All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And our next guest on the show is my friend Charles Goyette, America's most independent talk show host, former partner at Anti-War Radio.
If you go to the archives at antiwar.com/radio, you'll have to go back to 07 or 08 or something, but there are hundreds of excellent Charles Goyette-conducted interviews there.
And you can check out his website, charlesgoyette.com, and you can go to any bookseller online other than amazon.com to buy the book The Dollar Meltdown.
Welcome to the show, Chuck.
How are you, man?
Hey, it's great to talk to you, Scott.
I'm very happy to have you here, and I've got to tell you, man, I really enjoyed your speech at the Freedom Summit over the weekend, but you scared the hell out of me.
Yeah, but, you know, that's my job.
I mean, people have been sugarcoating this stuff for so long, somebody's got to just stand out and tell you what the truth is.
I have an idea you weren't that shocked.
Well, you know, the thing is, is I pretty much understand everything you're saying, and it all sounds right to me, but I've learned in my own experience whenever I'm the most alarmist about an immediate threat, that usually I'm wrong, and so I always try not to be.
You know, like on Korea, for example, I'm a Doug Bandalonian, and that is that I'm not too nervous about.
It's all going to blow over.
Nobody really wants a war there.
And even though people do crazy things on the 38th parallel or whatever from time to time, try not to get too excited about where it might lead.
And so when I hear you talk about how absolutely screwed every single one of us, you know, other than the top one-tenth of one percent or whatever in this country are, I guess I know that you're right.
I just wonder when, I guess.
I don't want to be as alarmist as you, but then again, I don't know as much about it as you.
I don't think of myself as alarmist.
I look at it this way.
I mean, the world has been through these currency crises before.
This isn't our first rodeo.
So, you know, I've been a student of monetary policy and these things for a very long time and have paid a great deal of attention to people that have been correct in their assessment of monetary policies going back for a very long time.
So I've just gone to the trouble.
I don't think I'm an alarmist.
I've gone to the trouble of parking my car, pull over to the side of the road, and I walk down the road and I, you know, look down around the curve.
Everybody's racing down the road.
I pull over and park.
I walk down the curve and I look around the curve and what's there?
And there's a bridge out.
So I come back and I flag people down and I say, you know, you wouldn't want to go around this corner at 80 miles an hour.
There's a bridge out around the corner.
I don't think that's a cause for alarm or it's fear-mongering.
It's just, you know, here we are.
You better take a detour because there's a problem ahead.
And then on the other side of the story, I'm not really in the business of predicting what people will do and what they won't do and whether, you know, North Korea is going to take us to the limit and South Korea is going to help.
You know, I don't know.
I know what I learned from antiwar.com and other places about the potentials and the proclivities of people.
But in this economics thing, there's another side of the story, and that side of the story is the law of economics.
And in the cases of all the things I talk about, I don't know exactly what the Fed will do and I don't know exactly what the fiscal authorities will do.
By that, I mean the Congress and the executive branches.
I know what their propensities are.
I know what the likelihood is.
But in any event, no matter, you know, whether they make decision A, B, or C, I know that the debts already exist.
The money has been paid.
And the laws of economics insist that, you know, that those debts will be repaid in some fashion.
And, you know, so I'm saying I don't know whether they will be repaid by massive inflation, by just outright repudiation of the debt, by just sticking the bondholders with, you know, a little note that says, you know, we're not going to pay you.
Sorry, sucker, and walking away.
But one of those sorts of outcomes will take place.
But the money has already been spent.
It's been borrowed from somebody.
And somebody will get left holding the bag.
So that's the story that I bring to people.
And to me, it's not, you know, it's not really predicting exactly how the outcome will be.
In fact, in the dollar meltdown, I go to the trouble to kind of explain, you know, these are kind of the indications.
And here's what the political classes typically do.
And if they do this, then you'll see that.
And if they do the other, you'll see the other thing.
But in any event, we're in a world of hurt.
Yeah, well, I mean, and that's really the point, right, is whether we do this, that, or the other thing, the consequences are going to be really tough.
So why don't you explain how that is.
If they just, for example, repudiate the debt, wouldn't that be the right thing to do?
Well, I don't know whether that's the right thing to do.
I mean, if you're, you know.
Would that be the least bad thing to do?
Well, if your kids bought, you know, U.S. savings bonds for some ungodly reason, and then the government said, by the way, you know, we're not going to pay you, I think that's a criminal act.
