state will believe itself to still be empowered, and people will increasingly ignore it.
It's like what we saw with the Communist Party in China.
You know, all this wealth got started to be created in the 80s, 90s in China, and the people in the coastal provinces that were creating all the wealth, they just did whatever they wanted to do.
And the central government, the Communist Party and so on, believed that it was still in charge, and they got to cream a certain amount of the wealth, so they persisted in believing that they were in charge, but the people who were creating the wealth just did what they wanted to do.
And I think we're going to see sort of a slow-motion decentralization of American economic and commercial life, in which the central state and the central bank are going to be rendered Of course there'll still be an onerous burden on us to the extent we let them, but they'll start to become irrelevant.
People will start to find other sources of money other than the central bank's money.
They'll find other ways of doing business other than the centralized way, with the centralized money center banks that have the imprimatur of the Fed on them.
They'll find other ways of conducting their commercial and their economic affairs than the ways that are under the regulation of the government.
Oh, Charles Goyette, you're such an optimist.
Yeah.
All right, well, so now, you know, the subhead of this book is how to protect yourself from these goons, something like that.
So if anybody in the audience actually has any money, ever, you know, didn't have it inflated out from under them in the first place, or have any left since this crisis broke out, what do they do to protect what they have left?
Not to make a bunch of money betting in the market, to protect what they have.
Well, everybody, it's a real simple realization.
There is real wealth represented by real things, and I mean, I can tell you, the world depends, for example, on petroleum to get around.
You know, everything depends on petroleum.
So petroleum is real wealth, and it's prized all over the world, people all over the world desire it.
And it can't be created by, you know, by an act of a board or a body or a bureaucrat.
It can't be created willy-nilly by the creation of a bookkeeping entry.
It takes hard human labor and ingenuity to bring it out of the ground.
So that's real wealth.
Those are the sorts of things that persist in serving as wealth in a currency crisis such as the one that we are approaching.
But paper and ink really reverts to its innate value.
I mean, there are certain things you can do with paper and ink, and I guess if they get bad enough, we'll find out what they are.
But it has no other, no innate value just because it is signed by a member of the Federal Reserve or a Treasury Secretary than any other piece of paper with ink on it.
So this is the kind of thing, people are going to have to start giving more serious thought to the nature of money, what gives it value.
And they will soon find that the paper stuff doesn't have value, but the real tangible assets that people all over the globe prize, like petroleum, will persist in having value.
All right, so, well, but what else?
Because you've got to keep everything diversified, right?
Well, sure.
I mean, you know, everybody knows that gold has served as money for centuries.
It's exactly analogous to oil.
It cannot be created by the stroke of a pen.
It can't be created by a bookkeeping entry.
It takes human effort and ingenuity to recover it.
And it is served as a monetary commodity.
Mises says money is the most liquid commodity.
And gold has served as the best monetary commodity throughout hundreds of generations of human experience.
There's no reason to suspect it's going to be otherwise.
I mean, when there is a currency crisis, you will already see that people increasingly turn to gold.
I mean, you know, you've got central banks of the world.
Here this year, over the course of the last year, central banks of the world that have been net sellers of gold have now started looking increasingly skeptically on American paper and the size of this burgeoning American debt and the prospects for it ever being repaid.
And they are diversifying their central bank reserves increasingly and have become net buyers of gold.
Let that be a warning sign.
All right, everybody, go get the dollar meltdown.
It's big and it's yellow.
And you can find it easily at your bookstore.
And even if you're colorblind, you know what color you see when something's yellow.
Well, you know that it's a good it's a good primer to on free market economics and Austrian school.
Yeah.
No, it's the best thing in the world.
I didn't really emphasize how much I like this book.
And I already knew you were a genius, man.
But this book, I thought, wow, Charles Goyette is really sharp.
This book is awesome, way better than I could have ever expected.
And now we don't even have time.
But tell me anyway, when are you going to be back on the radio as America's most independent talk show host?
Well, this interview doesn't count, really, although it was very good.
But and then also tell us about your new book, if you can real quick.
Yeah, just just real quick.
We'll see if something develops on the radio front.
I'm not at liberty to talk about it, but maybe something will.
And the new book is about that sounds like maybe there must be something that you can't talk about.
So that sounds like a silver lining to me for your non answer there.
And the new book is really about prosperity.
I'm not sure that the American people want prosperity.
I'm not sure they can.
But at least somebody ought to lay out for them really simply that, you know, OK, if you want to be prosperous again, if you want a prosperous future for your children, here are the things that you need to do.
And they have to do with they have to do with things like liberty.
You know, with freedom.
How about peace?
How about peace?
That wouldn't that wouldn't hurt, would it?
Is that chapter one peace?
Works for me.
It's not.
It hadn't gone to print yet.
Good.
We'll put peace as chapter one then.
All right, everybody.
That's the Heroic.
Charles Goyette, America's most independent talk show host.
Check out his website, charlesgoyette.com and the book The Dollar Meltdown on your bookstore shelves and Amazon shelves now.
Thanks, Charles.
Good to talk to you, Scott.
Take it easy.
See y'all tomorrow.
