Musk/Trump; Debt; Parade; Fannie & Freddie; Blasphemy Law; Dems | Yaron Brook Show
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Fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is the Yaron Brook Show. All right, everybody. Welcome to Yaron Brook Show. On this Friday, June 6th, as our political titans continue to clash. Well, I don't know. Elon Musk has gone silent. He's not taking phone calls from anybody. Silicon Valley is freaking out.

They've invested a lot of money in Elon Musk companies and invested a lot of, I guess, energy and capital, reputational capital in the Trump administration. They're freaking out, but Elon is not taking calls. Trump has basically said he's not going to take a phone call from Elon. Yesterday, the rumors were that there was going to be a phone call today between them and they were going to reconcile. Many people within MAGA are trying to reconcile them, trying to get them back together because they're

They make such a great team. It looks good, right? You have to admit it looks good. And Victor Davis Hanson has a long tweet today about how this is the diversion. This is a mistake. They got to get together again. The enemy is the left. The Democrats are the enemy. You know, and, you know, if Musk is not going to help Trump fight the enemy, then so be it. But we've got to we've got to destroy the left. That's the left.

devil incarnate. And so a lot of manga that views Elon as helpful to going after the left, even if you completely disagree about what should replace the left, it doesn't matter because the left is the, I mean, these people are obsessed by the evil of the left so much that they can't see the evil within. The evil within. So, yeah, Elon is not talking. He's

pretty silent on social media, as far as I can tell. And Trump is playing it cool so far. It's like, yeah, I'm not even thinking about Elon. I've got things more important to do. He did mention that he's probably going to sell his Tesla. Remember when he bought the Tesla and the car was sitting, you know, and he bought the Tesla to help Elon Musk at a time when Teslas, I guess, were being burnt and people weren't buying them for political reasons. So,

And now now Trump is saying he's going to sell the Tesla. No news about contracts being canceled. Elon Musk did withdraw the statement that he said that he would back off from the I guess the Dragon Project, the one spaceship that can American spaceship that can take astronauts to space station that NASA can use is SpaceX. He withdrew that. He mentioned it.

yesterday and then he withdrew it so uh musk overnight was trying to kind of calm things but it doesn't seem like trump is having any of it um uh vance uh who um at some point there was a tweet going around about uh trump should be impeached and government should be handed over to vance and elon musk expressed support for that idea well vance has come out and and um

and uh completely support the president and it's completely behind the president and uh and so on um yeah i i don't have much more other than that you know the this tweet by victor davis hansen is pretty pathetic but disorientation of what really matters is the left what really matters are the democrats nothing else matters and you see that a little bit on uh on the chat and um

We don't want this disunity. We need to bring them together so they can better fight the left because that's all there is. All there is is to fight the left. And if you understand that that is really what is driving everything, the idea of fight the left, that makes a lot more sense of Doge, right? Doge did a lot to, quote, fight the left, that is get rid of DEI in government, expose some of the crazy things that the government was funding of leftist nature, right?

cut some of that. So try to weaken the left hold on the bureaucracy. And it probably succeeded a little bit in that, a little bit. But it never could have. And I told you this from day one. It was never positioned, never able to. It wasn't the right tool to actually cut government spending, which is the ultimate affront to the left. Right.

That's not what Doge was all about, never was what Doge was all about. So that is happening. I'll add that the allegation that Elon Musk threw out there about the Epstein files is kind of rattling the internet a little bit and people are speculating about it and considering what's really going on and is he or isn't he.

I mean, there's plenty of reason to believe that Trump, I mean, we know Trump was in that kind of New York and even Palm Beach circle of Jeffrey Epstein. You know, Trump even said at some point, you know, he likes women almost as much as I do. They tend to be on the young side or something like that. So Trump knew what was going on. Did Trump participate? He was on the plane.

To what extent did he participate? I have no idea. But somebody probably knows. It's probably in the files somewhere if anybody wants to actually dig through them and if they're ever unsealed. So it would be interesting. I'm trying to think if there's anything else. You know, people are presenting timelines of their relationship and documenting all the tweets that have happened.

But so far, nothing new is happening. I did read somewhere that one of the reasons Trump might be silent right now or not really that vocal is that he's going to sue Musk, particularly about the Epstein allegation for defamation. Trump has deep, I mean, Elon Musk has deep pockets, could make a lot of money by suing him, particularly defamation.

If it's not true, that is, if Trump is not in the not in the files. So a lot could be happening in the next few days. I expect that, you know, I expect that this is just going to, in a sense, blow over in the sense that Elon Musk is really super busy with his companies. I don't think MAGA. I mean, I don't know if you saw Bannon last night. Bannon was like.

We should nationalize SpaceX, literally. Nationalize SpaceX. Going full fascist on us. Nationalize SpaceX and then investigate Elon Musk because if you worked illegally in the United States and then lied about it, if he was an illegal immigrant for a little while and then lied about it in his citizen application, then maybe we can withdraw his citizenship and kick him out of the country. That's Steve Bannon, the Trump whisperer, the MAGA king.

That's that's him. People like Bill Ackerman. And I think, again, the Silicon Valley people are panicking. I think for them, Elon Musk gave the Trump administration some credibility. I think that they're closer to Musk than to Trump in various ways. And they're panicking. So Bill Ackerman was tweeting, we're stronger together than apart. Again, I guess the left and Musk said,

trying to kind of walk back some of his tweets, replied to Ackerman saying, you're not wrong. So I don't know. I don't see them getting together. I don't see a rapprochement. I think Musk has left. He's left Doge. He's not going to do Doge. And so then the question is, what is the point of anything else to be done? I think Musk will be with his companies. The bill is not going to change.

I mean, I think the Senate will try to squeeze out some more cuts. I saw this great tweet. Let me find this tweet. This is the tweet by Justin Amash about the cuts. He says, when Mike Johnson and the White House officials say the big, beautiful bill cuts spending, they mean something akin to we were going to buy a five million dollar Bugatti. That's a supercar.

But instead, we're going to buy a 4.7 million Lamborghini and on credit.

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A whole half a million dollars, all on credit, of course. So that is possible. The Senate will cut a little bit. I don't think that'll satisfy Musk. I think Musk is truly worried about deficit spending. I think he's really motivated around that. And I think he's really upset. And, you know, we will see. We will see. But in terms of the relationship, of course, I don't know. But...

