Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Ryan McMacken.
He is the senior editor at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
Well, Jeff Dice says, just call it the Mises Institute.
That's easier.
Mises.org.
Welcome to the show.
How you doing, Ryan?
Hi, good morning.
It's good to be here.
Very happy to have you here.
And let me just say for the audience here that, you know, obviously this is pretty much mostly an anti-war show and I don't do that much economics on it.
But I want to say to all the conservatives and right-wingers of whatever descriptions, and the same for the liberals and progressives and leftists and socialists of all different descriptions listening that you don't have to agree with Austrian school libertarians about everything.
We think a lot of things.
We're right about everything, but we think a lot of things.
But you don't have to agree with us about everything to understand the one single most important thing other than the empire itself in this country.
The worst thing our government does is it runs this central bank.
And that central bank and its, you know, member banks, they cause the boom and the bust.
It's not capitalism.
It's the government control the money system that causes the boom and the bust cycle that makes everyone hate capitalism so much and feel so destabilized all the time in this economy.
And the Mises guys are the ones who know it because Mises himself was the one who figured it all out.
Ain't that right?
Yes, absolutely.
All true.
Yes.
Well, central bank's very damaging because it allows the government to spend a lot more money than it would otherwise and to basically tax people through other means.
So it creates a more powerful state which can engage in war more often.
It also creates a divorce between the taxpayers and the state itself.
And Mises did talk about this.
And that is if the state could only get a way to give itself wealth, to extract wealth from the public without the public really appreciating that this was a form of taxation, then the state could really extract more wealth because the people wouldn't really realize what was going on.
If you had a system where, oh, you have to have an election where you approve an increase in the tax rates and so on, if wealth was going to the government only based on an obvious and clear tax mechanism, that would be one thing.
But the central bank allows a lot of deception to take place and for the state to enrich itself in a roundabout way that few people understand.
But then, so back to the theory of money and credit there and the boom and the bust.
Because inflation is one thing, this sort of hidden taxation and all that.
And that's huge and important.
It's so important.
And in fact, we could go on all for the rest of the afternoon about the negative effects of inflation on our society that have nothing to do with even the boom and the bust, that are just separate from that even.
Just making it more difficult for people to save on the most basic level, for example.
But talk about this boom and the bust, because in my lifetime, I've seen the economy come and go.
I guess when I was real young, it was a deliberate crash enforced by Paul Volcker in the early Reagan years.
I remember the ads for, you can get a loan for a truck and the interest rate is only 19% or 22%.
But then there was a big boom after that, the big Reagan years boom.
But then there was a big recession in the early 90s.
It helped George Bush lose to Bill Clinton, remember that.
But then there was this big boom again and everybody was making money, this big dot-com thing.
And then there was this big crash, right?
99-2000 and the NASDAQ and the Dow Jones and all that.
But then there was this huge boom during the George W. Bush years in the housing market, especially the stock market, of course, and fuel and other things.
And then a massive crash, the Great Recession, they called it.
And then they say, unemployment's way down, but inflation's way down, too.
The economy's just roaring along, everybody's happy, it's peak Donald Trump, and everything's fine.
And yet I'm worried that somehow underlying all this is that same boom-bust cycle of the phony money supply that's setting us up for a massive failure coming soon here.
Of course, the reason I brought you on is this piece, Money Supply Growth Slows in February.
I read that and it started scaring the hell out of me.
Well, yeah, I think if we're going to talk about the boom-bust, the most fundamental way of changing our thinking about it is getting people to appreciate that the problem isn't in the bust phase, the problem is in the boom phase.
And the problem here is that the central bank, they inflate a boom.
And then that boom causes money to flow into parts of the economy where it would not have otherwise, because the Fed is blowing up bubbles in those places.
And so that is where the economy becomes sick, where the economy becomes ill, where it becomes distorted and a product of malinvestment.
So the way most people think about it is, oh, there's this capitalist system and booms and busts are built into it for magical reasons that we can't really understand.
We just know that maybe it's like a drunken man, maybe people just drink too much and the economy is in the getting drunk phase and then there's the hangover phase.
