Jack Armstrong (2:21)

They've stolen our game. Time to declare war.

Joe Getty (2:23)

So I mentioned this yesterday essay in the New York Times over the weekend about the whole affordability thing. The a word that is going to be so everywhere until the next election. Affordability. And both, both parties Want to try to take the mantle on that and be the champions of trying to make affordability better. That's what Trump's working on every single day. This essay in the New York Time, written by some fancy pants professor. Economists take this idea. That's kind of funny. You're gonna, you're gonna argue about something that all economists say is a terrible idea. Economists hate this idea. But it could be a way out of the affordability crisis. Price controls.

Jack Armstrong (3:04)

Oh, Lord.

Joe Getty (3:05)

And it argues for why that would work.

Jack Armstrong (3:09)

Trying for the millionth time to push that fraud on humanity. Unbelievable.

Joe Getty (3:13)

And they even in the headline put that economists have decided this doesn't work. But hey, let's try it again anyway.

Jack Armstrong (3:19)

Because it kind of sounds good. Who's with me? So I, I've assembled a handful of stories about price controls, specifically in terms of real estate and rent. It was funny, I just found out that our, our remodel failed inspection. It's no big deal because they'll fix it and it'll be fine. But one of the things that the inspector said, no, you gotta have this contractor has been doing this for many, many moons. Exactly where my house is said. I've never heard of that in my life. That is an example of what it's like to build housing, you know, writ large. But anyway, just get this out of the way. It's funny, this Wall Street Journal headline hit me. How building affordable housing became the hottest game in la. And what happened was the city decided we need more affordable housing. And so they eliminated a lot of the BS red tape, but only for quote, unquote, affordable housing, which means all units are for tenants who make no more than 80% of the city's median income, which somebody decided was the proper number. More places across the US are experimenting with similar policies to cut red tape for affordable housing in an effort to ease their yawning housing shortages. Well, what about unaffordable housing or nice housing or luxury housing?

Joe Getty (4:35)

Well, let me just jump in as no, somebody who knows nothing about this.

Jack Armstrong (4:40)

Just at first.

Joe Getty (4:41)

Listen to this story. So most regulations are around safety, some sort of, you gotta, you gotta, you know, use this sort of wood or plaster or cement, and the roof needs to be this high and blah, blah, blah, and all these different sorts of things. You got all the gazillions of regulations, everything like that. And you're saying if it's to build a house for someone who doesn't have much money, we don't need to meet this standard, but everybody else does. Well, that leads me to Believe that the standard is not necessary in the first place.

Jack Armstrong (5:14)

Well, or it's the environmental crap. And Cal unicornians are familiar with how this works. Okay, but environmental reviews don't exist to protect the environment. They exist so unions can sue and demand a share of the work and more money.

Joe Getty (5:26)

Yes, my argument is the same if, if you're claiming it was for the environment originally when you pass this regulation. Well, obviously it's not that important if you can waive it for people under a certain income.

Jack Armstrong (5:37)

Right, right. So if you want to build like a norm, a regular development, it takes you years, years and years. But if it's affordable housing, we'll cut all the red tape and you can go ahead and build it. What possible sense does that make? Anyway, moving on to this great piece by the editorial board of journal, how to shrink housing supply in Los Angeles. The city tightens its rent control law. Good luck finding an apartment. The economic law of supply and demand is simple enough, but LA is defying it again by tightening rent control laws in the name of housing affordability. The result will be as it always, always, always is, fewer apartments and less affordable housing. City restricts rent increases in properties built before 1978, which for some reason is the golden year to the consumer price index. And it can't even be more than 8% even if the price index goes up 8% and the rent caps apply to about 3/4 of the multifamily housing units in the city. So last week the City Council wanted to voted lower the cap to 90% of the consumer price index with a maximum increase of 4%. So landlords will no longer be able to raise rents to cover an increase in electricity charges, for instance. That means they'll have to eat rising electricity rates caused by the state's destructive green energy policies. But the in effect what happens is they don't eat it because it's a fairly tight profit margin. And so what happens is rent control discourages housing investment and reduces supply. And if landlords can't rent raise rents to cover their costs, including repairs, insurance and utilities, they won't maintain them. They won't fix the leaky pipes or water heater. Forget about upgrades, forget about new developments, it doesn't make economic sense to do it. So you restrict the number of new units to zero and you make all the units that exist crappier and crappier.