I assume it's over. I think Musk will stay out of politics for a while. And, you know, I mean, the best thing Musk could do politically, I think, is start a third party that really did focus on things like a sane approach to budgeting and, you know, and moving in deregulation and away from the nuttiness of the left and the nuttiness of the right.

I don't think he'll do that. It's too complicated. It's too much political work. But that would be a good, yeah, we could call it Party X. Party X, I like that. We could call it the X Factor. Party X Factor. Anyway, that's, you know, yesterday was a lot more entertaining because the tweets were a lot more entertaining. So there's less excitement I can share with you today.

All right, talking about the budget and the debt, I want to show you a graph because I don't think people actually get a good sense of the government debt and what's happened to it over the last, what, 30 years? So here's a graph of government debt in the US over the last 30 years. And that's a pretty cool graph. That's not the graph of Tesla stock or Bitcoin or

NVIDIA, that's a graph of the amount of debt the United States government has. Starting out in 1994 when it was somewhere around $5 trillion and going up. And you can see kind of when you get the big, the really changes in the level of debt. After 9-11, military buildup was in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

Then the financial crisis, massive increase in debt, you know, spending, particularly stimulus, a variety of different stimulus packages that involved taking on massive amounts of debt. Then, surprisingly, after the financial crisis is kind of over, they still keep on taking huge amounts of debt. That is, that doesn't stop. The slope of the graph doesn't change much.

little bit, you know, around 2013, maybe a little bit moderated. But this is the Obama Trump years where they continue to spend like crazy and they continue to borrow money like crazy money they don't have. Trump cut taxes, but spends like crazy. And then, of course, you get COVID and then you get this steep, almost completely vertical line of the debt going up.

And then, you know, the rest of the Biden years, which are dramatic increases in debt. And that's where we are today. Thirty six point twenty one trillion dollars. Now, some of that debt is debt held by other government institutions. So some of that debt is kind of internal security holding government debt, although

It still has to be paid because that's the way by paying that. That's the way Social Security gets paid. So that's but that's that's where we are. Thirty six trillion dollars. GDP, by the way, U.S. GDP is around 30. So we're over 100 percent of GDP. Now, if you look at just the debt held by the public, if you take out all the debt held by different government agencies and debt that the government, in a sense, owns itself, you

It's probably around $29 trillion. I still think the $36 trillion is relevant because the $36 trillion all gets paid out. But even the $29 trillion is about 100% of GDP. So basically, think about this. Think about having debt that is as high as your annual income. And so imagine you're a household and that's the situation you're in.

Let's switch from this graph. Imagine your household, that's the situation you're in. I've been in that situation, right? You have debt that is equal to your income. Not to your income, because the government doesn't have income. To the total income of the country. So if you tax the country at 100% and spent none of it on government expenditures...

You could pay off the debt. But of course, that's not what happens. You don't tax the country at 100%. You get a fraction of that. And then you actually spend and you continue to spend and you plan to continue to spend indefinitely into the future more than what you're bringing in, in taxes in this case. So this graph that I showed you continues to go at the same rate. That's the big, beautiful bill. It's debt continuing to go up at that rate.

Now, the only time in American history in the past where we have had debt at these levels was right after World War II, right? The end of World War II. But here's the difference. The end of World War II, we had millions of people rejoining the workforce. We had the country shifting from a military industrial base to

shifting production to civilian so a complete shift right and we had um and and we had very little government expenditure there was no medicaid medicare there was no medicaid there was no war on poverty there was very little welfare state there was no security but so security was small it was also uh we're about to launch the baby boom so uh you know a future with lots of people

growing population. And indeed, because of that, the United States could run surpluses because it cut government spending. All that money it spent on the war effort was cut, or a lot of it was cut. You know, we had a Cold War, but generally government spending was cut. Taxes were raised, and indeed, we ran a surplus, and we paid down the debt until the 1960s, when the

Because of the Vietnam and because of Medicare and Medicaid and because of the welfare state and the war on poverty and everything else, we started running significant deficits again. But even then, from the 60s until the early 1990s, it was still kind of okay. And then it just blew up. It's just blown up. And nobody seems to care because part of the reality is that the cost of having so much debt is not seen as

If you've read Economics in One Lesson, you know that there's the whole concept of the seen and the unseen cost. This goes back to Bastiat. There's what's seen and what's unseen. And, you know, a lot of what Peter Schiff and others said

particularly libertarians tell us, oh, we're heading towards a collapse. The dollar is going to go to zero. The world is going to collapse. Stand of living in the United States will collapse. We're heading toward a Great Depression. Stock market is going to go down 80%, all this stuff. That is seen. And the reality is that that hasn't happened. And as debt has increased since the 1990s,

People have warned, this is bad. Bad things are going to happen. This is, you know, we shouldn't do this. We shouldn't run huge budget deficits. We should cut spending. And politicians ignored it. Nothing bad is seen. Nothing bad happened, it appears. But that's a fallacy. The real bad stuff is happening because of all the lost opportunities that we had.

Imagine instead of spending trillions of dollars today to pay interest on the debt, borrowing those trillions, those trillions are still in the private sector being invested in American business. Imagine the government not borrowing huge trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars in order to fund the deficits, but instead that money stayed in people's pockets and

They need to invest it. They're not buying government bonds because the government is not issuing enough for them to buy. So they have to look for other investments, which means invest in businesses and increase productivity, invest in startups, invest in productive activity. So the cost is the lost dynamism in the U.S. economy. The cost is lower wages. The cost is a lower standard of living. The cost is less investment.

and everything that investment produces. Higher wages, higher standard of living, higher productivity, much greater GDP growth. Everybody compliments the US economy because it's done much better than Europe. God, what a standard. But what we don't see, we can see it's done better than Europe. That's the scene. What we don't see is how much better it could have done. What we don't see is how rich we could be, how rich we should be.

if not for this massive government spending. And of course, most of this is distorted by the fact that the Federal Reserve manipulates interest rates so that we don't suffer the full consequences of all this debt, because you'd expect that as the government takes on more and more and more debt, interest rates would go up and up and up and up, because there's more and more chance the government won't pay back that debt. Or if it does pay it back,

It probably will pay it back. But if it does pay it back, when it does pay it back, it'll pay it back with inflated dollars. Either way, you'd expect interest rates to reflect that. But interest rates are not fully driven by a market because the Fed is there. And throughout the 2000s, 20-teens, the Fed was manipulating buying bonds, selling, you know, particularly buying bonds and manipulating interest rates across the entire yield curve. So, so...