You know, I think it's a criminal act.
I mean, if I loan money to you, then you, you know, call me up some day and say, Charles, I'm not going to pay you.
I think there's a crime there.
And so I think it's a crime if the government does it.
So there's no, you know, it's like, well, okay, so if they decide to pay you back, so the government owes your kids, you know, $1,000 on savings bonds, and they're going to pay you back with money that they freshly printed, and $1,000 is enough to buy a cherry Coke on Saturday afternoon at the malt shop, you know, then I think that's a crime.
Right.
Somebody is going to be victimized.
And that's the point of the book is to insulate yourself from this monetary calamity that the fiscal and monetary authorities are enabling one another to perpetuate and to insulate yourself so that you and many of the rest of us don't have to be victimized by these clowns.
Well, now, the very worst possible scenario would be that they simply print money and conjure up money with their keyboards and pay off those bonds with worthless dollars.
That hyperinflation, that will destroy all of us.
And that is, frankly, in my view, that's the most likely outcome because, you know, if they suddenly announce, you know, listen, we lied, you know, we're not capable of paying these debts back, we lied, the whole thing was a joke, sorry, that's a game ender.
You know, that kind of ends the game.
And, you know, they awaken in the morning and they're out of power and a new structure develops or evolves or maybe doesn't.
But in any event, they find themselves on the receiving end of the pitchfork brigade, right?
So they don't want to do that.
Mises, Ludwig von Mises, says that, you know, these hyperinflationary outcomes are a result of the cowardice of the monetary authorities.
They don't want to say that, you know, we've lied to you, we've cheated you, sorry, there's no there, there, the game's all over.
So in their desperation, they do anything they can to keep the game going.
And you hear a clown like Bernanke on CBS this weekend, and he's, oh, he's 100% sure that once he lets the, you know, the monetary creation genie out of the bottle, that he can put it back in.
Oh, he's 100% sure about that?
Is that what, so, you know, they don't want to admit that they, you know, it's like the sorcerer's apprentice in Mickey Mouse, that they've uncorked something that they cannot control.
So they bluster and I think they tremble.
If you looked at Bernanke, I think he was trembling a little bit on 60 minutes.
They tremble and they bluster.
We're 100% sure that we can recork the genie in the bottle, but they can't do it.
But they continue down the same path because they don't know anything else.
It's the only, well, okay, we'll create a little more money this time, and then, you know, the economy will take off, and tax revenues will grow, and people will be back to work, and then we can reclaim it all we can.
And then, you know, QE2 is finished, it's over and done, and it didn't have the promised effect, so then it's QE3.
And, you know, but this one, you know, once we kick-start the economy, then everything will be fine.
And then we'll reclaim all of this, you know, this monetary base explosion that we've created, but they can't.
And this is one of the things that they, you know, that they mislead you about, in my view.
The Fed, I mean, just take QE1, quantitative easing one.
The Federal Reserve added, that was a $1.7 trillion operation in which the Federal Reserve added to its balance sheet over a trillion dollars' worth of mystery meat, of stuff that nobody knows what it is.
Nobody wants it.
It has no value.
That's the reason the banksters wanted to get rid of it and shuffled it off to the Fed.
There was no market for it.
And now they tell you that, you know, but once in the, you know, in the great buy-and-buy when the economy picks up and the effects of our monetary stimulus take off, then at that point, then we're going to unwind all this monetary creation and this growth of the monetary base with this mystery meat that we added to the portfolio of the Federal Reserve.
But they can't unwind it because there's no market for this crap.
If there had been a market for it, if anybody had wanted it, they wouldn't have had to take it on themselves to begin with.
All right.
Now, hold it right there, Chuck.
We've got to take this break.
Everybody, it's the great Charles Goyette, America's most independent talk show host and author of The Dollar Meltdown.
It's a brilliant book.
You've got to go and get it.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with my friend Charles Goyette, former partner at Anti-War Radio.
Someday we'll be back on the radio.
Right now he's writing a book.
His last book, The Dollar Meltdown, is priceless and it'll only cost you like $20 or something.
Get online.
Go to anywhere except Amazon.com and get yourself a copy.
Run down to your local bookstore.
It's big.
It's yellow.
It's got a melting Federal Reserve note on the front.
Charles, I told you this before, but I'll say it again because I mean it.
I already knew that you were brilliant.
I heard your show a million times.
I read that book and I thought, wow, man, I'm dealing with like a Rothbard-level intelligence here.
