07/03/12 – Charles Goyette – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, y'all.
Welcome to the show.
How's it going?
It's Anti-War Radio.
No, it's not.
See, I blew it.
My first line.
My opening line.
It's the Scott Horton Show.
There are changes afoot.
I'll explain what they are in about half an hour.
But first, I'll tell you...
First, I want to say thank you to Ernie Hancock for having me on his show this morning.
The show that just ended right before mine there.
He's in town doing a road trip with his wife and doing remote radio all over the place.
And so, this morning we did some radio from his hotel room, which was a great time.
So thanks very much, Ernie, for having me.
And that makes a great segue into our first guest on the show today.
It's Charles Goyette.
Ernie used to be his producer back when he was doing talk radio in Phoenix, which I'm sure won't be too long before he's back doing that.
He's the author, of course, of The Dollar Meltdown, Surviving the Impending Currency Crisis with Gold, Oil, and Other Unconventional Investments.
And the new one, Red and Blue and Broke All Over, Restoring America's Free Economy.
Welcome to the show, Charles.
You're the first guest on the new version of the same show.
Well, it's a great honor.
It's wonderful to talk to you again, Scott.
Well, good.
I'm very happy to have you here.
And Ernie was talking about what a huge fan of mine you are, so I better repay the favor and tell the people, go back to antiwar.com/radio and look in the archives there.
All Charles Goyette's foreign policy interviews are included there next to mine for the first couple of years of antiwar radio there.
Best radio in world history.
So that's worth patting yourself on the back for, I think.
I think there's some pretty strong material on there.
Yeah, absolutely there is.
Absolutely there is.
Just search.
You know what you do?
You type in Goyette and then site colon antiwar.com and then you'll find all of his radio stuff will come right up for you there.
That's the number one best, most foolproof way to do it.
The wars have all ended and there's no prospect of any more.
Man, we've really won this.
Oh, sorry, that's not quite how it panned out, is it?
Yeah, no.
Well, we're the good guys, but we lost.
Well, we're in a perpetual state of losing, which is a little different.
Your book, Red and Blue and Broke All Over, it's about how the great big we, as in the we the people and all that of the country, we are losing.
We got everything all screwed up real bad.
But on the other hand, too, a little bit unlike, it's a little bit different, it's not exactly the same, like in your previous book, The Dollar Meltdown, you do explain how individuals can work to keep their own situation safer anyway, how to invest in ways to protect your money from the great inflation and that kind of thing.
But you also talk about, especially in this new book, what America needs to do in order, you diagnose the problem here and you explain what America needs to do to get our free economy back.
So I guess, really, to start, you've got to give us a very short thumbnail of what's so broken that's got to be fixed.
Obviously, people are broke, but most people, they don't understand why.
It's very peculiar to me, Scott, that people are capable of learning.
I mean, primitive tribespeople have learned, I think, the basics of hygiene and they've learned not to fish where they dump their waste material.
It took a long time to do it, but 150 years ago or so, people learned about antiseptic childbirth and things like that.
So we've learned some fundamentals about hygiene, but I don't think the people at large, and I don't mean just the American people, obviously, but we should be responsible for having learned it, I believe, have not learned the fundamental lessons of prosperity, which is that prosperity is the offspring of freedom.
And it's no more complicated than that.
And yet, as simple as the lesson is, and despite the fact that it sort of should be in our cultural DNA, this is a memory that has somehow been lost in the national prosperity Alzheimer's that we have.
And so the answer is, what do we need to do?
We need to stop.
I mean, we need to stop the state.
But our collapsing prosperity in this country is the first real opportunity, I think, to make this case to the American people.
They look around and they go, whoa, what has gone wrong?
What is the problem here in the United States?
Everybody seems to understand that the American dream has been lost and is collapsing fast.
Those that don't will soon discover this to be true.
It's only around the corner for them if they haven't figured it out yet.
And so the fundamental lesson that people need to learn is that there's only one thing that needs to be done, and that's to stop the growth of the state that correlates as a perfect overlay with the decline of our prosperity.
And you would think that the Americans, as I say, would have something about freedom in their DNA, but what's really peculiar is the rest of the world, billions of people around the world, have started seeking the blessings of liberty.
They have succeeded in beginning to get the heel of the state off of their neck and are consequently becoming more prosperous.
And here in the United States, the American people are going the opposite way.
So I thought maybe it was time to put a book out to that effect and remind them of the fundamental lessons.
All right, well now, I think some people, okay, all Democrats are going to hear that and go, yeah, yeah, yeah, how pat and overly simplistic.
All people got to do is be free and then they're fine.
Well, what if they're weak or something like that?
Throw them out?
Well, the best thing in the world to happen to somebody that's poor is to be born into a society that's prosperous, period.