This debt is costing us, even if we don't have a cataclysmic collapse, although we might at some point have the cataclysmic collapse. And the thing is about the debt levels as they are today. Imagine if we have financial crisis like 2008 again. And it's quite possible, as we'll talk about later when we talk about Freddie and Fannie, that we will have another financial crisis or some kind of financial crisis in the future.

One of the ways you could argue, one of the ways the government responded to that, and conventional economists think you should respond, is with massive bailouts and with lots of goodies handed out, stimulus they call it. And they could do that because the level of debt in the U.S. economy were government debt relative to today low. They could borrow more. But if they try to do that today, or let's say there's a war with China and we really have to invest in rearming

in building manufacturing capacity to build the weapon systems we need in order to fight with China. Where's that money going to come from? We'll borrow even more. Who's going to lend us the money? And what interest rates will they demand? And at some point, our entire, at some point right now, interest on the debt, just interest on the debt is the second largest government expenditure after Social Security. At some point, it will be the largest.

I mean, at some point, at the rate we're going right now, I think within 10 years. Looking for that perfect Father's Day gift? Ditch the boring polo shirts and barbecue aprons and get him something as unique as he is. Get him a Funko Pop of his very own, customized to look just like him. Whether you're shopping for your favorite fisherman, grill master, amateur golfer,

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Two thirds of government spending. Two thirds is just interest on the debt. Now, the good thing about interest on the debt is it's going back to the private sector to be invested elsewhere, maybe in buying more government debt rather than just redistributed. But it's still a complete distortion. And it is a redistribution, right? They're taking out tax money and borrowing to pay previous borrowing with no plan to pay it all off, with no conception of how to pay it all off.

I mean, literally, there's no plan on the table on how this is ever going to pay. I mean, interest on the debt is going to bury this government with no ability to do anything. And what is Trump doing? Nothing. Nothing. He loves this. Cutting taxes, which is meaningless if you're taking on so much debt. There's no advantage to cutting taxes if you're taking on debt. I mean, one of the things about Millet is...

He didn't start off by cutting taxes. He's slowly over time cut some taxes. But his big thing was not to come in and cut taxes like stupid Republicans are. I mean, it is the stupid party. It really is. I mean, if you were going in today, if I were going in today and could, you know, run Congress, I wouldn't cut taxes. I might reform taxes and simplify them. But even that is not a major priority.

The entire focus, the entire priority should be as was with Millet. Cut government spending and deregulate on scale. Not that little bit they're doing. Cut government spending massively. Alex is pretty happy that they're cutting a significant chunk of the Inflation Reduction Act, the subsidies cut.

And yeah, I mean, it's better than nothing. And it's a step in the right direction. And they weren't going to do it. So it's a huge achievement that they're doing it, that they're cutting even that. And there's a threat, a risk that the Senate is not going to, is going to reverse that. What we really want is for them to cut it all, not stop there. All subsidies to all industries across the board, all subsidies should be cut, eliminated immediately. Trump keeps...

Trump keeps declaring emergency, states of emergency, so he can cut immigrations, he can put on tariffs, so he can control our lives. I'm about declaring a real emergency, an emergency around the budget. We're spending more money than we can afford. And as a consequence of this emergency, we're doing away with the tax cuts that Trump has proposed, and we are going to start slashing government spending. And by the way, because it's an emergency, the American people...

I'm here and I'm telling you we need to reform, at the very least, reform entitlements. Now, I want to get rid of the entitlements, but at the very least, an honest politician would tell the American people, we need to reform entitlements. I mean, I don't know, things like we need to raise the retirement age on Social Security. We need to change Medicare. We need to do all kinds of things. Continuing on the path we're on is insanity. And the numbers, the numbers are the numbers. They're right there.

We cannot, that graph cannot continue going in that direction without some, I mean, right now, the consequence of lower growth, less economic growth, less economic vitality, less investment, less everything like that. But at some point, it's much worse than that. At some point, it's negative growth. At some point, it's a, you fall off a cliff. You really do fall off a cliff.

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Hello, it is Ryan, and we could all use an extra bright spot in our day, couldn't we? Just to make up for things like sitting in traffic, doing the dishes, counting your steps, you know, all the mundane stuff.

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And their attitude is not on my watch. As long as the catastrophe doesn't happen on my watch, kick the can down the road because that's the easiest thing to do. I think some tech people believe, I think in their extreme naivete, that tech is going to, we're going to have so much growth in the economy. And I think Trump believes this to some extent. I think some people around Trump believe it. That the deregulation that Trump is doing is going to lead to such massive economic growth

that the growth will increase taxes and shrink the deficit and we'll get a balanced budget. That's the rationalization MAGA people engage in. The rationalization is we're deregulating, we're cutting taxes that will spur economic growth, which will increase tax revenue, which will reduce the deficit, maybe even get us to surplus. AI.

I mean, I've seen people say with AI, the economy is going to grow 10% GDP growth. It's complete fantasy, complete fantasy. I mean, you could argue that we are being bailed out from a catastrophe by economic growth, by technology, by Silicon Valley. And I've been saying that for years. If not for Silicon Valley, this country would be in shambles. That cannot continue forever. And indeed,

You know, the more the government borrows, the less capital is available for all these other for investment. So, you know, it's again, Trump came in with a mandate. And I think Elon Musk came in, indulged with a mandate to go crazy, to be radical, to create change, to really shift things around. And instead, they're just doing on the economic side.

They're worse than conventional Republicans. They spend like conventional Republicans. They do tax rates like conventional Republicans. And their deregulation, while it might be significant, particularly in the environmental realm, is still way, way, way below what is necessary and what is possible and what was what was.

The promise that one had in electing somebody who was as crazy and different and revolutionary potentially as Trump. But it turns out he wasn't as I expected. As I told you, he would not be. He's just another. I mean, he's not a conventional Republican, but he's when it comes to economics, he doesn't really care that much. And he is a statist and he is a central planner and all his instincts are anti-capitalist.

He does not have capitalist instincts, ideas, instincts is the wrong word. He's not consistent with capitalism in terms of his inclinations. And the debts and government spending, he doesn't care about all that. He really doesn't. I mean, the rationalization is because I'm such a great president, the economy will grow so fast, it won't be relevant. That didn't happen the first term. It's not going to happen this term. And tariffs are going to

destroy that ability, even if the potential was there. Tariffs will undo the benefits of deregulation, will be undone by tariffs, and the crazy central planning of this administration and the uncertainty that they create. But I'll just give you an example, one example of he doesn't care. Is this parade that they're having in Washington, D.C., you know about this parade?