I don't know about that, but that's very kind of you.
But the book has had more impact than I would have expected.
I'm very, very pleased with that.
I hear from people all over the world about it.
It's had an impact on people's behavior.
People now that the paperback just came out a couple of weeks ago.
The hardcover came out about a year ago.
But I'm hearing from people now that got the hardcover originally have already taken steps to insulate themselves from this coming calamity.
And they are very, very grateful that they understand it in a new way.
All right.
Now let me ask you again what I tried to ask you the other night at dinner after your speech at the Freedom Summit there.
You made the analogy to the 1970s in your speech.
And now I think most people kind of understand that there was a giant bubble from all the inflation created to pay for Vietnam and the great society that broke, I forget, in 68 or 69.
And then they spent the whole 1970s trying to stimulate and stimulate and monetize and, you know, the Fed creating new money, the Congress creating new debt, and John Maynard Keynes in full effect.
And all we got was stagflation, high inflation and high unemployment.
At the same time, it didn't work.
But then they brought in Paul Volcker.
And Paul Volcker did what they had the exact opposite, basically jacked interest rates up through the roof to force the recession that they had been stimulating to stop.
In other words, he let all those bad debts be liquidated.
And, in fact, a lot of good debts, too.
He completely put the American economy in a stranglehold in order to get us, you know, back down to a reasonable price level so they could start the bubble all over again.
And I was trying to ask you, how come they can't do that again?
Well, it's because the things are a lot, lot different than they were in the 1970s.
Let me think how to answer that best.
Okay, here's a good way to at least try to answer it.
In the most rosy scenarios of what the new Congress is going to try to trim from the annual deficit, there is talk from the, oh, John Boehner.
Okay, here, John Boehner and the Republicans now have the House.
And they said, if you give us the House, we will cut $100 billion from the deficit in the first year.
And the Deficit Reduction Commission came out, and the Deficit Reduction Commission said, well, here's how you cut $200 billion by 2015.
By 2015?
You got a $4 trillion budget by 2015?
You're going to cut 5% of it because circumstances are so grim?
Okay, now, you imagine that we go down the road that Paul Volcker suggested that interest rates start to climb.
What does that do to the cost of servicing U.S. debt?
I mean, a 1% increase in interest rates, just 1%.
We're at generational lows now.
A 1% increase in interest rates, more than obliterates all of John Boehner's first year, one year of $100 billion cuts.
It obliterates it.
So we're between a rock and a hard place.
What happens when U.S. interest rates get higher?
What happens to the cost of funding, you know, $14 trillion in U.S. government debt, not to mention the off-the-books debt?
What happens to all of that?
And it's a very, very different world now.
You know, in the 1970s, China wasn't even in the game.
Really, Russia wasn't even in the game at the time either.
The United States dollar is uniquely situated so that we can't just go out and raise interest rates and clear up our problems.
I mean, it's a very different world.
Well, yeah, I mean, it sounds like if we're paying half a trillion dollars a year just in the interest payments on the national debt, I think last I checked it was $400 billion a year, but I know the national debt's gone way up since then, and that's at interest rates that are basically at zero, half a percent, or one percent, right?
The construction trades in this economy are on their butt.
What do you do to them when you start raising interest rates?
What do you do to even an embryonic recovery if indeed there is one?
What do you do to all of that?
You destroy it completely.
Here in the Obama years, what happens to social spending?
It goes up.
I mean, didn't they just vote an increase in unemployment benefits?
Where does that money come from?
It goes up.
What happens to tax revenues when they raise interest rates to 12 percent or 18 percent or 19 percent?
Tax revenues collapse, so the deficit broadens.
That's before we get to the cost of rolling that debt over.
We're dependent on the kindness of foreign strangers like the Japanese or the Chinese to continue to buy our debt, and maybe it will be more attractive to them at 18 percent or 19 percent, but they will recognize the syndrome of a debtor who's getting in deeper and deeper and deeper and is going to finally have to declare bankruptcy.
So they become a little reluctant.
They want either still higher rates.
If the inflation rate is 15, they want a premium, an inflation premium on top of that.
So it's just, I mean, it's just you can't put the genie back in the bottle.
The time for America to have been responsible is the last couple of generations when all this social spending and war spending and stuff was going on.
War spending, look at this.
We had a trillion dollars a year, Robert Higgs, Ron Paul, many others, trillion dollars a year in foreign and war spending.
