Ep 388 | Economists Have to Keep Teaching the Same Lessons | Guests: James Harrigan & Antony Davies - Kibbe on Liberty

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[00:00]
A
Welcome to Kibbe on Liberty. I'm talking to my friends James Harrigan and Anthony Davies of Words and Numbers. We have an exciting announcement and more importantly, we're going to dissect whether or not the head of the Department of War, Pete Hegseth, is in fact a closet Keynesian. Check it out. Foreign. Welcome to Kibby on Liberty. James Anthony, welcome to Kibbe on Liberty.
[00:59]
B
Thanks for having us, Matt.
[01:00]
C
Thanks for having us, Matt.
[01:02]
A
I was scrolling back to see when we had first been together on this show and it was at the height of lockdowns and you guys had just, I think, written a book criticizing the sort of command and control way that we were supposedly dealing with the pandemic. And we've, we've been friends and collaborators ever since. But we have a big announcement to make today and I think I'm going to let James make it and see how he does.
[01:35]
C
Well, this comes as a surprise, but a welcome one. Thank you kindly, Matt. Anthony and I, in Words and Numbers, will be joining the Free the People family of programming, starting well right as you see this. And we are, if I can speak on ant's behalf, incredibly happy to be on board with you guys. We've been kind of fellow travelers for a long time, fans. We've been watching your content. Apparently you at least lie to us and tell us you watch ours too. And it's a natural match, I think. And your audience, I think, will really like what we do. And I suspect that our audience is going to absolutely love what you guys do. So this is a bit of a match made in heaven, and yet we found a way not to screw it up. Yeah, so far. So far. I mean, give it a minute, but so far.
[02:34]
A
So one of my pet peeves amongst free marketeers and libertarians and classical liberals, you have all these organizations and all these influencers and all these thinkers and there's not enough collaboration and there's a lot of competition and there's a lot of people sort of guarding their audiences and their donor lists and all that stuff. And as an economist, I've always thought that there's an occasion in this instance where cooperation Trump's competition, because when it comes to building audiences, I think we will discover that Free the people's audience is going to be very enthusiastic about words and numbers, and your audience might be interested in some of the things we produce as well. And the net effect is a win for all of us. And that is sort of an economics lesson in and of itself. So we're going to prove the Point.
[03:37]
C
And more importantly, it's a win for everybody who watches both.
[03:41]
A
Right.
[03:41]
C
It's the audience that wins the most.
[03:44]
B
I want to speak specifically to our listeners that I've been following the Kibbes since before our podcast, before I did videos. I was new to the liberty movement, and I quickly came to conclusion that there was a handful of adults in the room when it came to libertarianism. And the Kibbes, I can count in the fingers of one hand. The Kibbes were one of them. And I watched your stuff, Matt, specifically, and said, I want to be like him. And so this is the pinnacle of my career at this point.
[04:16]
A
Well, I'll admit that I did pay you to say that, so I appreciate the delivery.
[04:25]
C
I'm now a little angry I didn't get a payment.
[04:29]
A
Well, you haven't said anything nearly that nice yet, so.
[04:32]
C
All right, we'll take it.
[04:34]
B
James isn't used to saying nice things.
[04:37]
A
Yeah, you're sort of the grumpy gnome of the duo, I believe.
[04:41]
C
Gnome is not the word I would prefer. Curmudgeon is acceptable. Gnome is not. But you do you.
[04:49]
A
When did you guys start Words and numbers? It's been a while.
[04:53]
C
Yes.
[04:53]
B
It's about eight years ago now, maybe more. More than eight years.
[04:57]
C
That sounds about right.
[04:59]
B
So, pretty much our genesis story is kind of interesting. I was giving a weekend seminar on libertarian. Some libertarian, I shouldn't say that. Classical liberal thought, philosophy, economics. And it was at my alma mater, St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, and at the last minute, our philosopher dropped out. And I called up the people that were putting this together and said, look, I need a philosopher. And they said, have you heard of James Harrigan? I said, no, I don't know Harrigan. Well, he teaches right there at St. Vincent. So we met because of that, I grabbed him. I said, look, can you come and give lectures on, you know, philosophy, libertarianism, this sort of thing, Classical liberal thought? He says, yeah, sure. When do you need it? I said, tomorrow. And we've been friends ever since.
[05:53]
C
Yeah, no, it's barely been a day that we haven't communicated since then. And somewhere along the way, Antony had this just thoroughly stupid idea. And, I mean, it was stupid. He. He said, what we need to do, James, is read our op EDS into a camera and then publish them, whatever that meant at the time. And I said, exactly. No human beings are ever going to watch that. And he kept at it and kept at it and kept at it. And I finally said, if I do one and we send it to an independent, disinterested observer and allow that person to decide whether this sucks or not. Okay, so we did it. And my God, did it suck. It was dreadful beyond all measure. But the person we sent it to was Sean Malone, who had just taken a job at Fee, and he got back in touch and he said, guys, this is terrible. I mean, this is just, this is so bad. I don't even know what to tell you, but Fee has tasked me with coming up with content and I don't have any. And you guys seem to be interested, so you want to do something. And I went from elated because I never had to deal with this shit again to devastated because now it's a weekly event for the rest of my life within milliseconds. And turns out Ant was wrong about the content, but right about the idea. It really was the thing that looking back on it changed both of our lives for the better and probably changed a lot of other lives along the way. So it was functionally all ants idea, and I was nothing but a roadblock. And I came along begrudgingly after a while.
[07:41]
A
It's pretty og to be thinking about video that long ago, because now it sort of seems obvious. And it seems that everybody knows that for better or worse, young people like to consume video content. And I view it as a gateway drug to actually picking up a book. But I'm also comfortable if my 2 minute video turns them onto a new idea and maybe it leads them to an hour long podcast, and maybe that podcast leads them to Amazon to pick up a copy of Hayek's Road to Serfdom. That does happen, and I meet audience members that tell me those stories every day. But whether we like it or not, video is where we're at. And if you want to go back, my political and philosophical enemies can go back and find some of the early stuff we did. For a company that doesn't exist anymore called crtb, those videos are probably looking a little bit like that first op ed that you read into a camera. So we all, you know, innovation is not always beautiful.
[08:48]
C
And it's not because we started with Sean's direction as an eight minute video podcast and learned rather quickly that exactly no one wanted to watch an eight minute video podcast. And we, we flipped over pretty quickly to a 20 to 30 minute audio podcast, then came up with the format, right the two quake hits, the foolishness of the week in the main episode. And once we did that, everything just started working. And there was one day, as you well know, because you've been behind the scenes. I insult Anthony constantly. I can't help it. He doesn't care. He likes it. Truth be told, he's a bit of a masochist.
[09:32]
A
And it's actually. It's actually the only reason I tune into Words and numbers. I'll be honest,
[09:39]
C
and I think you're not alone. But. But Anthony used to do all of our editing, and he would just edit all of that out as if it never happened. And one day he missed one and the fans went crazy. They went, oh, God, that was hilarious, what James said to Ant. More of that, please. I said, more of that. I've been doing that every week for the past two years. But Ant had been cutting it out. So as soon as we became more transparently, honestly ourselves and we've got this dynamic, it turns out people liked it because they know we go after each other, but they can also tell we're the best of friends.
[10:19]
A
There's no shortage of hot takes out there. What's actually rare is rigorous thinking.
[10:24]
D
People who follow the data wherever it
[10:26]
A
leads, regardless of which side it makes uncomfortable. That's exactly what Anthony Davies and James Harrigan do on the Words and Numbers podcast.
[10:35]
D
And Free the People is proud to
[10:37]
A
announce their launch on our channels. New episodes will drop every Thursday.
[10:42]
D
Check free the people people.org on social
[10:45]
A
media@freethepeople or find words and Numbers anywhere you listen to podcasts. Go give your brain something it actually wants. So I want to. I want to steal your guys format for the purposes of this show. And I'll reference the show that we all did on Words and Numbers just a while ago. And I've been thinking ever since about something that Anthony challenged me on. And the question was effectively, why is it that we have to keep teaching basic economic lessons over and over and over again? I think you said every 20 years, you're kind of an optimist. I'm not sure they stick that long. But economists and, and philosophers and people that are animated by ideas and logic and math, radical things like that, we get frustrated that politics seems to do the same stupid thing over and over again. And you have these two countervailing forces, one of which is the fact that young people are, in fact, consuming a lot of podcasts. You know, Rogan now goes upwards of three hours. And, you know, the mythology was that technology and social media was giving young people short attention spans, but I don't really think that's true. I think to the extent that they want to find something for themselves, they have an ability to curate a curriculum outside of university and outside of corporate media. And they are finding serious economic conversations out there, like what you guys do. But on the other hand, when you actually look at the politics of the day, it literally feels like idiocracy. So I want to, well, comment if you care to, and then I'm going to tee up some examples of my point.
[12:59]
B
No, I think it's absolutely right. And it boils down to, I think, two forces. The one is that power attracts the. What is the word? The personality type that just wants to control everything. Psychopath. That's a wrong word. But power attracts people who want to control others. And so you necessarily get a preponderance, not all of them, but you get a preponderance of people in government who. Whose goal it is to wield government. Now, they'll say their goal is to make life better and blah, blah, blah. That's a means to an end. The end is they want to wield power. That's one force. The other force is people who have more important things to do. You know, you got to raise kids, you got to have a job, you got to pay the bills. And to delve into minutia of economic theory is a bit of a slog. And so when a politician comes along who says he's here to make my life better in the way he can make my life better is by raising the minimum wage. I say, yeah, for God's sake, do it. And that's where we come in. We've got to explain why it's so, why the easy solution is often not the right one.
[14:18]
A
And this, obviously, I think there's a lot of folks right now that have buyer's remorse, having voted for Trump. And he promised to drain the swamp. He promised to uproot the deep state. But I feel like more than anything else, he promised to make America great again. And he was referring to the economy and the real economic pain that people have been feeling nonstop since lockdowns created so much devastation. And I want to pull up this quote from Trump just a couple days ago. This won't be news by the time we run this, but I feel like we're going to have this conversation every day until at least the midterms. Trump was asked by a reporter, I think it was cnn, whether or not he was worried about the fact that so many Americans are suffering. You're feeling economic pain, inflation, the cost of groceries, certainly the cost of gas, in part, at least in significant part because of the war in Iran. And this is what he said, not even a little bit. The only thing that matters when I'm talking about Iran, they can't have a nuclear weapon. I don't think about American's financial situation. I don't think about anybody shockingly out of touch with the people that elected him and the people that will show up this November to decide whether or not Republicans or Democrats control Congress.
[15:55]
C
Well, he said the quiet part out loud right there at the end. He wasn't supposed to say that. We all know he thinks it, but he wasn't supposed to say it. Inflation is at 3.5%. I mean, it had crept down and now it's crept back up again. Gas is 450 a gallon, and that is painful to people who have to commute to work. I mean, good God, it was $3 when he started bragging about what a great president he was just a few months back. And it's already up 50% from that point. And it's going to go higher because it always does in the summertime. I don't know how you could be this out of touch with the electorate, but I do know that the Republican Party is going to pay the price dearly in the midterms.
[16:44]
A
Yeah. To me, the question is not whether or not the Republicans can hold the House, but whether or not they succeed in holding the Senate. And if they do, it's only because of the peculiarities of this year's political map that that favors Republicans over Democrats. But, Antony, how do we get people to care about the fact that the Trump administration. I looked this up. And debt under the first 16 months of this Trump administration has actually grown faster than it did under Joe Biden. And remember, Joe Biden's presidency is in the midst of all of that extra pandemic spending, but Trump is spending more. And I feel like there's not a single person that cares about fiscal responsibility anymore, let alone someone that understands that too much spending and too much borrowing leads to too much monetizing of debt that ultimately leads to. To more expensive groceries. But why do we care?
[17:56]
B