I mean, all these theories have nothing to do with good economic thinking.
The problem is not that, oh, that capitalism screwed up somehow and now we need the central bank to come in and fix it or we need government policy to fix it.
The problem is a result of government policy, of Fed policy, because what it does is it inflates the money supply.
It leads to that fake wealth that's being created going into sectors of the economy, whether it be dot-coms, as happened in the late 90s, or it goes into housing, as happened right before the Great Recession.
And then we could go back and pick apart how those other bubbles were blown up, say, in 1980 or in 1929.
And in each case, what we find is that there was massive inflation in some place.
It wasn't necessarily consumer inflation, because most people just point to the CPI and say, oh, well, prices didn't increase that much during the 20s or something like that.
The reality is if we look, we can see inflation in asset prices or in other places that are a reflection of the fact that the central bank was inflating the money supply.
And that's what creates all those people to invest in dot-coms, which then it turns out they're worthless, or all these people to buy five or six condos and rent them out, and then it turns out there's no demand for them.
It's that phase.
It was where people started pouring money into unprofitable parts of the economy.
That causes the bust.
And you want central banks to not cause that.
That is what the problem is.
So, you know, it's interesting.
Just a slight personal connection.
I like to mention that my old program manager at KPFK radio out in L.A. is a guy named Alan Minsky, really great guy.
And his father was Hyman Minsky, the author of the Minsky Theory of the Business Cycle.
And the Minsky Business Cycle Theory, I never read the book or whatever, but as far as I understand it, it's essentially like 80% of Mises.
He's saying that, well, when you have a bunch of businessmen with just massive amounts of accumulating capital and nowhere to invest it in, they'll start taking greater risks and investing in flimsier and flimsier, you know, projects that can't hold up and this kind of thing.
Which is, that's all right.
It's just like that movie, Inside Job, where they describe the entire, you know, boom and bust on Wall Street, but they just leave out the part where the central government is expanding the money supply all the time and is handing out licenses to all these banks, allowing them to expand the money supply and allowing them to create all this new money that they then have to make all these risky loans.
And it just seems like, I'm not sure, you know, how much Bob Murphy and Minsky would argue if it came down to it, but it seems like essentially they're in agreement.
It's just, they're missing the one big ingredient that seems to be, you know, beyond reach, which is that it's all government's fault in the first place, like you're saying.
We don't need them to fix the mess.
We need them to quit making it.
Right.
There are some insightful people who I think have noticed the general flow of the mechanism, which is that during the boom phase, people engage in yield chasing.
That is, they got to go after riskier and riskier investments, or they're throwing money at increasingly worthless stuff, and that is what blows up the bubbles.
But as you say, yeah, the real source of the problem is the inflationary currency, which is really only made possible with a central bank or with government intervention of some sort that inflates the money supply.
You don't need a central bank to do that.
We had in the late 19th century, the U.S. didn't have a central bank.
However, it did have government policy that created increases in the money supply, not backed by actual saving or investment, not backed by gold mining or something like that.
This was just paper money that was being created out of thin air, and that's what causes those bubbles and all of that bad investment.
Okay, now, so to a liberal or a progressive or something, this might sound sort of like no true Scotsman.
Listen, these two pro-capitalists explain away all the horrible, terrible flaws in the capitalist economy.
But so is it really true then, Ryan, that unless we have pure Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism, as long as we have a state at all, then it's going to have these distortions in the market, and we're going to say, well, that's not true capitalism then.
It's not capitalism that's chaotic.
It's just this system, which is different.
Are we as dishonest as a commie saying it would work if they only did it my way?
Well, I never use the true Scotsman argument, because it's not even true, right?
A system, if you took a heavily socialized system, and you just slightly privatized it, you just allowed a little bit of market freedom in there, that would be a much better system.
If you took a system that was a mixed economy, it was about halfway interventionist and halfway free.
If you made it 10% more free, that would be a better system.
So any movement in the direction of more market freedom makes people's lives better, makes it easier for them to earn a living.
So no, it doesn't have to be some pure market system or anything like that.
