All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Our next guest on the show is my pal, Bob Murphy.
He's at the Mises Institute.
He wrote the politically incorrect guide to capitalism and the politically incorrect guide to the great depression and the new deal.
And his website is Bob Murphy.
Let's see.
Wait, it's consulting.
By Robert P. Murphy, rpm.com.
Right.
I do it right.
All right.
Hey, welcome to show Bob.
How are you doing?
I'm glad to be here.
Scott.
Thanks.
It's the free advice blog.
Oh, did I say the Mises Institute?
Mises.org named for Ludwig von Mises.
That is the guy that wrote human action.
And, um, uh, also, uh, we find some of your stuff at Lou Rockwell.com too, right?
Yeah.
All right.
There you go.
Lou Rockwell, Mises.org.
Um, consulting by rpm.com.
Now, um, I don't know.
Somebody said that the recession thing is over and that, uh, Hey, look, Bob was wrong.
There was no hyperinflation or anything close to it.
And that the stock market was going up.
That's what the top of the hour news said.
Uh, we avoided the double dip and, uh, now the economy is growing again.
We haven't recovered yet, but we're recovering, uh, pronounced, uh, the chief executive or the commander in chief maybe is more like it.
And so, um, what do you have to say for yourself, Mr.
Murphy?
Well, uh, as far as the economy being in recovery, I mean, no, I, I still think it's the economy right now is held together by bubblegum and Bernanke's charm.
So I do think that we're going to, even outsiders are going to realize, oh yeah, we're back in the midst of a plunging recession again, whether it's going to happen next month, five months from now, I'm not sure, but I certainly think when the tax increase is going to affect, you're going to see that issue.
Um, but in, in terms of the inflation too, it's, it's true.
Probably if you look at what I was saying on your show 18 months ago, I was more worried about milk and bread prices being higher today than they are.
That's certainly true.
But this idea that we're on the edge of a deflationary cliff is just crazy.
The last producer price index that just came out.
So these are the government's own numbers.
We're saying things like intermediate goods are up 5.4% year over year and crude goods are up 20.3%.
Right?
So last September to the previous September, that one year period, the price of what they call crude goods rose over 20%.
Right?
So that's not deflation.
So it's, it's true.
The certain, I mean, the statistics that Bernanke and all the guys point to when they try to say we're in danger of deflation, it's consumer prices with food and energy taken out.
So with 10% unemployment officially, and then of course the real numbers higher, is it any wonder that people aren't spending gobs of money on things besides food and energy?
I mean, why is that shocking?
Yeah.
Well, you know, I'm at least three quarters crank here or something, but, uh, it sort of seems to me like a sick evil plot because you're telling me that they're raising taxes, which means they're destroying our money and creating deflation for our, you know, real income basically.
And at the same time that they're talking about doing all this quality quantitative easing, creating another, what couple of trillion dollars to buy a couple of trillion dollars of bonds that they also created.
That's how the bookkeeping trick works, I guess.
And they're going to use all this money basically to give more welfare to all the billionaires at the same time that they're making the money that we make disappear its value and the actual digit in the check that they give us at the end of the way, because they take it right out of the check before we even get it.
Yeah.
I mean, the whole thing, I'm obviously not telling your listeners anything they don't already know, but yeah, the whole thing is a big con and it's even on their own terms, what they're saying is not true.
But just one example, why did we, why would we have to get TARP?
Remember under Paulson, $700 billion bail out of the bank.
Well, they told us, Oh, we, we hate giving money to all these bankers.
Don't get us wrong.
We want to stick it to them just as much as you guys do, but we have to bail the banks out because otherwise loans to small businesses will dry up.
And then the, you know, they're, they're the backbone of this economy.
Right.
If you look at the figures and it meters that org within the last two weeks, I had an article called, was TARP good for the taxpayer?
If people want to look and see the stuff documented, the government's own numbers, you look at their graphs, loans to small businesses are way down from the moment TARP went into place, literally to the month.
Yeah.
They said, we, we, of course we only want to save main street, but we can't save main street unless we save wall street because you need wall street.
Exactly.
So, I mean, everything, the official narrative is literally a hundred backwards.
It's the big banks of course, are making huge profits.
This is all went through at the same time.
The only group that they're lending to is the government.
But if you look at it again, document all the stuff that people want to see it with their own eyes.
Why do they want to raise taxes though?