Well, I think we care when it becomes painful to us. One of the problems, and perhaps economists, and I would include myself here, shot ourselves in the foot by warning over and over again that if we keep running deficits like this, we're going to end up monetizing them. It's going to come back as inflation. Those are words I've been saying for going on 20 years now. And in response, people say, yeah, but where's the inflation? I don't see it well, 2022, that's kind of the first time we actually started to see that inflation. And even now, James says he's correct, we're down to like 3.5%. I think it's projected to be 4% in Q2. But nonetheless, the inflation forecasts, and I've been watching this for going on three years now, the inflation forecasts out as far as they go. None of them, I shouldn't say none of them. The average forecast does not have inflation coming back at any point to what we had prior to Covid. In other words, what we've got now, the 3.5%, possibly more, that's the new normal. And it's a new normal that comes about because of these deficits. And you know, now that it's starting to become painful, to answer your question, I think people are going to start to look, they're going to start to pay attention. But then on the other side, we've got the politicians who say, oh, no, no, no, it's not the deficit, it's Joe Biden or it's Donald Trump or it's this war in the Middle East. That's not the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is we keep printing money.
[19:35]
A
Thank you for joining me today on
[19:36]
D
Kibbe on Liberty and for being part of our fiercely independent audience. Every week, my organization, Free the People, partners with BlazeTV to bring you this show. My guests bring smart perspectives on everything from current events to timeless philosophical debates. If you like what you hear, go to freethepeople.org kol and support Kibbe on Liberty so we can continue to produce these honest conversations with interesting people. Now, let's get back to it.
[20:06]
A
I'm thinking back to so we won't know whether or not we don't know today whether or not Thomas Massie will win his primary. And we will know by the time people are watching this. But I'm thinking back to his argument as the sole person that voted against the multitrillion dollar Covid bill, the CARES act, and he called it the cheese in a trap. And in that bill, there were relatively small checks to people that were of course, forced to lock down. They weren't allowed to work and instead the government sent them a check. But he called it the cheese and the trap because ultimately all of that money plus will come out of your wallets through inflation. And obviously that argument at the time fell on deaf ears. It's kind of hard to argue economics when people are in a full panic. But it does seem like when things are bad It's a moment for economists to step up and say, let me tell you why this is happening and what we need to do to get out of it. But that makes us the bad guys, right? Like we're always delivering the bad news.
[21:19]
B
Yeah. And it takes us much longer to do it and to explain it than it does the politician to say, oh, forget about him, I'll just send you more checks.
[21:30]
C
Well, just to put it in perspective, Ant and I have gone back and literally solved America's debt problem and America's Social Security problem. We have the plan that will do that. The only downside is that you would have to stick with the plan, each of them for 100 years. That's the kind of problem we now have. We have centuries long problems.
[21:59]
B
It's not an economically insoluble problem, it's a politically insoluble problem.
[22:05]
A
Yeah. And neither party, I don't know what we would have gotten out of a Harris administration, but I think the feeding frenzy, particularly during times of war, is very much a new thing. You guys may recall the old, the old macroeconomic argument about budgeting during times of war. The trade off between guns and butter. And it used to be the case within, certainly not perfect, but it used to be the case that there was some conversation about economic trade offs during times of war. And if we were at war and if that was the choice that voters and the president had made, that there would be trade offs, we would have to cut domestic spending in order to finance military spending. But somewhere around 2015 that was abandoned. And now instead of having typically the Democrats would be demanding more domestic spending and the Republicans would be demanding more military spending. Now regardless of the President, they just doubled down on, on both sides. And we've lost the connection between the pain of war, the fiscal pain of war and the consequences.
[23:26]
B
And it's not just war. If you think about it. This happens every 10 years. Something comes along that causes the politicians to say, look, this is an emergency, it's a one off. We've got to deficit spend, we've got to significantly increase the deficit. And voters agree and they say, yeah, this is a big deal, let's go ahead and do that. But then it never comes back, Right? So going by, going by decades, we've got Covid in the 2000 and 20s, we've got the financial crisis circa 2010, we've got 9, 11 circa 2000, we've got the meltdown of the SNLS circa 1990, we've got the inflation in interest rates circa 1980. We've got the oil crisis circa 1970. Every single decade, one, something. And I can tell you right now what the 2031 is going to be. It's going to be Social Security insolvency. And they're going to say we've got to increase the deficit to $5 trillion this year instead of only 2 because
[24:31]
C
of that grandma starving to death. Ant. Yeah, that's what that's going to be. What you said is the jab and what I said is the following. Hard right hand, right. They're going to look, we've got this terrible problem. Sit down so I can punch you in the mouth and give you the answer. And we could solve this, but we do not have the political will to do it. And we will, I dare say, never have the political will to do it. And that will cause a mountain of long term problems.
[25:07]
B
I'm going to disagree with you. I think there will come a time when we have the political will to do it, but at that point it will no longer be economically soluble.
[25:15]
C
Yeah, no, it'll be too late.
[25:16]
B
It'll be too late.
[25:17]
C
Too late. And you know, we've been kind of, we were once seen as crazy people. Me more than you, but both of us, because I think this will mark the end of the United States as we know it. How on earth could it not? And that's becoming a more irresistible conclusion now than it ever has been before.
[25:41]
B
Before.
[25:42]
A
Do you guys remember. And this seems quaint now, but back in the Tea party days circa 2011, there was in fact a serious political push to balance the budget and cut programs and reform entitlements. And we were putting defense on the table. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs at that time kept saying the biggest threat to national security is the national debt. And surely he was not a Tea Party Republican or a libertarian, but he was pointing out this point that you just made that empires die because they spend too much money they don't have. History teaches this lesson over and over again.
[26:33]
C
It does and will happen.
[26:35]
A
But unfortunately. Go ahead.
[26:37]
B
I was going to say ultimately when we deficit spend, we're, we use the phrase we're spending money we don't have, which is correct. Perhaps more specifically, we're spending future generations money and at some point they run out of money. Even more so now that we're in this situation where our population is topping off and is going to start to decline.
[26:59]
A
How much? It seems, it seems worse. The lack of fiscal accountability seems worse than any time in my lifetime. How much of this do you suppose can be attributed to the magic elixir of modern monetary policy? Modern monetary theory?
[27:20]
B
Yeah. I don't think much. Now that was a big player back in 2020, 2020, when we were expanding the deficit by 50% overnight, you know, and the argument from the MMT crowd was, yes, go ahead and print money, you won't get inflation. And the two of us, and I'm sure you as well said at the time, you can't do this, you're going to get inflation. Of course there was no inflation. People laugh at us and then come 2022, because these things take time. You get 10% inflation and people turn to us and say, why didn't you warn us?
[27:54]
C
Yeah, I would like to add that. Can we call her the mother of MMT theory? Or perhaps we should be more mean spirited and call her the grandmother of MMT theory. Stephanie Kelton. We invited her on Words and Numbers to explain herself and she didn't even return the email. So I don't know, maybe she knew all along she was full of shit, but we did. Anybody with half a sense of common sense, half an ounce of common sense, knew that that was crazy and yet.
[28:33]
B
But she, she, she was espousing a fringe economic theory that would never have seen the light of day except for politicians, encountered a situation in which they found her theory useful to advance what they wanted to do anyway. And I argue, I argue the exact same thing happened with John Maynard Keynes. Had it not been for the Great Depression and politicians looking for an excuse, academic window dressing to justify what they want to do anyway, Keynes would not have come to the fore.
[29:10]
A
Of course, the Keynesians became kind of a caricature of Keynes in the sense that he, he argued not only that you should expand spending during bad times, but that you should actually be fiscally responsible during good times. Politicians only chose half of that equation.
[29:32]
C
Right. If the Keynesian crowd had actually listened to Keynes, it wouldn't have been so terrible. Wouldn't have been. But you know, this is where we're left and you know, we don't have a lot of great options. And it falls to people like us, I think, to point out how utterly precarious our situation is right now. And people will either listen and change their ways, which I think the odds of that are slim to none, or this material will live on long enough that when we have to refound a country, people might remember and they might point back and say, these people were warning us all along, perhaps we should go check out their body of work and see what else they had to say because they were certainly right about this.
[30:23]
A
If you made it this far into
[30:25]
D
the show, it means I must be doing something right. Kibion Liberty is just one of the amazing products we created for the people. We tell emotionally compelling stories and produce educational videos for the Liberty Curious. Our award winning documentaries personalize all things liberty, independence, creativity, hard work, integrity and perseverance. After the show, check out our work@freethepeople.org and if you like what you see, donate to support what we do. That's freethepeople.org now back to the show.
[31:00]
A
So when I was preparing, I was trying to figure out what we would talk about today, and I had a revelation that now seems profoundly unprofound, but that Trump himself and the Trump administration and their spending policies are basically a caricature of Keynesian economics. And I guess that's always been the case. Trump has always been the king of debt and he loves borrowing and he loves spending. But I want to apply this to specifically the proposal that the Trump administration, kind of out of thin air, announced several months ago that they were going to increase the defense budget by 50%. And I don't know if you've seen this. I think it's a comical video that Pete Hegseth put out. The head of the Department of War, we've renamed it more honest name perhaps than Department of Defense. But in that video and in a statement that the Pentagon put out after appearing before the Appropriations Committee trying to defend an absurdly massive increase in the Department of Defense, 50% that would make defense spending even higher than it was adjusted for inflation at the height of World War II to give people context for just how much money that is. But this is what this is Hegset's logic to this quote. We are firing up the American economic engine. And at every level of our defense industrial base, every policy we pursue, every budgetary item we request serves to ensure the department remains laser focused on increasing. I don't know how to say that word, lethality and survivability of our forces from the front lines to the factory floors. So they're basically saying war is good for the economy because it forces us to make more bombs and more planes and more bombs and more planes, create more jobs. I've heard this argument before. Four somewhere.
[33:15]
B
Yeah, Many, many times.
[33:17]
C
Many times.
[33:18]
B
And the fact is, the fact is it is good for the economy until it isn't. I mean, it is the exact same thing as saying, look, you're feeling bad about your life, you're in a bad place, throw a party, put it on the credit card. You'll feel better, and you will until the next month when you get that bill. And then you're going to feel worse than you did to begin with. Right? That's what's going on here. If the goal, if the goal is to gin up the economy, this is first off, this is not the way to do it. But if you're convinced that this is the way to do it, why spend 50% of the budget on increasing, you know, building more military stuff? Just cut checks to people. Let them buy the things they want to buy. I'd rather have more avocados than hand grenades. It'll make me happier. It costs the government the same amount.
[34:09]
C
But I'll remind you, Anthony, what happened last time. We cut everybody a check to go buy whatever they wanted.
[34:15]
B
Yes, you're absolutely right. And that'll happen again. Now it's not going to happen. The same magnitude 50% of the budget, of the military budget is roughly 7% of the entire budget. Back in Covid, we did 50% of the entire budget.
[34:31]
A
So explain for people that don't know, there's a famous economics lesson called the broken window fallacy. Explain that for people if you would.
[34:43]
B
Yeah. Broken window fallacy says that if you break a window, you actually create jobs because the glazier now has work in making a new window and the contractor has work in replacing the window. And we look at these things and we say, look, we've done a good thing. We broke the window. We created work. We created jobs, income. And what the. Where the fallacy comes in is in only looking at half of the story. The one half of the story is that the shop owner has to pay to have his window replaced. The other half that we've ignored is what the shop owner would have done with that money had someone not broken his window. You know, and he could have, you know, bought more materials for his shop or, you know, taken his kids out or his wife out for dinner or bought them new shoes or whatever it is. He could have done other things with that money that actually, that would have a created jobs just as much as the glazier's job and the contractor's job was created, but also provide the shop owner with something that he would rather have. I would rather have a night out with my wife, new shoes for my kid, more materials for my shop, than to have to replace a window that's already there.
[36:02]
A
