02/26/09 – David R. Henderson – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, thanks for tuning in.
Introducing David Henderson, he's AntiWar.com's wartime economist, you can find all his articles for us at AntiWar.com slash Henderson.
He is a research fellow with the Hoover Institution and associate professor of economics, nice talking, in the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School.
He's the author of The Joy of Freedom, An Economist's Odyssey, and co-author with Charles L. Hooper of Making Great Decisions in Business and Life.
His latest book is The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.
Welcome to the show, David.
Thanks, Scott.
It's good to have you on here, how are you?
I'm doing all right, I'm kind of down in the dumps.
I think we've got a bad president and he seems to get worse day by day, and the only things I'm excited about are his at least apparent attempt to close Guantanamo Bay, and there's not much else on the list.
Oh, well, what a bummer.
Yeah, I'm afraid I agree with you.
Well, you know, the funny thing is about that is I'm so relieved, and this isn't really my cortex, this is some other part of my brain where my emotions are centered, I'm so happy it's not the Republicans.
I mean, if John McCain was the president right now, I might be hanging from the ceiling fan.
Oh, I see, because at least the Republicans aren't doing the bad things, or because the Republicans are out?
Yeah, I'm just happy that they're gone.
I think that they're the worst organized force in the world right now.
But the Democrats obviously are close runner-ups, but I want to try to give the benefit of the doubt to these people, to the new president for that matter, if only so I can not hate the president for one day or something.
Everybody else in our society gets to switch back and forth between whether they hate him or love him.
I never get to.
But no, as you said, he doesn't do anything but the wrong thing, of course.
And I don't hate him.
I mean, I don't think I hate many people.
I'm very upset about the direction he's going, and I think that he does like big government, he does like having government control.
I think that he kind of is another Roosevelt, another FDR, or maybe another LBJ.
You know, we're going to get the escalation of the war in Afghanistan, and we're going to get a substantial layer of economic regulation on top of what we already had.
It was never a laissez-faire economy, and we're going to get substantial increases in government spending.
One of your friends, Anthony Gregory, just pointed out that the deficit that's planned is equal to what the whole federal budget was back not decades ago, but nine years ago.
Yeah, in the year 2000.
Yeah.
Yeah, wow.
That really is incredible.
You know what really gets me, too?
Did you see the speech the other day?
You know, I was teaching a class that evening, so fortunately I didn't.
I've read about it, but I haven't actually even gone to the transcript and read it yet.
Yeah, well, I think maybe you should find the YouTube and watch it, or see if they rerun it on C-SPAN or something, watch it on the big screen.
It was really incredible to me, the pretensions of grandeur.
It was, I have to say, even more transparent and even silly than when George Bush got up there and did the Axis of Evil and everything.
The amount of love flowing from the Congress to the President, it was a play on itself.
You know what I mean?
It was just ridiculous.
Yeah, and I think the reason is...
Over the top.
I'm sorry?
It was over the top.
Yeah, and I think the reason is that he gave them so much of what they wanted.
He comes out very strongly in favor of the so-called stimulus package, which wasn't really stimulus, and it's really got the fingerprints of Congress all over it.
It's Nancy Pelosi's and Harry Reid's bill.
Obama had very little input into it, and so he's really this passive guy in the process who just kind of then takes it and runs with it and takes credit, so it's not surprising that Pelosi and Reid liked it so much and that the Democrats in Congress liked him so much for it.
He gave them so much of what they wanted.
Well, isn't it weird, though, to have somebody come into power and encouraging people to compare him to Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt and all this?
I mean, I could see making that comparison halfway through his third term or something, but right now it's like he's coming in here to try to outdo every president since World War II or something.
That's his goal, is to make more of a mark than anybody in anybody's living memory.
Yeah, and he does not have a small ego, that's for sure.
And I think that, unfortunately, I think there's something to the comparison in the sense that he's going so far so quickly, he's trying multiple fronts.
Now he's got this new, you know, let's tax the wealthy, by which he means high-income people, to provide more government spending on health care for other people, and so he's just pushing on multiple fronts all at the same time.
And on the one hand, that could mean that he could collapse, because it won't all happen, and then he just goes way out too far.