And in fact, we can look just at the history of the central bank and see that it's become progressively worse in recent decades.
And you can see a lot of this in the work of David Stockman, where Stockman notes that in the middle of the 20th century, the Fed wasn't all that bad, and that the people who were running it really viewed the central bank as really just the banker's bank, and it was there to add liquidity in a variety of situations.
But what we've got now is a central bank that micromanages the economy in a variety of ways.
Oh, we've got to make the stock market do this.
We've got to invest in these sorts of things.
Through our open market operations, we've got to make sure these asset prices don't do this, and that does that.
Now, of course, they claim they're not doing any of that, but it's clear that they're constantly looking at the market for how to fine-tune things, and that is not the way central banks necessarily work.
So not all central banks are the same.
Some are worse than others, and some get worse over time.
But the way we've got a central bank right now, especially since about 2001, it's been endless stimulus, endless meddling.
And it got even worse in 2007, where, of course, the assets they own, their portfolio, went up to $4 trillion.
It's endless looking at what can we buy from the economy to revalue assets and to basically bail out banks one after the other.
That wasn't necessarily always the case.
Hey, here's a book for you high-tech businessmen out there, No Dev, No Ops, No IT by Hussain Badakh Chani.
Check it out at Amazon.com.
So, speaking of which, it seems like, well, to paraphrase Lou in an entirely different context, as an economist, it seems like we've got a lot of money in the bank, a lot of money in the economy, a lot of money in the economy as an economist.
I'm a great anti-war guy, so what the hell do I know?
But from what I hear in the chatter out there, it seems like the amount of liquidity pumped into the system in response to the last crash has probably set us up for even a far worse kind of correction in the future since it was, you know, in the years prior to this bubble.
Is that the way you read that, too?
Yeah, and the great irony is that it's going to be capitalism that gets blamed the next time there's a crash.
But thanks to the central bank and federal policy in general, the economy is heavily federalized now.
Very little of single-family home purchase is a market process.
It's almost all going through Fannie Mae and those other GSEs.
It's, of course, these investors who are putting money and liquidity into the real estate markets.
A lot of their moral hazard is being provided by the central bank.
And all of these investors and these institutions that are involved in this, they know that the Fed's going to bail them out if something goes terribly wrong.
And so there's really no market process left beyond a small portion of the stock market.
How much will it pump up asset prices?
How much worthless garbage will it purchase in the open market if the valuations go down too low and just increase its portfolio even more?
How much will it manipulate interest rates to keep things going and to keep, of course, federal payment on the debt low as well?
And that's another major factor as well, is the federal government is an important part of that as well.
And so we've got all of these moving pieces going on which are all a result of government policy, but when it all comes crashing down and it may be less of a crash than more of a long stagnation like has happened in Japan where the standard of living just goes down a little bit every year and people keep working longer and longer hours to maintain that standard of living and it's a capitalist system.
And well, there's a real benefit, I think, to people like yourself and your Mises Institute doing everything we can to get the word out first.
I mean, the reason I'm inoculated against all this stuff is one of the main reasons, of course, is because of Ron Paul.
So I started following him even before it crashed.
I knew because he had already explained it right there on the House floor on C-SPAN about how the real bubble is in real estate and when the dot-com thing comes crashing down we'll probably see that continue to expand and then, you know, he narrated the whole thing as it happened, the whole time, and I think one of the most important lessons when people learn libertarianism, right, is that, yeah, the Fed wasn't created in the New Deal.
The Fed was created by Woodrow Wilson a generation before and that was part of what helped to lead to that crash that then led to the New Deal and all this government control on the theory that it was, as they taught me in junior high, the wilds of free market, the excesses of free market capitalism that had caused that crisis and, yeah, that free market capitalism is what caused the last few crashes and this one and the next one since the New Deal was way back 80 years ago but anyway.
Well, this of course is a good point because Sean Rittner has a nice article on this on Mises.org where he looks at the actual record of the central bank and the Fed and it's not good at all and he can take you through some of the key points and what is miraculously forgotten about the Great Depression happened.