And John Maynard Keynes famously, in the general theory, made this argument that you could actually stimulate the economy by filling in, I believe it was coal mines, filling in old coal mines and then paying people to dig those holes. Again, it's the same logic.
[36:23]
B
Oh yeah. And in fact, we use this logic and it becomes obvious. Every April 15, we pay a bunch of people in Washington to come up with convoluted tax codes and then we pay accountants to figure out how to undo them so that we end up paying what we would have paid if everybody had just gone and done something more useful with their time.
[36:44]
A
Do you remember Paul Krugman made this much ridiculed at the time? He was defending the Obama economy and the fact that the recovery just wasn't happening despite all of the spending. That Paul Krugman, the sort of caricature of a Keynesian economist that he is. And he actually argued. And I'm going to read from this because it kind of reminds me of Pete Hegseth. Paul Krugman and Pete Hegseth are kind of the same guy. If we discovered that space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat, and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. And if we made a mistake and there were no aliens, we'd still be better off. How's that any different than what Pete Hegseth is arguing?
[37:42]
C
Well, it's not.
[37:43]
B
It's the same thing.
[37:44]
C
When you initially read what Pete Hegseth said, I thought that's the dumbest goddamn thing I' heard all week. And then when, when you read from Krugman, I, I thought, well, that's the dumbest goddamn thing I've heard since the Pete Heth thing. And it, it really is the. The same batch of nonsense. If there are no aliens and you waste your time and your resources protecting yourself from aliens, you've just wasted all of your time and resources on an unnecessary thing and inflicted hardship on a globe the likes of which are unfathomable. And yet he seemed to honestly believe this kind of crap.
[38:35]
B
Let me throw in something here, which is I think we, the three of us, and the country also is doing exactly what, what Donald Trump would like us to do, which is circling around this question, this economic question. I think that's not the game. The game is actually in James Bailiwick, which is Trump is desperate not to lose Congress. If he loses both houses, he will be impeached, he may be removed, and at the least the remainder of his term is going to be taken up with 24 7. With nothing other than fighting impeachment and removal.
[39:15]
C
I'll bet, I'll bet the equity in my House that he will lose the House of Representatives. He will at some point, if he doesn't retire, be impeached and that that won't be a non starter in the Senate the way it was the last two times, that there will be people in the Senate who say, you know what, wait a minute. Well, he's the only.
[39:40]
A
He's a lame duck. He's a lame duck at that point. So he doesn't wield the kind of power over his own caucus that he would otherwise.
[39:49]
C
And does anybody really fear President J.D. vance? And I can't imagine that Republicans in the Senate are gonna care at all what JD Vance has to say about much of anything.
[40:02]
A
Yeah, the pendulum swing. This is always, you know, when Trump first came on the stage in 2015 and I was supporting Rand Paul for president at the time, it struck me particularly as Trump started to get traction and then just became an unbeatable force within the Republican primary. I always thought, you know, the pendulum swing against Trump coming from the left is going to someday give us someone like President aoc.
[40:38]
C
Agreed.
[40:39]
A
And my fear, with the collapse of the economy and the raging inflation and the spending, I feel like we're going to get someone that looks more like Mondami than Bill Clinton.
[40:56]
C
Yeah, but the three of us are old enough to know that Democrats have this historical record of shooting both of their feet off every time that they're looking at total victory. And I could see them doing it again. They get full of themselves. They do something profoundly stupid. I could see it happening again. The question is, do the Republicans have it in them to nominate an adult for this office? And I'm not sure they do.
[41:29]
A
I'm old enough to remember in Republican circles, everybody sort of laughing off Barack Obama, making fun of his name and pointing out that he was way left of any place Bill Clinton ever was. And, and then they proceeded to nominate Mitt Romney. And you know how that turned out. So I just think we're not going to vote our way out of this and the current Republican Party is not going to solve our problems. The question is going back to Anthony's original lament, how do we turn people on to some basic economics so that we could create a constituency for people that have really radical ideas like we shouldn't spend money we don't have and we probably can't print our way out of the next war. We're going to have to make Some tough decisions, and hopefully along the way, push more power and money and control of people's lives back to the people themselves. Is that, is that a pipe dream? Or can we, can we do that?
[42:43]
C
I don't think it's a pipe dream, or I wouldn't be sitting here right now. Right. I'd be wasting my time doing something else because this kind of feels like hitting my head against a wall. But I'm going to keep saying it. And I think the worse things get, the more interested people becoming in hearing what the crazy bald man's been saying. And you know that that's not nothing. And if you get a multiplier effect by sheer luck or accident somewhere along the way, which is generally how those things happen, well, great. But I'm, I'm going to keep right on going. I know Ant is too. I can't imagine you're going to stop, right? This is what we do, and we do it for very good reasons, honorable reasons. So. All right, you want to fight, let's fight. I'll keep fighting.
[43:36]
A
Anthony, way in.
[43:38]
B
Yeah, I agree. I think I came to terms some time ago with the fact that my value add is doing this. It's, it's writing about principles of, of liberty, it's speaking, it's doing the podcast. And, and if I'm doing that to the best of my ability, I'm doing the best I can. The rest of it, I have to trust and leave up to the masses of listeners out there. Let them do their part.
[44:09]
A
You know, I wish this wasn't true, but I think there's something to be said for people finally trying liberty after they've tried everything else. And I think the, the remarkable turnaround in Argentina is demonstrative of that. Things got so bad, inflation got so bad, the economy got so bad, people were so poor, that they finally said, you know what? This experiment in socialism just isn't working out. And they tried something radically different. And we'll see how that plays out. But I haven't checked in lately, but I feel like the voters are, in fact rewarding a fiscal hawk that says we can't continue to spend and inflate and regulate our way to prosperity.
[45:03]
C
It comports with common sense. And people still do have common sense.
[45:10]
B
They do. And if there's going back to James talking about the Democrats shooting themselves in the foot, the libertarians can do the same thing. In fact, we routinely shoot ourselves in the foot. It's just that we're not prominent enough that many people notice it, and we do it by. By diminishing those who disagree with us rather than finding common ground with them. In fact, that's why, in my experience, I, as a Libertarian, end up being lumped in much more with Republicans than I do with Democrats, despite the fact that I have probably as much in common with each of them. It's when I find when I disagree with the Democrats on just one thing, that's it. They'll have nothing to do with me. I can disagree with Republicans on just one thing, and they'll say, okay, let's put that aside. But here are these other things we do agree on. Libertarians aren't good at that latter piece. They're much more like Democrats when it comes to disagreement.
[46:08]
A
Yeah, I think that's fair. And part of that is the nature of small, ideologically driven communities. I still remember Bernie Sanders, old socialist buddies from Burlington. And this is when Bernie was a real national force threatening to defeat Hillary Clinton until the DNC sort of kneecapped him. They were complaining that Bernie just wasn't hardcore enough and he had sold them out. And I'm like, I. I belong to that club, too. I know those guys. But I don't know if. It's not really about political parties, though. I think so many people today are more inclined to call themselves independents because they're looking at the two choices in a Soviet grocery store saying, I got nothing here. They're searching. That should be an opportunity for libertarians and other third parties. We'll see how that goes. But I think, as we say often on this show, politics is downstream of culture. And our project, obviously on your show and my show, is to just turn people onto these ideas. And the simple logic of how this works can be applied to things that. That we don't even talk about.
[47:36]
B
So it's usually at this point, my mother, who always listens to our stuff, says to me, all right, you've said all this stuff, and it's interesting, but give us a solution. Say something about a solution. And I think there's a. Easy solutions are hard to come by, and often if it is easy, it's the wrong one. But I think there is a somewhat easy right solution to. To the problem you raised Democrats versus Republicans, and that is to break the monopoly hold that Democrat, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have on the televised debates. If we could get a third party, it doesn't even have to be Libertarian, just get a third option in there. It very, very much changes the dynamics amongst the. The now three of them. And I think we would end up, we would put an end to this extremism where Democrats and Republicans in the primary run to the edges as far as they can.
[48:37]
A
Yeah. And having been involved in presidential political campaigns before, including third parties, I could spend a whole show explaining to you how it is that the Republican Democratic duopoly cartel keeps changing the rules and rigging the game and moving goalposts so that should someone actually emerge, they will find a way to keep them off the stage. I will offer a different solution. And I'm sort of a one note Johnny on this. I think that. And you guys may have noticed that at the moment, the Republican establishment, the Trump administration, is spending a lot of time complaining about podcasters and how podcasters are off the reservation. And all the while, the power of these independent voices just grows and grows and grows. I think that's part of the solution in and of itself. I think frustration is an opportunity to get people's attention, and that's when people consider different alternative approaches to solutions, problems that they thought that their party was just going to fix. So I think, again, like Argentina, when things get bad enough, people start searching for alternative ways to fix problems. And that's why I still do it. To echo what James said earlier, this is why I do what I do. And this is why Free the people and words and numbers have partnered with. Because together, like, I don't even know what we're going to do with the size of the audience that we're going to generate together. It's going to be crazy.
[50:19]
C
Can I say the thing I always say?
[50:21]
A
Yes.
[50:22]
C
In these dark times, which are far less dark given what we've just announced today, but the times are nonetheless dark, and we all know it. Everybody's cranky about something. Take a look around, look at the quality of your life, and understand that every single thing you see would have been a miracle to your grandfather. Every single thing. And life isn't so bad. And if life isn't so bad, maybe you should cut the shit a little bit. I mean, seriously, just cut the shit a little bit. Not even all of it, just a little bit. And when you're feeling that urge to go, let somebody have it, be nice to him instead. See what happens. Be nice to each other. It's a small price to pay for a beautiful, beautiful thing. Be nice to each other.
[51:17]
A
Except Anthony, of course.
[51:18]
C
Except Anthony. He never. Not that jackass.
[51:22]
A
Don't be nice to him.
[51:25]
C
There's only so much any one man.
[51:29]
A
So obviously, people watching this show will have immediate access to words and numbers. On all of the channels where they follow Free the people on YouTube, as podcasts, all that stuff. But where can people find your work should they choose to be somewhere else?
[51:51]
C
Well, you can always find us at wordsandnumbers.org words a n d, numbers.org, those damn ampersands don't work in web addresses. And that's a great place. And that'll take you right over to our Free the People feed. Nice and easy. We are not hard to find. Amesrharrigan on X for me. Ntony Davies on X for him. What am I forgetting at? Oh, yes. And you can join us at Words and Numbers Backstage, where the conversation continues. It's our once small Facebook group that has now grown to 1800 or so members, all of whom are angry at me for something or another every day of the week.
[52:42]
A
Is there like a super chat feature where James will just yell at random people?
[52:47]
C
No, I just do that for free.
[52:50]
B
Yeah.
[52:50]
A
No upcharge.
[52:51]
B
Yeah, that's just a. That's part of the. What we offer.
[52:54]
C
Matt. I cannot escape my nature.
[52:58]
B
But, but I'll tell our listeners, know this. But, but for your listeners, if you have been wanting a place where you can go and talk about issues in economics, politics, society, disagree with people and not have them call you names, but take you seriously.
[53:18]
C
Words and numbers backstage, Yep, that's your place. And if they do call you names, we shut it down pretty fast. It happens from time to time. Not nearly as often as you would think in a group that big. But we have created a bit of a unicorn. It's a functioning little online society where people do, in fact, talk about important things without the vitriol. And it's a place where you have immediate access to me and Ant because really we started it because we couldn't keep up with the email we were getting. And we said, well, screw it, let's just start this and we can interact in real time. And it's been, I think, one of the best things we've ever done.
[53:59]
A
Nice. Well, I'm really proud to be partnering with you guys and associated with you and I look forward to seeing how this goes.
[54:08]
C
Yeah, we're really pleased. Thank you.
[54:09]
B
Thanks for the opportunity, Matt.
[54:11]
C
Nothing but blue sky ahead. It's going to be fantastic.
[54:15]
A
Okay, cheers, guys.
[54:17]
C
Take care.
[54:18]
D
Thanks for watching.
[54:19]
A
If you liked the conversation, make sure to like the video, subscribe and also
[54:25]
D
ring the bell for notifications. And if you want to know more about Free the people, go to freethepeople.org.
[54:42]
A
It.