End of story.
I mean, would you rather be poor in the United States or poor in Zimbabwe?
You know, it's pretty clear that the best thing that can happen is to be poor here in the United States.
But look, you mentioned Democrats, and I'm glad you did, because I want to bring up this partisan thing.
This seems to be where the problem is lost, and I remember one great moment during the debates in the Republican presidential contest.
When Gingrich got a big line, everybody laughed.
They thought it was very funny.
Gingrich called Barack Obama the food stamp president.
Yeah, and the truth is that when you look at the numbers a little more closely, more people were added to the food stamp rolls when Bush was president than Obama, by about a half a million people.
I mean, it's pretty close.
It's almost 15 million under Bush compared to 14.5 million or so under Obama.
So both these parties are the food stamp parties, and Washington is the capital of the food stamp nation.
And in the United States, the earning of the American people is collapsing.
You have Depression-era levels of unemployment, debt compounding.
Good Lord, you look at 60 Minutes and you see stories about kids, you know, living in cars with their family and brushing their teeth at night in the gas station bathrooms and stuff.
I mean, it's going on all over the United States.
Oh, here's just one factoid I'll throw at you.
This is from a Milken Institute study.
It looked at median earnings of Americans over the course of 40 years, coinciding almost peculiarly enough with the ending of the gold standard.
But over the course of 40 years, you take men's median earnings in America of college-educated men in constant dollars in real purchasing power, the median earnings of American men over 40 years is down 12%.
The median earnings of American men with a college degree, down 12%.
Median earnings of men with only a high school diploma, down 47%.
Now, this has happened under the rule of Republicans and Democrats.
Ours have a majority.
These have a majority.
Republican presidents, Democrat presidents, liberal politicians, political politicians from the conservative side.
I mean, you know, it makes no difference.
We live in a debt-saturated economy.
The debt bubble is beginning to pop in Europe.
It is going to pop here in the United States, and the American people are being made very, very poor for it.
And what kind of choice are we faced with in November?
More of the same from the Rs and Ds who got us into this mess.
Yeah.
Well, now, when I was saying Democrat, it maybe wasn't clear.
I meant little-D Democrat, the Democrat voters out there who always conflate freedom with the worst sort of, you know, top-hat-wearing social Darwinism.
And, Charles, you think that anybody who's born inheriting millions of dollars ought to be able to do what they want, and everyone else should just go die in a ditch.
That's what liberals think, all of them.
You know, I sympathize with them in a way.
I even wrote in red and blue and broke all over that I won't use the word capitalism in the public debate the way that perhaps you should be able to use it.
It's just another case of the popular political debate being stolen from us, you know, the word, you know, they're venerable good words like liberal and like capitalism and so on that have been used to ill effect.
Capitalism today means crony capitalism in the minds of the American people.
Right.
Yeah, that's a big part of what we're dealing with.
That debt bubble is something else.
We're going to talk more about that when we get back from this break.
It's the great Charles Goyette, author of Red and Blue and Broke All Over.
Check out his website, charlesgoyette.com.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm going to keep doing that.
I was just thinking about to not do that.
And then I did it anyway.
It's the Scott Horton Show here on the Liberty Radio Network.
We're talking with Charles Goyette, charlesgoyette.com.
And at the bookstore, the dollar meltdown and red and blue and broke all over.
I bet if you just typed in right now as you're sitting at your computer listening to the show, amazon.com, and then typed in there a little search thingamajig, red and blue and broke all over, or just the name Charles Goyette, you would find this book, and then you could spend a reasonable amount of money on it before it devalues right out of your wallet and get something very valuable in exchange.
This book is Diagnosing What Ails America?
Why We're So Broke?
And it's because we've lost our freedom.
And how to fix it.
And that is, yeah, get freedom.
And then we'll be all right.
That's oversimplifying it, but that's basically the case that he makes, which I think is so important, Charles.
In fact, that's why I wanted you to be the first guest on the new version of the same show, whatever it is going on here, because I think that ultimately your bottom line argument that the revolution we need is simply to just start acting right like we all already know we're supposed to in the first place.
We're not supposed to be an empire.
We're not supposed to have a police state that rivals the one in China.
And we're not supposed to take all the best legacy of America's founders and throw it in the garbage.
We're supposed to try to keep the good parts if we can.
And so we don't need guillotines, really.
We just need, for starters, the old rule of law that we used to have.
Yeah, it all makes sense to people.
But I walk through this thing very carefully in a way that everybody can understand it.
Because to tell you the truth, everybody listening to this show right now, and their friends and their family members and people that would like to restore the American dream, restore our prosperity, be left alone in life, they're going to need to know the fundamentals of freedom in a new way on the other side of this calamity.