On the other hand, it could mean that he puts his opponents in disarray, and they don't know what to fight, and it's moving so fast, and he gets a lot of what he wants.
So I think it's kind of scary times right now, and I think the stock market is reflecting that.
Well, and the Republican Party and ideology are so bankrupt that no one's going to hear, I'm not hearing any dissent from them, I don't care what they say, I know they're a bunch of torturers, they're the fans of the biggest government in the whole world, they're the ones who created this thing, and to hear them try to pretend like they're a bunch of libertarians who want small government and low taxes and whatever now is a farce.
So that means that we're without opposition, really, to the Democratic Party at this point.
Well, we're without opposition within the political system, which is why I liked and highlighted on my blog, on EconLog, I also blog regularly on EconLog, I highlighted Rick Santelli's statement on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange last week, which I thought was great, wanting to have a tea party to take on this bailout of people who are overextended on their mortgages.
And so it might be that we don't get much good opposition from within Congress other than from Ron Paul and Jeff Flake and a few of the others, and that where we get it is from people in general.
But there are a whole lot of libertarians who believe that the way we're going to get any kind of reform or any kind of move in the right direction is not by depending on our politicians, but by having this kind of populist uprising to some extent, a populist uprising informed by good thinking, informed by economics and understanding of the issues.
So that is my one little ray of hope here.
Well, and that's the real trick is, you know, I mean, this guy Santelli did give a great speech on that.
But of course, he never gave a speech like that about the bailout for the zillionaires who did all this to us.
Well, you know, I heard people saying that.
But when I was and I, you know, I was I've become a late comer to being a fan of Santelli.
But when I was despairing back in September, when Bush and Paulson and Bernanke were pushing for the big bailout, I watched CNBC more that month than I had in any other month because I was trying to see what people were saying.
And I have this vague recollection that he did oppose it.
He didn't oppose it, I think, with the same passion, but I think he opposed it.
I'm just not sure.
Yeah, well, and this is the thing that libertarians are going to have to deal with is that, I mean, I guess nobody's really saying that libertarianism caused the crisis, but they're certainly saying that.
Right.
I mean, there are people saying that there are people saying we had this great, you know, laissez faire or people saying that we had the laissez faire that libertarians wanted in there and look how badly it turned out.
So there really are people saying that.
In fact, I wrote an article in Cato taking that on in Cato's policy report about a month or two ago, this idea that we had this great this era of just deregulated markets.
And that's what caused the problem.
Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, they're certainly blaming capitalism and that's what we're promoting.
So we have and, you know, here's the thing, too, like if you if you pretend to be a liberal for a second, you could see why they would assume that somebody like you who argues for less government, less regulation and more of a free market must be just therefore some kind of shill for some big corporation or something.
You couldn't possibly have people's best interests at heart saying that the evil corporations and financial interests who created this giant crisis ought to have more power and and the democracy less.
You can see why it seems to them like you must be cynical.
They don't understand.
Right.
Because they've never quite understood libertarianism.
They've never quite understood that it's not about kind of defending certain interests.
It's about defending certain principles.
And and the principles are people being free to do what they want with their own lives as long as they don't infringe on other people's freedom.
And so I don't have to be someone who uses heroin to think that people ought to be free to use heroin.
I don't have to be someone who wants to be in a gay marriage to think that people should be able to have a gay marriage and on and on.
And I think what's so foreign to most people is they're so used to people just representing their own preferences, their own taste and rationalizing it in principles that they can't quite believe it when they meet someone who actually does have principles.
Right.
And that's why we have to.
Well, for example, be more opposed to welfare for billionaires than anyone else in the society.
We have to emphasize that's you know, we're not for, you know, food stamps either because it's bad for poor people, frankly, you want to get down to it to have welfare, but welfare for billionaires.
Now, anybody giving out welfare for billionaires ought to be fired and, you know, run out of town, maybe set them loose on an iceberg like the Eskimos or something.
Yeah, no, I think that's right.
And of course, welfare for billionaires, if it's enough billionaires and then the large amount, the large amount per billionaire is more expensive.
So, yeah, welfare for anyone is wrong.