Joe Getty (7:30)

Yeah, there's no. I don't have rental property, but there's no way I would ever decide to do that if I lived in an area where I don't get to determine the rent regardless of what market demand is or what, you know, energy costs have become or whatever.

Jack Armstrong (7:44)

Yeah, one, two more notes that I found really interesting. This one is about a case.

Joe Getty (7:51)

And then, of course, if you already.

Jack Armstrong (7:53)

Own the property, why would you try.

Joe Getty (7:56)

To compete to be able to raise the rent if you're not allowed to?

Jack Armstrong (8:01)

You just, well, let it be crappy. All right? And if the city says if your unforeseeable costs in the Future go up 10%, you can just raise the rent 4%. Sorry, I'm thinking, no, I got other places to put my money because rental property is risky in several different ways, which we won't get into. But, no, that's just not nearly enough to justify the risk. So, interestingly, there's a lawsuit going on filed in New York City by building owners challenging the city's rent stabilization law, which is similar to what we've been talking about. What they're saying is that rent fixing is an unconstitutional taking under the Fifth Amendment because you can't just fine me without me violating the law and breaking a specific law and the rest of it. So they're trying to claim that making me charge sub normal rent or submarket rent is an unconstitutional taking. The courts have rejected that on a number of different occasions. I was corresponding with our good friend Tim Sandifer about that, but he says it's plainly, clearly an unconstitutional taking. It always has been.

Joe Getty (9:13)

Yeah, I don't know anything about that. That's interesting. You shouldn't even have to get there, though. Again, like that headline in the New York Times. Economists think it's a bad idea. It's been looked at for years, these ideas. I remember the Washington Post several years back said, sorry, Democrats, but it's just true. Rent control doesn't work. And the Washington Post laid out why for their readers. It's just a bad idea. I know you think it's a good idea, and I don't blame anybody for.

Jack Armstrong (9:40)

Thinking it's a good idea. I did too, when I was young.

Joe Getty (9:42)

First time I ever heard it. But then when somebody explains you why it isn't, well, then you.

Jack Armstrong (9:46)

You move on. So the Supreme Court has been edging closer and closer to being sympathetic to this claim. I certainly hope they come around. Final example, this one again from New York City, Matt Miller, writing for the Free Press. Why New York City has 50,000. 50,000 ghost apartments. Mumdani's freeze. The rent pledge misses the real problem. The rent that landlords can charge often doesn't cover their Costs. And of course, he's got to begin with a particular anecdote. Normally, it doesn't take too long for landlords like me to renovate in an empty apartment and list it so that new people can move in and start the next chapter of their lives. But since this particular apartment is rent stabilized, laws that were passed in 2019 essentially prevent me from doing anything with it except shutting the door and keeping it empty. Strict limits on rent increases under the 2019 laws have left an estimated 50,000 apartments like this one vacant across the city. Because the restrictions on what landlords can charge for these apartments often don't even cover the cost of maintaining them. They become like ghosts. It's like they don't exist at all. And he goes into how Mamdani is going to make it even worse. And then he goes into some of the particulars of it. But the point is, if you rent your apartment, you will be losing significantly more over the longer term than if you just leave it off the market and hope that the rents change in two years and hope that the laws change in two years or five years or whenever. So you have 50,000 plus empty apartments because it makes more sense for the owner to keep them off the market than to rent them, thanks to rent control. It is obscenely idiotic. It just sounds good to dopey young people who listen to Mom Donnie and people like him, and it's been true forever. I mean, as Jack said, it sounds good to young people who don't understand how markets work. Which is another reason Econ 101 should be a required class in every high school in America, if not middle school. The easy stuff or the simple stuff in economics is super easy to grasp, and it's as true as anything has ever been. True. But people fall for the scam over and over again because they think, yeah, I'm voting for that guy because he's gonna stick into those green landlords and I can get a super cool apartment for a lot less than they're charging right now.

