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The "What is Money?" Show
Democracy: The God that Failed | The Song Series | Episode 2 (WiM087)
01:28:27
Jimmy Song joins me for a multi-episode conversation covering the masterful anti-state treatise “Democracy: The God that Failed” written by Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
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- [00:08]
Speaker A
It's, it's well to at least one party. So you can't have something like slavery where you can, you can, one party benefits but the other party gets screwed.
- [00:18]
Speaker B
Right.
- [00:19]
Speaker A
And that's unfortunately been the model that we've been reduced to in a lot of societies. The Romans did it, did this that way and all the way up to the Soviet Gulags, they built their entire country and all of the infrastructure and stuff through slave labor. Right. They would put them to the gulag or whatever and that's how they would build it out. And that's what it reduces to when you don't have voluntary trade. So really the alternative to capitalism, the alternative to voluntary trade is some form of slavery, which is not a very good prospect.
- [00:57]
Speaker B
Absolutely. Maybe the voluntary trade is a positive sum game and if we introduce an involuntary aspect to that, it becomes much more zero sum, much more master and slave dynamic. And that's embedded in the central bank system. There's involuntary exchange right to the core. Every time we print money, they're stealing from the productive economy. And I think I've been thinking about this a lot recently too, is I think this impacts not only our self identity but our group identity as well that we identify so much with politics. We're so concerned about our political leanings one way or another. And it's only because politics determines the distribution of property to a large extent. If it couldn't be stolen, then all of a sudden we just wouldn't have an incentive to care about one another's political leanings as much. So it's almost like politics is this mass psychosis induced by fiat or at least contributed to by fiat currency.
- [02:05]
Speaker A
Yeah, fiat money definitely raises the stakes of politics because there's this money printer that you get to control if you get into power. So of course elections matter because it's all about spending this common public property, especially in the democracy where everything becomes sort of hyper political because if you come out on the losing side, you kind of are screwed by the majority that get what they want, but at your expense ultimately. And this is like sort of getting much deeper into the book about the flaws of democracy. But this is definitely one of the things that should concern us, is that when you combine democracy with fiat money, it makes it like the stakes get way higher. And of course a lot more people are going to be political because there's just so much at stake.
- [03:09]
Speaker B
Yeah. So we really are changing our behaviors, our patterns of action, the characters we exhibit by the systems that we inhabit, or the incentives that we Face. I guess it reminds me of that quote I love Paraphrase says every public election is an advanced auction on stolen goods. The author gets into that in very good detail soon. So just before we get into that, he talks a bit about goods themselves, where they come from, that essentially we have to, each of us owns ourselves. This is an undeniable fact. Only you can move your arm. Only I can move my arm. We control our time, our mind, et cetera. That is the most personal form of property. It's given to us just by virtue of being alive. And then every other form of property is when we take that personal property and go out into the world and combine it with something that we then own. I mean, that's the idea at least that we have exclusive rights to that property. We can trade it with other self owned people. And that's the basis of capitalism, wealth creation. So he calls us, we're expropriating from nature effectively. There's things in the world, we're going out and making it our own and then we're trading it with each other. And it seems like perhaps this political or Keynesian worldview kind of extends that expropriation from nature into human nature a little bit. It's where people start to decide they want to cross that line and say, whatever you worked to produce, I now have rights to that. Maybe we could say politics is treating people as a means in a way. They start to actually look at them as capital goods and trying to control them perhaps. So this, I mean, one of the ways I'm looking at this is civilization in itself. And in addition to all the things we've said today, one of the most important aspects of it is that we build systems and technologies that resist this expropriation of others so that we can secure ourselves against this predation of property.
- [05:32]
Speaker A
Yeah, and this really comes from this idea of socialism, which I think only really came into prominence post enlightenment with sort of like this denial of God is this idea that, okay, if it doesn't belong to pre enlightenment, it was, it's all gods and you know, we're all, you know, sort of, you know, borrowing his stuff, including our own bodies. Right. Like, and this was the motive for virtue or to leaving things better than we found them and stuff, because we're not expropriating from nature per se, we're expropriating from God or we're, we're not even expropriating. We're not really ever possessing it as much as we are taking care of it. Until you know, we're done. And, you know, there's. There are many biblical parables about this, but the one that stands out to me is the parable of the Talents. You know, he's entrusted you with a bunch of stuff, right? And this could be, you know, your skills and your abilities, which is how people tend to think of that, which is where why the word talent came to mean, like skills that you might have that you happen to be good at. But it's also other things that you are appropriated, including land that you might have or things that you will inherit. It's everything that was. That used to be how people thought of as property. But once you remove God from the equation, now it's like, okay, who does it belong to? And this is where the title of the book is just so poignant, because Democracy, the God that Failed. The place where democracy goes wrong is that when it becomes a God. And to a degree, that's what it's become, where property doesn't belong to a person anymore. It belongs to the collective, to the democracy, to the government. And this is where, you know, like, all forms of socialism. And I think Hopper basically calls democracy sort of sort of like a representative socialism or something, something to that effect. It's the idea that everyone owns it. But then, as he argues, if everyone owns it, no one owns it.
- [07:54]
Speaker B
Right.
- [07:55]
Speaker A
And this. This is the particularly poignant part of it, is that when you make it a God, then you don't really have a good argument for why they can't take it away from you. Right. Like, if you make something and there is no God and there is no sort of, like private property or whatever, and it belongs to the collective, yeah, they have a claim on it, if that's the philosophy that you subscribe to. But if you believe in natural rights and if you believe in God, if you believe in private property, then none of that makes sense. That expropriation of your labor, that claim that government has on you, is based on this idea that democracy is our God, and it is a God that has failed because all of its promises about making everything better by having collective ownership of something. And really what he's saying is democracy is just a mild form of socialism or communism or something like that, where there is this idea of a public good and that private goods get expropriated into public goods very quickly as things progress, as we've been seeing. So in that sense, I think it is important that we have some way to protect our individual rights, our individual property, and having some sort of Ways to prevent seizure. And Bitcoin, I think is like hands down, better than anything that we've ever seen ever, because it is in a sense, metaphysical. It doesn't have a physical location and therefore you can seize whatever. But if I keep it in my brain, there's no way you can get it out. And just despite you, I might not let you have it. I'm willing to die on this hill. That might be. Be the case. And that, and that level of individuality, that level of freedom, of, of being able to resist is like, is a virtue, I think, in civilizing something because it prevents this expropriation, the stick in the flywheel or whatever, to a small degree. Obviously, like you can't prevent a lot of the bigger stuff that they enforce with guns, with threats on your life. But stuff like this, where you do have significant value stored up here, well, you can't take it away. All right, that's amazing for low time preference behavior, because ultimately you can rely on that. Whereas they can tax almost everything else. They can take it away and, you know, pass laws that say, you know, like, like the first law that almost every tyrannical government does is they. They take your property, right? It's okay. It's not legal for us to take our. Take your property. And if government is the God, right, it doesn't matter if it's necessarily democracy, monarchy, or whatever. And we can talk about the subtleties between those differences in a bit. But if they have that right or if there is no God and they act as a God, then you really have no recourse. You can't say, well, you can't do that. Why not? Why not? We have the power and we have the guns and we have the ability, so why not? And if you appeal to some moral thing, they can say, we make the morals and that's it and you're done. But if we have something where they don't have the ability to take it away, well, at least we can stop them at that level. And there we go. They can pass laws, but you still can't take it away because you don't have the ability to. And that's really our defense.