And but I think you also put your finger on it when you pointed out the Republicans.
I mean, I've actually been impressed with many of what much of what the Republicans in the Senate have said and what they voted for in taxes and so on last month.
But again, we kind of have to take it with a grain of salt.
What were they doing a few months ago?
What were they standing for a few months ago?
And I think that, you know, that they just do have this really bad track record that makes them very, very non-credible now as as spokesmen for freedom.
Yeah, afraid so.
Yeah.
What were they doing a few months ago?
They were torturing people and passing blank checks for the president to spend torturing people.
Yeah.
And and of course, but now to put in perspective, I'm not again, I'm not trying to defend them, but look at Nancy Pelosi, who wanted to have in a bill that you couldn't torture.
And now that President Obama is president, she's not pushing for that same bill.
So I think that we should be pushing.
We should be talking about the Democrats and their hypocrisy also.
And, you know, sometimes I talk about hypocrisy.
People think, again, I'm taking a side.
Oh, I think the Democrats are terrible for their hypocrisy.
Well, and and therefore the Republicans aren't.
But hypocrisy is wrong.
I mean, hypocrisy is bad no matter who's doing it.
And and we've got we've got lots of targets now, lots of people in Congress and both sides of the aisle who are very hypocritical.
Yeah.
Well, and in fact, I think this is what makes being a libertarian real easy is I have to figure out ways to bend over backwards, trying to defend one party or another in power when none of them are defensible by a long stretch.
Yeah, yeah.
So that's easy.
I get to just invite them all.
Well, so let's talk about the the biggest, most important welfare program for billionaires and zillionaires in our society, world empire.
And I asked Robert Higgs, the great economist on the show just the other day about this.
And I'm interested in your view of whether the American empire has ever been profitable for the American people as a whole.
I guess I'll set this up the same way for you as I did for him, which is Bacevich says that, hey, stealing Mexico, it's pretty hard to argue that that wasn't a net gain, at least monetarily.
But at what point do you think the American empire became a net loss for the American people?
Well, I don't know enough about Mexico.
Remember, I grew up in Canada.
So virtually all my history I learned from just reading on my own, which is probably a net plus, because I know you got a lot of propaganda in school.
Yeah, indeed.
Well, you know that you know that in the 1840s, the United States stole the northern half.
Right, right, right.
That's where we are now.
I know that.
It's just I don't know much about the data.
So so here's what I think.
I think it quickly, whatever was true about Mexico, it was pretty much a net negative for the United States under McKinley with the invasion of Cuba and the invasion of the Philippines.
And so and it's it's by the way, the same kind of there's a school of thought in economics called public choice.
And what they do is they use the same reasoning we use about firms and consumers and so on, all pursuing their self-interest to look at the political system and say, OK, if we take that assumption in the political system that you've got politicians pursuing their interest, lobbyists pursuing their interest and so on, bureaucrats pursuing their own interests.
What kinds of conclusions do we reach and do those conclusions accord with what we observe empirically?
And the bottom line, with some exceptions, is, yeah, it pretty much does accord with what we see empirically.
But the public choice economists haven't done much to apply those tools to foreign policy.
They've always left that alone.
And so if we look at, say, the various interventions the United States government has gotten into, there will always be interest interest groups that benefit.
But just as we point out that when you have an import on steel, the benefit to steel companies and steel unions is less than the cost to consumers.
So it's typically true that when the government intervenes through war, the benefit to say the defense contractors who make more money or whatever is going to be substantially less than the cost to the American taxpayer and the cost to, you know, soldiers who are conscripted and so on.
And that's, by the way, just leaving out all the damage done to the people on the other side.
And of course, that's substantial because they don't get to vote in our elections.
So so I think that basically and Adam Smith, by the way, believe this.
Adam Smith has a very strong statement against imperialism in his book, The Wealth of Nations, pointing out that the benefits to Britain from keeping the colonies in the United States were less than the cost.
It's just that the benefits were to a certain class of merchants and the costs were spread throughout the whole society.
So Adam Smith really did have this very basic public choice analysis back in 1776 when The Wealth of Nations was published, laying out why imperialism generally is a net loser for a country.