Joe Getty (12:13)

Well, you're right.

Jack Armstrong (12:14)

It's too damn high.

Joe Getty (12:16)

Everyone should come out of high school at least having heard the arguments on both side of price control, rent control, that sort of stuff. But that's never going to happen in government schools because the government crowd always thinks this stuff is a good idea.

Jack Armstrong (12:32)

Yeah, the greatest illustration of this is, and this is a conversation we had a number of years ago with Tim Sanifer from the Goldwater foundation about gouging and how gouging is a good thing. Like after a hurricane. And it's. It's like going to the end of the argument to make it absolutely clear why rent control is a bad idea. The idea being, all right, after the hurricane, Florida chainsaws are going for quadruple their normal price. If I'm Joe's Chainsaws in Georgia, I'm loading up a truck with every chainsaw I could beg, borrow and steal. I'm driving straight to Florida to get those fabulous prices for my chainsaws, which floods the market with chainsaws because that's where people need them the most. And the price drops almost immediately. And the people who need the chainsaws the most, they go ahead and buy them and the goods flow to where they're needed. Soon the prices level out and everybody's fine. You put a price control on chainsaws can be no more. The Gavin Newsom has done this. The friggin disingenuous lion idiot. You put a price control on chainsaws, you can only charge 10% more than the usual price. Here I am in Joe's Chainsaws in Georgia. I'm sitting there in my. My Georgia chainsaw store and I'm not moving an inch. Why would I. So the people in Florida can't get a damn chainsaw. Chainsaw. That's right. Got a bunch of same flim flam gets sold over and over again. It's enough than making insane.

Joe Getty (14:03)

Everybody's waiting for the Nvidia earnings to come out. That could be huge. On the whether or not the AI bubble is bursting or not. After several days in a row of the stock market kind of having an AI hit, I've got an interesting AI story. I may have kind of changed my.

Jack Armstrong (14:17)

Mind as a doomer around AI based.

Joe Getty (14:20)

On some stuff I heard yesterday.

Jack Armstrong (14:22)

Okay, doomer, get to that later. All on the way.

Joe Getty (14:26)

Stay here. Armstrong and Getty is all the doom saying about AI or safetyism that has infected our culture to such a stagnating point that we all recognize that didn't used to exist when we were a bold, innovative country? Going to talk about that coming up a little bit later.

Jack Armstrong (14:48)

Oh, I'm a bit of a doomer, but you've hit me with one of my favorite arguments. You know your judo. Well, I can't wait to hear about that. So this is, this is really interesting. We're talking about the humble raccoon. Could be your next pet. The trash panda, if you will.

Joe Getty (15:05)

Is that the one with like, looks like it's wearing a mask?

Jack Armstrong (15:08)

Yes, yes, that's the yes, city dwelling raccoons seem to evolve, be evolving a shorter snout. So what you say? It's a telltale feature of our pets and other domesticated animals. And they go into detail about the dexterous childlike hands and the cheeky masks. Raccoons are North America's ubiquitous backyard bandits. They're so comfortable in human environments. Now new study finds that raccoons living in urban areas are physically changing in response to life around humans, an early step in domestication.

Joe Getty (15:42)

I didn't think evolution could happen that fast, they explain.

Jack Armstrong (15:45)

They have a pretty good theory why it's happening and this was the part that I thought was a good simple revelation. The study lays out the case that domestication is often wrongly thought of as initiated by humans, with people capturing and selectively breeding wild animals. But it's not that at all. The study authors claim, and I think they're right, that the process begins much earlier when animal animals become habituated to human environments, says one of the studies co authors from University of Arkansas. And they ought to know about raccoons in Arkansas. One thing about us humans is that wherever we go, we produce a lot of trash and piles of human scraps offer a bottomless buffet to wildlife. And to access that bounty, animals need to be bold enough to rummage through human rubbish, but not so bold as to become a threat to people, he says, quote if you have an animal that lives close to humans, you have to be well behaved enough that selection pressure is quite intense. I' Proto Dogs for example. And seriously, Proto dogs is the name of my next band. 100% that's great. It's mine, you can't steal it. They would have dug through human trash heaps and cats attracted to mice gathered around refuge. Over time, individual animals that had reduced fight or flight responses could feed more successfully around humans and pass their non reactive behavior onto their offspring. Interestingly, in decoding the genome, they figured out that the less fight or flight thing seems to come in a set of genes that also has been associated with traits such as shorter, a shorter face, smaller head, floppy ears, white patches on fur, a pattern that Charles Darwin noted back in the 1800s that were common among more domesticated animals. So they think the shortening of the stout, the snout rather is just kind of coincidental to the I'm aggressive or bold enough to get near humans, but not so bold as to want to hurt them or anything. It's a step toward domestication.