If they're trying to, if they believe that consumer spending is what the economy is based on or whatever nonsense, aggregate demand and all that, don't they want us to stimulate?
Well, I can give you the official answer, then I can give you a, you know, maybe with the real answer.
So officially if you asked if, you know, if you had Paul Krugman on your show or something, a Keynesian economist, they would say, look, the raising taxes, especially on the so-called rich, that's not going to, you know, a rich person right now, it's not like he's out spending money, employing people at restaurants and that, and you know, if we raise the taxes by a point or two, that he's going to stop.
They're going to say what's important is for the government to spend money or they're going to say, you know, give more income assistance to middle income or lower income groups because they're going to turn around and spend it.
Whereas the rich, if you give them a tax cut, they're just going to save it.
So that leaks out of the economy.
Okay.
So that's the official Keynesian story.
Now, if you're asking me, what do I think?
I, you know, not to be conspiratorial or anything here, but I mean, just think of it from their point of view.
If you have the fed in your pocket and you can literally create money and you've already created billions of hundreds of billions of dollars and handed it out and bailed out your buddies, I mean, how do you stay on top?
You could, you know, raise taxes or the estate tax is getting reinstated next next year, they've lowered the threshold there.
So now it's any state over a million dollars gets hit with a 55% estate tax.
So in terms of once your family or your buddies get on top, how do you stay on top?
Did you just kneecap everybody else?
So why wouldn't they want to do that?
Yeah, I don't know.
Everybody always thinks when Bill Gates says, yeah, taxes ought to go up.
Everybody thinks, wow, what a great guy.
He, he wants to pay more taxes because he cares so much about the society and whatever.
And no, no, no one ever thinks, huh?
Maybe it's in his interests.
Since he has $60 billion, he doesn't pay a dime in taxes.
You know, it's, it's like Walmart coming out to increase the minimum wage and they get to be on the front page of the paper and everything.
Look, Walmart says that the minimum wage ought to be raised.
How selfless of them on behalf of the poor.
Meanwhile, they pay their people just barely more than minimum wage, still enough that they got to be on welfare and have the rest of us pick up their expenses for them anyway.
But then, um, the people who do pay minimum wage are the mom and pop shops that hire kids for summer jobs and things like that.
Walmart's competition.
And those are the people who have to pay the price.
Right.
I'm glad.
I mean, I know, Scott, that you're well read in these areas, but just to give another example to your listeners in case, you know, they've never heard a viewpoint before what people need to realize is it's not the simplistic thing where, Oh, the government is anti-business and so therefore all businesses oppose all regulation.
That's not true.
Major corporations, a lot of times are actually lobbying for restrictive regulations that on paper you would think, well, this, this hampers the big corporation.
Why are they for it?
And it's because it hurts their competitors even more.
If you're a huge multinational corporation and you get some new, you know, regulatory thing, like you gotta, Oh, we gotta comply and put in ramps for people in wheelchairs, stuff like that.
You can handle that much more easily if you're a multimillion dollar company than if you're just, you know, some $800,000 a year company that's competing with you.
Yeah.
Now what makes us libertarians is that we recognize that regulatory capture as liberals call it when they admit that such a thing exists is the reason that Alexander Hamilton created this state in the first place.
He was the corporation that wanted to do some capturing.
And so he created the Congress and the presidency.
Yeah.
I mean, it's, how can I put it?
Things like the federal reserve is the best example in terms of if you wanted to look at an industry and it looked at banking as an industry and how those governors and so forth are picked.
I mean, it's, it would be as if the, you know, the, uh, factories all got to appoint the people that were going to them being in the regulatory agencies, watching over them.
Right.
Yeah.
And you can look at the list of everyone who's ever been on the federal reserve board.
They're all Morgan and Rockefeller men, basically.
All right.
Now hold it there.
We got to take a break.
We'll be back with Bob Murphy from the Mises Institute right after this show.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Santa war radio got Bob Murphy on the phone.
He's at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
He wrote the politically incorrect guide to capitalism, which I highly recommend to liberals to challenge your point of view.
It ain't some Rush Limbaugh crap.
It's my man, Bob, you know, it's not what you thought was the opposite of you.
It's libertarianism and, uh, real economics, Austrian economics.
All right.
So Bob, uh, where were we, man?
Go ahead.
I know we're talking about regulatory capture and yeah, yeah, it's, I mean, it's just classic.