Summary7 min read

Podcast Summary: Kibbe on Liberty – Ep 388: “Economists Have to Keep Teaching the Same Lessons”
Guests: James Harrigan & Antony Davies (Words and Numbers)
Date: May 27, 2026

Episode Overview

In this episode, Matt Kibbe welcomes James Harrigan and Antony Davies, co-hosts of the Words and Numbers podcast, for a dynamic conversation on repeating economic lessons, political hypocrisy regarding fiscal responsibility, and the perils of wartime economics. The episode also announces a new partnership: Words and Numbers is joining the Free the People family of programming. Expect the trio’s trademark candidness, humor, and frustration about the cyclical ignorance of sound economics in American politics.

Major Themes & Discussion Points

1. Big Announcement: Words and Numbers Joins Free the People

[01:34–03:44]

Harrigan and Davies announce their show’s integration with Free the People, expressing excitement at the shared values and potential audience crossover.
Matt Kibbe highlights the importance of collaboration over competition in the liberty movement:

"As an economist, I’ve always thought... cooperation trumps competition, because when it comes to building audiences... the net effect is a win for all of us. And that is sort of an economics lesson in and of itself." (Matt Kibbe, 02:34)

2. Origin Story of Words and Numbers

[04:48–10:19]

Antony recounts the accidental beginnings of the podcast, a fortuitous partnership forged by necessity and mutual respect, developing over eight years.
Early forays into video and format evolution reveal humility and the value of iteration:

"My God, did it suck. It was dreadful beyond all measure." (James Harrigan, 06:17)
Embracing their authentic dynamic—especially their repartee—proved popular with audiences.

3. The Need to Repeatedly Teach Economics

[10:42–12:59, 16:43–17:56]

The episode’s central theme: Why must economists keep teaching the same basic lessons every generation?
Kibbe notes the paradox of a culture with access to abundant, long-form content while political discourse (and policy) remains stubbornly ignorant or cyclical.
Antony notes two key forces:
1. Power attracts those who wish to wield it ("control freaks").
2. Most people are preoccupied with life’s necessities and accept simple political solutions without scrutiny.
"When a politician comes along who says he's here to make my life better...I say, yeah, for God's sake, do it. And that's where we come in. We've got to explain why it's so, why the easy solution is often not the right one." (Antony Davies, 13:39)

4. Fiscal Irresponsibility Across Parties

[14:17–17:56, 22:04–26:58]

Critique of both Trump and Biden: Both have presided over historic debt increases, with little attention from either party to deficits or fiscal sustainability.

"There’s not a single person that cares about fiscal responsibility anymore, let alone someone that understands that too much spending and too much borrowing leads to too much monetizing of debt..." (Matt Kibbe, 16:43)
Inflation, once a “future threat,” is now a “new normal.” Antony notes that despite repeated warnings, most Americans ignored economists’ cautions—until inflation hit home.

"What we've got now, the 3.5%, possibly more, that's the new normal... because of these deficits." (Antony Davies, 18:40)

5. Wartime Spending – Abandoning the ‘Guns vs. Butter’ Debate

[22:04–23:26]

Kibbe points out how, unlike in previous generations, American politics no longer even pretends to make budget trade-offs between military and domestic spending. Both are now increased simultaneously, regardless of party, severing any link between war and fiscal discipline.

6. The Looming Social Security Crisis & Deficit Emergency Cycle

[23:26–25:17]

Antony runs through a timeline of “crises” each decade—fueling justified deficits, which then never get reversed.

"Every single decade, one something. And I can tell you right now what the 2031 is going to be. It's going to be Social Security insolvency. And they're going to say we've got to increase the deficit to $5 trillion..." (Antony Davies, 24:01)
James forecasts that at some point political inaction will create a crisis too late to solve by conventional means.

7. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) & Political Expediency

[27:19–29:31]

The guests argue that MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) only gained prominence because politicians needed academic justification for more spending.

"She was espousing a fringe economic theory that would never have seen the light of day except for politicians... wanting to do anyway." (Antony Davies, 28:32)
They recall inviting Stephanie Kelton (“grandmother of MMT”) onto their show—she declined.