And he said he had a famous line in there.
He said, this policy, it's not appropriate for a nation of shopkeepers, but a bunch of shopkeepers will propose it or something like that.
It was like the idea that on net it hurts us, but there will be certain merchants who benefit from from it.
And I think the same thing is true with with the United States.
I mean, you look at the huge amount of expenditure on destruction that we get into with war.
And then if defense contractors are getting a 10 percent rate of profit on sales, that's trivial compared to the huge cost to to Americans.
And again, that leaves out the cost to people who are being bombed.
And so, no, if if the purpose of imperialism is to, you know, take over or run things and it's not to actually defend against real enemies who are really going to attack us, then then, no, it's a it's a loser.
Well, and, you know, I think what's the worst part about this is opponents and proponents of empire both believe that it's a profit making thing.
People who are against it say, oh, well, see, it's a profit making thing and it's all discreet and how much human blood per gallon of gasoline is worth it to you and that kind of thing.
And then people who are for war, they might cheer real loud about yellow ribbons and fighting terrorism or whatever.
But a lot of times they'll tell you, well, you know, we need that oil.
We have to occupy these lands to protect the oil pipelines or else, you know, how will I get to work?
Yeah.
And and that's why I wrote another piece that Independence to put out a couple of years ago entitled Do We Need to Go to War for Oil, in which I laid out why we don't need to.
I mean, aside from the morality of it, why we don't need to.
And the basic idea is no matter who owns those oil reserves or who claims ownership of those oil reserves, they don't want them in order to sit on them.
They want them to sell them.
And so no matter who runs various things in the Middle East, people over there are going to want to sell it to us.
And therefore, we're always going to be able to buy it.
There will be a world market for oil and it might matter who runs it as far as how efficiently they run it, how much more oil they can get out of it.
But the basic idea that somehow they won't sell it to us is absurd.
And unfortunately, the main reason that people my age and older tend to believe that we are at risk is they conflate two events that happened like within months of each other.
One was the OAPEC, or Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, embargo on oil to the Netherlands and the United States in late 73, in response to the Netherlands and United States supporting Israel.
The other was it was just right around that time, literally within those same months, that OPEC, the whole of OPEC, substantially raised the price of oil.
So people looked at the higher price and thought it was due to the embargo.
But the price we were paying for world oil was the same as the price France was paying or Italy was paying or Germany was paying or Japan was paying.
And so the embargo, per se, had virtually no effect.
We were able to get the oil from other people who weren't part of the embargo, shipments that are shipped across the ocean, change ownership on the commodity exchanges a few times while they're crossing the sea.
So we were able to get the oil at that price.
And in fact, it was Nixon's price controls that caused the shortage.
And then, of course, that's another thing people conflate.
They think it was due to the Arabs.
In fact, it was due to Nixon.
As I said to a class I was teaching the other night, when you looked at how there were these people advocating bombing Saudi Arabia, you know, because they ruined our oil markets.
There's really Nixon.
And so if you really want to bomb someone who's ruining the oil markets, you should have advocated bombing Nixon.
Well, and so let's break that down on the shortages in the price controls, because, you know, too often that goes kind of without saying, but it does need explanation.
Why would it be that price controls would cause shortages in fuel availability?
OK, so Nixon on August 15th, 1971, imposed a price freeze, froze all prices in the United States, and then 90 days later relaxed the freeze.
Prices were allowed to go up a certain amount.
In October 73, when the price of world oil went up and we're in a world market, he didn't allow the price of domestic oil to go up to the world price and he restricted that.
And then he also restricted the amount that gasoline prices of the retail level and of the refiner level could go up.
And so when prices when supply decreases, the price will normally go up.
And at that higher price, everyone who wants it at that price can get it.
Everyone who wants to sell it can sell it.
But by not allowing the price to go up to reflect that new higher price of world oil, he caused a shortage.
And then what he did instead of reducing, removing the price controls, he set up the Federal Energy Office that started allocating oil by central planning from various market to various market.
And we had some shortages in some markets and surpluses and other just like the Soviet Union.
And that's kind of how we got in this mess.