We get the revelation that, you know, a lot of that is for stuff like Hillary Clinton's buying on the sex life of the president of Argentina and stealing diplomats' credit card numbers, and yet the American people and the new Congress aren't willing to make a dent in it.
I mean, the Heritage Foundation, to whom these people bow and pray, has said here's how you cut a whole bunch of money from the budget, and yet they leave the cost of empire intact.
Right.
Now hold it right there.
Can I keep you longer here?
Yeah, sure.
Cool.
I'm going to put in a call to Garrett Porter and try to bump him a segment or two because I still have so many more questions for you.
So I'll call Garrett during the break and see if we can push him back.
Later in the show, everybody, at the bottom of the third hour, we'll have Robert Stinnett, the man that finally proved the case beyond a shadow of a doubt of FDR's treason.
Oh, I've got to listen to that.
Looking forward to speaking with Mr. Stinnett again very much.
But, you know, you talk about the war spending and a trillion dollars a year, and I'm trying to remember, Charles, because you cite Robert Higgs there, and, of course, Mother Jones did a piece called Shock and Charge or something like that, and they came up with the same number, a trillion.
I'm trying to remember because it was just a couple of weeks ago that there was another third independent source.
Oh, I know what it was.
It was one of those factcheck.org, or one of those did a fact check on Ron Paul because he keeps using the figure a trillion dollars a year.
And so it was Snopes or factcheck, I think it was factcheck.org.
They went and did their own numbers and said, yeah, it turns out Ron Paul's right.
You count the cost of nuclear weapons and all the intelligence and the national security state and buying new fighter jets for Eastern European NATO members every year and et cetera, et cetera.
You're talking a trillion dollars, including the wars and the defense budget.
I don't know, and as you said, we don't even know the off books part.
But hold it right there, Charles.
We'll be right back.
It's Charles Goyette, author of The Dollar Meltdown on Antiwar Radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm talking to my buddy Charles Goyette.
The website is charlesgoyette.com.
The book is The Dollar Meltdown.
It's now out in paperback.
And, well, Charles, I guess I wanted to ask you about, I think you've told me before on the air that the subject of your new book that you're writing now, or maybe you're done writing now, is about what to do next, basically.
This is a theme that was pretty consistent throughout the Freedom Summit conference over the weekend, was that it's too late for us.
This is Rome in the decline.
This is the Soviet Union falling apart.
The empire is coming down.
And that part is irreversible.
There is no restore the republic.
There is no, well, all we've got to do is vote a bunch of Ron Pauls into the House of Representatives or something like that.
It is too late for us.
The imperial court in Washington, D.C., has already driven us over the cliff.
The real question is, when the proverbial S goes down, when the dollar becomes worthless, when there's a real crisis affecting the 310 million of us in this country, then what?
Yeah.
Well, it depends.
I guess, let me answer it, Scott, the way I answered it for my publisher who asked me to write a preface for the new paperback edition, asking the same thing.
How can you tell at this juncture, where we are today, just how bad it will get?
Because, you know, there have been so many cases of currency collapses, and some of them have been brutal.
I mean, some of them have been like the French Revolution, and others have been fairly over and done with fairly soon.
How can you tell in advance?
And so, for the preface of the book, I advance the suggestion, which I'm moderately sure, that you can tell, you can assess the severity of the calamity in advance by the cluelessness of the governing classes as we enter into it.
Yeah.
In other words, if they understand, as we march along, that they've created a problem, they understand the nature of the problem, and so on, and it plays out, then we can get back to normal fairly quickly.
They understand, you know, it's our interference, we did this, we tried to create money out of thin air, we became dependent on borrowing money to spend our way to greatness, and so on and so forth.
We're not going to do that anymore.
Then, you know, the normal human propensity for people to provide for themselves and to create wealth re-establishes itself.
But if you look at the governing classes in this country, in this environment, I mean, I don't know whether, well, let's start on the monetary side.
I mean, before the inflationary effects of QE1 had begun to work their way through into the economy and the time you see it at the level of consumer prices, before that has even happened.
And, oh, yeah, consumer prices will be up.
I mean, raw materials prices are up.
Gasoline is going to be $3 if it's not already in your neighborhood.
You know, corn and oats and wheat and canola oil are up.
I don't know, that group, probably 40% from October to October.
Energy prices 30%, 30-some percent.
Natural gas, heating oil, gasoline and so on.