If you go through and, you know, uh, Tom DiLorenzo has done a lot of good work on this stuff and just look at historically, you know, with the railroad regulations.
And so, I mean, they clearly took over the regulators.
I mean, people know, don't let this take the Bernie, Bernie Madoff scandal.
I mean, it's, it's not a surprise that they, the FTC was just completely ignoring the people who knew the FTC.
Which is completely ignoring the people who knew that he was running a Ponzi scheme and sending those letters to the FTC saying, Hey, you guys need to look into this because it made up with buddy, buddy with the people in the FTC.
So, I mean, it's how, and how could it be otherwise?
It's not, if you just think about it, if the government's going to establish some regulatory body, that's going to regulate some industry, the people in the bureaucrats who are picked, they have to know what they're talking about.
They just can't be completely alien to the industry.
So obviously they're going to recruit from people who worked in industry.
And then you get these unavoidable conflicts of interest, just like, you know, Paulson being the former CEO of Golden Sacks now under George Bush was the treasury secretary and oh gee, he happened to be running the bailouts and Golden Sacks came through in flying colors.
Imagine that.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, and of course this is really the economic system that Adam Smith was refuting when he wrote the wealth of nations, he said, you don't need to have every corporation sponsored by the crown and have, you know, all this where the, the profits are privatized and all the risks are socialized onto everyone through state power, what you need is a system where people can rise or fall based on whether they're actually turning a profit or not.
And so here we are, we live in this, you know, I don't know what to call it other than fascism.
Really.
It's where everything is a public private partnership where government is involved in everything and we're big business loves it that way.
And it's permanent war.
I mean, go ahead and call it what it is.
Mercantilism, killing people.
That's fascism.
Yeah.
And it's, and again, I understand.
I mean, I know a lot of your listeners don't trust big businesses and I understand that, but the, the libertarian point on this issue is look precisely because you can't trust them and they were ruthless and they will do whatever they need to, to make money.
That's exactly why you don't want to have the government create this, you know, this regulatory body that has power to shut down some companies in the, in the prop of other ones, because that body itself is going to get corrupted by the big businesses because they're going to give them bribes and they're going to do all sorts of stuff behind the scenes.
So it's precisely because you can't trust the big businesses that you don't want the government getting this much power to be able to pick winners and losers.
Well, and we see how it's been, you know, they try to pretend that it is really funny, actually, like in 2008, I guess we probably talked about this at the time that when this crisis broke out, they said, yeah, basically George Bush is Ron Paul and we just lived through a eight year era of complete lousy fair, free market economics, and the belief that corporations can regulate themselves and whatever kind of madness freedom took the rap for this whole thing.
Even though we all know that's the exact same thing that they told us was that Herbert Hoover was Ron Paul and sat around and did nothing and believed in libertarian free market economics and whatever.
And, and that's why that was a failure.
And that's why we threw out the constitution and Franklin Roosevelt and then established the precedent that the government can do anything that it wants to any person or any business, basically at any time, I mean, ask Jose Padilla what their limits are and, and, and that that was a long time ago when our grandparents were little kids.
And so it couldn't possibly be that we had a free market just now.
And yet still, they just put the exact same myth from the 1930s, the one that you debunk completely in the politically incorrect guide to the great depression and the new deal, and they just placed it on top of the George Bush, Barack Obama era and people bought it.
So even now everybody's turning to, you know, stimulus and Keynesianism and, and Rooseveltism to try to get us out of this more government, more regulation, more inflation.
Well, yeah.
I mean, everything you're saying is right.
And that's, that's actually why if we're going to have a president who's going to be an interventionist, I would rather the person stand for big government rather than, you know, so for example, I wanted McCain to lose it, even though I know a lot of people that were economic conservatives were asking me, Oh, but come on, this Barack Obama guy is going to be more of a socialist than McCain.
But I said, yeah, but McCain is going to run on the free market.
And so he gets in there and does the exact same policies, except, you know, give or take 10% either way on any issue.
I mean, McCain would have done all the same thing qualitatively as Obama has done on every issue, but at least with Obama in there, people will know this was supposed to be liberalism for you in the American sense, right?
Whereas under McCain, they would have said, Oh, yep.
This is the free market solution.
Look what happened.
So you're exactly right.
And I would just say for your listeners who are skeptical and think, Oh, come on, George Bush deregulated and all that stuff.