There's going to be a parade on, when is it, later this month, June 14th. So next week, in eight days, there'll be a parade to commemorate, I guess, Donald Trump's birthday and the end of World War II or something like that. And it's just a grandiose thing for Trump to

And the parade is they've flown, they brought in tanks and there's going to be potentially significant damage to Washington, D.C. infrastructure. I don't know if you've ever seen a road that a tank is driven on. It's not pretty. Lots of equipment, tanks and personnel carriers. You know, it's birthday and flag day, right? It's going to cost, I mean, by low estimates, it's $25 to $40 million. For what?

to bolster Trump's ego. $25 to $40 million for, you know, in a government that is running massive deficits and can't pay the bills. And this is not a cut you have to make to the budget. This was never budgeted for, so this is an extra expense. This is just, don't do it. Don't add this expense. So...

Yeah, I mean, and think about military parades. Who has military parades? I know the U.S. has had military parades in the past, usually to commemorate a victory in a war. We have military parades. But who has military parades? I mean, North Koreans are really good at it. Putin is really good at it. I don't know if even the Chinese, the Chinese have military parades. I don't know. That would be a good question. But.

It's an authoritarian kind of thuggish, look at how strong we are, look how powerful we are. And it's an opportunity for the commander in chief to take credit for, look how powerful we are. We're going bust, but we've got money to spend on parades, on military parades, something that's, I think at the end, pretty un-American, pretty un-American. But then again, Trump is an un-American president, very much an un-American president.

All right, parades. We have parades. Okay, let's talk about Freddie and Fannie. So Freddie and Fannie were created by the government. One of them, Fannie, was created in 1940, I think. And the other one, Freddie, was created in the 1960s. And they were created in order to lower the cost of mortgages. And they were created by the government with the idea that they would buy the mortgages from the banks and other entities that made the mortgages.

and then they would package them and resell them. And they would be willing to do this at a low price. In other words, they would be willing to buy relatively risky or all mortgages at a pretty low interest rate. And thus, the banks wouldn't charge a very high premium on the mortgages.

And people could afford homes. This is part of the whole get people into the home. It's why your interest on your mortgage is tax deductible, but no other interest is. It's just a mortgage because our government has decided in its wisdom that it is very important for you to own your home. Renting is no good. You've got to actually own the home. So Freddie and Fannie were created for this purpose, buy mortgages,

package them and sell them and thus provide a constant flow of capital to the mortgage market and allow banks to just become issuers of mortgages and they don't hold the mortgage. So banks don't care that much about the safety of the mortgage, the quality of the mortgage, because then they can just sell them to Freddie and Fannie. Freddie and Fannie give them a set of guidelines of what kind of mortgages they will buy and

and uh and banks just just make those mortgages and as long as they and and the guidelines are usually politicized when we want more home sales like in the um in the early 2000s one because bush and clinton had decided we want more home sales then we lower the standards for the loans and then banks issue lots of loans and fetty and fanny buy them and sell them and um

And then we want to tighten things up, like with Dodd-Frank, after the finance crisis, things were tightened for a little while, then we tighten them up. And it's all based on politics, not on economics. And basically, that has been the housing market in the United States since the 1940s, and particularly since the 1960s. And the GSEs, you know, these are the Freddie and Fannie Mac, which are government-sponsored enterprises. The reason they can take on a lot of risk is

The reason they don't have any problem buying mortgages that maybe are not worth what they're paying for them and maybe could go into fault is because they are guaranteed by the government. What it means to be a government-sponsored enterprise is that the government will bail you out.

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during the crisis. The government bailed them out, put them under receivership. And this was predictable. A lot of us were saying these entities are corrupt and they're not economic entities because the government guarantee they're taking on more risk than they should and they will cause a crisis. And they did. And they were also politically corrupt. Both entities spent a lot of money lobbying Congress. And no wonder Congress bails them out ultimately.

And for example, I think it was Fannie, maybe it was Freddie, I mean, one of the two, for years could not produce an audited financial statement. They didn't know where the money was and where it was going. Corruption was that bad. Anyway, coming out of the financial crisis, there was pretty much a consensus that these entities needed to be reformed. They need, their role in the mortgage markets needed to shrink. There was indeed no reason to have Freddie and Fannie because they

Private markets would develop to repackage loans and they would do it on a risk basis. They wouldn't do it blindly like or politically like Freddie and Fannie. Indeed, Dodd-Frank of 2010, the law, the act, was supposed to curb their influence and allow the emergence of a vibrant private market.

Instead, what happened was the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which is the regulatory agency that oversees Freddie and Fannie, raised loan limits, loosened credit standards, and expanded programs, for example, for first-time homebuyer incentives and special refinancing options, so that today, GSEs have expanded their market. They used to only do, what do you call it, non-jumbo loans. Now they do jumbo loans all the way up to $1.1 million. Right?

It used to be that Freddie and Fannie backed about 45% of all the loans. That was before the 2008 financial crisis. Now they back 60% of all new mortgages. If you include other government programs like the Federal Housing Administration and the Veteran Affairs loans, the government today, the U.S. government today backs 85%, 85% of all mortgages.

The GSE's loan portfolio stands at $7.5 trillion. And, you know, they continue to repackage these and sell them. Among the holders of some of the securities that the GSEs have issued when they sell these prepackaged is the Federal Reserve, which owns $2.2 trillion in mortgage-backed securities, which was one way in which the Federal Reserve injected a huge amount of money into the economy, all in an effort to keep down mortgage rates.

They didn't keep down mortgage rates. Mortgage rates above prime is about the same as it always has been. But the reality today is that we have a mortgage market that is overwhelmingly dominated by politics and by government, 85%. We have a mortgage market that is not guided by market forces, market risks, but by government priorities. We also have a mortgage market with

Almost no innovation. Very little innovation in the kind of loans you can get and in the kinds of rules that those loans follow because they all, all the mortgages that you get out there have to follow the guidelines that would allow Freddie and Fannie to purchase them. So it's basically government is setting the terms for all the mortgages out there. So there's no innovation. You know, one of the things I would love is,

is for my mortgage to be portable. Like I got a really good mortgage on this condo at a very good interest rates. I would like to be able to take this mortgage with me when I buy my next apartment home. Now that would increase people's mobility. If you take out a mortgage at 3% and interest rates rise to seven as they have, right? You know, I can't afford to move. Like if I sell this apartment, pay off the mortgage,

The new mortgage I take on the new home is even to have the same monthly payment, I would have to take half the mortgage. I would have to lower my standard of living. Imagine if I could move my mortgage with me, more people would move. There'd be more availability of houses for sale. So it's completely distorting the mortgage market, the fact that there are no alternative products. There's no innovation. Freddie and Fannie, an example of government entities that were created to

They were never needed, but they're certainly not needed now. They've proven themselves to be creators of mayhem, the financial crisis. And it's another example of bureaucratic inertia, cronyism, pressure group politics that makes it impossible to get rid of them. Even though there was a political consensus on the left and on the right in 2009-10 that they needed to be completely reformed, nothing has changed.