But that's not even really the full impact of QE1.
So before QE1 has begun to work its way through the economy and to mushroom its way into the expansion of money and credit by the fractional reserve banking system, before that has even happened, the monetary authorities have decided to double down with QE2.
So if this is a symbol of anything, it's a symbol of cluelessness.
And then Bernanke had the temerity to tell us on Sunday night on 60 Minutes that, you know, if this doesn't work, we've got more waiting for it.
We can do QE2.
We can do QEs forever.
And, of course, they're all done at the destruction of the purchasing power of the dollar.
But that's just the enablers of congressional profligacy.
Yeah, but all these guys went to Harvard and Yale.
How can they be so clueless?
Yeah, how can they be so clueless?
It's their stock in trade.
I mean, you tell me.
You read Paul Krugman.
You listen to Ben Bernanke.
You know, this is what the...
I'll tell you, I don't think they're really as clueless as they seem.
I mean, if you watched Bernanke on 60 Minutes, he was visibly nervous.
So help me, go back and play the video.
His lip was trembling over and over again.
He was visibly nervous.
Well, I didn't watch the video, but I saw it where someone posted it on Facebook, and that was their description of it.
Watch this guy as I'm lying to you is written all over his face.
Yeah, it was very frightening.
So I think he knows he's got a problem.
But look, they have one arrow in their quiver, period.
Well, I mean, you know, it's that great line one of my friends uses.
We've all heard, you know, when you're holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
What else do they do?
What are their tricks?
Do they produce wealth?
Does the Federal Reserve go out and produce wealth?
All they can do is inflate.
That's all they know how to do.
That's the only thing that they have.
That's all they can do is they can print funny money.
And so, you know, when the crisis comes, they, okay, I guess, you know, we'll do what we do.
And they will do what...
And how clueless are the American people?
I mean, we have gotten a huge document dump out of the Federal Reserve telling us, telling us that the Federal Reserve is now acting like Central Bank of the world, Societasian, Oral, Barclays, UBS, and others taking money from the Federal Reserve, other central banks taking money from the Federal Reserve.
I mean, and is there a huge outcry about this?
No.
I've looked for this story.
3.3 trillion.
Here's the hundreds of billions we gave to Bank of America, to Citigroup, and I guess, you know, that whole Wall Street, Main Street thing.
As you point out in your speech, the American people were opposed 100% to the bailout.
But then once it got done, I guess they internalized it as a good thing, or else why would the government have done it?
Yeah.
And so now here's the next question.
I mean, if you can...
If the monetary authorities and the fiscal authorities can justify extending American credit and a $3.3 trillion operation for other central banks around the world, what do they do now with the you-know-what hits the you-know-what?
What do they do about California with the $25 billion problem?
About Illinois with the $13 billion problem?
About New Jersey?
About Texas?
What do they do with $400 billion in pensions, underfunded pension liabilities, that, you know, the unions and others are desperately trying to get nationalized, taken over by the federal government right now?
What do they do with that?
What do they do with that?
How do they make the argument that they can bail out Societasian, Oral, and Barclays and not California?
The very same arguments that they marshaled to bail out UBS play over more so for California, but it shows that they're tools of the banksters.
I mean, the banks are exposed to UBS.
The American banks are exposed to Barclays.
American banks are exposed to Societasian, Oral.
But American banks are also exposed to California and in Illinois and in New Jersey and in Texas and in other states.
So if you look at the cluelessness of the governing classes, as bad as it's gotten, as deep as the problem has gotten, they are willing to double down.
I think this portends a really, really difficult period.
And, Scott, just to take it one more point, you know, in the past, in these currency crises, in these periods of severe inflation, there have been alternatives.
I mean, during the Weimar Republic inflation, you know, you could get a hold of British pound sterling.
There were other currencies available.
In Zimbabwe, or better still, take the inflations in South America over the last couple of decades.
You know, the people scrolled away U.S. dollars as a form of holding wealth.
Well, now you've got the Federal Reserve printing money, the IMF, special drawing rights or whatever they do.
Oh, they're going to put your guarantee behind it as an American taxpayer, but that's fiat money.
They are printing money.
The European Union is printing money.
Japan is printing money.
China is printing money.
And it's not like the world has any currency that, you know, is sort of a sanctuary during this thing.
We have a globalized problem.
All the countries of the world are.
What are all the euphemisms for printing money?
All the currencies of the world are being tarped, deficit accommodating, quantitatively easing, liquidity operations.