We probably wouldn't have got a Department of Energy if not for Nixon's price controls, because that was what led a whole lot of people to say, oh, we need some special Department of Energy to handle these kinds of problems.
Well, but even then, you still skipped over how the price control causes the shortage.
OK, so at a higher price, if you don't allow the price to go up, people demand the same amount they would have demanded.
But the higher the price needed to go up to reflect the reduced supply.
So if you have the same amount that was demanded at the lower price, but now less supplied, you're going to have a shortage equal to the difference between those two.
There you go.
All right.
So for oil control, it's like price controls on beef during the summer of 73 that caused a shortage of beef.
It's not specific to oil.
I see.
All right.
Well, so how is it that for my entire lifetime so far, at least, and for longer than that, this imperial policy, which is a net loss all the way around from McKinley all the way through the World Wars and and all the way now to the beginning of the 21st century.
How could it be that this has gone on so long just because the people who are the few interests making the money can simply buy congressmen and then, I guess, use the media to tell us all that it's for all our interests.
And they're able to keep this scam going at a loss to the people of this country for a hundred years in a row.
Well, yeah, it's kind of hard to believe in its own.
I think if it were just that, no, I don't think it would continue that long.
I think there's this whole mythology that gets built around this, that and like one of the standard things you will hear is that someone is going is over in Iraq or in Afghanistan or whatever, defending our freedom.
And if you start actually thinking through it, you say, well, which of my freedoms is being threatened by people in Iraq or Afghanistan?
It's really hard to come up with them.
And but it's this whole mythology that gets built and we hear it everywhere.
And, of course, it helps from the viewpoint of the imperialist side to have government running the schools because they can determine what gets taught in schools and so on.
But it's just it's just pervasive through our culture.
It's a very hard task to turn that around when you've had it this long.
People would and Friedrich Hayek, this famous Nobel Prize winning economist, once told a friend of mine who talked about how hard it was to get people to accept economic freedom.
And he was just talking on the domestic level and not about foreign policy.
And, you know, why is that, Professor Hayek?
And Hayek kind of smiled and said, the private property that people feel most attached to is the property in their ideas.
And if you convince them they've had a bad idea, you've made them feel suffer a capital loss and they won't appreciate it, appreciate you for it.
So there is this whole thing about as when people hold on to ideas and they have a strong attachment to them.
And by the way, that attachment gets bigger with age.
So it's much harder to convince a 60 year old of some of these things than an 18 year old.
And, you know, so that's just something that we're working against.
And it's very hard.
I mean, that's one reason I wrote right for any war dot com is to try to get some of those ideas out there.
Well, you know, I like to think that I'm more concerned with being right at the end of an argument than at the beginning of one.
But maybe that's not true.
Maybe I guess everybody's got that same problem, huh?
Well, I think in various degrees.
I mean, I think I have it less than most people my age, but I bet I have it.
And, you know, it's just something to watch in ourselves.
But it is true, I think, that people it's like if you have to say, oh, my goodness, it overturns how I've thought about things for the last 40 years.
That's very hard.
And now, of course, if we're talking about foreign policy, if you do it in that area, there's an additional double there's a double whammy, which is you get attacked for not being patriotic, you know.
So if I say, well, I don't think our soldiers are fighting for their freedom, much as I might admire it in individual soldiers.
Somehow I'm unpatriotic in saying that I've been in these situations.
Well, are you really fighting for freedom?
Oh, we can't.
You know, don't go there.
That's terrible.
That's unpatriotic.
And so that's another piece on top of it.
I mean, it's really it's very ingrained after 100 years and it's very hard to work our way out of it.
Well, you know, my point of view on that has always been that anybody whose own son died in the war who wants to believe that their son died for freedom.
I don't want to argue with somebody like that.
They've got an emotional attachment that is far more important than them understanding, you know, my point of view on the thing.
Whatever.
I leave somebody like that alone.
But I figure anybody whose own son hasn't died in the thing ought to be grown up enough to face the question as to whether this is national suicide or whether this is leading the world or whatever these bromides that they give us.
You know, that's a good point.
But what will happen is if you challenge whether a particular person, even an abstract person, died for our freedom, what you will get coming back at you is people trying to connect it up with a specific person who died, you know, and they're going to try to play that against you.