Joe Getty (17:44)

I like the YouTube videos of raccoons trying to get into cybertrucks because they think they're trash containers. Really enjoy those videos.

Jack Armstrong (17:52)

Really entertaining. Armstrong and Getty.

Joe Getty (17:56)

The House voted to release the Epstein files.

Jack Armstrong (17:59)

And if the day couldn't get any worse for Trump, halfway through the vote, there was a performance from Bad Bunny. The final vote was 427 to 1. It just goes to show, every office has that one weirdo. You know what I'm saying? Charming efforts at humor. How the narrative has taken shape that this is bad for Trump to the extent that his young liberal audience cheered, and all because it's bad for Trump is so interesting mostly through Trump's, you know, resistance to it, I guess.

Joe Getty (18:35)

Yeah. Because your natural reaction is he doesn't want this to happen. There must be something back which may not.

Jack Armstrong (18:42)

He never offered, like a real explanation of why he was against it. It's a hoax. It's a stupid.

Joe Getty (18:47)

We'll talk more about that in hour four. We talked a lot about it now. Or two one and two. There's a bunch there. And this might be our slide into the country being really reality television if this sets a precedent. But more on that later. Wanted to talk about, first of all, this. I got a text from a friend of mine. I thought this was pretty damn funny. She is in her mid-40s, an attractive woman in her mid-40s. She said, I'm going to create a website called Older Fans and it's just me telling people what part of my body hurts today and what minuscule task I was doing that caused it.

Jack Armstrong (19:24)

Oh, that's priceless. Well done. Yeah, that is really good. Yeah.

Joe Getty (19:30)

You get on there and you're dressed, you know, whatever your dress sexy and say, today my knee hurts because yesterday I had to do something and now I was gardening and now my knee hurts.

Jack Armstrong (19:40)

I walked up four stairs and I hurt my knee. How? I don't know. Older fan. Yeah. Hanson says he wants to be the first subscriber. That's brilliant. 10 out of 10, my dear. Well played.

Joe Getty (19:52)

So if you've been following the stock market, it's had a rough week or so and it's almost all AI. Well, almost all of the growth in the stock market over the last couple of years has been AI. And so a downturn is around AI and it's concerned that the bubble's about to burst and that sort of stuff. Huge day to day. Why Nvidia, which is a big chip maker, which the common thing to say in the stock market world right now is as goes Nvidia, goes the stock market. That's how big a deal they Are they're going to announce their earnings at the close of the bell today. So around 4:30 Eastern Time, they'll put out their earnings. And this might shore up this concern that it's a bubble. Depending on how well they do or analysts expect to dig this. Analysts expect the chip behemoth to show more than a 50% growth in net income and revenue this quarter.

Jack Armstrong (20:54)

Moving up.

Joe Getty (20:55)

Yeah, I would say that will shore up the whole this is a bubble thing.

Jack Armstrong (21:00)

Nope. There's the stock market.

Joe Getty (21:02)

I mean it still could be a bubble, but the bubble ain't about. It ain't over yet.

Jack Armstrong (21:07)

Except as you've pointed out, that whole incestuous thing. Nvidia's profits mostly came from, you know, OpenAI, whose profits mostly came from Nvidia, whose profits mostly came from cloud services, from Amazon.

Joe Getty (21:20)

This is from Bloomberg. So the they're expecting Nvidia to announce a 50 growth in both net income and revenue its fiscal third quarter. The reason is straightforward. Says here Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet. That's Google or that's. That's Google. Right. And Meta, which is Facebook, and Zuckerberg all taken together represent more than 40% of Nvidia's sales.