- [12:07]
Speaker B
Well said, man. Bitcoin, it's such a pragmatic defense of this core morality to Western civilization. And this goes all the way back to, I think it was Aristotle that said, when everyone owns everything, nobody takes care of anything. So it's not like, I guess we figured out empirically true in the 20th century that socialism does not work. It's pretty Clear it does not work. The results could not have been more catastrophic, but it's something we've really known forever, right? This is not, not new knowledge or wisdom. And this idea of removing God from the state sort of leads to this. And you don't even, in kind of a purely secular sense, if we just said God is a higher principle to which the state is accountable. Right. You don't even need the deity or any of that. When you remove that and the state has no accountability, it just runs amok effectively. Um, and I think in, you know, in Western civilization at least, I guess that higher principle would be preservation of life, liberty and property. Roughly. We could really condense that based on what we've learned here today, that it's really just property. Right. If you, you are natural law, right?
- [13:26]
Speaker A
Like ultimately, like the, the idea that you have rights and that you can't violate them, that's it. Like, that's what, what the Declaration of Independence was all about was you are violating our natural rights. Therefore you are not il legitimate government. You can't say that if you don't have a higher principle to appeal to exactly like natural law. And that's unfortunately the direction we're headed that apparently we don't have a natural right to assemble. We don't have a natural right to even. Like if you're, if you live in Australia, go outside whenever you want. Like, that's, that's not a natural right that you have. And that is, that is a very scary thing because when you, when you take those things away, you get civilization collapse fairly quickly.
- [14:15]
Speaker B
Yes, yes. It is a very slippery slope towards totalitarianism when government that is really only intended to uphold those things. The preservation of property, which we could say includes life, liberty, property or natural law and natural rights, when they turn on that, it devolves very quickly. And so, and this is, you know, property rights themselves, there's been many arguments made, I agree with this, that they actually emerge from the Judeo Christian ethos that, you know, Jesus taught us the sovereignty of the individual matters more than the sovereignty of the state or any group right. Individual identity matters more than group identity. That's kind of the core of property rights. It's like the individual is the element of civilization, not the group necessarily, which can maybe be a bit tricky for people to comprehend. But it's like when you optimize for the individual, you actually have a better group outcome versus if you have the group identity superseding individual identity, you get socialism type outcomes. And so there's this Property is the crux of the whole thing. Right. The government's there to preserve property, it feeds on property. And this is where the technological domain comes in. It's like, we need to have a sounder civilization. You need unassailable property or inviolable property is kind of the ideal. Gold was the best thing we had. You could conserve a lot of economic value in a small space. It could be secured and verified. And it lasted a long time, all these. These things. But Bitcoin is something fundamentally new. It's a damn near unassailable property if you do it right. And it's a purely voluntary system. To our point earlier, that there's no involuntary element to it, so there's no coercion. It's kind of stripping coercion out of socioeconomic systems as well. And yeah, it might be the most important thing ever in that respect.
- [16:26]
Speaker A
Yeah, what that brings to mind is just how much the state, when it tries to change human nature, how much it doesn't work. And this is where the a priori Austrian economic axioms like people prefer things now versus later and things to that effect really come into play. Because when you do prioritize the state, you are essentially making the claim that you can change each individual's preferences, right, which you can do to some degree, but like axioms like that, you're not going to be able to change, at least not easily, not without complete brainwashing and turning essentially people into animals. And this is why optimizing for the individual works much better than optimizing for the collective. Because if you optimize for the collective, you're essentially. And this is what Keynesians do, if you try to do that, you're essentially trying to change human behavior, which is, which is the real flaw of socialism and communism is that they're trying to flip these axioms on its head and saying, no, you're going to prefer this instead of that. You know, when people don't operate that way, and in order to make them behave in the way that they think they should behave, the only real thing that works is lots and lots of fear. And that means exertion of violence, of threats and things of that nature which cause people to behave in the way that people want, that the, that the rulers want, but ultimately is counterproductive because you're essentially taking away the creative and productive capacities of a lot of people and reducing them down to some form of slavery. And it's beneficial maybe for the rulers for a short time, but it's literally decivilizing because all of those people can't think of the future. And it's only the future of the rulers that get satisfied and not like all of civilization. And collectively it just keeps collapsing.
- [18:47]
Speaker B
Yeah, it's an excellent point and it seems like one we have learned repeatedly, yet we are here once again going through it again and kind of a new manifestation. And it's almost like to your point, they're trying to change human nature or control it, I guess. And it's, you know, in the long run, to your point, in the short run, sure, you can get people to do different things by pointing a gun at them or threatening them, whatever, but in the long run, it's as fruitless as trying to change the laws of physics. I mean, you just create this unstable system that eventually ruptures, right? There's some revolution or some breakdown. And this isn't a hypothesis. I mean, again, it's rooted in a priori knowledge. You're destroying the incentive for people to be productive, the ability for people to be productive. The government or the rulership feeds on that productivity. It needs income and wealth being generated by the productive economy, otherwise it doesn't exist. Right. It's like a parasite that kills the host, if you will. So yeah, it's heavy thoughts to think, maybe for most, but it's a very, very serious matter. And now the author, I want to get into where he introduces government, government growth and the process of decivilization spanning from monarchy to democracy. And I'll read an excerpt to introduce this. He says, quote, every government, and that means every agency that engages in continual institutionalized property rights violations, AKA expropriations, is by its nature a territorial monopolist. There can be no free entry into the business of expropriations, otherwise soon nothing would be left that could be expropriated and any form of institutionalized expropriation would thus become impossible. Under the assumption of self interest, every government will use this monopoly of expropriation to its own advantage in order to maximize its wealth and income. Hence, every government should be expected to have an inherent tendency toward growth in maximizing its own wealth and income by means of expropriation. Every government represents a constant threat to the process of civilization, of falling time preferences and increasingly wider and longer provision and an expanding source of decivilizing forces. I mean, this is heavy. He is positing that government, contrary to the belief, I think, of most people, that it is the preserver of civilization, is quite in fact the opposite. It is a Threat to civilization as an agency that's engaging in this continual institutionalized form of expropriation of property.
