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All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's antiwar radio and now introducing America's most independent talk show host, the great Charles Goyette, former partner in crime.
We'll be again one day soon at antiwar radio and legendary broadcaster in the valley of the sun.
Welcome back to the show, Chuck.
How are you, man?
Hey, Scott.
I am so independent.
You know how I'm so independent I'm not even on the air now.
That independent.
That's right.
How are you, bud?
You're so alternative.
You're banned.
I didn't even play music.
There you go, man.
All right.
Well, so what is up with that anyway?
Well, I don't know.
I guess the answer to that is I wanted to take some time off and I've had it and I had a chance to work on finishing up my second book and it was something I wanted to do all my life and I'm starting to miss it a little bit.
I don't miss the god awful early hours that I used to keep to be on the air at 6 a.m. every day.
I don't miss that.
I'm actually starting to think about how nice it is and I go to bed at night and I close my eyes and I see a microphone, so maybe there's something coming.
Ah, well, there you go.
Yeah.
I mean, of course, all you got to do is snap your fingers.
You could be on the radio anywhere in the world that you want and continue to lead the way for them also.
You know, I don't know.
Believe me, though, I ain't knocking the books.
I think I was just telling them earlier, five minutes or something, how great the dollar meltdown is.
It's big and yellow.
It's got a melting paper dollar on the front of it.
It's at all your local bookstores and everywhere online, although you should boycott Amazon, but it's an excellent book and I know the new one that's coming out is also going to be awesome, so I don't begrudge you for taking the time to write the books.
I think they're absolutely great, but I do miss you on the radio, Charles.
I wish you'd come back, but anyway.
Yeah, enough about us.
Yeah, exactly.
So you got this article today on LewRockwell.com and it's about this heinous monster, one of the worst butchers of the 20th century, Richard Nixon, who killed millions of Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians.
And anyway, it's about his economic policy and seems like the way you describe his economic policy, he was more on the side of Ho Chi Minh than he realized.
They were blood brothers, anyway.
I mean, there's a reason they called him Tricky Dicky, but here's the really disgusting thing.
He imposed wage and price controls on the country at the same time he took us off the gold standard, August 15th, 1971.
But what I suppose should be most disappointing or enlightening to people who have not awakened to the fact that the governing classes are not our servants, the most disappointing thing is the subsequent White House tapes reveal that he knew with his institution of wage and price controls that it would harm the economy, that it could not accomplish the purpose for which it was sold to the American people to get a handle on the cost of living, which, after all, was the result of the Federal Reserve creating money, even as they have been doing today.
Well, now, hold it right there a second.
He knew better at the time.
Right, because there was an election around the corner.
This is the whole thing.
The article is too late.
The government already did do something.
When everybody is finally demanding wage and price controls, that's already chapter six of the dang thing, right?
Yeah.
Okay, so it's the American syndrome, though.
I mean, every time there's a problem, they say, well, the government should do something.
And my point in the article is, look, the government already did.
Oh, you want them?
The government created this problem by their prior actions.
You want them to do something to fix this problem now?
Okay, they'll institute wage and price controls to cap rising prices, and then you'll get shortages.
All right, well, so then take me back to Kennedy and Johnson, then, was it?
Because it seems to me, but I wasn't around or whatever.
I've only read about it, and, you know, not that much, but I'm trying to get my head around, you know, the business cycle of the 1960s, because I know you had a massive socialist program called the Pentagon, waging an eternal war in Southeast Asia, and, of course, the Cold War around the world.
And then you also had all the great society spending and whatever.
So, but then I wonder, does that mean that in, say, like 1966 or whatever, everything seemed great, and everybody was rich, but then the bubble popped.
It was 1968 when the bubble popped, and then they started the correction, the stimulus to correct from that recession, right?
Is that right?
Yeah, and, you know, and it was a constant series of little booms and busts during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
So they'd crank up the money supply.
They'd accommodate the guns and butter policy of LBJ and then Nixon, and the result, of course, would be rapidly rising prices throughout the economy.
And in response to that, of course, the Fed would say, oh, somebody would got to do something, right?
Well, the government already did do something.