8. Keynesian Caricature, Broken Window Fallacy, and War as ‘Stimulus’

[31:00–37:44]

Kibbe and guests critique Trump’s proposal to increase the defense budget by 50%, and the reasoning that war/spending is good for the economy.
Antony delivers a textbook explanation of the broken window fallacy (35:00): destruction/war don’t create wealth, just opportunity costs.
They also poke fun at claims made by Keynes (digging and filling holes for employment) and Paul Krugman (alien invasion as economic stimulus).

"If there are no aliens and you waste your time and your resources protecting yourself from aliens, you've just wasted all of your time and resources on an unnecessary thing and inflicted hardship on a globe..." (James Harrigan, 37:44)

9. Political Prognosis and the Futility of Expecting Change from Parties

[38:34–41:28]

Antony and James predict Trump will lose Congress and likely face impeachment as a result.
Matt laments the (short) age of genuine fiscal debate and skepticism that either party will change course:

"I just think we're not going to vote our way out of this, and the current Republican Party is not going to solve our problems." (Matt Kibbe, 41:28)

10. Can Economic Reason & Liberty Win?

[41:28–47:35]

Discussion shifts to broader culture, the failure of political parties to offer fresh solutions, and the ongoing work of independent education.
Davies: Libertarians often fumble coalition-building by purism and not seeking common ground.
Kibbe: Most Americans see themselves as independents—an opportunity for new voices.

11. Practical Solutions & the Power of Independent Media

[47:35–50:18]

Antony advocates for breaking the Republican/Democrat stranglehold on debates.
Kibbe argues that alternative media—podcasts, especially—are the real answer, as legacy parties increasingly attack independent voices.

"The power of these independent voices just grows and grows and grows. I think that's part of the solution in and of itself." (Matt Kibbe, 49:13)

12. Memorable Farewell & Call for Civility

[50:18–54:14]

Harrigan closes on a trademark note, reminding everyone to put things in perspective and treat each other kindly—even in divisive times.

"Every single thing you see would have been a miracle to your grandfather... Maybe you should cut the shit a little bit. Not even all of it, just a little bit. And when you're feeling that urge to go, let somebody have it, be nice to him instead." (James Harrigan, 50:21)

Notable Quotes & Moments

James Harrigan on transparency:
"As soon as we became more transparently, honestly ourselves... people liked it, because they know we go after each other, but they can also tell we're the best of friends." (09:32)
Antony Davies on explaining economics:
"It takes us much longer to do it and to explain it than it does the politician to say, 'Oh, forget about him, I'll just send you more checks.'" (21:18)
Matt Kibbe on the broken window fallacy:
"War is good for the economy because it forces us to make more bombs and more planes and... create more jobs. I've heard this argument before. Four somewhere." (32:54)
Antony, on MMT’s political appeal:
"She was espousing a fringe economic theory that would never have seen the light of day except for politicians, encountered a situation in which they found her theory useful to advance what they wanted to do anyway." (28:32)
James Harrigan’s signature sign-off:
"Be nice to each other. It’s a small price to pay for a beautiful, beautiful thing. Be nice to each other." (50:21)

Segment Timestamps

[01:34] Announcement: Collaboration between Words & Numbers and Free the People
[04:48] Words and Numbers origin story, how their partnership began
[10:42] The challenge—why basic economics must be repeatedly taught
[13:39] Dangers of seductive political promises vs. economic reality
[16:43] Trump v. Biden on inflation, debt, and political honesty
[18:40] The “new normal” of persistent inflation
[23:26] The perverse cycle of “emergency” deficit spending
[27:19] MMT, Keynesianism, and politicians’ selective adoption of theory
[31:00] Defense spending, the "war as stimulus" fallacy, and the broken window
[35:00] The broken window fallacy explained
[37:41] Krugman’s “alien invasion” as stimulus—satirical takedown
[38:34] Prognosis for Trump, Congress, and the Senate
[41:28] Can principled economics win in politics and culture?
[47:35] Open debates: a partial solution; the hope for independent media
[50:18] Words and Numbers’ call for civility and gratitude

Where to Find the Guests

Words and Numbers podcast: wordsandnumbers.org
Words and Numbers Backstage Facebook group: Open, moderated group for thoughtful, civil debate.
X/Twitter: @amesrharrigan and @ntony_davies

Tone:
Candid, humorous, occasionally frustrated, driven by an earnest desire for liberty, truth, and good economics in a troubling political age.

Summary Use:
This in-depth breakdown is suitable for anyone interested in economics, politics, and the ongoing fight for better conversations in the liberty sphere—even (especially) if you did not catch the original episode.