Nothing has changed. Mortgages should be in some marketplace. Government has no role in it. Bureaucrats have no role in it. Even in a mixed economy like ours, it just doesn't make any sense. I don't think this is how the rest of the world functions. This is one of the areas in which the United States is more statist than much of the rest of the world, not some of the rest of the world. And it creates real financial instability. It creates a real risk.

of another financial crisis, which I think we're experiencing. It's also, you know, this is also linked to the fact that we can't build, and if you can't build houses, home prices only going up, which creates all kinds of other distortions and perversions in these markets. And nobody has an incentive to build a lot because if you build a lot, then what would happen? Home prices would go down. And believe me, aging baby boomers don't want their home price to go down.

And they're an important political bloc. So they don't, so, you know, politicians have no incentive to approve lots of building to drive prices down. Basically, the mortgage subsidies, the lack of allowing building is a massive redistribution of wealth in favor of baby boomers, favor people who own homes, have owned homes for a long time. Those homes go up in value when there's a shortage of home supply.

Anyway, that's my rant about Freddie and Fannie. But it's just it's another example of how imagine somebody came in to government today with a with a fresh perspective and wanted to make real changes in Washington, D.C. This is like the kind of not sexy work you would have to do. You'd go to Congress and say, I want a bill that basically eliminates Freddie and Fannie and privatizes the mortgage markets. That would be massive deregulation.

It would have a huge impact, positive, short-term, but primarily long-term, and nobody is going to do it. I mean, that's the kind of stuff. And there's a thousand things like that. If you were Elon Musk, if you were Donald Trump, and you really want to have an impact, this is the kind of work you would have to do. And yet, it ain't happening. All right, shifting gears, let's talk about England. So a man...

I think he's a man, burned a copy of the Quran outside the Turkish consulate somewhere in England. Well, this week he was convicted of, quote, religiously aggravated public order offense and fined. Religiously aggravated public order offense. In other words, the United Kingdom now has blasphemy laws, not generalized blasphemy laws, only those that apply to Islam.

the prosecutor claimed that the man's actions were intended to cause harassment, alarm, or distress. Probably. But causing alarm and distress, and I don't see what the harassment is, is not a reason to arrest somebody, to silence somebody. Among Muslims, you know, a woman showing a strand of hair or showing her face causes alarm and distress and could be conceived as sexual harassment, according to

Some Muslims. Are we going to arrest women? We're not, but that's the way it works. By the way, that's true, at least in terms of hair, for Orthodox Jewish women as well. They're not allowed to show any hair. They wear wigs or they wear hair covering. And if they don't, that causes distress, alarm, panic. And by the way, they really do believe sexual harassment. So it's stunning to me.

Kind of in a sense, the birthplace of the ideas of individual rights, of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, is now in the name of Islam, not even in the name of Christianity, is adopting a legal code and certainly a moral code that, you know, does not allow the, I don't know, blasphemy against Islam. And this is a trend that's been going on in Europe for decades.

40 years, going back to Salman Rushdie's fatwa, to the Danish cartoons, to Charlie Hebdo. And a lot of it is driven by fear of Muslim violence against those who blaspheme it. But the whole job of government is to protect us from exactly that violence. But here, it's not just the fear of Muslim violence. Now it's the fear of the British government. The government is going to protect Muslims.

Soon we're going to ban Mohammed cartoons. We're not going to not show them because we're afraid the Muslims will come and kill us. We're going to not show them because we're afraid the British government will come and arrest us. I mean, this really represents kind of an end of free speech in Europe. It's been slowly dying for a long time.

And again, the elevation of Islam, dedicated to Islam, at least a faction of which is dedicated to the destruction of the West, giving them all the power. This is something I've been talking about since the Danish cartoons. And Charlie Hebdo, as you might recall, the first Iran book show ever was on the day Charlie Hebdo was attacked in

And I decided to do a show that day once I heard about the attack. This is a... The issue of free speech is the cornerstone of really Western civilization. It's very, very... It's impossible. Not very hard. It's impossible to fight for freedom, for liberty, for justice, for capitalism, if you're going to be silenced. If the government is going to abandon its role in protecting you. But even worse, if the government is now going to stop you from speaking. So...

United Kingdom slowly seems to be abandoning any kind of respect for the ideas of free speech. As you probably have read, people get arrested for tweets because they're hateful. Yeah, I mean, Elon Musk's tweets against Donald Trump were hateful. Shouldn't be arrested. But Islam has this different category. And I think it's mostly driven by fear and mostly driven by guilt, guilt of the colonizer, the oppressor.

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And it's something that needs to be fought. Constantly fought. One of the things I admire about Sam Harris is his un-

uncompromising position on Islam, on religion generally, in Islam in particular, and his willingness to say it. There's a great segment with him and Pierce Morgan that I just watched recently, where he just talks about the barbarity of certain interpretations of Islamic religion and how we in the West capitulate to those barbaric interpretations. I mean, burning the Quran is just burning a book. All right, finally...

You know, one of the big challenges is with the Republican Party dominated by MAGA is you look at the Democratic Party and the nuttiness and the craziness in the infighting and the just the stupidity of it all just continues. So the latest is that the former White House press secretary under Biden, she was there for two years, Corinne Jean-Pierre. Corinne's declared herself an independent. She's leaving the Democratic Party.

After she's publishing a book called Independence, a look inside a broken White House outside the party lines. Now, this is really weird because supposedly she's going to reveal Biden's cognitive impairments and the cover up and how horrible he was in the White House and all of this. But she was there for two years enforcing party lines, lashing out at anyone who challenged Biden.

Biden or the party line. She was the press secretary in charge of the cover-up of the cognitive state of the president of the United States. She was doing it. She was the public face of it. Now suddenly she's become an independent. Now she wants to reveal it all. Talk about a gimmick to make money. You know, she was the one who talked about

All the videos of Biden who looked lost and cognitive challenged, right? She called them cheap fakes, not real videos, but they were real. And the state he was in was real. But now she's an independent and she's going to fight, fight those. I mean, why didn't she resign? Why didn't she? Why didn't she publicize this when it was relevant? So anyway, you can imagine the Democratic Party is out to get her.