So they'd crank up interest rates for a while.
And, you know, that would kill business and commerce.
Nobody thought to end the empire.
Nobody thought to end the warfare state or the welfare state.
That's the basis on which both parties got elected.
Right.
Well, you've got to the people from the Russians.
Isn't it uncannily, eerily similar to today?
Yeah, absolutely.
It's the same story over and over again.
It's funny because you can read stuff from the 19th century and go, wow, that really, you know, the Spanish-American War, whatever, a hundred years ago, that's just like now.
The war against the Philippines is the same as the war against Iraq or whatever.
In fact, you take, well, never mind, I could go on and on.
Well, no, so wait a minute.
So it was 1968, the bubble popped, and then the Fed started saying, oh, well, we're good Keynesians.
And so we have to now print a bunch of money and inflate to stimulate the economy in the 1970s.
Yeah, sure.
Sure.
I mean, and it's always the same syndrome.
And so, you know, Nixon was looking at, it's almost laughable in retrospect, but he was looking at, as I recall, it was like about a 5% inflation rate or 5% cost of consumer price index rise at the time he instituted the wage and price controls.
5%, by the end of the decade, 5% was nothing.
Yeah, right.
I mean, look at us now.
So does that mean that this is what we face in our near term?
Well, I mean, you know.
And what's so bad about that?
Because I got to tell you, I can honestly speak as somebody who's broke, I can't afford a $10 price of, you know, loaf of bread or whatever.
So if the money is worth so little that the stores have to charge that much for me to get a loaf of bread, I think I might need the government to stop them from charging me that much, Charles.
Yeah, that's good.
And then, of course, the consequence is that there are people up the food chain.
I mean, you're not a kid, so you don't think that bread and milk and eggs come from the grocery store.
You know that there's somebody up what's literally the food chain that's in the business of milking cows and raising wheat and so on.
So when the government says we're going to help the consumers, we're going to cap prices of milk and eggs and bread, then what happens to the guys up the food chain that produce those things?
They've got feed costs.
They've got to feed those chickens.
They have to feed that.
They've got to fertilize.
They've got to fill up the tractors with gasoline or diesel and go out and work the fields.
And all of those things are costly.
But you're saying, no, we don't want the consumer to have to pay the cost at the grocery store of you to produce these things.
So what happens?
So they stop producing things.
And then the economy really starts.
You think we have troubles now.
What do they have to do with wage and price controls?
Charles, was it in your book, The Dollar Meltdown, now out in paperback that I read that Harry Truman actually had a plan, or tell me he didn't carry it out, to use the National Guard because he convinced himself that the farmers were hoarding all the meat and he needed to go and take it and bring it to market?
It sounds familiar.
It wasn't in The Dollar Meltdown, but it's the sort of thing I would have written about.
Yeah, this is Qaddafi madcap economic policy.
But Truman was totally capable of doing something like that, just as he was capable of nationalizing major American industries on the pretext that we were at war in Korea.
But the real reason was he was pandering to union votes for the upcoming election.
Because they wanted their industries nationalized?
Yeah, well, isn't that peculiar?
I don't know how anybody thinks they get a fair break from the cops than their regular boss.
But OK, I don't know.
All right.
So now, Charles, this is the part of the show where I tell you what I think I got from you so far and then see if we can go from there.
So give it to me in small chunks.
All right.
So you had Lyndon Johnson.
You had George W. Bush.
They had these giant wars and these giant socialist programs and all this massive deficit spending and a real under them and their watch.
Their Federal Reserve governors had a real easy money policy that created big bubbles.
Then you have Richard Nixon and Barack Obama were the guys that come in, you know, too late time to clean up that mess or try to.
And the only way that they can think of to do that is to print more money and go into more debt.
And in the case of Richard Nixon, he actually took us off the gold standard.
In the case of Barack Obama, he's just going with or at least with the Fed going with trillions of new dollars being created to fill up the hole of all the bad debts that collapsed and all the wealth that was destroyed when the bubble popped.
So with all of that.
So all that's good so far.
That's good.