Loading summary

Transcript124 lines

[00:00]
A
Welcome to Kibbe on Liberty. I'm talking to my friends James Harrigan and Anthony Davies of Words and Numbers. We have an exciting announcement and more importantly, we're going to dissect whether or not the head of the Department of War, Pete Hegseth, is in fact a closet Keynesian. Check it out. Foreign. Welcome to Kibby on Liberty. James Anthony, welcome to Kibbe on Liberty.
[00:59]
B
Thanks for having us, Matt.
[01:00]
C
Thanks for having us, Matt.
[01:02]
A
I was scrolling back to see when we had first been together on this show and it was at the height of lockdowns and you guys had just, I think, written a book criticizing the sort of command and control way that we were supposedly dealing with the pandemic. And we've, we've been friends and collaborators ever since. But we have a big announcement to make today and I think I'm going to let James make it and see how he does.
[01:35]
C
Well, this comes as a surprise, but a welcome one. Thank you kindly, Matt. Anthony and I, in Words and Numbers, will be joining the Free the People family of programming, starting well right as you see this. And we are, if I can speak on ant's behalf, incredibly happy to be on board with you guys. We've been kind of fellow travelers for a long time, fans. We've been watching your content. Apparently you at least lie to us and tell us you watch ours too. And it's a natural match, I think. And your audience, I think, will really like what we do. And I suspect that our audience is going to absolutely love what you guys do. So this is a bit of a match made in heaven, and yet we found a way not to screw it up. Yeah, so far. So far. I mean, give it a minute, but so far.
[02:34]
A
So one of my pet peeves amongst free marketeers and libertarians and classical liberals, you have all these organizations and all these influencers and all these thinkers and there's not enough collaboration and there's a lot of competition and there's a lot of people sort of guarding their audiences and their donor lists and all that stuff. And as an economist, I've always thought that there's an occasion in this instance where cooperation Trump's competition, because when it comes to building audiences, I think we will discover that Free the people's audience is going to be very enthusiastic about words and numbers, and your audience might be interested in some of the things we produce as well. And the net effect is a win for all of us. And that is sort of an economics lesson in and of itself. So we're going to prove the Point.
[03:37]
C
And more importantly, it's a win for everybody who watches both.
[03:41]
A
Right.
[03:41]
C
It's the audience that wins the most.
[03:44]
B
I want to speak specifically to our listeners that I've been following the Kibbes since before our podcast, before I did videos. I was new to the liberty movement, and I quickly came to conclusion that there was a handful of adults in the room when it came to libertarianism. And the Kibbes, I can count in the fingers of one hand. The Kibbes were one of them. And I watched your stuff, Matt, specifically, and said, I want to be like him. And so this is the pinnacle of my career at this point.
[04:16]
A
Well, I'll admit that I did pay you to say that, so I appreciate the delivery.
[04:25]
C
I'm now a little angry I didn't get a payment.
[04:29]
A
Well, you haven't said anything nearly that nice yet, so.
[04:32]
C
All right, we'll take it.
[04:34]
B
James isn't used to saying nice things.
[04:37]
A
Yeah, you're sort of the grumpy gnome of the duo, I believe.
[04:41]
C
Gnome is not the word I would prefer. Curmudgeon is acceptable. Gnome is not. But you do you.
[04:49]
A
When did you guys start Words and numbers? It's been a while.
[04:53]
C
Yes.
[04:53]
B
It's about eight years ago now, maybe more. More than eight years.
[04:57]
C
That sounds about right.
[04:59]
B
So, pretty much our genesis story is kind of interesting. I was giving a weekend seminar on libertarian. Some libertarian, I shouldn't say that. Classical liberal thought, philosophy, economics. And it was at my alma mater, St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, and at the last minute, our philosopher dropped out. And I called up the people that were putting this together and said, look, I need a philosopher. And they said, have you heard of James Harrigan? I said, no, I don't know Harrigan. Well, he teaches right there at St. Vincent. So we met because of that, I grabbed him. I said, look, can you come and give lectures on, you know, philosophy, libertarianism, this sort of thing, Classical liberal thought? He says, yeah, sure. When do you need it? I said, tomorrow. And we've been friends ever since.
[05:53]
C
Yeah, no, it's barely been a day that we haven't communicated since then. And somewhere along the way, Antony had this just thoroughly stupid idea. And, I mean, it was stupid. He. He said, what we need to do, James, is read our op EDS into a camera and then publish them, whatever that meant at the time. And I said, exactly. No human beings are ever going to watch that. And he kept at it and kept at it and kept at it. And I finally said, if I do one and we send it to an independent, disinterested observer and allow that person to decide whether this sucks or not. Okay, so we did it. And my God, did it suck. It was dreadful beyond all measure. But the person we sent it to was Sean Malone, who had just taken a job at Fee, and he got back in touch and he said, guys, this is terrible. I mean, this is just, this is so bad. I don't even know what to tell you, but Fee has tasked me with coming up with content and I don't have any. And you guys seem to be interested, so you want to do something. And I went from elated because I never had to deal with this shit again to devastated because now it's a weekly event for the rest of my life within milliseconds. And turns out Ant was wrong about the content, but right about the idea. It really was the thing that looking back on it changed both of our lives for the better and probably changed a lot of other lives along the way. So it was functionally all ants idea, and I was nothing but a roadblock. And I came along begrudgingly after a while.
[07:41]
A
It's pretty og to be thinking about video that long ago, because now it sort of seems obvious. And it seems that everybody knows that for better or worse, young people like to consume video content. And I view it as a gateway drug to actually picking up a book. But I'm also comfortable if my 2 minute video turns them onto a new idea and maybe it leads them to an hour long podcast, and maybe that podcast leads them to Amazon to pick up a copy of Hayek's Road to Serfdom. That does happen, and I meet audience members that tell me those stories every day. But whether we like it or not, video is where we're at. And if you want to go back, my political and philosophical enemies can go back and find some of the early stuff we did. For a company that doesn't exist anymore called crtb, those videos are probably looking a little bit like that first op ed that you read into a camera. So we all, you know, innovation is not always beautiful.
[08:48]
C
And it's not because we started with Sean's direction as an eight minute video podcast and learned rather quickly that exactly no one wanted to watch an eight minute video podcast. And we, we flipped over pretty quickly to a 20 to 30 minute audio podcast, then came up with the format, right the two quake hits, the foolishness of the week in the main episode. And once we did that, everything just started working. And there was one day, as you well know, because you've been behind the scenes. I insult Anthony constantly. I can't help it. He doesn't care. He likes it. Truth be told, he's a bit of a masochist.
[09:32]
A
And it's actually. It's actually the only reason I tune into Words and numbers. I'll be honest,
[09:39]
C
and I think you're not alone. But. But Anthony used to do all of our editing, and he would just edit all of that out as if it never happened. And one day he missed one and the fans went crazy. They went, oh, God, that was hilarious, what James said to Ant. More of that, please. I said, more of that. I've been doing that every week for the past two years. But Ant had been cutting it out. So as soon as we became more transparently, honestly ourselves and we've got this dynamic, it turns out people liked it because they know we go after each other, but they can also tell we're the best of friends.
[10:19]
A
There's no shortage of hot takes out there. What's actually rare is rigorous thinking.
[10:24]
D
People who follow the data wherever it
[10:26]
A
leads, regardless of which side it makes uncomfortable. That's exactly what Anthony Davies and James Harrigan do on the Words and Numbers podcast.
[10:35]
D
And Free the People is proud to
[10:37]
A
announce their launch on our channels. New episodes will drop every Thursday.
[10:42]
D
Check free the people people.org on social
[10:45]
A
media@freethepeople or find words and Numbers anywhere you listen to podcasts. Go give your brain something it actually wants. So I want to. I want to steal your guys format for the purposes of this show. And I'll reference the show that we all did on Words and Numbers just a while ago. And I've been thinking ever since about something that Anthony challenged me on. And the question was effectively, why is it that we have to keep teaching basic economic lessons over and over and over again? I think you said every 20 years, you're kind of an optimist. I'm not sure they stick that long. But economists and, and philosophers and people that are animated by ideas and logic and math, radical things like that, we get frustrated that politics seems to do the same stupid thing over and over again. And you have these two countervailing forces, one of which is the fact that young people are, in fact, consuming a lot of podcasts. You know, Rogan now goes upwards of three hours. And, you know, the mythology was that technology and social media was giving young people short attention spans, but I don't really think that's true. I think to the extent that they want to find something for themselves, they have an ability to curate a curriculum outside of university and outside of corporate media. And they are finding serious economic conversations out there, like what you guys do. But on the other hand, when you actually look at the politics of the day, it literally feels like idiocracy. So I want to, well, comment if you care to, and then I'm going to tee up some examples of my point.
[12:59]
B
No, I think it's absolutely right. And it boils down to, I think, two forces. The one is that power attracts the. What is the word? The personality type that just wants to control everything. Psychopath. That's a wrong word. But power attracts people who want to control others. And so you necessarily get a preponderance, not all of them, but you get a preponderance of people in government who. Whose goal it is to wield government. Now, they'll say their goal is to make life better and blah, blah, blah. That's a means to an end. The end is they want to wield power. That's one force. The other force is people who have more important things to do. You know, you got to raise kids, you got to have a job, you got to pay the bills. And to delve into minutia of economic theory is a bit of a slog. And so when a politician comes along who says he's here to make my life better in the way he can make my life better is by raising the minimum wage. I say, yeah, for God's sake, do it. And that's where we come in. We've got to explain why it's so, why the easy solution is often not the right one.
[14:18]
A
And this, obviously, I think there's a lot of folks right now that have buyer's remorse, having voted for Trump. And he promised to drain the swamp. He promised to uproot the deep state. But I feel like more than anything else, he promised to make America great again. And he was referring to the economy and the real economic pain that people have been feeling nonstop since lockdowns created so much devastation. And I want to pull up this quote from Trump just a couple days ago. This won't be news by the time we run this, but I feel like we're going to have this conversation every day until at least the midterms. Trump was asked by a reporter, I think it was cnn, whether or not he was worried about the fact that so many Americans are suffering. You're feeling economic pain, inflation, the cost of groceries, certainly the cost of gas, in part, at least in significant part because of the war in Iran. And this is what he said, not even a little bit. The only thing that matters when I'm talking about Iran, they can't have a nuclear weapon. I don't think about American's financial situation. I don't think about anybody shockingly out of touch with the people that elected him and the people that will show up this November to decide whether or not Republicans or Democrats control Congress.
[15:55]
C
Well, he said the quiet part out loud right there at the end. He wasn't supposed to say that. We all know he thinks it, but he wasn't supposed to say it. Inflation is at 3.5%. I mean, it had crept down and now it's crept back up again. Gas is 450 a gallon, and that is painful to people who have to commute to work. I mean, good God, it was $3 when he started bragging about what a great president he was just a few months back. And it's already up 50% from that point. And it's going to go higher because it always does in the summertime. I don't know how you could be this out of touch with the electorate, but I do know that the Republican Party is going to pay the price dearly in the midterms.
[16:44]
A
Yeah. To me, the question is not whether or not the Republicans can hold the House, but whether or not they succeed in holding the Senate. And if they do, it's only because of the peculiarities of this year's political map that that favors Republicans over Democrats. But, Antony, how do we get people to care about the fact that the Trump administration. I looked this up. And debt under the first 16 months of this Trump administration has actually grown faster than it did under Joe Biden. And remember, Joe Biden's presidency is in the midst of all of that extra pandemic spending, but Trump is spending more. And I feel like there's not a single person that cares about fiscal responsibility anymore, let alone someone that understands that too much spending and too much borrowing leads to too much monetizing of debt that ultimately leads to. To more expensive groceries. But why do we care?
[17:56]
B