- [21:56]
Speaker A
Yeah, he's essentially saying that they are sticks in the flywheel. Whatever productive capacity that people naturally have through trade specialization, building up of capital goods through capital accumulation and things of that nature, all of this civilization building is essentially slowed down by any form of government. Essentially because they have a monopoly on certain things. And there are certain a priori things about human nature that, you know, that will lead such monopolies to become very inefficient and subject to moral hazards that they'll fall into and so on. So what you have is in his argumentation is that government doesn't actually protect anything more, that they actually take things. I don't think I would necessarily go that far. I think it is possible for government to be protecting people, especially from foreign invaders. Like common defense. I think is. Is a pretty good argument for why you would want a government. And obviously the larger the territory, the more peaceful territory there is and the more opportunities to trade you get and stuff like that. And that's basically how the US operated up until World War I or so, where it was known as an isolationist country to most of the world because they didn't really do things outside the US they kept. They kept out of European affairs. And it was a tradition, for example, for presidents to never leave the United States during their four years in office. They literally would not go to any other country. They would stay. And it was Woodrow Wilson that broke that as part of his campaign for the League of Nations and getting the US into World War I and so on. But that was what the US was like. And providing for a common defense and doing things like that, I think have some value. Although a monopoly, I think, as he sees it, is probably bad and there was probably inefficiency as a result of that. But yeah, I think his general point is definitely correct, that it's more a tax on productivity and the abundance of everything rather than a facilitator as we tend to view it. Again, history is written by the winners. And it is in the interests of governments like ours to make the claim that they are the cause of this abundance rather than the abundance being there despite their interference.
- [24:59]
Speaker B
Yeah, and this seems to be related to really the founding principles of America as we tried to create a decentralized implementation of government such that there were checks and balances on this institutionalized predation of property. Again, try and optimize for the individual. So it was like the principles are sound. The implementation was actually good initially, but it became corrupted over time. The social contract sort of broke down. And he has this other. I want to read this one other short excerpt. He says, given that all expropriation creates victims, and victims cannot be relied upon to cooperate while being victimized, an agency that institutionalizes expropriation must have legitimacy. So, you know, there's that old saying that no government can remain unpopular for long. Like they have to actually get public buy in on this ideology. It has to be justified. And this reminded me of the end of human action or Mises is basically saying that when it comes to ideologies winning the court of public opinion is so critical because it's not like the ideology that best serves humanity necessarily wins out on the free market. You know, it's like there's a lot of rhetoric, a lot of propaganda that gets mixed in with it. And the truth does not necessarily prevail on its own. Like, there have to be champions on its behalf. There have to be people speaking on behalf of libertarian principles or whatever it may be. And I just, you know, the degree to which false ideologies have taken hold of the world today is simply stunning. And I think we mentioned earlier this idea of reciprocity between your virtue and your savings. So there seems to be this constant relationship between what is and how we behave. There's this back and forth. And I guess my great hope of Bitcoin is that we just have something that will help us like a true disciplinary force that will help us get to the next level of human organization where we're not constantly going through these cycles of us was great in the beginning. It honored private property rights. It was an isolationist nation, had low and predictable taxes. We had English common law tradition. We had all this stable stability, effectively that let us become incredibly wealthy and powerful. But then with that wealth and power drew all these. The growth of the parasite, I guess you might say. And now it seems like we're on the backside of that or approaching the backside of that. Hopefully not too soon, but who knows? How do you think about. How do you think about this battle that we face against false ideologies and trying to spread the truth about this.
- [28:16]
Speaker A
Yeah. As you said earlier, ultimately every government has to kind of sell itself. Right. Like and make sure that they are approved by the people. No government can stay in power without the consent of the government for much for that long. Although, you know, North Korea is proving to be quite the exception, having done what they've done. But that said, like how do you sort of legitimatize what you are doing? And really the path to that was shown, I think from the 20s on with the advent of propaganda. That's been the hack that a lot of people or a lot of people in power have discovered in order to essentially manipulate people into thinking something legitimate without thinking too much. Right. Like, they've put in a culture of not too much critical thinking around areas that they don't want examined too closely. So the monetary system is definitely one, but also how legitimate some of these ideologies are. Not many people give thought to a priori knowledge. They're given sort of false statistics with the veneer of empiricism, right? Like, oh, you know, like for a long time during the Soviet Union, they would always like, spout these statistics about how the Soviet Union was much better because they had more scientists per capita and things like that, which are kind of meaningless statistics, honestly. Like as far as scientific breakthroughs, they stole most of them, right? Like, got them from spies in other places. So they were very good at espionage and things of that nature, but actual original things like they weren't very good at. But, you know, they can sort of make it seem legitimate through propaganda. That seems to be the, the path of what these governments are doing. The thing about propaganda, and I read a book a while ago, or at least got through part of it by Jacques Elal, you know, that talks about propaganda, is that the propaganda has to be mostly based on truth. The idea isn't to lie all the time. That just looks ridiculous. And people cognitively have a very difficult, difficult time incorporating lies into their worldview unless it's like, really held there by force. It's to tell most of the truth and the truth that you want heard. But the key to propaganda is not saying the truth that actually matters. And this seems to have been the strategy. This is why we don't find out about the monetary system or all the different things that go on in foreign policy. I'm learning now about stuff that happened in World War II that I always thought I knew. I'm like, what? Is that what actually happened? And it's like, okay, Germany was this crazy aggressor that went in against its ally, Russia. What we don't know, what we aren't taught in history books, is how aggressive Russia was against Germany for about six months before that. What they did in Romania, Bulgaria and many other places like, they, they, they were clashing heads. Like, at the time it was very, very clear that they, they were going to go to war. But this is not something that you read in history books. It's Hitler invaded Russia and then the Russian winter killed them. And then you know, like, you know, basically the Allies won. And they don't go into any of the screw ups or the stupidities or you know, Roosevelt's