Jack Armstrong (21:45)

They're buying the chips for AI.

Guest/Additional Commentator (21:47)

Yeah.

Jack Armstrong (21:48)

Yeah.

Joe Getty (21:49)

And they're projected to increase their combined AI spending by 34% over the next year. They've been throwing money at AI like crazy. And those companies that I all just mentioned are going to increase it by a third over the next 12 months. It's expected. Holy crap.

Jack Armstrong (22:10)

It's a gold rush and nobody's sure there's gold.

Joe Getty (22:16)

So I was talking yesterday about how much I read and listened to about AI. Joe was asking why. For me it's. I think it might be the biggest thing that's ever happened on planet Earth. So I would like to know as much about it as possible.

Jack Armstrong (22:29)

And the reason I asked was it seems like uncertainty piled on uncertainty and it's just at some point you get okay, we're not sure.

Joe Getty (22:35)

Boy, I highly recommend. Steve Hayes of the Dispatch did an interview with a podcast guy the other day that broke it down like really long conversations into about an hour. So if you're interested in at all he had on the guy from the podcast the last invention which I've gotten into now. It's really good. It gets into the history of all this which is what I was going to talk about now. The history of AI. AI got a really big start in the 50s and we got to jump on it and had almost all your sci fi and projections of flying cars and all that sort of stuff that, that if you're older you grew up with all came out of this rush toward AI in the 50s. Then it just got like stuck for some reason. And I haven't heard an explanation for that. My. I suspect it's just computing power. Wasn't there just plain didn't have the computing power at the time to pull off their ideas behind AI. And then with Moore's law, with computer power cube cuting, computing power doubling roughly every 18 months over the last many, many decades speeds. We've gotten to a point now that chips are so fast and processing speeds are so great that they can do the stuff that they thought about a very long time ago, which is interesting. Now I'm. I'm a doomer. In the three camps that that particular podcast talks about, the real polar opposites are the doomers like me that think this is going to be the end of mankind. It's going to be the worst thing that ever happened to us. It's coming whether we like it or not. How quickly it ends, I don't know. In my lifetime or not, I don't know. We'll find out. And then you got the accelerators, he calls them, or the people that say this is going to be the greatest thing that ever happened to mankind. Well, it's split between two crowds, the accelerators. I think I mentioned this yesterday. You've got the. This is going to be the greatest thing for mankind. We're going to cure all the diseases. We're going to live to be 150. Nobody's going to have to work. It's going to be the like heaven on earth everybody is hoped for since the dawn of time. Half the accelerators believe that. The other half the accelerators think, no, no, no. I think it's going to be the worst thing that ever happened. But better that we get it first rather than the Chinese. So that's why I'm all for plowing forward as fast as we can. But I was listening to this podcast guy yesterday from the last invention talk about how safety ism is what's driving the doomers. He was just presenting the different arguments. And there's no doubt that we have a safetyism problem in our culture. No doubt whatsoever.

Jack Armstrong (25:08)

The entire Western world.

Joe Getty (25:09)

Yeah, the entire western world. We don't let kids play tag at school. We put rubber bumpers on the corner of our tables when our kids are little. I mean, just all these different things that we do. We won't let our kids play outside.

Jack Armstrong (25:23)

There's a gazillion to the park on their own, whatever.

Joe Getty (25:26)

Yeah, we've got a millions examples of this. And the guy was talking about how we didn't used to be like that culturally when the automobile was first invented and then started to become mass produced and going. We didn't get seat belts until what? They didn't put seat belts in cars at all for a very, very long time. And then they weren't mandated in this country until what, the 90s. I don't even know when that happened. It was a long time. And he makes the point that everybody wasn't pushing back on the automobile. You know, how many people are going to die from this? And what about all the jobs that are going to be lost from people that farm with horses and this and that and all these different things? It's going to destroy these industry. No, we just plowed ahead with this new invention that was super cool and it was the latest technology and we just full steam ahead, for example, on the danger of it, the peak of highway deads. I did the research on this yesterday, was in 1970. I think it was about 58,000 deads with a much smaller population that'd be the equivalent of 95,000 highway deaths today. We were willing to put up with in 1970 because we just thought the technology was important enough. It changed our lives enough in a positive way. We were just plowing forward. That's the way we used to look at things.