Well, I think we care when it becomes painful to us. One of the problems, and perhaps economists, and I would include myself here, shot ourselves in the foot by warning over and over again that if we keep running deficits like this, we're going to end up monetizing them. It's going to come back as inflation. Those are words I've been saying for going on 20 years now. And in response, people say, yeah, but where's the inflation? I don't see it well, 2022, that's kind of the first time we actually started to see that inflation. And even now, James says he's correct, we're down to like 3.5%. I think it's projected to be 4% in Q2. But nonetheless, the inflation forecasts, and I've been watching this for going on three years now, the inflation forecasts out as far as they go. None of them, I shouldn't say none of them. The average forecast does not have inflation coming back at any point to what we had prior to Covid. In other words, what we've got now, the 3.5%, possibly more, that's the new normal. And it's a new normal that comes about because of these deficits. And you know, now that it's starting to become painful, to answer your question, I think people are going to start to look, they're going to start to pay attention. But then on the other side, we've got the politicians who say, oh, no, no, no, it's not the deficit, it's Joe Biden or it's Donald Trump or it's this war in the Middle East. That's not the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is we keep printing money.
[19:35]
A
Thank you for joining me today on
[19:36]
D
Kibbe on Liberty and for being part of our fiercely independent audience. Every week, my organization, Free the People, partners with BlazeTV to bring you this show. My guests bring smart perspectives on everything from current events to timeless philosophical debates. If you like what you hear, go to freethepeople.org kol and support Kibbe on Liberty so we can continue to produce these honest conversations with interesting people. Now, let's get back to it.
[20:06]
A
I'm thinking back to so we won't know whether or not we don't know today whether or not Thomas Massie will win his primary. And we will know by the time people are watching this. But I'm thinking back to his argument as the sole person that voted against the multitrillion dollar Covid bill, the CARES act, and he called it the cheese in a trap. And in that bill, there were relatively small checks to people that were of course, forced to lock down. They weren't allowed to work and instead the government sent them a check. But he called it the cheese and the trap because ultimately all of that money plus will come out of your wallets through inflation. And obviously that argument at the time fell on deaf ears. It's kind of hard to argue economics when people are in a full panic. But it does seem like when things are bad It's a moment for economists to step up and say, let me tell you why this is happening and what we need to do to get out of it. But that makes us the bad guys, right? Like we're always delivering the bad news.
[21:19]
B
Yeah. And it takes us much longer to do it and to explain it than it does the politician to say, oh, forget about him, I'll just send you more checks.
[21:30]
C
Well, just to put it in perspective, Ant and I have gone back and literally solved America's debt problem and America's Social Security problem. We have the plan that will do that. The only downside is that you would have to stick with the plan, each of them for 100 years. That's the kind of problem we now have. We have centuries long problems.
[21:59]
B
It's not an economically insoluble problem, it's a politically insoluble problem.
[22:05]
A
Yeah. And neither party, I don't know what we would have gotten out of a Harris administration, but I think the feeding frenzy, particularly during times of war, is very much a new thing. You guys may recall the old, the old macroeconomic argument about budgeting during times of war. The trade off between guns and butter. And it used to be the case within, certainly not perfect, but it used to be the case that there was some conversation about economic trade offs during times of war. And if we were at war and if that was the choice that voters and the president had made, that there would be trade offs, we would have to cut domestic spending in order to finance military spending. But somewhere around 2015 that was abandoned. And now instead of having typically the Democrats would be demanding more domestic spending and the Republicans would be demanding more military spending. Now regardless of the President, they just doubled down on, on both sides. And we've lost the connection between the pain of war, the fiscal pain of war and the consequences.
[23:26]
B
And it's not just war. If you think about it. This happens every 10 years. Something comes along that causes the politicians to say, look, this is an emergency, it's a one off. We've got to deficit spend, we've got to significantly increase the deficit. And voters agree and they say, yeah, this is a big deal, let's go ahead and do that. But then it never comes back, Right? So going by, going by decades, we've got Covid in the 2000 and 20s, we've got the financial crisis circa 2010, we've got 9, 11 circa 2000, we've got the meltdown of the SNLS circa 1990, we've got the inflation in interest rates circa 1980. We've got the oil crisis circa 1970. Every single decade, one, something. And I can tell you right now what the 2031 is going to be. It's going to be Social Security insolvency. And they're going to say we've got to increase the deficit to $5 trillion this year instead of only 2 because
[24:31]
C
of that grandma starving to death. Ant. Yeah, that's what that's going to be. What you said is the jab and what I said is the following. Hard right hand, right. They're going to look, we've got this terrible problem. Sit down so I can punch you in the mouth and give you the answer. And we could solve this, but we do not have the political will to do it. And we will, I dare say, never have the political will to do it. And that will cause a mountain of long term problems.
[25:07]
B
I'm going to disagree with you. I think there will come a time when we have the political will to do it, but at that point it will no longer be economically soluble.
[25:15]
C
Yeah, no, it'll be too late.
[25:16]
B
It'll be too late.
[25:17]
C
Too late. And you know, we've been kind of, we were once seen as crazy people. Me more than you, but both of us, because I think this will mark the end of the United States as we know it. How on earth could it not? And that's becoming a more irresistible conclusion now than it ever has been before.
[25:41]
B
Before.
[25:42]
A
Do you guys remember. And this seems quaint now, but back in the Tea party days circa 2011, there was in fact a serious political push to balance the budget and cut programs and reform entitlements. And we were putting defense on the table. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs at that time kept saying the biggest threat to national security is the national debt. And surely he was not a Tea Party Republican or a libertarian, but he was pointing out this point that you just made that empires die because they spend too much money they don't have. History teaches this lesson over and over again.
[26:33]
C
It does and will happen.
[26:35]
A
But unfortunately. Go ahead.
[26:37]
B
I was going to say ultimately when we deficit spend, we're, we use the phrase we're spending money we don't have, which is correct. Perhaps more specifically, we're spending future generations money and at some point they run out of money. Even more so now that we're in this situation where our population is topping off and is going to start to decline.
[26:59]
A
How much? It seems, it seems worse. The lack of fiscal accountability seems worse than any time in my lifetime. How much of this do you suppose can be attributed to the magic elixir of modern monetary policy? Modern monetary theory?
[27:20]
B
Yeah. I don't think much. Now that was a big player back in 2020, 2020, when we were expanding the deficit by 50% overnight, you know, and the argument from the MMT crowd was, yes, go ahead and print money, you won't get inflation. And the two of us, and I'm sure you as well said at the time, you can't do this, you're going to get inflation. Of course there was no inflation. People laugh at us and then come 2022, because these things take time. You get 10% inflation and people turn to us and say, why didn't you warn us?
[27:54]
C
Yeah, I would like to add that. Can we call her the mother of MMT theory? Or perhaps we should be more mean spirited and call her the grandmother of MMT theory. Stephanie Kelton. We invited her on Words and Numbers to explain herself and she didn't even return the email. So I don't know, maybe she knew all along she was full of shit, but we did. Anybody with half a sense of common sense, half an ounce of common sense, knew that that was crazy and yet.
[28:33]
B
But she, she, she was espousing a fringe economic theory that would never have seen the light of day except for politicians, encountered a situation in which they found her theory useful to advance what they wanted to do anyway. And I argue, I argue the exact same thing happened with John Maynard Keynes. Had it not been for the Great Depression and politicians looking for an excuse, academic window dressing to justify what they want to do anyway, Keynes would not have come to the fore.
[29:10]
A
Of course, the Keynesians became kind of a caricature of Keynes in the sense that he, he argued not only that you should expand spending during bad times, but that you should actually be fiscally responsible during good times. Politicians only chose half of that equation.
[29:32]
C
Right. If the Keynesian crowd had actually listened to Keynes, it wouldn't have been so terrible. Wouldn't have been. But you know, this is where we're left and you know, we don't have a lot of great options. And it falls to people like us, I think, to point out how utterly precarious our situation is right now. And people will either listen and change their ways, which I think the odds of that are slim to none, or this material will live on long enough that when we have to refound a country, people might remember and they might point back and say, these people were warning us all along, perhaps we should go check out their body of work and see what else they had to say because they were certainly right about this.
[30:23]
A
If you made it this far into
[30:25]
D
the show, it means I must be doing something right. Kibion Liberty is just one of the amazing products we created for the people. We tell emotionally compelling stories and produce educational videos for the Liberty Curious. Our award winning documentaries personalize all things liberty, independence, creativity, hard work, integrity and perseverance. After the show, check out our work@freethepeople.org and if you like what you see, donate to support what we do. That's freethepeople.org now back to the show.
[31:00]
A
So when I was preparing, I was trying to figure out what we would talk about today, and I had a revelation that now seems profoundly unprofound, but that Trump himself and the Trump administration and their spending policies are basically a caricature of Keynesian economics. And I guess that's always been the case. Trump has always been the king of debt and he loves borrowing and he loves spending. But I want to apply this to specifically the proposal that the Trump administration, kind of out of thin air, announced several months ago that they were going to increase the defense budget by 50%. And I don't know if you've seen this. I think it's a comical video that Pete Hegseth put out. The head of the Department of War, we've renamed it more honest name perhaps than Department of Defense. But in that video and in a statement that the Pentagon put out after appearing before the Appropriations Committee trying to defend an absurdly massive increase in the Department of Defense, 50% that would make defense spending even higher than it was adjusted for inflation at the height of World War II to give people context for just how much money that is. But this is what this is Hegset's logic to this quote. We are firing up the American economic engine. And at every level of our defense industrial base, every policy we pursue, every budgetary item we request serves to ensure the department remains laser focused on increasing. I don't know how to say that word, lethality and survivability of our forces from the front lines to the factory floors. So they're basically saying war is good for the economy because it forces us to make more bombs and more planes and more bombs and more planes, create more jobs. I've heard this argument before. Four somewhere.
[33:15]
B
Yeah, Many, many times.
[33:17]
C
Many times.
[33:18]
B
And the fact is, the fact is it is good for the economy until it isn't. I mean, it is the exact same thing as saying, look, you're feeling bad about your life, you're in a bad place, throw a party, put it on the credit card. You'll feel better, and you will until the next month when you get that bill. And then you're going to feel worse than you did to begin with. Right? That's what's going on here. If the goal, if the goal is to gin up the economy, this is first off, this is not the way to do it. But if you're convinced that this is the way to do it, why spend 50% of the budget on increasing, you know, building more military stuff? Just cut checks to people. Let them buy the things they want to buy. I'd rather have more avocados than hand grenades. It'll make me happier. It costs the government the same amount.
[34:09]
C
But I'll remind you, Anthony, what happened last time. We cut everybody a check to go buy whatever they wanted.
[34:15]
B
Yes, you're absolutely right. And that'll happen again. Now it's not going to happen. The same magnitude 50% of the budget, of the military budget is roughly 7% of the entire budget. Back in Covid, we did 50% of the entire budget.
[34:31]
A
So explain for people that don't know, there's a famous economics lesson called the broken window fallacy. Explain that for people if you would.
[34:43]
B
Yeah. Broken window fallacy says that if you break a window, you actually create jobs because the glazier now has work in making a new window and the contractor has work in replacing the window. And we look at these things and we say, look, we've done a good thing. We broke the window. We created work. We created jobs, income. And what the. Where the fallacy comes in is in only looking at half of the story. The one half of the story is that the shop owner has to pay to have his window replaced. The other half that we've ignored is what the shop owner would have done with that money had someone not broken his window. You know, and he could have, you know, bought more materials for his shop or, you know, taken his kids out or his wife out for dinner or bought them new shoes or whatever it is. He could have done other things with that money that actually, that would have a created jobs just as much as the glazier's job and the contractor's job was created, but also provide the shop owner with something that he would rather have. I would rather have a night out with my wife, new shoes for my kid, more materials for my shop, than to have to replace a window that's already there.
[36:02]
A