The infighting, the fighting is starting. So it's not just in the Republican Trump, Trump-Musk, but the left is doing the same thing. There is, though, a new moderate Democratic think tank being established. That's what we need. We're missing. We don't have enough think tanks in Washington, D.C. It's called Searchlight. And it comes from the former chief of staff of John Fetterman, Adam Jentleson, I guess.

And the purpose of Searchlight is to help Democrats move forward towards broad popular positions. So they're a populist party? I don't know. They're going to abandon the far left, but they're going to adopt popular positions wherever they come from. Wherever they come from. It's not exactly what they stand for. They don't. They're rejecting a purity test. They're not positioning themselves as centrist exactly.

They, you know, but they're against taxpayer-funded surgeries for illegal immigrants in prison, I guess. So they want to reject the far left and they want to be more mainstream. They want to be more popular. They want to be the cool kids. One more think tank. That'll save the day. In the meantime, you know, the Democrats that actually have good ideas, not good ideas, better ideas, those advocating for an abundance agenda, which is...

Not a free market agenda. It's just an agenda focused on abundance, which I think is at least let's have that discussion. How do you achieve abundance? Let's agree that abundance should be the goal, which the Democrats have rejected in the name of environmentalism and a bunch of other goals. Anyway, there's a big move for Democrats to adopt the abundance terminology. I don't think they know what it means.

Tim Walz has been using abundance. Kamala Harris has been using abundance. I think the more people use abundance, the less abundance will mean anything. There are some on the left, Inglis, Noah Smith, and then some others. There's a book out now by God, I forget his name. There's a book out now about an abundance agenda. It's mostly a statist abundance agenda.

although Northsmith is a little better, but even he is for industrial planning. But it's much better than the all-in on environmentalism, don't build anyway kind of agenda that the Democrats mostly have embraced in history. And as such, Ezra Klein, thank you, Subkasky, Ezra Klein wrote the book. It would be a better Democratic Party in one

One you could have actual discussions with debates with if it embraced the Ezra Klein abundance agenda. It's still false. It's so bad. It's so much better than the new left nihilistic far left craziness that has dominated democratic party. So, uh, the problem is it's, it's become like a sexy term that everybody picks up and it emptied of all content and it'll just become a slogan. And that will be a disaster. All right. Uh,

I think that is the news for Friday, June 6th. Plenty more going on in the world, but I figure an hour for the news is enough. And at this point, we should move to the super chat. Don't forget, this is a way to support the show. Stickers, super chat questions, particularly those $20 and above are highly, highly, highly, highly valued by me.

They make these and their monthly supporters make the show possible. So thank you to all of you. Vikram did a sticker. Thank you, Vikram. I saw some other stickers. Mary Aline did a sticker. Thank you, Mary Aline. And John, $50 sticker. Thank you, John. That is really, really appreciated. And Jonathan Honing, Gail Honing.

Thank you all for the stickers. I appreciate it. And then we've got a bunch of questions. We're still quite short on the second hour goal. So please consider supporting the show, getting us to the goal. Getting to the goal is how we keep the show going. This is a listener-supported show. It doesn't exist without you. You can support the show monthly.

kind of regularly by, by, by becoming a monthly contributor. You can do that on Patreon, patreon.com. Just search your own book show and, and become a supporter. $2, $5, $10, $10. You get a ad free version of the podcast. Um, but a hundred dollars, two 50, 500. Those really are a great in terms of, uh, making the show possible and supporting the show. Uh, we've, we've shot about 200 bucks to a $500 goal. So, uh,

just consider doing something, even a small amount. Everything helps. Everything supports. Remember, it's a value for value. It's a trade. I do this, and you pay for it. That's how you would conceive it. You pay for the stuff you consume, and you're consuming this. Yes, I also want to mention the...

ARI is a sponsor of the show, Ayn Rand Institute, and ARI is putting on Ocon, the conference, and this will answer, Elmo, this will answer your question. You can sign up for Ocon, both in person for the whole conference, one day, or even the virtual Ocon at a 10% discount just for listening to you on book show. For that, you need a code, and the code is 25...

YBS 1025.

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pop yourself. Visit Funko.com. It is Ryan Seacrest here. There was a recent social media trend which consisted of flying on a plane with no music, no movies, no entertainment. But a better trend would be going to ChumbaCasino.com. It's like having a mini social casino in your pocket. Chumba Casino has over 100 online casino-style games, all

absolutely free. It's the most fun you can have online and on a plane. So grab your free welcome bonus now at Chumbacasino.com. Sponsored by Chumbacasino. No purchase necessary. VGW group void where prohibited by law. 21 plus terms and conditions apply. YBS 10. Now, Elmo has tried, I think I gave him a wrong code before and he tried and it didn't work. But Elmo's coming to Ocon. You should come to Ocon too. Now, like, uh,

Registration for being at Ocon in person is closing in 10 days, I think on the 16th. So you only got about a week and a half to get it done.

And, but it'd be great. It'd be great to meet you, Elmo. It'd be great to meet the rest of you. So it would be, it would be really, really, really cool to, to have a large group of YBS listeners and supporters at the conference. And we'll try to, we'll try to bring some hangout, some hangout potential. Alex Epstein, of course, is also a sponsor of this show.

And Alex has alex.substack.com. He is at the forefront of the current discussions around cutting subsidies to unreliable energy sources like wind and solar. Alex is doing important work on liberating the energy sector. That is the sector he has taken on as kind of a life's mission and is doing amazing work to liberate that sector.

Alex should be supported, but you should read him. You should read him because you'll be better for reading him. You'll be a better communicator about these ideas. You'll learn a lot. I always learn stuff when reading Alex's posts. So alexepstein.substack.com. Do it. Do it.

All right. So let's turn to the Super Chat again, taking questions and also taking stickers where you can support the show without actually asking a question. And we're still looking for about 200 bucks to make our goal. All right, Michael, $50 question. Thank you, Michael. Michael usually does more than $50, but spreads it out over lots of questions, concentrating it all into one today. There are more, more for Michael as well.

How can you be a nationalist and a fascist and not a Nazi? The rounding up of immigrants is clearly Nazi-esque. The removal of DEI and affirmative action is freedom by accident. Trump only got rid of these programs because he views them as anti-white. No, I don't think being a nationalist is automatically being a Nazi.