Jack Armstrong (26:40)

Yeah. I'm tempted to go off on a tangent about safetyism and how our acceptance that humans live and then they die and perhaps there's a better place afterward has given way to we've got to prolong our lives as long as possible, no matter what it costs, culturally speaking. But back to you.

Joe Getty (26:58)

But here was an invention that was clearly going to kill lots of people. And the data was there right in front of us that was that it was killing lots of people for a long time. I mean there were lots of highway deaths in the 50s and the 60s. We kept moving forward. We're faster and more powerful cars and it wasn't people afraid to get in them. And then like I said, the what will this do to society? Blah, blah. I mean there were those articles, you can find them, they're hilarious. But we, we plowed forward and then a lot of the naysaying about AI now fits in with our safetyism. I don't know if I fully buy this argument because I think AI is going to doom us. And, and it'll be the end of society and the end of mankind and all these different sorts of things. But there's no doubt we have a safetyism problem in the country and any modern invention now. If you tried to get the car for instance, going now, there'd be so much pushback around the danger and the changes to our economy. And we probably shouldn't. We're more of a probably shouldn't society now than we were back in the day. There's no doubt about it.

Jack Armstrong (28:00)

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Joe Getty (28:35)

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Jack Armstrong (28:50)

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Joe Getty (29:18)

I look forward to listening to the episode of the podcast from the Last Invention where it gets to the accelerators. Not the ones that think we need to accelerate just to stay ahead of a China, but the accelerators that think it's going to bring about the greatest time in human history. I think those people are nuts. I mean like crazy crazy don't understand human nature at all. Not so that they think nobody's going to have to work is going to lead up to a positive outcome. I couldn't, I couldn't disagree with that.

Jack Armstrong (29:51)

If you do not specifically address that concern about human nature and idle hands and the rest of it, then they need to go to hell. I mean, that's ridiculous. It's like rent control, which we were talking about earlier, not addressing the constriction of supply. If you'd own. If you don't address that, you're a crackpot. I'm not going to waste 10 seconds listening to you.

Joe Getty (30:09)

Yeah, they, they just don't believe it. So it's. You've used this examp before among, like some of your super smart libertarians. The reason they think their, their version of government would work is they think everybody's like them. They think everybody's super smart, motivated to do the right thing, etc. Etc.

Jack Armstrong (30:29)

If everybody's like you're motivated, they'll always stay busy and go get it because that's how human beings behave.

Joe Getty (30:34)

And I think a lot of the AI accelerators, they have that problem too. Well, I, if I had more free time, I would learn to play the piano. I would travel the world, I would write a symphony, I would do all these different sorts of things. That's not the average person. Maybe you would if you had lots of free time. The average person's going to sit around, get fat and do drugs.

Jack Armstrong (30:54)

Two things to that, to that point. Coming up next, an argument about capitalism, the free market, ripped from my very life within the last 24 hours. And then you mentioned the dispatch and it reminded me because they have Trump Derangement Syndrome. Is or should Trump Derangement Syndrome now be a recognized psychological problem?

Joe Getty (31:18)

Wow, that's a good question.

Jack Armstrong (31:19)

The answer is clearly yes. And I've got this great stuff written by a psychiatrist about it.

Joe Getty (31:25)

Wow, that is interesting.

Jack Armstrong (31:27)

It's a real thing.

Joe Getty (31:28)

I think it's provably.

Sponsor/Announcer (31:29)

Yes.

Joe Getty (31:30)

Yeah. Okay, stay tuned for all that Armstrong and Getty.

Guest/Additional Commentator (31:36)

China and Japan, they are locked into this escalating dispute over Taiwan. It's prompted the Chinese government to warn its citizens against traveling in Japan. And now what we have is the governments in Japan and Taiwan are now issuing warnings of their own. And the trigger of this was, of course, those comments by the Japanese prime minister to parliament earlier this month when she was answering a question and said that a Chinese invasion on Taiwan would be an existential threat to Japan and could spark a military response that infuriated China.