idiocy, like just utter complete idiocy that he displayed in World War II that I could get into, but that were just really, really bad or US foreign policy in the Middle East. I had a show with Scott Horton about that. And just the utter stupidity of what we've done there the past 42 years is just absolutely unconscionable. And the only reason that sort of thing doesn't get known is because of propaganda. And this, this, this is the thing that we're trying so hard to fight against. But with centralized platforms this is near impossible because they now have not just like it used to be that TV was just, while radio was extremely effective because you can actually hear the person's voice and you can hear like how sincere they sounded and so on. And then TV came and you can, you can see people's like sincere faces. And like every politician now has to be an actor, right? Because if you don't give the right facial signals and things of that nature to the audience and you don't sound sincere, then people are going to sniff you out and you're not going to get elected or whatever. It's gotten to the point where we have Twitter and YouTube and all these other things, all these platforms that are essentially becoming nationalized where there is a central controller and if they don't like a particular thing, they can just say, hey, you know what, we're going to shut down your license or we're going to take away this clause from this obscure bill so that you're now liable for whatever your users are saying. The channels of propaganda are getting worse, right? At least as far as our ability to be manipulated goes. But this is where sort of like Bitcoin is sort of the vanguard of the resistance against that is that it's showing us that it can be decentralized and there are ways to get out messages on a peer to peer basis. And really it's going to require some people to take responsibility and run their own servers and things of that nature. Because if you're not serving up your own content and you're relying on another service to serve up your content while you're, you're essentially going through their censorship filter. Whereas if you are going peer to peer, you have no censorship filter. And that's the key to being sort of immune from propaganda, is either not paying attention at all, which very few people are willing to do, or you have to have sources that are actually genuine and not only what they want you to see. Because most of propaganda, again is mostly telling the truth, but truth from only one side and like the rest of the other stuff, they just get you to ignore. And that's unfortunately been the case. And this is, I think, our resistance against that.
- [35:29]
Speaker B
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- [38:53]
Speaker A
Yeah, I would say. Well, there's a few things that Hapa talks about in the first chapter, but the main one is that it's still a government. So in his view, I think it qualifies as a parasite, but it's a parasite that cares a little bit about the host and making sure that the host stays alive. Whereas with the democracy, it's okay, well, you know, whatever happens to the host, whatever is what happens to the host. And for that reason, like because it wants the host to stay alive, it might even like not suck as much blood, blood from it or some, or hurt it quite as much as would, you know, something that's not necessarily a parasite, but it's, I guess democracy is more like cancer, right? Like, no, no reason to stop its growth. It just continues until the host is dead. So in that way, I think that's the main difference that he shows, is that there is that monarchs have skin in the game. The other thing that I found really interesting is this idea of class consciousness, that in a democracy it's not at all clear that you are not part of the ruling class because you always have that potential to get to that ruling class. That is the American dream that's sold to you. Despite the fact that very few people that get in tend to be very uniform in certain things. You have to have done certain things in order to have gone there and so on. So it's not nearly as expansive as it seems. But that illusion, as he calls it, is what sort of gives you this idea that you own a piece of the government when you really don't. It's really owned by nobody. But with the monarchy, you have a specific person that owns it. So that class division or that class consciousness means that as a non monarch or somebody that has the potential to be a monarch, which is typically very few people, relatives of the monarch, typically. But if you know that you're not, then it's like, okay, well aren't you supposed to take care of it? And it isn't sort of like this weird idea of civic responsibility or whatever where you're not really incentivized with money to do something, but with some weird moral tinge to everything where it's your civic responsibility to go vote or to recycle or to do X, Y or Z, which is kind of unique in a democracy, whereas with a king it's sort of, okay, well, aren't you supposed to take care of it? What am I getting out of it, right? Like, if you want me to do something, you better pay me. Or, you know, it becomes a market exchange instead of this sort of weird ideological thing that democracies tend to impose largely through propaganda.
- [42:23]
Speaker B
Yeah, it's a great point. It reminds me again, it's like democracy and socialism are in many ways one and the same. You're replacing these economic incentives with some obscure devotion to the nation state in one way or another, jury duty or recycling or whatever. That just doesn't work as well. It just doesn't cohere people together as effectively as direct economic incentives which tend to prevail under a monarchy. And to tie this back to the earlier discussion of time preference, I want to read another couple of excerpts here. He's making the point. The monarch has a property right in the tax basis, so he has skin in the game. He's accountable to his customers, I guess is another way we could say this. The monarch has accountability with his customer base. Hoppe says the defining characteristic of private government ownership and the reason for a personal ruler's relatively lower degree of time preference as compared to criminals and democratic governments, is that the expropriated resources and the monopoly privilege of future expropriation are individually owned. He's got skin in the game. And he goes on to say that assuming no more than self interest, the ruler tries to maximize his total wealth, that is the present value of his estate and his current income. He would not want to increase current income at the expense of a more than proportionate drop in the present value of his assets. Furthermore, because acts of current income acquisition invariably have repercussions on present asset values, reflecting the value of all future expected asset earnings discounted by the rate of time preference, private ownership in and of itself leads to economic calculation and thus promotes farsightedness. So he has an incentive to increase the total capitalized value of his kingdom effectively. Whereas. So I think about this as like owning a car versus renting a car, right? If you own the car, you have an incentive to take care of it and make sure that the capital asset on your balance sheet car lasts as long as possible. If you're renting a car, if you've ever rented a car, you know how you tend to treat it like you just don't care because you're just going to drive it hard and slam the door. And it just doesn't matter because you're giving it back at the end of the week. That's kind of like the difference between a monarch and a democratic ruler. The democratic ruler is effectively renting the car. He has no economic interest in the capital value of the economy. He's just giving it back at the end of the week. Although in this case, it's every four years in the US Versus. The monarch owns the interest, the capital interest, and he can pass it on to his heirs. So it's this. What is that old saying that. Actually, I'll let you speak to that and I'll look up this quote that I think captures it really well.