They're doing it all over the world.
And so there's a solution.
I mean, this is how you judge how bad it's going to get, too.
You know, if there is not a medium of exchange that people will use, then commerce grinds to a halt or becomes very primitive at the level of border.
So the solution is to repeal the legal tender laws and let natural organic currencies begin to develop.
Right now we're going to pick that up.
Let's pick that up on the other side of this break.
The big problems are coming.
What can we do about it on the individual level to protect ourselves is an important part of this.
Charles Goyette on Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
CharlesGoyette.com is the website of my guest, Charles Goyette.
We're talking about the government's funny money.
Now, over and over again throughout history, governments have destroyed their societies that they're the governments of with their funny money.
And you mentioned the French Revolution there.
I think for the most part that's an untold story, untold, a little understood version of the French Revolution, that currency manipulation was what led to that crisis.
But if we just take your word for that much, at least for the sake of argument, I think we all remember what happened was Napoleon became the emperor and then waged war on as much of the earth as he could until he finally lost.
Yeah, millions of deaths, turmoil, unsettled conditions, unhappy human beings across the whole swath of Europe thanks to...
Yeah, and you're right.
He arose out of the ashes.
He arose out of the ashes of the destroyed and crippled French nation.
And now, so how do we avoid that fate in the U.S.?
Well, I mean, well, I suppose widespread civil disobedience.
You know, if you can't get them to repeal the legal tender laws, the legal tender laws that maybe people need to begin to develop alternative currencies that they use on their own anyway.
Right, just keep each other's contracts and don't have to take it to court.
So you don't have to have it enforced by the court because you mean what you say when you sign the damn thing in the first place.
You drop out of the system.
You drop out of the monetary system, drop out of the court system.
But I don't think that it will penetrate enough people to keep commerce going at the level that we would like.
And by this, I mean right now I'm wondering not how do we restore, and you're right, you alluded to my new book.
It's a little bit about the relationship of freedom and how to restore prosperity in this country.
But I'm afraid that the real problem is not how do you restore prosperity, but how do you arrest the decline.
And I don't think there are enough people that are up to speed on this.
I think, I don't know, maybe it's karma, Scott, who knows.
Maybe we've got to live through this misery so the people awaken and they go, my God, that was awful work.
Let's do something so we don't get reamed like this again.
Maybe.
But they're still asleep at the switch.
I mean, look how they respond to all of this stuff.
You would think they'd be livid, livid about what's being done in their name around the world, not just the killing of people.
Those are foreign people anyway.
They don't really exist.
Not just that, but what they're spending your money on and what's called diplomacy around the world.
You'd think that they'd be livid about the Federal Reserve bailing out other central banks and foreign banks.
You'd think they'd be livid about that.
You'd think they'd be livid about all of this stuff, trying to lock up a publisher that's not even an American citizen and you've got people calling for his assassination.
You'd think that the American people would be livid about this.
They'd want the restoration of a free and open society and a prosperous one too, but they're not.
Yeah, it's outrage fatigue is what it is.
So many evil things in a row, it's hard to stay angry.
Well, I think the American people are going to get exact...
And I'm taking kind of a snarky tone in the new book, at least at this point in my writing, that it's very clear that the American people don't want to be prosperous anymore.
And it's too bad that they're inflicting that on the rest of us who do.
You know, that's too bad for you and me, Scott.
But it's clear that this is what the American people want.
They want to be impoverished.
They want their standard of living drastically lowered.
And I guess that's fine if they want to do that to themselves.
Now, if they were to change their mind, if they should suddenly realize that, you know, gee, being prosperous and having opportunity for ourselves and our children going forward is a wonderful thing, then here are the things that they should do.
Well, actually, the point is actually not the things they should do, the things they've just got to stop doing.
Right.
Well, and that's the thing.
They all want to be prosperous.
They just want to be prosperous for free.
Yeah.
Well, they want what never has been and never will be.
They want to spend their way to prosperity.
They want to believe that we can, you know, keep this government spending fed by borrowing from some of the poorest people in the world, that they will never want to spend the money that they earn, that, you know, that we can continue to borrow from them.
They want to think that you can create money out of thin air.
They want to think that the authorities know what's best for us and are always in charge and have our best interests at heart.
I mean, as long as they want to buy these myths that a little child wouldn't believe, then they're going to have, you know, the unhappy outcome that occurs to people who believe things that simply aren't true, believes childish myths.