We'll just think of how annoyed you get when some interventionist who thinks we should intervene in the Middle East is going to say about Barack Obama's presidency, Hey, we tried to be compassionate and Obama went around apologizing to everyone and look what it got us.
And that's why we need to get tough with these people.
When you know full well, Obama is not, you know, pulling out of the Middle East.
It's just his rhetoric while he's upping the ante.
So it's the same thing with Bush.
He talked a good game about how he was a free market kind of guy and he nationalized banks, so he's not a free market guy.
He took over the banks.
Yeah.
You know, I had an argument with a left anarchist a long time ago where I said, come on, man, face it.
Socialism with the police forces, communism.
And he said, fine, capitalism with the police forces, fascism.
And I says, you got me.
And this is the America I live in.
Yeah, it really is.
I mean, it's the one thing, if you can call it, that's a consolation and all this is I can kind of understand that when you read the history books and you see the crazy stuff that other people did in countries back in the day and you were like, man, how did those people just sit there and let their government turn into this monstrous thing?
Well, we're seeing it right now.
I mean, 10 years ago, if somebody said, hey, do American troops torture people?
Every American would have said, categorically, no, we don't do that.
But now if you ask them, what do you mean by torture?
You know, we do harsh interrogation because that's just, they think by definition, my government doesn't do bad stuff.
And so no matter what it does, they just adjust their their belief system to make it so that my government is still the best one in the world.
Right.
And, you know, on this show, we're always talking about the wars and the torture and the the theories of executive power, the lines being crossed in terms of who the president can kill and how and when.
But on the economic front, what you guys are paying attention to and cataloging and really writing the history in real time of over there at Mises.org every day is how all these same lines are being crossed.
It really is sort of revolutionary New Deal-ish times in terms of the power of the government over the economy, which just, of course, still means the power of the banks over the government, over the economy.
Well, yeah, that's exactly right.
I'm glad you're drawing that analogy, because I know there are a lot of, I guess they would call themselves leftists or whatever term you want to use that think, you know, look, civil liberties and war and those are really important things.
Who cares about marginal tax rates or who cares about when that was the bailout of the big auto companies, if the shareholders rights were respect?
But the point is, it's the government arbitrary power intervening with standard what were supposed to be areas of rights of people that they had.
And so, yeah, of course, it's more of a crime if the government goes and kills innocent person, if it just takes somebody's money.
But it's still a crime.
And like you say, Scott, the stuff they're doing economically now, especially with the Federal Reserve is doing, I mean, Bernanke was literally bailing out, is creating billions of dollars out of thin air, handing it to bankers.
Congress called Bernanke before them and said, we're not telling you to stop.
We just want you to tell us in private, who are you giving this money to?
And Bernanke said, no, I'm not going to do that because it would undermine the purpose of the program.
So Bernanke, this one guy literally is creating hundreds of billions of dollars and handing it out.
And he doesn't even have to tell Congress who he's giving it to.
That's insane.
And, you know, I just read an article yesterday where one of the founders of the Tea Party, I don't know the guy's name, but one of the, you know, the right Tea Party, the post Ron Paul Tea Party movement here.
And this was he just blasted Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin and all of them and said you can all go to hell, I think was the exact quote, because what they founded the movement to be was he wanted prosecutions of the people who stole all this money, this giant mortgage fraud bubble and these bailouts and these bankers and these, you know, current and former Treasury secretaries and their assistants and whatever.
They wanted accountability.
And instead they get Sarah Palin.
And he says, that's it.
Forget you guys.
I'm taking my ball and going home.
Yeah, I mean, if I don't know how much time we're having this before the break.
Very little.
OK, I'll tell my quick Tea Party story.
I went and talked on it last April 15th in Cincinnati at the Fifth Third Arena.
I was like the second billing.
I wasn't the top guy, but I was up there.
And yeah, they were showing a slideshow before the show started and they were showing like Pelosi and people are booing Obama, people are booing.
And then they showed Bush and Cheney and the crowd erupted into a cheering and applause.
And I was like, how can you say you're against, you know, big deficits when you're applauding the guys who gave it?
Because they get their news from TV.
That's why.
All right.
Everybody go check out Mises dot org and consulting by RPM dot com.
That's my man, Bob Murphy, the politically incorrect guy to capitalism.
And yeah.