There are nationalists all over the world, and there were nationalists before the Nazis. There was a massive nationalist movement in Europe in the 19th century that created many of the countries that today we know as countries in Europe before there were these empires. And Mussolini was a fascist and a nationalist, but he was not a Nazi. And he suddenly...

you know, had, you know, mild racist elements, but nothing like the Nazis. The Nazis were a particular type of fascism and nationalism oriented around the Aryan race and very explicitly so, not by accident, but

I mean, Trump is removing DEI and affirmative action because that's what his base wants him to do. He doesn't he's not Hitler. He hasn't written Mein Kampf. He doesn't believe in in those ideas. He isn't, you know, organizing massive rallies, denouncing the Jews in in in ways that will lead to rounding them up and destroying them. He's not talking about the superiority of some race. It

I mean, he's bad. He's just not that bad. And he's just not that type of bad. But, you know, there are a lot of different types of statism. There's a lot of different types of fascism. There's a lot of different types of nationalism. They're all bad. But the differences between them and calling everybody a Nazi when they're not, it just diminishes our capacity to attack them. People will stop taking us seriously if our enemies are all labeled Nazis. Trump is not Nazis, not Hitler.

He's not creating concentration camps. He's not, you know, yes, he's demonizing immigrants. I mean, demonization of immigrants, demonization of the other is a part of politics that goes back hundreds of years, thousands of years. Nazis were a particular movement at a particular time. They are people who identify explicitly as neo-Nazis.

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That's ChumbaCasino.com. No purchase necessary. VGW group void. We're prohibited by law. 21 plus terms and conditions apply. Because they are Nazis. There's symbolism. There's a particular ideology. Now...

Trump is still evil and bad. The ideology is evil and bad. The nationalism and the fascistic tendency. I mean, Trump is not even a full blown fascist. He's just not ideological enough to be a full blown fascist. He's not. Mussolini was ideological. Hitler was ideological. Trump is not. Trump's just a fascist.

a brat, a thug. He's a mafioso gangster who happens to become president who is thuggish, but he doesn't have an ideology driving him. This is why I've always said bad is really, Trump is really, really bad, but he's not the coming dictator. He's not the guy who will end America. He's not the person who will end liberty in America.

It's much more likely to be Josh Hawley or J.D. Vance or somebody we don't know because they believe in something. Trump believes in nothing. Hitler believed in something. Trump believes in nothing, nothing. He's motivated primarily by his psychology, by his narcissism, by elements of, by some nihilism and, and by his just thuggishness. Jennifer, oops, Jennifer says, um,

Let's see. You on? Did you see that Alex Epstein just came back from an energy conference in Alaska? Yeah, he gave a talk that upset a lot of people, which is good. It was in a building on 7th Avenue in Anchorage. I know where that building is. Very cool. I have no idea. You know, only two states in the United States that I have not visited yet, Alaska and North Dakota. I don't know how we're going to fix that. Somebody should invite me to come and give a talk there.

in North Dakota and or Alaska. We need to chip in. We need to get rid of this deficit in my travel. I need to be able to say I've been to every state in the union. All right, not the average algorithm. Did Rand evade the damaging effects of cigarettes on her health or because she didn't experience any symptoms, she saw no need to take the government propaganda against tobacco industry seriously? Yeah, I mean, Rand was skeptical.

of the government's approach to cigarettes. You know, I don't think she evaded until her doctor told her that she needs to stop smoking. That is, she accepted it when it came from an authority that she trusted, her personal doctor. And when he told her that, she went cold turkey. She didn't linger around. So I don't think she evaded. Remember, you know, I remember even in the

when was this, in the 70s? And into the early 1980s, there was still some debate about, well, does it really cause cancer? You know, what is really going on? I mean, there's still a debate about secondhand smoke. I mean, I think all of you, most of you assume secondhand smoke is deadly. I'm skeptical about that, particularly, I mean, secondhand smoke, yes, in a closed-off space where the smoke is just hanging in the air.

But then don't go into a closed space where people are smoking. But outside, secondhand smoke doesn't do anything to you. In a well-ventilated facility, secondhand smoke doesn't do anything to you. So, I mean, there's still nuance that people will not accept around smoking. And smoking became kind of a religion almost to oppose smoking. So she was skeptical.

And she liked smoking a lot. And as a consequence, I don't think she investigated it very deeply. But then as soon as she was confronted with real evidence or real expert opinion, she took it seriously. All right. Rational IP, again, coming in and making a significant dent in our goal. This is great. So thank you. 60 euro.

Just a quick thought experiment. Could privatizing streets and parks reduce public nuisance since private owners may have strong incentives to maintain order and safety? How would this work for residents? And what's your view on this? Yes. No, absolutely. Private roads, I think a great way to increase safety, reduce nuisance, increase cleanliness, you know, rationalize, what do you call it? Traffic, traffic lights, you

particularly if you could toll it, you could toll the roads, some of the roads, you could have different levels of tolls depending on the time of day, which would create incentives for people in terms of when to drive through your streets. You would have, it would increase safety because you would have standards by who could be on the streets. You wouldn't have homeless people camping out because it's private property. You would have every reason to kick them out. So absolutely, you know, it's, it's,

You'd have to think through exactly how it works. There'd have to be some kind of acknowledgement of a right of access. So if you own the road, you'd have to allow people to access it. And for example, you can't be in a position where the street owner or the pavement owner says,

You can't leave the store. You can't step on the pavement leaving the store. I mean, those are irrational things. And the law would have to recognize that. You'd have to think about how to apply property rights to things like pavements and roads and things like that. But yeah, you could imagine...

The Shop Owners Association owning the streets or shop keepers owning the streets or the mall owning the roads that leads to the mall or all kinds of things that could evolve. It would be really interesting and beautiful to watch to see how a private market in roads and streets develops and the kind of rules it puts in place in terms of how to deal with its private property.

All right. Frank, thank you, Frank. $50. Really appreciate that. Again, making a dent. Still got about $100 to go, guys. So we need another $250. $50. Shazbad worked overtime today, right? Frank says, MAGA has the conceptual flag of great again to rally around. The woke had DEI. And I guess the liberal left has abundance.

What would be the capitalist flag? Excellence, your way, reality, thinking, values as possible ideas. I mean, I would think it would be, I don't know, liberty, life, life on my terms. I mean, it used to be something like don't tread on me. Right. I mean, some of those slogans around freedom.