And John Maynard Keynes famously, in the general theory, made this argument that you could actually stimulate the economy by filling in, I believe it was coal mines, filling in old coal mines and then paying people to dig those holes. Again, it's the same logic.
[36:23]
B
Oh yeah. And in fact, we use this logic and it becomes obvious. Every April 15, we pay a bunch of people in Washington to come up with convoluted tax codes and then we pay accountants to figure out how to undo them so that we end up paying what we would have paid if everybody had just gone and done something more useful with their time.
[36:44]
A
Do you remember Paul Krugman made this much ridiculed at the time? He was defending the Obama economy and the fact that the recovery just wasn't happening despite all of the spending. That Paul Krugman, the sort of caricature of a Keynesian economist that he is. And he actually argued. And I'm going to read from this because it kind of reminds me of Pete Hegseth. Paul Krugman and Pete Hegseth are kind of the same guy. If we discovered that space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat, and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. And if we made a mistake and there were no aliens, we'd still be better off. How's that any different than what Pete Hegseth is arguing?
[37:42]
C
Well, it's not.
[37:43]
B
It's the same thing.
[37:44]
C
When you initially read what Pete Hegseth said, I thought that's the dumbest goddamn thing I' heard all week. And then when, when you read from Krugman, I, I thought, well, that's the dumbest goddamn thing I've heard since the Pete Heth thing. And it, it really is the. The same batch of nonsense. If there are no aliens and you waste your time and your resources protecting yourself from aliens, you've just wasted all of your time and resources on an unnecessary thing and inflicted hardship on a globe the likes of which are unfathomable. And yet he seemed to honestly believe this kind of crap.
[38:35]
B
Let me throw in something here, which is I think we, the three of us, and the country also is doing exactly what, what Donald Trump would like us to do, which is circling around this question, this economic question. I think that's not the game. The game is actually in James Bailiwick, which is Trump is desperate not to lose Congress. If he loses both houses, he will be impeached, he may be removed, and at the least the remainder of his term is going to be taken up with 24 7. With nothing other than fighting impeachment and removal.
[39:15]
C
I'll bet, I'll bet the equity in my House that he will lose the House of Representatives. He will at some point, if he doesn't retire, be impeached and that that won't be a non starter in the Senate the way it was the last two times, that there will be people in the Senate who say, you know what, wait a minute. Well, he's the only.
[39:40]
A
He's a lame duck. He's a lame duck at that point. So he doesn't wield the kind of power over his own caucus that he would otherwise.
[39:49]
C
And does anybody really fear President J.D. vance? And I can't imagine that Republicans in the Senate are gonna care at all what JD Vance has to say about much of anything.
[40:02]
A
Yeah, the pendulum swing. This is always, you know, when Trump first came on the stage in 2015 and I was supporting Rand Paul for president at the time, it struck me particularly as Trump started to get traction and then just became an unbeatable force within the Republican primary. I always thought, you know, the pendulum swing against Trump coming from the left is going to someday give us someone like President aoc.
[40:38]
C
Agreed.
[40:39]
A
And my fear, with the collapse of the economy and the raging inflation and the spending, I feel like we're going to get someone that looks more like Mondami than Bill Clinton.
[40:56]
C
Yeah, but the three of us are old enough to know that Democrats have this historical record of shooting both of their feet off every time that they're looking at total victory. And I could see them doing it again. They get full of themselves. They do something profoundly stupid. I could see it happening again. The question is, do the Republicans have it in them to nominate an adult for this office? And I'm not sure they do.
[41:29]
A
I'm old enough to remember in Republican circles, everybody sort of laughing off Barack Obama, making fun of his name and pointing out that he was way left of any place Bill Clinton ever was. And, and then they proceeded to nominate Mitt Romney. And you know how that turned out. So I just think we're not going to vote our way out of this and the current Republican Party is not going to solve our problems. The question is going back to Anthony's original lament, how do we turn people on to some basic economics so that we could create a constituency for people that have really radical ideas like we shouldn't spend money we don't have and we probably can't print our way out of the next war. We're going to have to make Some tough decisions, and hopefully along the way, push more power and money and control of people's lives back to the people themselves. Is that, is that a pipe dream? Or can we, can we do that?
[42:43]
C
I don't think it's a pipe dream, or I wouldn't be sitting here right now. Right. I'd be wasting my time doing something else because this kind of feels like hitting my head against a wall. But I'm going to keep saying it. And I think the worse things get, the more interested people becoming in hearing what the crazy bald man's been saying. And you know that that's not nothing. And if you get a multiplier effect by sheer luck or accident somewhere along the way, which is generally how those things happen, well, great. But I'm, I'm going to keep right on going. I know Ant is too. I can't imagine you're going to stop, right? This is what we do, and we do it for very good reasons, honorable reasons. So. All right, you want to fight, let's fight. I'll keep fighting.
[43:36]
A
Anthony, way in.
[43:38]
B
Yeah, I agree. I think I came to terms some time ago with the fact that my value add is doing this. It's, it's writing about principles of, of liberty, it's speaking, it's doing the podcast. And, and if I'm doing that to the best of my ability, I'm doing the best I can. The rest of it, I have to trust and leave up to the masses of listeners out there. Let them do their part.
[44:09]
A
You know, I wish this wasn't true, but I think there's something to be said for people finally trying liberty after they've tried everything else. And I think the, the remarkable turnaround in Argentina is demonstrative of that. Things got so bad, inflation got so bad, the economy got so bad, people were so poor, that they finally said, you know what? This experiment in socialism just isn't working out. And they tried something radically different. And we'll see how that plays out. But I haven't checked in lately, but I feel like the voters are, in fact rewarding a fiscal hawk that says we can't continue to spend and inflate and regulate our way to prosperity.
[45:03]
C
It comports with common sense. And people still do have common sense.
[45:10]
B
They do. And if there's going back to James talking about the Democrats shooting themselves in the foot, the libertarians can do the same thing. In fact, we routinely shoot ourselves in the foot. It's just that we're not prominent enough that many people notice it, and we do it by. By diminishing those who disagree with us rather than finding common ground with them. In fact, that's why, in my experience, I, as a Libertarian, end up being lumped in much more with Republicans than I do with Democrats, despite the fact that I have probably as much in common with each of them. It's when I find when I disagree with the Democrats on just one thing, that's it. They'll have nothing to do with me. I can disagree with Republicans on just one thing, and they'll say, okay, let's put that aside. But here are these other things we do agree on. Libertarians aren't good at that latter piece. They're much more like Democrats when it comes to disagreement.
[46:08]
A
Yeah, I think that's fair. And part of that is the nature of small, ideologically driven communities. I still remember Bernie Sanders, old socialist buddies from Burlington. And this is when Bernie was a real national force threatening to defeat Hillary Clinton until the DNC sort of kneecapped him. They were complaining that Bernie just wasn't hardcore enough and he had sold them out. And I'm like, I. I belong to that club, too. I know those guys. But I don't know if. It's not really about political parties, though. I think so many people today are more inclined to call themselves independents because they're looking at the two choices in a Soviet grocery store saying, I got nothing here. They're searching. That should be an opportunity for libertarians and other third parties. We'll see how that goes. But I think, as we say often on this show, politics is downstream of culture. And our project, obviously on your show and my show, is to just turn people onto these ideas. And the simple logic of how this works can be applied to things that. That we don't even talk about.
[47:36]
B
So it's usually at this point, my mother, who always listens to our stuff, says to me, all right, you've said all this stuff, and it's interesting, but give us a solution. Say something about a solution. And I think there's a. Easy solutions are hard to come by, and often if it is easy, it's the wrong one. But I think there is a somewhat easy right solution to. To the problem you raised Democrats versus Republicans, and that is to break the monopoly hold that Democrat, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have on the televised debates. If we could get a third party, it doesn't even have to be Libertarian, just get a third option in there. It very, very much changes the dynamics amongst the. The now three of them. And I think we would end up, we would put an end to this extremism where Democrats and Republicans in the primary run to the edges as far as they can.
[48:37]
A
Yeah. And having been involved in presidential political campaigns before, including third parties, I could spend a whole show explaining to you how it is that the Republican Democratic duopoly cartel keeps changing the rules and rigging the game and moving goalposts so that should someone actually emerge, they will find a way to keep them off the stage. I will offer a different solution. And I'm sort of a one note Johnny on this. I think that. And you guys may have noticed that at the moment, the Republican establishment, the Trump administration, is spending a lot of time complaining about podcasters and how podcasters are off the reservation. And all the while, the power of these independent voices just grows and grows and grows. I think that's part of the solution in and of itself. I think frustration is an opportunity to get people's attention, and that's when people consider different alternative approaches to solutions, problems that they thought that their party was just going to fix. So I think, again, like Argentina, when things get bad enough, people start searching for alternative ways to fix problems. And that's why I still do it. To echo what James said earlier, this is why I do what I do. And this is why Free the people and words and numbers have partnered with. Because together, like, I don't even know what we're going to do with the size of the audience that we're going to generate together. It's going to be crazy.
[50:19]
C
Can I say the thing I always say?
[50:21]
A
Yes.
[50:22]
C
In these dark times, which are far less dark given what we've just announced today, but the times are nonetheless dark, and we all know it. Everybody's cranky about something. Take a look around, look at the quality of your life, and understand that every single thing you see would have been a miracle to your grandfather. Every single thing. And life isn't so bad. And if life isn't so bad, maybe you should cut the shit a little bit. I mean, seriously, just cut the shit a little bit. Not even all of it, just a little bit. And when you're feeling that urge to go, let somebody have it, be nice to him instead. See what happens. Be nice to each other. It's a small price to pay for a beautiful, beautiful thing. Be nice to each other.
[51:17]
A
Except Anthony, of course.
[51:18]
C
Except Anthony. He never. Not that jackass.
[51:22]
A
Don't be nice to him.
[51:25]
C
There's only so much any one man.
[51:29]
A
So obviously, people watching this show will have immediate access to words and numbers. On all of the channels where they follow Free the people on YouTube, as podcasts, all that stuff. But where can people find your work should they choose to be somewhere else?
[51:51]
C
Well, you can always find us at wordsandnumbers.org words a n d, numbers.org, those damn ampersands don't work in web addresses. And that's a great place. And that'll take you right over to our Free the People feed. Nice and easy. We are not hard to find. Amesrharrigan on X for me. Ntony Davies on X for him. What am I forgetting at? Oh, yes. And you can join us at Words and Numbers Backstage, where the conversation continues. It's our once small Facebook group that has now grown to 1800 or so members, all of whom are angry at me for something or another every day of the week.
[52:42]
A
Is there like a super chat feature where James will just yell at random people?
[52:47]
C
No, I just do that for free.
[52:50]
B
Yeah.
[52:50]
A
No upcharge.
[52:51]
B
Yeah, that's just a. That's part of the. What we offer.
[52:54]
C
Matt. I cannot escape my nature.
[52:58]
B
But, but I'll tell our listeners, know this. But, but for your listeners, if you have been wanting a place where you can go and talk about issues in economics, politics, society, disagree with people and not have them call you names, but take you seriously.
[53:18]
C
Words and numbers backstage, Yep, that's your place. And if they do call you names, we shut it down pretty fast. It happens from time to time. Not nearly as often as you would think in a group that big. But we have created a bit of a unicorn. It's a functioning little online society where people do, in fact, talk about important things without the vitriol. And it's a place where you have immediate access to me and Ant because really we started it because we couldn't keep up with the email we were getting. And we said, well, screw it, let's just start this and we can interact in real time. And it's been, I think, one of the best things we've ever done.
[53:59]
A
Nice. Well, I'm really proud to be partnering with you guys and associated with you and I look forward to seeing how this goes.
[54:08]
C
Yeah, we're really pleased. Thank you.
[54:09]
B
Thanks for the opportunity, Matt.
[54:11]
C
Nothing but blue sky ahead. It's going to be fantastic.
[54:15]
A
Okay, cheers, guys.
[54:17]
C
Take care.
[54:18]
D
Thanks for watching.
[54:19]
A
If you liked the conversation, make sure to like the video, subscribe and also
[54:25]
D
ring the bell for notifications. And if you want to know more about Free the people, go to freethepeople.org.
[54:42]
A
It.