- [45:44]
Speaker A
Yeah. I would go even further with the analogy. A monarch is one who owns the car. Somebody in a democracy, a president in a democracy, they don't just rent a car. At least with a rental car, they check the car afterwards to see if you did it, any damage and stuff like that. Said, you know, this a guy that's probably stealing the car stereo, replacing the tires with something cheaper and pocketing the difference and, you know, like taking out the car jack in the back trunk and, you know, stripping it of the leather like that. That's the degree of, you know, sort of like asset stripping. By the time it gets to like, you know, fourth generation, it doesn't really even have tires. You know, like, it might have, like, crack windows everywhere because, you know, like, maybe they drove it through a terrible neighborhood or something like that. And yeah, like, it's. It's a piece of junk very quickly because, like, there's no incentive for anybody during that whole thing to take care of it other than maybe for the four years that they get to drive it. So maybe at the beginning they treat it a little better, but then afterwards it's like, I don't care. It's gonna go to my successor.
- [47:00]
Speaker B
Yeah. And it's a nice. Because there's so many delayed consequences to their actions. It's a great way to blame your successor. Right. When the wheels do come off, you've kind of stuffed the economy with all these hidden risks, and then you can just blame the next guy. So there's.
- [47:18]
Speaker A
Nobody's changed the oil for years. Yeah.
- [47:22]
Speaker B
This key point. And we keep coming back to property being the crux of the matter. And I think another way to think about property rights individually, it is the mechanism of responsibility. If you want someone to be responsible for something, give them a property interest in the thing, then they will have an incentive to take care of it over time to improve its capital value. And there's this great quote, this is from Matilda Bethem Edwards. She said, quote, give a man the secure possession of a bleak rock and watch him turn it into a garden. Give a man a nine year lease on a garden and watch him convert it into a desert. The magic of property turns sand into gold. I love that quote. I think it just captures it so well. And I think of people like Peterson that talks so much about responsibility and how important it is in our lives individually and property is the implementation of responsibility in a socioeconomic system. You can't have real responsibility without property. I mean, to your point, you can try these other mechanisms of oh, do it for your country or whatever kind of amorphous semi incentive that might be. But to give someone a direct financial incentive to secure and protect and preserve something is undoubtedly, I would say even inarguably the best way to make sure that asset has a long life, long and useful life. And that's the difference here. The monarch has a property interest, the democratic ruler does not.
- [49:10]
Speaker A
Yeah, and that's what it comes down to is that a priori knowledge, which is that if somebody owes something, they're going to want to preserve it or improve it, or at least most of them will. There are very high time preference people. And this is kind of what Rome ran into is Tiberius was a huge saver, but his successor ended up spending all of the property or all of the collected revenue and ended up having to raise taxes because he was just so profligate with his spending. It does happen, but at least with a monarch we have a chance. But with a democracy you have no chance whatsoever. Because ultimately what people end up doing is they, they just spend as much. And this is something that we can know a priori that you can't really impose new behaviors on a person. This is what we were talking about earlier is that there are certain incentives that people have and these can be treated as axioms of economic science. But instead what they do is they try to change the person to fit their economics. Like, okay, we're going to have this collective economy or something to that effect and we're going to change everyone's behavior by instilling them new civic virtues. You're going to go and recycle and clean up the highway and do whatever. To some degree there are people that are enough of a rule follower that they'll just go and do it even to feel good that they're supporting the government in some way. But the Vast majority will not. And that's been shown over and over again in every sort of like socialist, communist thing. And this is where it gets dicey, because typically when enough people sort of resist, you get. You start getting into tyranny. You start getting into methods of violence and fear. And this is kind of what's happening right now, right? Like they're trying to make it seem like vaccination is your civic responsibility, that it's your civic duty, but it's not working on a lot of people. And at some point it's going to be, well, you're going to lose these services if you don't do it, or you're going to get taxed more, or you're going to, you know, like there's going to be some threat or violence that's going to come upon you in order to get you to comply. And this is the flaw behind all of these democratic socialists or some sort of essentially socialist ideas of changing human behavior to conform to the good of the state. Rather than trying to protect the good of each individual, in which case you get prosperity, they're trying to promote the good of the state, in which case you end up trampling on individuals. And that causes this civilization, which is what we're seeing.
- [52:29]
Speaker B
Absolutely. We're back to that. Prioritizing the group over the individual. And it's all the crucible of all this. It always comes down to property. Even when they're trying to instill these virtues, quote, unquote, do your civic duty and get your vaccine or whatever. I think a strong argument could be made that it's really trying to optimize the property of those that benefit from that vaccine, whether it's the vaccine producers or whatever industrial complex behind it. And it's further the way I think about this, it's almost like the state as a predator of property in a way. So this idea of mandating vaccines, let's call it a specter, right now, it's kind of a threat. I don't think it's really been completely done anywhere yet. If I'm not mistaken, that would be the violation of your most personal property. It's like they're crossing the threshold of your skin and your body via government mandate. We know that government tries to encroach on your property step by step. So it seems like that step where they actually mandate you to take a vaccination would just be the most fatalistic step and then from there they could just take it any direction. And also in the sphere of war on property, the Fiat currency inflation that's been rampant since COVID That's all a violation of private property. People really need to understand that when you hear printing money or raising the debt ceiling, it all means the same thing. You're being robbed in broad daylight, full stop. There's nothing else to it. So one other thing I wanted to hit on monarchy, which you brought this up. I think it's a very important point before we move into the shortcomings of democracy, was this clarity of class division. In a monarchy, you know, relatively, certainly you're either part of the ruling class or part of the ruled class. And Hoppe makes a point that this promotes solidarity among the ruled. So it's like they know that they're being expropriated from. But because they know that and there's clarity, they have, there's more group cohesion among some. Like if the ruler makes a misstep or does something they don't like, they have more power to keep him in check, you know, by, by moving as a collective and further to that, the ruler. There was more symmetry between the incentives and disincentives. So if the ruler wanted to, say, go to war and expand his territory, he was expected to do that from his own balance sheet. If you went out and tried to, and I know the line's not a bright line here, but if you tried to tax the population for the war or print currency or whatever, they would resist, there'd be a resistance because there was this clarity of class division. Whereas what we see in democracy, there's no such thing. It's like we just go to the printing press to finance, at least in the US this global imperialist effort. So there seems to be this point of clarity and more clarity and certainty in a monarchy that promotes lower time preference versus the obscurity that we see in democracy.