I mean, we're going to have a choice.
The calamity's baked into the cake.
The money's been spent.
The debts are very real.
The consequences are set in motion.
But what do we do on the other side?
How many people are going to be prepared?
And you're right.
It's not that complicated.
Look, everybody understands.
Republicans understand.
Democrats understand.
Liberals and conservatives understand.
This crony capitalism in this country stinks.
Everybody knows they are stealing everything that's not nailed down.
I mean, anybody who pays any attention at the extent of the theft that is going on in this country by the governing classes and by Wall Street, I mean, it just stinks.
And so people have to understand.
And I try to display this in a book in a way that people can assimilate it and pass it on, display it even to their brother-in-law who's a little slow, why it is that crony capitalism is inevitable in this kind of government, why crony capitalism makes us all poorer, why is empire inevitable in this kind of a state, why does empire make us more poor.
Look, people instinctively know somebody has to be badly indoctrinated not to understand that you cannot spend your way to prosperity.
Everybody understands that there's a problem with too much debt.
Everybody except the fast talkers, the smooth-talking Keynesian economists at the World Bank and European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve and their sycophants, everybody with normal human consciousness understands that we have a problem with debt.
Everybody really understands when they get a look at it that the monetary system in which money can be created out of thin air to spend on the growth of the state at the expense of the people has got to collapse.
So everybody understands those things basically, but I try to present them in a way that everybody can now retain those lessons, explain them to family members and to others, and to be prepared to reinstitute some sort of a protocol for freedom, for liberty, and for prosperity on the other side of this calamity.
Because if these lessons aren't carried through this crisis, then things can get even a lot worse.
Right, that's the whole thing.
The case you make, as you say, these debts are real.
The money's been spent.
We're in a situation where it's only a matter of time, and maybe you can talk a little bit more about what you mean by the debt bubble really exploding and talk about Greece or whatever.
So if that's all so easy to predict, then it's not hard.
It's just like, wait a minute, if you have a regime change in Syria, well then what's going to happen?
The Muslim Brotherhood or worse is going to take power there.
It's pretty obvious.
All you have to do is ask the question, and the answer is readily apparent.
What usually happens in a country where the economy collapses?
Well, a bunch of demagogues come forward and explain how the powerless are the ones at fault and that everybody get them.
So this is exactly what we need to not do.
And I think that's really a lot of what you're trying to head off here, right?
You know, what we ought to do is just start murdering the gays and the Mexicans, and then we'll be prosperous.
That's the solution.
In a crisis, people are susceptible to all sorts of demagoguery, and of course the architects of our problem, the status and the governing classes that are the architects of the problem, they are very, very good throughout history.
I mean, they are almost impeccable in their ability to scapegoat somebody else for the problems that they themselves have created.
And so, you know, it's international speculators sometimes, it's the gnomes of Zurich, or it's another race, another class, it's some foreign devil.
They have been very, very good at scapegoating others for the problems which they themselves authored.
And we have to be inoculated against that as well, because that is a very, very grim prospect.
So, you know, we go through a crisis of the existing debt, and then we see if the current generation of Americans are capable of the challenge of our time, and the challenge of our time is understanding this mess and restoring our prosperity.
And it may very well be that we're not, because on the other side of this crisis the people that got us into the mess are perfectly happy to hold on to the reins of power and to actually increase their footprint in our lives, that they will do so if the people don't reclaim their liberty.
And I'll tell you, there are budding signs.
The Ron Paul campaign was a great sign that people are beginning to wake up to the problems.
If they don't wake up now, though, during the development of this crisis in our debt-saturated economy, as the European bubble pops, as the American bubble is on the verge of popping, if they don't wake up now, they're certainly not going to wake up later.
And now, I know you're in a rush.
There's no way I can get another segment out of you, is there?
I've got to run, but I'm happy to talk about it at any time.
All right.
Well, listen, everybody, please go and look at Red and Blue and Broke All Over, Restoring America's Free Economy by Charles Goyette.
Before that, of course, the dollar meltdown, both of them absolutely excellent and great as gifts.
You know, he writes the way he talks, which is, you know, a generation spent on the radio making quips out of important points.
It's all in there.
It's great reading, very informative and fun reading.
You know, good for anyone who you know who's got the slightest interest in what the hell is going on in the world.
Red and Blue and Broke All Over, the website, again, is charlesgoyette.com.
Thanks so much for being my first guest on the new version of the same show here, Charles.
It's great to be on your show, Scott, and to talk to you again.
And I know the Scott Horton Show has a huge future.
Well, thanks.
We'll see.
All right, everybody, that was the great Charles Goyette.
And that is the bumper music that I expected to kick in 30 seconds ago.
What the hell do I know about things?
Not much.