So it's very hard to avoid talking about specific people because the other side will bring it to that.
And also there's the sunk cost fallacy that if we lose 4000 people, 4000 Americans or forty two hundred and fifty Americans in Iraq, people want it to have meant something.
And so they'll say, well, let's throw even more people in there and not realize, wait a minute, that's a sunk cost.
We've lost those people.
That's horrible.
But they're gone and nothing that we can do will bring it back.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Can't have them die in vain.
That was one of George Bush's favorite arguments, in fact, was you let me get away with it this far.
And if you don't let me keep getting away with it, then everybody who's died so far, it will have been for nothing.
Yeah.
And the right way to look at it is to say, OK, what are the expected future deaths and what are we getting out of that?
And if the answer is we're not getting anything out of that or we get even worse things out of that, then you shouldn't have those future deaths.
OK, well, so now back to President Obama as FDR and our current situation as the Great Depression, are we looking at four terms and then another world war here?
Or what?
Some say this is the end of the empire.
In fact, George Soros was quoted last week in a speech saying that this doesn't compare to the Great Depression.
The comparison here is the collapse of the Soviet Union.
This is the end of the American imperium.
That's interesting.
I'd heard about that.
I hadn't actually heard the specifics of what he said.
Well, I hope he's right.
I just don't know if he is.
You know, certainly the fact that Obama is spending as much as he is makes it that much harder to spend more on attacking other countries.
But, you know, you you pay more attention to this than I do.
You know, he's trying to increase the number of troops in Afghanistan by 17000.
Well, and he's backed off of his promise to get the American forces out of Iraq in 16 months.
They're determined to leave 50000 forever.
And they changed the 16 months for the other two thirds of the troops to 19 months, I think, only just to officially break the promise.
Now, I don't know what other purpose there is.
And not waiting until month 17 to tell us it's actually going to be 19, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
And so I think that he is now this is what could bring him down, that he could be another LBJ where, you know, Afghanistan or maybe even Iraq is his Vietnam, because at some point now, here's where I do cut him some slack.
I mean, if he were to get our troops out of both of those places in the next six months, I'd say he's done pretty well, but he's clearly not going to.
And so after a few months, when he's not bringing them out, it does become his war quite legitimately.
He has the choice to do something different.
And he chooses not to do something different.
And so I think that he will be responsible, just as after a few months, it became Nixon's war instead of LBJ's war in Vietnam.
Well, OK, now the collapse of the military imperium aside, do you more or less agree with Soros about the extent of the damage of the current financial crisis?
I mean, you know, people on TV say a lot of things and none of them we already know that none of them know anything.
So you're somebody who knows something.
Is this the Great Depression?
Is this the unraveling of of all, you know, banking in America and the breakdown?
Are we looking at the 1930s in terms of unemployment rates?
And I don't think we are.
Now, let me just put some perspective on that.
The unemployment rate at its maximum during the Great Depression hit twenty five percent.
We're still under eight percent.
That's pretty different.
I do think that what Bush did in the last few months of his administration, what Obama did with the so-called stimulus bill and what they're doing with this mortgage bailout and what Geithner is doing, because I don't I don't even know what he's doing.
I don't even know if he knows what he's doing, what those things are doing are delaying.
They're extending.
They're going to make this last longer.
But do I see us yet even close to another Great Depression?
I do not.
And for one thing, I know you don't like Bernanke and I don't like him either, but he does understand the the effect of the collapse of the banking system in the early 30s on the Great Depression.
And even if it turns out to be expensive for us and there would have been better ways to do it, he won't let the money supply fall by a third as it did during the Great Depression.
And so we won't have that as a contributor.
So, no, I don't think we'll have another Great Depression.
Well, is there a risk of an inflationary depression?
Because what he's doing to prevent that is creating what?
Doubling the money supply.
Yeah, there's a risk of that, you know, and then then the question is how much inflation.
And he is going to be walking this tightrope because as the banks start lending more, he's going to try to dial back.
He's going to try to sell bonds and bring back some of that money, those reserves.
And he's going to be walking a tightrope when he does it.