The Fed was there during the 1929 crash and did not prevent it.
It of course as Rothbard shows in his book on the Great Depression the Fed was a key player in causing that problem but we can look back through the late 20s through the Depression through multiple recessions that occurred in the 50s and 60s and then looking at the long inflation that occurred in the 1970s after Nixon closed the gold window that was the thing that was the thing that was the thing that was of course something that was made necessary by the Fed's inflation of the money supply and making the dollar worth so little that Nixon could no longer make good on the promises in terms of gold exchanged for dollars from foreign sources so that had to be ended that brought on a much higher level of inflation during the 70s this then had to be dealt with in the early 80s which led to a huge recession and lots of farms going out of business and all sorts of bubbles crashing down then there was the 1987 stock market crash which led to then the final embrace of huge inflationary policy under Greenspan that continued throughout the 90s and then and ever since then ever since the 90s ended it's just been one group of bailouts and QE and attempts at stimulus every few years and we're now in a state of perpetual stimulus and we don't know how it's going to end yet.
Sorry hang on just one second hey guys as you know I have a notorious history with server problems but those days are over it's all solved and that's because of the great Harley Abbott at expand designs dot com expand designs dot com your website is too old it's out of date you need a new one for the 2020s so go to expand designs dot com and go to expand designs dot com slash scott and you'll save $500 alright so for a new liberty this is chapter 7 or whichever it is the central banking chapter for a new liberty Rothbard talks about how they always try to prick the bubble in a tiny little bit and let the air out slowly try to create and start to deflate in other words once they get terrified of their own inflation that uh oh we may have overdone it boys it's time to start you know tuning this thing back that once they do that there's a crash come there's nothing you can do about it once the sort of I guess he makes the comparison to a heroin addict back to your recent article here you know in 2008 I wasn't reading Mises as much but I was reading LRC a lot and Gary North in the summer of 2008 was saying wow they're deflating big time right now everyone look at M1 M2 M3 this that and the other thing and uh what's happening is there's a severe retraction of the money market soon and then it was six weeks later there was a crash in the market it was right then and there in fact I interviewed Ron Paul about that in August of 2008 where he was saying oh yeah I agree with North that there's a crash coming and very soon here and there it was a crash coming and there was a crash coming and there was a crash coming and there was a crash coming and there was a crash coming and there was a crash coming and there was a crash coming and there was a crash coming and there was a crash coming and there was a crash coming and then next case was If you're too close to zero, you may find that, okay, you've reduced the rate to zero, but it didn't have the stimulus effect you wanted to.
The ideal is you start out at 5%, 6% target rate, and then you've got all sorts of leeway to lower it considerably, as happened, and that's about where they were back in 2001, when they wanted stimulus back then.
But now they're nowhere near that, and so they don't have nearly as much wiggle room as they would like.
In recent years, they've been trying to get it back up, back above 3%, which they haven't managed to do, and then now they're already talking about, oh, well, maybe we'll cut rates.
And so they're desperate for a way to kind of normalize Fed policy before the next recession happens so that they can then engage in a fresh round of stimulus, starting from a normal place.
But they haven't managed to return to normal, and so that's a big problem for them as they see it.
All right, well, you know, politics has everything to do with this, and what about the idea that they would go ahead and cause the crash now before the next election, because they want rid of Trump so bad, if we have one coming anyway?
Well, I have no idea.
You know what, let me rephrase that.
What about if you had Brand X president that the establishment didn't like, you know, is this the kind of policy that you see playing into politics?
Never mind Trump personally, necessarily, but just, or these guys really, they swear to God they're apolitical, man.
Well, I think they're under a lot of pressures just far beyond the White House, in terms of working with other central banks, in terms of looking around the world, dealing with the Chinese central bank and all of those issues.
I don't know how much of it is domestic policy for them, since, of course, they are unelected and they're not concerned as much with the next round of elections as they are with, I think, with larger international issues.
And I don't mean that as a compliment, I mean it as, they've got concerns that don't involve the American people, and they're more really trying to save their own skin, trying to see how Fed policy fits in with the larger global issues.