OK, but now the difference is that because Nixon took us off the gold standard way back then, the way you put it in your book, the dollar meltdown now out in paperback is that this is the end of the game.
You can only play this same scam so many times in a row.
And then what happens?
Yeah, Scott, I described it to somebody the other day this way.
I said it's like the story of the three little pigs in reverse.
There we were in a solid gold based monetary system.
It was a monetary system was built like a brick house.
Right.
It was solid.
And then the government said, by the way, we're we're take you're going to have to move out.
Oh, by the way, we're going to take all these bricks for ourselves.
And so the American people were forced to to flee into a house, a house made of of sticks.
And, you know, that held up for a couple of years.
But the winds of economic reckoning began blowing and the the the dollar, the dollar exchange standard broke down in 1971 when Nixon entered the gold standard.
And so we were forced to flee into a house made of straw, which is what we're in now, in which there is no pretense of any kind of redeemability, no break or discipline whatsoever on the monetary authorities for the money that they create virtually out of nothing by electronic bookkeeping entry or or sometimes money printing.
And and so we're in this we're in this house of straw.
And the the winds of change and economic reality are beginning to blow.
And we are going to be forced to leave this.
The dollar reserve standard on which the world has been since roughly to the end of World War Two is is blowing apart, that it is being abandoned by by foreign governments, by people all over the world, by oil producers and central banks of other nations.
It is being abandoned by anybody that watches are out of control spending and are compounding debt.
So as a consequence of this, we're going to have to find another shelter.
And my suspicion is that the the authorities will try to move us then into a house made of paper and they will paint the paper.
They will mark the paper up to look as though it's made out of bricks.
So they'll scrawl, they'll draw some, you know, nice brick outlines on the outside of it.
But it will be another irredeemable, you know, worthless paper monetary scheme.
Who knows some sort of a, you know, special drawing right or other fiat currency or something to create the illusion that the under underlying problem of the monetary system being irredeemable being made up has been solved.
And of course, it will not be be solved at all.
But that's roughly where we are today.
Yeah, but it sounds like you're saying that everybody believe in it makes it go.
So then what's the problem?
Well, it it certainly sucks people in for a time, doesn't it?
All of these I mean, you know, when the American people were asked to turn in their gold or forced to turn in their gold under threat of criminal sanctions in the 1930s, most many of them turned it in when when the nations of the world were persuaded to go to the dollar, the dollar exchange standard in Bretton Woods, most of them went along with it.
When the the dollar standard broke down in 1971.
The American people didn't peep when they took, you know, the redeemability, they got rid of the silver certificates, and they started making coins with a little wash of, you know, kind of a nickel wash on the outside of pretend to make it look like it was still sober.
The American people went along with that.
So I mean, you know, the American people are confused.
And, you know, the monetary authorities and the schemers are, are believed to have great insight and great wisdom.
And so they'll come up with a system that will get us out of this mess.
And, you know, it'll buy them, it'll buy us some time, it'll enrich some and impoverish others.
And ultimately, it will be very, very destructive of the American people's liberty and prosperity.
Here's the thing, though.
It's been like this through all of American history.
I mean, the phrase not worth a continental right was the paper script that they wrote up to pay the soldiers who fought in the Revolutionary War, and they don't get to hang about a greenback dollar.
Right, right.
Yeah, yeah.
And like Confederate money to write is, you know, so this is something that, you know, central, it seems like basically, here's what I'm getting at.
The people at large, supposedly, can never understand enough about how money works, they can understand, you know, buying and spending, but where the money comes from, how the government deals with that, how the big banks create it, whatever, it's just too far away.
So the bankers always just immediately ally themselves with the state.
And it's a state business, it always has been.
And it doesn't seem like there's any way around this, no matter, you know, how horrible an end they seem to be driving us to.
Well, I think you're largely right.
I mean, bitter and difficult experiences, you know, awaken some people.
I mean, to this day, you know, Germans are still a little bit reluctant to participate in the full tilt money printing boogie like American central banks do, you know, Merkel at least dragged her feet a little bit about huge money printing schemes because of the German experience of almost 100 years ago.
And so, you know, people learn from bitter experiences.