Jack Armstrong (32:09)

Well, as Stewie kind of woke up, infuriated. Back to you.

Joe Getty (32:13)

As Stewie Griffin of Family Guy once said, world keeps spinning. We can talk about Epstein all we want, but you got that out there. Now that's reality.

Jack Armstrong (32:23)

Two things number One. I have a tie into that. It is. It occurs to me as I was structuring what we're going to talk about that I really need more time than we have in this segment. So why don't we do it our four. If you don't get hour four, grab it via podcast. You ought to subscribe to Armstrong and Getting on Demand. A great unintended consequence of the super secure American security umbrella for 75 years is that you've got enormous potential bulk military, social, economic bulk in Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, South Korea, a handful of other countries in the Pacific region that could be a hell of a good counterbalance to China, but they've been kind of dependent. And that's weirdly a tie into what I wanted to talk about about the free market in the I promised you, you know, the incident ripped from my very life in the last 24 hours. So we've mentioned we have people working around our house a lot. We've done this major, major remodel, practically rebuilt the house. One of the guys who's been on site a lot, who I was fairly friendly with, and it was a good worker. He started just not showing up and giving bowless excuses to his supervisor, the foreman. And I was surprised by that. But it got to be ridiculous this week. And so, I mean, it was one of the classic. Jack, you'll recognize. Everybody will recognize this. Yeah. What was the, the first one? Oh, my alarm wasn't set right. And I overslept. Okay. Next day. Yeah, my, my tire went flat and, and my phone went dead the same day. That's the reason I wasn't answering your texts or calls. I don't know what happened. My phone went dead. Blah, blah.

Joe Getty (34:15)

All those can happen, but when they happen multiple days in a row.

Jack Armstrong (34:18)

Yeah. And, and so that his employment was ended and I was discussing his. With his supervisor. The fact that it is so clearly heading toward a situation where he will be on the dole, he will be the underprivileged, he will need social aid, and I will be told repeatedly that I should pay my fair share because he is disadvantaged, having made stupid decision after stupid decision.

Joe Getty (34:51)

And the ability to be gainfully employed.

Jack Armstrong (34:54)

When was the last time in a discussion of the haves and have nots you heard factored in the decisions you make?

Joe Getty (35:03)

Never. Never. I bring, that's why I bring it up all the time. Drives me nuts.

Jack Armstrong (35:06)

Oh, oh, it ought to drive you nuts. That's like talking about, I don't know, rockets without discussing fuel or, you know, the engines. It's it's absurd. Which just goes to show you that haves and have nots thing is politically useful. You can get it to wrench money out of people that then you spread out to your cronies. Not that there's no need. You know, as I've said many times, the essence of politics is you have completely real needs. You have kind of half real needs, then you have completely fictional needs and politicians put all of those in front of you and explain why that those things mean we need more tax money and then we'll spend that money to solve those needs, fulfill those needs. And that's the scam, because a lot of it's fake.

Joe Getty (35:52)

Now, I would be against this as a libertarian, although we. If you're going to live in a, with a welfare state, you got to have this sort of stuff. Stuff. At age 65, there should be an accounting of how you spent your whole life. And then they determine how much money you get of other people's money. And if it looks like, you know, you, you bought a new car every two years, didn't like driving used cars. Okay, fine, like, like the vacations. Huh? Like flew around, did a lot of stuff. Okay, cool. But this is how much money you get from other taxpayer. Oh, you saved your money your whole life and you have more money because you, you drove your cars longer, you.

Jack Armstrong (36:25)

Didn'T travel and maybe your entire savings were wiped out by some medical catastrophe. Okay, that's fine. We're not talking about you, you know, in, in, in like lawsuits. It's called contributory negligence. How much did you contribute to the situation you are in now? Oh, that's what we need, overwhelmingly. Well, then why are you looking at the taxpayers? There's no stupid insurance paid for by taxpayers anyway. A defense of capitalism. And you've gotten a hint of the shape it. And is Trump Derangement Syndrome an actual psychological problem? We'll have that next hour. Armstrong and Getty. This is an iHeart podcast.