And whether that fits into screwing over the current incumbent in the White House, I don't know.
And it may not, it may be that they've concluded that having a crash in time for the next election does benefit them or doesn't, I don't know.
I can't think like a member of the Fed board of governors, because I just have no idea how they think.
So it's hard to say.
I just do know that some of this, of course, is beyond their control.
So it's not that they can just push these levers and have things happen they want to have happen, because, of course, they don't even directly set the interest rate.
They go into the market and through free market operations, they manipulate the markets in such a way as to hit a target rate.
And then we look at what they're trying to do right now in terms of keeping the money supply growth at a stable rate, and they may or may not be able to do that.
As you noted, in looking at what's the money supply doing right now, it's been going down in recent years, and it's at really the second lowest growth rate it's been at in years right now.
And if you look at over time, you can see, of course, that there have been significant drops in money supply growth rates in the years preceding a significant recession or financial crisis.
And I think one could make the case that we're at a point right now where you could expect then something in the next 18 months.
I try not to make predictions, though, because that's so difficult.
And then you look dumb if you try and, of course, call a specific month or quarter or something like that.
But I think if we're looking at a declining money supply, we look around a little bit more into the broad economy, and we can see that there's been slowing in loans made by commercial banks, and there doesn't seem to be as much liquidity, there doesn't seem to be as much economic activity in terms of loans being made, investments being made.
And this is what we would expect using general business cycle theory, because having blown up that bubble, having created a bunch of malinvestments, having created a lot of growth in the money supply that wouldn't have occurred in a market system, we have lots of people then that were taking out loans, that were founding businesses, that were making investments, that were buying homes based on, essentially, this money made up out of thin air.
Eventually, though, whether or not the Fed wants it to happen, beyond the Fed's control, it eventually is discovered that a lot of these investments really didn't have the sorts of saving and investment necessary to sustain them.
So at some point, people start to go bankrupt, people start to not make their housing payments, people start to not have growth in their incomes like they assumed they would, and these investments start to go bad.
We find that businesses aren't sustaining themselves because the demand isn't there.
And then when that starts to happen, banks find it harder and harder to find people to lend to, and then the money supply growth slows.
So we may very well be in that phase right now, and probably are, where it's being harder and harder to have safe and reasonable places, I wouldn't say safe, but have places that look like a reasonably good investment in terms of what a commercial bank is thinking.
And that's why you're seeing some of this money supply go away, is it's getting harder and harder for them to find places to sustain more spending and investment.
And that can then build on itself, and that's what leads to a crash.
And the Fed has a real hard time controlling that.
Central banks, once you're in that phase where commercial banks are like, oh no, we've got investments going bad, we've got loans that aren't being paid back, we better retrench, we better up our investment guidelines a little bit, be a little bit more careful, that's when you start to enter that bust phase, because the money supply then starts to go down.
Actual money supply disappears into thin air, just as it was created out of thin air, because now all of these debts just disappear and they're not going to be paid back.
Yeah.
Well, and I don't know, I don't pay that close of attention to the business press, but I do see where it looks like, for example, the college loan bubble and crisis, seems like they've created a pretty bad bubble in auto loans, seems some reports about new housing starts going down, and every week new stories about retail chains going out of business, that may just be structural to the economy, because everybody's buying from Amazon Prime now and this kind of thing, but it certainly plays into the larger theme, once people start worrying about it, that's all it takes, because essentially, they can cause a crash, but they can't prevent one, they can try to delay it, but they don't have the magic power to undo the damage that they caused during their fake bubble times.
So, yeah, here we are.
OK, now, I want to change gears real quick here, because today or yesterday or something, you published at Mises.org, my favorite Rothbard essay from 1965, from Left and Right, that's the name of the journal, and the article is, Left and Right, The Prospects for Liberty.
And, I don't know, is it fair to say, this is left-wing Rothbard?
This is Rothbard writing to a left-wing audience, maybe?
Well, this is revolutionary, radical Rothbard, which of course, was always there, but I don't really buy the theory that Rothbard changed significantly between the 60s and the 90s, I think he was simply bringing in different historical examples and things like that.