- [56:15]
Speaker A
Yeah, there's this illusion of consent that you have in democracy. I think that's what he calls it, that makes it seem like if the monarch, if a democracy goes to war, that they have the consent of the governed, whereas with the monarch it's, you know, I'm going to do what I want, but, you know, you're not obligated to like, support me in that. Right, that, that, that's basically the monarchs, Monarchs thing. And conscription was rare and resisted heavily whenever that like, came into being. Like, people would hate that because they knew like this, this was a form of tyranny. Whereas in a democracy it's like it's your civic duty to sign up for the army or something. Something to that effect. It's, you know, they have to utilize propaganda so much more because it is very unnatural. But there's also some level of confusion about what you consented to and so on. And that's what gets exploited for the benefit of those in power. And it really still is kind of a small class of people. It's just that they can do things without necessarily having to pay the price for them that they would in a monarchy. So in a sense, I think the argument that Hopp was making here is that, that monarchies allow a very clear draw much clearer boundaries around whose is what's. Whereas in a democracy you have this weird thing called public property. And this is where almost all the problems around political discourse come because you have even stupid stuff like littering. Where is it a problem? It's a problem on like public highways or public places or it's because, well, like if a private property owner owned it, then they would say, okay, if you want to come on my property, don't litter. If you litter, I'm going to kick you out and you can't use it again. But with public property, it's not at all clear. I mean, we have like a problem right now here in Austin where we have all these homeless people on public property, right? Like, that wouldn't exist on private property. If you set up a tent next to my house or on my lawn, I'm going to get a gun and say, get off my lawn. That is not allowed on private property. The abomination of public property is what has caused all of these problems that happen politically. And this is what you get to avoid because you have clear boundaries around whose is what's. And in a monarchy public, there is no public property. There's the monarch's property and there's your property. The monarch owns the property. He can do whatever he or she can do whatever he want, he or she wants to do with it. But if, you know, like, if they want to host homeless people, be my guest, right? Like it's their property. But you know, like, don't like force us to have homeless people on our property. That would be expropriating our property. At which point we're going to go and resist. But with public property, it gets to be this weird in between state that gets taken advantage of by the ruling elite to sort of take it, like, I don't know, seize power or make things inconvenient or do all sorts of power plays. I find it hilarious that every time that there's some sort of like Budget battle, and then they don't have a deal. Like the first thing that they shut down are national parks. Absolutely the first thing every single time. And this is because this is one of the clear things that is public property. And they want to shut it down so that everybody else feels the pain and not them. They don't shut down the government bureaucrat that's working for the NSA or something like that. Always shut down the freaking national parks. Pisses me off. And if they were more vicious, they would probably shut down the interstate highways, but they would never do that because they're beholden to corporations that depend on the trucking.
- [60:27]
Speaker B
It's a beautiful rant. We're back to this again. Public property. Back to what Aristotle said. When everybody owns everything, nobody takes care of anything. We just get this tragedy. The commons property again is a mechanism of responsibility. Then public property is kind of an oxymoron. It's just an abdication of responsibility. Nobody's taking care of it. So it's just the most littered, abused, neglected property, if you even want to use that term. There is, and Rothbard makes great points about this too, that the issue of pollution is largely because we don't have more private property. If you dumped sewage in my river, I would sue your ass or stop you from doing it Versus if the river, we don't really know who owns it and it's public property, then the corporation has an incentive to go and dump in this river that nobody has a financial incentive to preserve. So it's just a breakdown of incentives, I think across the board.
- [61:38]
Speaker A
It's a fuzzy boundary. And nobody does well when you have a fuzzy boundary, because it's not clear who's is who. And this reminds me of how people tend to like, even like going on Twitter or something like that, and they complain about being kicked off. And it's like both sides have good points, right? Because what do you own really, when you have Twitter account? Because like, do you own your likeness? Do you own their database rows? Like, what the hell do you own? Because it's not at all clear when you have centralized parties that sort of like, like clearly Twitter, the corporation owns the databases or at least rents them out from AWS or something like that. It's not at all clear where the boundary is there. Who owns what? Do you own your tweets or do you not own your tweets? And if they own even a part of it, then ultimately that's what results in them being able to ban you off their platform. And like you said this is the big problem, like most problems, like, if you had clear property boundaries, you wouldn't have. And this whole censorship debate is because of the fuzzy property boundaries that exist. And I think this is like a bigger point that Hopper makes later on. Democracy is antithetical to private property.
- [63:09]
Speaker B
Yes.
- [63:09]
Speaker A
Because as soon as you have a democracy, there is some level of claim to your property that they have. They make themselves sort of a trusted third party. So if you own a house, for example, well, you know, you don't really own it because they can tax you, and if you don't pay your taxes, they'll take it away. So really, you don't have full possession of your house. And the boundary between what's yours and what's theirs is not at all clear because they have this right to tax. And that's similar for almost everything in a democracy because of this ability to create new laws with the quote, unquote consent of the governed. And you can be in the minority that gets screwed in that instance, in which case you're a slave to the majority, in a sense. And that's kind of the direction we seem to be going. But I'll save that a little for later.
- [64:06]
Speaker B
Yeah. I guess even technically on Twitter, you're the product, frankly. Right. To a centralized party, so you don't really have any property. Right. But further to the point, to really have. Which, I mean, even when I say freedom of speech, I think Rothbard, too, would argue here that's a property rights issue. It's like, if you just have property.
- [64:31]
Speaker A
Rights, where are you doing it? Yeah. If you're at my home, you're not allowed to say certain things or I'll kick you out. Yeah, but if you're on public property, it's like, completely amorphous.
- [64:41]
Speaker B
Exactly. So if we just had, you know, uncensorable media, effectively in the digital age, that would give everyone sort of providence over their own data or property. Right. In their own whatever they're doing online.
- [65:00]
Speaker A
Yeah. I mean, this is what I would call like running your own server. Right. If you're hosting your own stuff, yeah. That's your property. And if people want to subscribe to it and pull from it, yeah, that's fine. You can go do it. And maybe I'll even charge a little bit of money for it through lightning. Right. Then you don't have any property rights issue there. And if the government says, hey, I'm going to ban you from being able to disseminate your lies, well, come at me, bro. You're going to Seize my computer. That would be a giant property rights violation. And I think there would be enough people that would be like, oh hey, you can't just seize this computer. Why? Because you don't like what he said? That's definitely against the founding principles of this country. And I would have trouble seeing even a very liberal Supreme Court saying well that's okay, but I mean that's the idea is that right now we have to entrust some part of all of our property to the democracy. There is a public claim to your property in some way in a democracy which is pernicious and evil and wrong, but we kind of tolerate because democracy is supposed to be good.