He's probably not going to do it perfectly, but I don't see inflation going above 10 percent.
I don't even see it going to 10 percent in the next couple of years.
So that's my little again, a little ray of hope.
I would be surprised if the unemployment rate now goes above 10 percent.
And to put that in perspective, in the Reagan administration, when they had their recession to kind of get rid of inflation back in the early 80s, it went to 10.8 percent.
But I'd be very surprised if it hits even 10 in this in this recession.
Well, what about what Ron Paul says about this is the end of the dollar standard?
And he seems to think that Ben Bernanke and other central bankers around the world are getting together to plan some kind of new global central bank to be the lender of last resort and a global Fed of some kind.
I just don't know.
I mean, I know he thinks that and I don't know what he has behind that thought.
I don't know.
I don't I don't think they can do it.
Frankly, I don't think there'll be enough consensus to bring various countries into that.
And so I just fortunately, I don't see that happening and I don't know.
I don't know where the I mean, I think that if you say, you know, nowadays, right away, I'm kind of skeptical of you.
It doesn't mean I don't want to talk to you.
I want to ask you why you think, you know, but if you know, so I'm making bets here.
I'm I'm saying I don't think the inflation rate will hit 10 percent.
I don't think we'll be in another great depression.
I'm willing to make bets about that.
And the fact is, in fact, in a sense, I am making bets.
If you look, I've still got a substantial amount of my retirement money in stock and I've got to spend the rest of my retirement money essentially in my house.
And so I'm making various kinds of implicit bets.
And so I but I don't know and I don't think anyone really knows.
Yeah.
Well, you know, my initial reaction to that kind of talk is the same as yours.
And I tell you, I'm really glad to hear you say to that.
How are they going to do that?
They're not going to be able to get Russia, China, the EU and America to agree on.
You know, they've already tried to have a few of these summits and nobody came away with anything making any sense at all.
Yeah.
Look at the fact that one of the clearest voices in the last few weeks that said things clearly about the problems with debt, government debt and so on.
I mean, he kind of sounded like Ron Paul was Vladimir Putin.
Yeah.
So there are these there are these little bits of dissent.
Angela Merkel of Germany said a couple of good things mixed with a few bad things recently.
And so I think there's going to be a lot of a lot of diversity in opinion here.
So, again, I think that will be good.
I'll tell you, my biggest fear right now and it kind of gets back to Obama and it was actually Robert Byrd, the senator from West Virginia, who pointed this out a couple of days ago that Obama is really violating the Constitution in a new way.
I mean, Bush did it in so many ways.
And and now Obama's doing it further with all these czars and all those people, these people in charge of this, in charge of that people whom the Senate doesn't get to confirm.
And so you have the the secretaries of the various departments increasingly being puppets.
And the people running them are people sitting in the White House, people like Larry Summers, people like Carol Browner and so on, who never had to be confirmed, who are just that they're taking on a lot of power.
Yeah.
You know, I saw some headline that Robert Byrd said something, but I didn't read it.
I'll have to take a look at that.
Yeah, it was really refreshing because, of course, Byrd was saying very good things about the Constitution during the Bush administration.
Well, what you always are justified in asking of anyone like that is, will you say the same things when your guy does the same thing?
Right.
And the nice thing about Byrd is he appears to be doing so.
Yeah, for a former Klansman, he gave a great anti-Iraq War speech.
I was talking to a local reporter, interviewed me, and she'd been in the West Virginia market beforehand.
And I said, well, who do you like there?
She said, I like interviewing Robert Byrd.
And I said, did you know that he used to be in the Ku Klux Klan?
Her mouth fell open.
She had no idea.
I told a friend of mine that.
And he said, no, that can't be true.
And I said, Google it.
And the first thing that came up was this Photoshop picture of old Robert Byrd, you know, in his 80s, but wearing a green Grand Dragon costume or whatever.
All right, everybody.
So you've been listening to me interviewing David R. Henderson.
He's the wartime economist.
We keep those archives at Antiwar dot com slash Henderson.
And now I'm paging down to the bio.
He's a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and associate professor of economics at the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School.
His latest book is The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today, David.
Thanks, Scott.