The French used to have a saying in my lifetime, it's probably died off by now.
But when I was a young kid, they had, there was a saying that went like this, are you as smart as a French peasant?
Because the French had been through so many of these monetary burlesques that they had learned to keep some, you know, some gold or some silver on hand, you know, buried in the garden or something, because they had been through, you know, all of these destructive monetary policies generations ago, but they learned something over the years.
So the American people, you know, have a short memory and, you know, don't remember the continental, they don't remember the greenback dollar.
So they have to learn again.
But, you know, Von Mises said that ultimately people are going to have to figure out that the creation, that the production, that the monetary unit needs to be separated entirely from the governmental authorities.
He says it's a matter of basic civil liberties as fundamentally important as constitutions and Bill of Rights to keep the government and the monetary unit, the monetary system separated or the people will be fleeced.
We haven't learned that lesson yet.
Yeah, but what's all that got to do with the price of revolution in Egypt, Libya, and Bahrain?
Yeah, it has everything to do with it.
You know, the Americans, you know, the Americans print money like crazy, run up global food prices by monetary creation and all of a sudden you have, you know, the grocery revolution in the Middle East.
You have people that can't make ends meet.
Yeah, but wait a minute.
I thought prices in Egypt are wholly dependent on the amount of money that Hosni Mubarak creates.
Why is it dependent on American currency?
Don't they buy and sell all their groceries with their local currency?
Yeah, but it's a global, it's a global food market.
Look, even in Hosni Mubarak's money, I think prices in the last couple of years in Egypt had run up about 40 percent.
I mean, you know, how do unemployed people, you know, afford the staples of life when prices are escalating and they don't have any income?
Yeah, well, and this goes back to people don't understand inflation.
They know the prices are rising and they know they're mad.
And all, and all the governments of the world are doing it, so there's virtually no escape.
I mean, you know, the Chinese are printing money.
The European Central Bank is printing money.
Japan is printing money.
So help me, the International Monetary Fund wants to print more of its fiat currency or special drawing rights.
They want to create money.
The Americans are printing money.
It's going on all over the globe.
You know what's funny, though?
No one on TV ever says that they think that the monetary policy has anything to do with the price of food.
They'll name any number of things, global warming and droughts and trade and storms and frost.
Yeah, you know, it's like, it's like the Soviet Union.
Every, every year for 60 years, like clockwork, they had unusually inhospitable weather and crop failures every year.
And nobody, you know, nobody in the American commentary had ever figured out that it was, gee, another bad, another bad weather year in Russia.
That's too bad.
Never figured out that this is what happens under statism.
So really, you know, all this inflation, this giant bubble, and then the more stimulus to correct from that, mostly based around the Iraq war and the terror war.
This has been the undoing of the whole thing.
This is what's created all these uprisings against our local satraps across the Middle East.
Yep.
And there are probably more to come and wait, let's start doing it in America.
Yeah, well, except we see the rallies in America are all for everybody wants a government job.
They want, we're rallying for more corruption.
Well, apparently up there in Wisconsin, it's the socialists on one side versus the fascists on the other.
And apparently you're supposed to pick one.
Everybody wants their good thing from the government.
Everybody wants a crack at the American pinata.
Yeah, exactly.
And that's the thing about the pinata.
It looks nice when you string it up there, when you bring it home from the store and whatever.
But once you're done with it, there ain't much left.
Yeah.
And then we're supposed to have a huge debate that occupies us all for years about whether George Bush's guys should get the stick and get the whack at the pinata or Obama's guys should get the big stick and take a whack at the pinata.
I'm going like, I don't care.
I don't want to be a part of the pinata party.
Yeah, because we're the pinata.
We're the ones getting hit with the stick.
Every time they beat you across the head, they steal your wallet.
Oh, man.
All right.
Hey, listen, I love talking to you, dude.
Thanks a lot for the great interview.
Good to talk to you, Scott.
Keep up the good work, bud.
All right, everybody.
That's the great Charles Goyette.
His website is charlesgoyette.com.
He's the author of The Dollar Meltdown.
He's got another really good one in the lineup coming soon for you.