- [66:24]
Speaker B
Yeah. When you take that public claim on your property and you combine it with this tendency for governments to grow, as Hoppe laid out earlier, it just becomes, it encroaches further and further on your property. And that's what we're going through right now. Again, the printing of money, the mandatory vaccines, all of this. So we'll shift a bit into the specific problems with democracy. The first obvious one we've touched on already, that public officials, they just have little to no skin in the game. They have these two to four maybe eight year windows, they effectively come into office, they inherit whatever problems from their predecessors, they have a short window in purely economic terms to maximize their current income of their position. But they have no interest again because they have no property, they have no capital interest in the productive economy at all. So they don't care if all the wheels come off if they're a four year guy. If all the wheels come off in year five, so be it. They have no skin in the game to that outcome. So they're incentivized to maximize current income even at the expense of decapitalizing the economy. And they just don't face consequences of their actions, frankly. So there's no symmetry of incentives and disincentives that maintains it. And it's just kind of this convincing illusion in a way, as Hoppe argues, that we have self rulership when in fact we're just rotating in different rulers every so often that are maximizing their own interest at the long term cost of everyone.
- [68:13]
Speaker A
Yeah, and this is why the monetary policy has been just so loose over the last 50 years, because each successor has no incentive to restrain spending. And whether it's for war or it's for social programs or whatever, there is zero incentive to do that. They want to get theirs before they leave office. And whether it's for their party or for, for them Personally or whatever. Generally. Like the crazy thing is that what they end up doing is spending billions, sometimes trillions of dollars so that they can have $30 million for the foundation that they establish afterwards. Right. Like it's a paltry sum compared to the amount. And they're okay with it because once a trillion dollars that I'm not paying when I'm getting $30 million afterwards. And this is the prize that they're going for, which is completely insane that this is the trade off that they're willing to make. But they do it all the time and they do completely pointless and unproductive things like run wars in order to get their however many millions afterwards. It seems like it would be much better if we could just bribe such people like before they get into office. Just bribe them and say we'll give you $30 million, just don't do anything, just don't do anything, just stop doing anything and we'll just pay you $30 million. That would be better.
- [70:00]
Speaker B
Yeah, yeah, that's a great point. Yeah. Again, just broken incentives and it just really distorts the outcomes. Another point that Happy makes is that because the lines are blurred, anyone can come into office so anyone can get into this position of benefiting from expropriation. Let's say that it decrep. There's less clarity of the rulers and the ruled. So this actually decreases the solidarity of the ruled because you don't know really who's who. And this actually lowers the resistance to expropriation because. So the government can just get away with more because there's no, there's not again, there's not a bright line. Right. You can't say you're taking for me because it's. We're all kind of a mishmash in this one group. So this kind of gets us into something else that's really problematic is it tends to increase the ratio. As governments are spending more and more and more. We're increasing the ratio of government to private sector employees. And so it's just more and more misallocation of capital. And I think back to the ussr, which again we have this common outcome between democracy and, and straight communism that towards the end of the USSR I think the numbers were 1 in 3 people with a job were government informants. So they're just, just ratting on one another, you know, like that. Clearly that's a non productive activity. But that made up, you know, a third of their, their employment.
- [71:44]
Speaker A
Yeah, I mean you can kind of do that when you have slave labor which they had, right. And it was so, so crazy, like, learning about just how much they leaned on that in order to make their economy run, because socialism just does not work and you need slave labor in order to make that work. But, yeah, getting to your broader point, democracies do have this weird blurred line. And that in turn means that when you. When government takes something away from you, it's sort of like, we're not taking it away from you per se. We're just sort of sharing it with everybody else. You know, you still own part of it. Right? Like, that's sort of like the justification that they give, although to any property owner they know what's actually going on whenever they get summoned for, you know, like, what's that thing if the government just takes your property?
- [72:49]
Speaker B
Imminent domain.
- [72:51]
Speaker A
Yeah. Any victims of eminent domain will tell you straight up, okay, yeah, that was theft. But this is the pernicious thing about democracies is that they can say that everyone owns it as a justification for taking your stuff away. And it seems more legitimate because, well, the greater good has need of your stuff, and then they take your stuff. And, you know, I mean, not to say that monarchs didn't do the same thing, but it was much less tolerated because it was seen as the monarch's war or the monarch's expenses or something like that. If, you know, if the monarch took your horse because he has need of it, you'd be like, why? You're already really rich and you can afford it. Why are you just taking it away from me? But when the government does seems more legitimate somehow, despite the fact that they have all kinds of resources and all kinds of land and all kinds of stuff that they supposedly own that could potentially be sold or used to raise revenue, but they don't ever do it. Why? Because they have the printing press and they can steal from everybody at any time by just printing more of it. And that's ultimately like the biggest expression of quote, unquote, public property is the money. Because they say, well, we'll just print more of it. Government has need of your. Your savings and will use it for the common good. It really is this common good fallacy that's inherent in quote, unquote, public property that confuses absolutely everything. Like, what's the common good? I've been reading some Aquinas lately, and I think even his view of the common good is fairly confused. And it doesn't really make sense because it's hard to measure things collectively, and it does kind of get into empiricist camps. Because how do you measure the common good? How do you even know that it's ultimately better for most people when everything, all value is subjective and there's no real measurable way to figure that out. So they just sort of take it as an article of faith that you can do that and that it will benefit people in some way in the future.
- [75:37]
Speaker B
Yeah, it's a great point. I'm. The common good seems to me to be this kind of moralistic camouflage, not unlike the communistic thing, you know, from each according to their ability, to each according to their need. It's just a lie, frankly. You know, it's an excuse or a scapegoat to get away with whatever they want. I guess the other point here is that to try and measure that outcome, the greater good or the common good, very difficult, amorphous to do. But we know a priori that a free market promised on purely voluntary exchange would optimize for the want satisfaction of the most people. Like by definition, that's what it does. So it's so simple almost, you know, like just instill liberty and let things be, you know, don't violate the property of others and then we create the best outcomes as a result. But human beings, you know, just our sinful nature, we have just not been able to just do that. We just keep crossing that line across one another's property. The other point, I think that, and Hayek makes this point a lot too, that because there is a way for people to get on the other side of this nozzle where they can benefit from the expropriation. This is attracting people with high time preferences, thirst for power, limited farsightedness. It's actually a magnet for the worst people in society. And so you end up with democracy, ends up with this top heavy ruling class of the worst people. It's scary to think about, but I would. I think we're seeing the consequences of it now.