Right.
Well, you know, one of the biggest childish myths, of course, of our entire society, which is believed by everyone who's never actually taken the time to really think about it and look into it, but it just goes without saying, we learned this from the times that we're little kids, is that big business and big government are always in a big fight and that it's just the progress of those opposed to the biggest, most powerful, richest, you know, evil top hat wearing capitalists or whatever, who've gotten all this socialism and all this regulatory state accomplished.
When, in fact, especially as proven by Gabriel Kolko in his book, The Triumph of Conservatism, progressivism really has always been a conservative plot to buy off those who oppose, who naturally, you know, natural liberals who oppose the old order, whoever happens to already be a billionaire and so forth, and get them to support the state, which is the key to those zillionaires' success.
And so we have a lot of people, Charles, who hate all the very same banks and corporations as you and I, who think that, for example, you know, your libertarian solutions to our problems are actually what the evil corporate powers want, and insist that what we need is more Paul Krugman economics.
We need to stimulate the economy to help the little guy, like FDR did.
So they want the right thing, but they just believe a bunch of nonsense.
This is one of the greatest cases of identity theft in the history of mankind.
For people to believe that these business establishments and plutocrats and stuff are for a free economy.
On the contrary, they're not for a free economy at all.
I've gotten to the point where I'm in a minority now.
I don't even use the term capitalism.
It's been so tainted to, you know, to represent the monopoly man and all these plutocrats and the banksters that are in bed with the government.
But the last thing any of these people want is a free economy.
They want their privileges.
They want their connections.
They want to be able to control government policy, fiscal policy.
They want to be able to control every aspect of your life for their profit and well-being.
And, yeah, the people are so confused about that.
And, of course, the education system and the media and so on perpetuate the confusion.
Yeah, well, you know, Ron Paul all the time when I interview him on TV emphasizes that, look, you've just got to believe in freedom.
And he doesn't always necessarily explain or provide good footnotes or whatever.
But his argument basically is that I think that it's not that America as a premise, the experiment is a big failure and it ain't right.
It's that we abandon what we all know we're supposed to be about, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the rule of law, justice and freedom and fairness and these things.
This is what we've abandoned.
We've become an evil empire.
And that's why we're destroying ourselves.
So we don't need a new fascist America with Roman Emperor Petraeus in charge.
And we don't need some kind of a Marxist revolution.
What we need is to just get back to what we're supposed to be doing in the first place.
We don't need anything top-down.
We don't need a new policy out of Washington.
We don't need a new initiative.
We don't need a new fit.
We need them to leave us the hell alone.
This country is made rich.
All of this wealth around us was created by people who just, you know, the architect that goes out and architects, and the engineer that goes out and engineers, and the waitress that goes out and waits.
It's all created by the people just doing what they do individually on their own.
That's created all this wealth.
None of it was created from the top down.
And so if we want a restoration of our wealth, we need to get these guys in that are micromanaging, directing our affairs, telling us how much we're going to save, telling us how we're going to retire, who's going to provide our retirement, telling us what we can eat, what we can think, what we can read, what documents we're allowed to read.
We need them to go away and leave us to our prosperity.
Yeah, and you know, what I really think too is it's, I think it was that Albert J. Knott piece, Isaiah's task, where those of us who are the remnant, who understand these things, it's our job just to stay the remnant.
And maybe we don't win the argument when we want to win the argument, but when the time comes, and this goes for the people in this audience too, when the time comes, the people who understand these principles have to be able to stand up and explain them to everybody else.
The reason that we have all these troubles is because of the empire.
The reason that we have all these troubles is because of paper money.
It's not because of capitalism.
It's not because of private property rights.
It's not because of Barack Obama or George Bush.
It's because of both of them, and that kind of thing.
And that, I think, is what Ron Paul is really getting at, is kind of preparing the remnant.
This is the speech that you've got to give coming soon when the dollar breaks.
Yeah, it's certainly true.
And as I said earlier, it's too bad for those of us that you characterize as the remnant that the rest of society, the way the numbers want to end our prosperity and our opportunity and our freedom, but that makes it more compelling for us to go out and win the argument.
That's right.
Well, you couldn't be better armed for that task than reading The Dollar Meltdown by Charles Goyette.
Just go to charlesgoyette.com.
You'll find the link right there.
Thank you so much for your time, Charles.
Great to talk to you, Scott.
Thank you, bud.