But I always liked this essay, I read it in college, I had a copy of that, Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature book of essays, which you can still buy in the bookstore, and I always, yeah, I was at a soft spot for this essay, because it provided a historical theory, a historical narrative, and I think this is what a lot of people find perhaps lacking if they don't go looking for it among the free market narrative.
I don't think free market people push the historical narrative enough, the narrative is that industrialization is good, it's that people's material lives have been made better by markets, and that people have actually been made more free by the fact that industrialization and markets have given ordinary people more wealth.
That actually leads then to a more egalitarian political structure, which Rothbard pointed out is what, in many cases, what liberalism is, is that it's the bourgeoisie, it's the middle classes being empowered for the first time and being able to assert themselves, that mass middle being able to create a system that was more responsive to them, it was no longer just this kleptocracy of older times that was able to keep the large mass of people who owned nothing down, and so we have markets and industrialization to thank for making this new system possible that we now live in, where ordinary middle class people can expect, and they do expect, to be able to have a reasonably comfortable life, and that a lot of that was made possible by the liberal revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries, and he points to the English revolutions, he points to the American revolutions, the levelers in England, which he calls the first truly libertarian intellectual movement and political movement, and then more controversially, he says that the French revolution was part of that too, which I'm sure you'd get more argument from conservatives on that, but the fact of the matter is that that was a revolt, not against things of the Middle Ages, but against French absolutism, which of course had nothing to do with free markets or with local government or with families or anything like that, French absolutism was very much based on horrible banking policies, it was based on profligate government spending, that government was a basket case, the French Bourbons were a mess, they were a disaster for liberty in every way, and Rothbard appreciated that, and if you actually want to see the continuation of that line of thinking, Rothbard didn't change his mind on the French revolution, you can read Rothbard's later work on the history of economic thought and go through that, and he just trounces on French absolutism, he absolutely rakes the French Bourbons over the Coles and what they were doing to the French economy and how they basically caused the revolution with their terrible economic and political theories, and at the same time he defends the far better economic theories of the Middle Ages, but I think what a lot of what conservatives think is they got it into their head somewhere that the ancien regime in France was somehow the regime of old fashioned medieval villages and peasants kind of working on their farms and having ownership in an agricultural society and all of that, they see it as a revolt against everything that came before, but that's not true at all, it was a revolt against the horrible policies of the 17th and 18th centuries under the French monarchy, so I don't see any reason to hate the idea of revolting against the French monarchy, and Rothbard I think took the right position and explained it much better later in his economic theory book.
Yeah, I mean, hey, they made a wreck of the revolution, but that doesn't mean they didn't have the right to revolt in the first place, and so that goes to the whole thing, right, that essentially what he's saying is individualist libertarians are all the way to the left and the most radical of all, and that the right wing is the ancient regime, ancient regime, whatever, the king and the church and the old landlord and all of this, and that then of course the irony is that when socialism broke off from liberalism, from old liberalism, they became more statist even than the right-wingers, so then true libertarian, capitalist, radical, free market, property rights types like yourself end up, or not like you specifically, but well, all of us, end up a lot of times feeling like, well, we're allied with the right because the left is so socialist and so at war against economic thinking at all even, really, that then we sort of sometimes, I don't know, we, many libertarians come from the right and then think of libertarianism as part of the right, and you know, I just thought of this essay the other day because I'm reading, I just finished reading Matt Taibbi's new book, and it begins with an interview with Noam Chomsky at the beginning.
It's about media control and the propaganda model and all this stuff, but at one part they're both sort of clucking their tongues and laughing and talking about how, isn't it ironic that if you go back to the 19th century, Adam Smith and all those guys, they were liberals, they were radicals, they weren't the right, they were the disruptors, and isn't that funny because of course to them all business and all capitalism and all property rights now is something that is allied with the right, against the rights of man, and they have a point, like, you know what I mean?
We do, our government allied with right-wing capitalists, billionaires especially, is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.
Just like Martin Luther King said back 40 years ago, it's been 50 years ago, it's been true the whole time ever since.