- [77:34]
Speaker A
Yeah, I mean, it really does sort of like have terrible incentives. And you know, at least at the beginning in the United States, you know, like there were a lot of people that were, that saw like being president as a burden, right? Like Washington was like, he really wanted to quit after the first term, but everybody wrote him and said, your country really needs you, please go for another four years. And he's like, all right, fine. And then he's like, I'm not doing it, I'm not doing this anymore. Right? Like that was his attitude. And these were virtuous men, they really wanted what was best for the rest of the country. And they tried very hard to restrict themselves. I'd like to think that's the case of more leaders today, but all the evidence is that they're definitely not. Or either that or they're just, you know, they're not the ones in charge. Right. Like the people in charge are what we would now call the deep state. It's, it's almost like, you know, its own creature at this point where they, they've, they seek to, you know, keep growing as a parasite on society and whatever the figurehead might be, they kind of do their own thing and, you know, it grows fat on fiat money, which allows them to direct access to the economy to suck blood from. And that's the unfortunate reality of what's going on today in a democracy. But I would say that, like democracy, I think, isn't quite as potent or as pernicious or evil or morally hazardous as it would be without fiat money. It is fiat money that really supercharges all of the worst aspects of a democracy. And this is where I disagree with Hopper a little bit. I think there are redeeming aspects to democracy versus a monarchy in the ability of transitions of power and so on tend to be much more peaceful in a democracy. Whereas in a monarchy you have three sons, then you have three, you have this terrible times of transition and things like that. I think there are good aspects of a democracy. It's just that combined with fiat money, it just supercharges its evil to a degree that it really is this civilizing. Much more so than maybe a monarchy would be.
- [80:39]
Speaker B
Yeah, agreed. I think another. Maybe we can finish with this for today. The incentives that it creates for a democratic ruler to basically just borrow and accumulate debt on the behalf of the productive economy or on the public balance sheet, if you will, is enormous. And we know that. And they're basically passing that buck along again to someone else, the next democratic ruler that is equally non liable for the debt. So they're incentivized to accrue all these benefits to themselves and defer the cost. And clearly rising government indebtedness, a huge problem today. The United States, one of the worst in the world. We know that this fragilizes economies. It raises time preferences, as Hoppa argues. And I'd like to just read this one other excerpt I think captures it well. He says, quote, while the king is by no means opposed to debt, he is constrained in this natural inclination by the fact that as the government's private owner, he and his heirs are considered personally liable for the payment of all government debts, he can literally go bankrupt or be forced by creditors to liquidate government assets. In distinct contrast, a presidential government caretaker is not held liable for debts incurred during his tenure of office. Rather, his debts are considered public to be repaid by future equally non liable governments. And he goes on to say, quote, and with the expectation of a higher future tax burden, the non government public also becomes affected by the incubus of rising time preference degrees. For with higher future tax rates, present consumption and short term investment are rendered relatively more attractive as compared to saving and long term investment, unquote. So there's just an incentive to accumulate more indebtedness which raises time preferences and destroys civilization. It's an a priori explanation of what we are living through today. And it just blows my mind.
- [83:02]
Speaker A
Yeah, and if you thought that public property was an abomination, public liability is even worse of an because literally nobody cares, right? But there is debt that needs to be paid. And this is where it gets really pernicious because like to take it back to the car analogy, right? The Monarch is the one that owns a car and the President is one who has access to a car. Well, each president successively takes out loans against the car so they could go.
- [83:36]
Speaker B
Buy what they want.
- [83:39]
Speaker A
This is what's been happening in the US US over and over again, and this happens in every democracy with fiat money, is that you have this spigot of new money that comes in the form of loans, but it's really money printing and public liability continues to grow. So really I don't know what the assets. If you did an accounting of the federal government balance sheet, you have certain assets like public land and things like that, that versus the public liability. I actually wonder if it would be largely negative. I imagine it would be for a lot of countries. Certainly for the US it would be pretty close because the federal government owns a freaking ton of land, at least in the US But I wouldn't be surprised if it was negative at some point. I think all the real estate in the US is something like 30 trillion. I think we're pretty close to that with the federal deficit. And I imagine that it has to be only a portion of that for real estate and so on. So I don't know that ability to incur debt means that really public property is of negative net worth because of the public liabilities, which is the territory we're getting into. And that's probably towards the end of its existence, if that's what continues to happen.
- [85:11]
Speaker B
Yeah, and to your earlier point, fiat Supercharges this dynamic, especially as global reserve currency, we have even more incentive to take on even more debt because we can always just print our way out of it. So there's just, we've kind of just getting this double whammy of democracy and fiat currency driving us deep into indebtedness. And basically that is a destructive force of civilization. I mean what.
- [85:45]
Speaker A
At least monarchs have to be solvent. Democracy does not. And that's the big restriction.
- [85:53]
Speaker B
I forget was it, I forget who said it, but he said there's two ways to enslave a country. One is by the sword, the other is by debt. You know, so such a, such. I guess putting these two things together, democracy and fiat currency, they're like two forms of self deception at scale, you know, and it leads to these self destructive behaviors. Yeah, it just, it is. So I hope that by talking about it or at least equipping people with more knowledge about what's going on in the world so that we can rectify this in the years ahead because it's very disheartening to look at it where it stands today.
- [86:39]
Speaker A
Yeah, I personally hope for smaller city states where we try different forms of government that might be more appropriate to the local population and stuff like that and see what works, see what doesn't. And you know, a priori there are certain things that you can predict about certain ones. So like if you have a socialist city state, it's probably not going to work and a lot of people are going to just leave as soon as it gets tyrannical. But you know, like there are other things that we could find out empirically like that work for certain regions and at certain times and so on. So I'm hoping that's the direction we go in. But unfortunately we're in a fiat based economy where control over territory matters as far as being able to tax them stealthily. And there is this natural inclination for governments not to grow themselves but to grow their own territory so they can tax more people. One thing I remember reading that, I was like, that's not exactly true because of fiat money was Hapa says that they have to have war in order to get more territory so they can tax more people. But I was like, actually the US doesn't do that. They tax more people. Just with the monetary conquest and having the world on a dollar standard means that they could tax everybody in the world. So. So I thought that was a pretty interesting point.
- [88:16]
Speaker B
Yeah, that is very interesting point.