Well, yeah, there's never been any coherence.
This is especially true in America.
These political parties, these movements, there's no real internal logic or internal coherence among what it is that people believe.
If we look at the Republican Party and the right, this is just through a variety of accidents of history that you ended up with the people who were both small business people who supported economic freedom on those grounds, and then at the same time they ended up allied with this huge national security state.
It doesn't have to be that way, this is just the way it ended up after the 1930s, but you could totally reassemble all of these coalitions in a different way to perhaps embrace a more coherent ideological program.
That's why things are so confusing when you look at the politics and you think, why do these people, why does this group of entrepreneurs who happen to be on the right, why are they allied with all of these huge mercantilist central bankers who also want to manipulate the economy and bail out billionaires?
These people do not have the same interests, they don't have the same economic views, and at the same time funnel trillions of dollars to the national security state.
There's no reason why these people should be together, but what happens is over time they embrace this cultural idea of that, we on the right all have this common culture and we all support both freedom and free markets and a gigantic military, as if those two things necessarily go together.
Their parents told them that if you're patriotic that's what you believe, and they never really gave it any deeper thought about whether those two ideas are compatible or not.
Smaller government just means when a Republican is in power, nobody's checking the charts, it's fine.
Yeah, and then of course they're incoherent on issues like decentralization as well.
It's the left now that seems to be the champions of decentralization on a lot of stuff.
It's the left that's succeeding on the drug war with efforts at decentralization, for example, whereas the right all along is, oh, well, we need the federal government to tell everybody what it is they can smoke or eat or drink.
And then if you point out, well, I don't think that says that anywhere in the Constitution, and then they just completely ignore that.
And they go back to things like, well, if you don't like the federal law, change the law.
Well, you don't have to change the law because the 10th Amendment already says you can't have a drug war.
It prohibits it because it's not among the enumerated powers.
But meanwhile, we've got Republicans suing the state of Colorado because the state constitution now allows people to smoke pot, and they want the federal government to step in and rewrite the Colorado state constitution for them.
I mean, it's bizarre now how authoritarianism is good on some things, as long as it reflects conservative values.
You can't even attempt to reconstruct some sort of ideological coherence out of this.
Yeah, it really is sad, too, because then you just have both sides just fighting over the power so that they have a chance to inflict this post constitutional police state on their enemies and then just trade off using it against each other.
When the obvious interests of the people would be in forging a consensus against government abuses, and, you know, just basic Declaration of Independence constitution sort of stuff.
If we don't have that as the consensus, if our only consensus is just you wait till the NSA belongs to me and my party, then we're in for a really rough time, I think.
Well, that's just the worst, right, is the idea that, well, the way to win is just to just keep voting for the right guys, and eventually we'll be in control and we'll do everything.
Of course, I mean, the right, quote unquote, party was in charge fully, controlled the federal government entirely during the middle of the George W. Bush era and did nothing to significantly change the status quo, except, of course, to massively expand government power over people in terms of spying and issues like that.
It didn't address the abortion issue, didn't address decentralization, didn't abolish the Department of Education, didn't do anything of that.
And so we're always supposed to believe that that strategy is a winning strategy.
Yep.
So here we are still.
And anyway, I'll let you go, man, but I thank you for that.
And I do want to mention this one more time to people here because, and it'll be in the show notes, we'll have a link, but this article, this essay by Rothbard always meant so much to me way back when, like you were saying, read it back in college, made a big impression.
And then I have also had incredible results by showing this to people.
And, you know, the typical response is, wow, my mind is really blown.
I really sort of have to consider some things in a different light now.
You know, like he gave them some DMT or something, and now their whole kind of structural reality is a bit shaken.
They've got to re-ask a lot of questions.
And I just love reactions like that.
And this is a great essay for that.
Left and Right, the Prospects for Liberty.
And then that's Ryan McMacken.
He is the editor of all things at Mises, senior editor there.
And this article is called Money Supply Growth Slows in February, among many great others there at mises.org.
Thanks very much, Ryan.
Thank you.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