So liberty, don't tread on me, living life using my mind by my standards, right? My mind, my values. There's a good slogan. My mind, my values. Get out of the way. My mind, my values. Things like that. Thank you. Thank you, Frank. Thank you. And yeah, I mean, when it comes to politics, we'll have to develop some slogans.

The next AMA is Saturday, this Saturday, this coming Saturday, tomorrow. AMA tomorrow. Ask me anything is tomorrow. If you'll contribute $25 or more to the show on a monthly basis in one of the monthly possibilities, then you should have got an invitation to it. And yeah, join us tomorrow. Yeah, tomorrow. So tomorrow, 2 p.m. East Coast time.

Wes, thank you for the $50 sticker. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Wes. We're now down to only $40 to make it to our goal. $40. You guys can make it to $20 questions. That'd be perfect. Perfection. Or just a $40 sticker would be good too. Taylor. Taylor.

James Taylor, is the stock market up and unemployment down? Because Trump has been putting leashes on a lot of these alphabet super agencies. Even without an act of Congress, he's having them take their boot off the neck of business. Look, unemployment is not down. Unemployment is 4.2%, which is basically flat since Trump took over. I don't think it's down since Trump took over.

jobs are being created still so the economy is still growing jobs are still being created but not at a very high pace 139 000 jobs this last month it should be well over 200 000 just to just to give jobs to everybody who kind of graduates from college and graduates from high school and is looking for a job so um we're still behind where we need to be to have jobs in a

Yes. So in the stock market, it's not up. The stock market's up about 2 percent for the year. S&P 500 is basically flat. So the question is, why isn't the stock market down a lot given the uncertainty that Trump has created? I think the reason is that even though there's a lot of negative uncertainty in terms of a lot of potential for Trump to do a lot of bad things, there's also potential for good things. And most of those good things are the deregulation of

The reigning in of alphabet super agencies, they just – Congress just today approved a new vice chairman of the Fed in charge of regulation. And she basically has said that she wants to – in terms of enforcement –

deregulate the banking sector. So you're going to see more and more of that, of kind of deregulatory efforts, which do enhance the economy. So instead of going full in on that and the economy going...

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absolutely free. It's the most fun you can have online and on a plane. So grab your free welcome bonus now at Chumbacasino.com. Sponsored by Chumba Casino. No purchase necessary. VGW group void where prohibited by law. 21 plus terms and conditions apply. I mean, the stock price should be way up now. That is being offset by stupid things like tariffs and immigration. And the market is trying to price all this and uncertainty in and what we're getting is flat.

Uh, and we'll see, we'll see where it goes from here, but yes, he, some good things are happening. Kibb, have you seen a video of Jordan Peterson versus 20 atheists? It's all over YouTube universe. Great material for your show. Yeah, I have. Oh, I haven't seen the whole thing. I've seen like two, two kids going after, going after Jordan. And yes, there is a lot of good material there. I'll have to watch more of it and, and,

Take sections and discuss them on the show. It's a good one for a non-news show. It's a good one to do on a non-news show. We'll see. Maybe on Sunday, maybe this Sunday, maybe next Sunday, I'll do it. We will see. We will see. But, yeah, thanks for pointing that out. And it is super interesting. Huh, what is that? That's not what I wanted. That's not what I wanted.

I used to be able to gift memberships, and I can't gift memberships anymore. They've taken that feature away. That's interesting. The gifting membership feature is gone. Interesting. All right. Thank you, Keb. Let's see. Mary Alene. How much would it help our economy to eliminate all tariffs, regardless of what other countries do? Also repeal antitrust laws and Jones Act and auction off 15% of the federal government lands. Use auction dollars to pay down the debt. I mean...

trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars worth. I mean, it would be worth unimaginable amounts of wealth and money and economic growth. I don't know how to quantify it. I mean, if you eliminate all tariffs, that in and of itself would be a huge spur for economic growth. And then if you

If you unilaterally and then if you repeal antitrust laws, God takes a massive amount of uncertainty out and encourages businesses to grow and be successful. The Jones Act is just stupid and would made our roads safer, particularly along the I-95 corridor. And it would reduce costs all along, particularly coastal America.

It would just cost dramatically on goods in coastal America, but also Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. And then if you auction, why 15 percent of federal government land? Why not 85 percent? Why not 100 percent? But anything you auction off, it's good money. And yeah, it would be fantastic. And you could use all that to.

buy down the debt that would lower interest rates that will encourage economic growth. So yeah, you could see dramatic improvement in economic growth. If you did those things, um, I am maker says, what was Augustine's underlying? I unifying idea besides make Rome great again, Augustus, what was Augustus's unifying idea beside make Rome great again, that allowed him to give the Republic the kiss of death and,

Or did he become emperor because the Republic was just that sick? P.S. Gaza should be destroyed. I mean, I'm not an expert on the Roman Empire, on the history of Rome. But my understanding is by the time Augustus becomes empire, the Republic is already quite sick. I mean, Julius Caesar's basically overturned the Republic and become a Caesar. Augustus is already is capitalizing on what Julius Caesar's done. And Julius Caesar had to do it because of corruption.

or felt like he had to do it because the republic was already so corrupt. I mean, it's very difficult. The Roman Empire is still at a time of a very—the pie is not growing much. That is the pie. The economy is not growing much. It's a zero-sum world. They don't have principles of political behavior. They have some ideas about republicanism, but they're not guided by any kind of conception of individual rights whatsoever.

And it, you know, it was bound to not last. And I think Augustus just capitalizes on the decay and the corruption. Now, did he have a unifying, did he have, no, I don't think he had a unifying ideology. I don't think he had a philosophy of governing philosophy that I know of. But again, I'm not an expert. It's not my field.

Andrew, why is being independent minded safer than banding together with others and being a collectivist? Is safety in numbers untrue if one compromises the independence of one mind? Yes, absolutely. It's untrue. I mean, your life depends on your mind, your mind, your thinking. Nobody can think for you.

Nobody knows what your values are. Nobody knows what you want, what you desire, what is good for you. Only you can do the thinking for yourself. Nobody knows how to get those values for you. Only you can discover that, figure that out. So by giving up on your mind, you're making yourself dependent on other people who cannot take care of you, cannot.

I mean, they can provide for your survival at the most basic of needs, means, but only your physical survival. And so it puts you completely at their behest. You become completely dependent on other people. Your mind is your tool for survival. Therefore, it's your tool for safety. There's nothing else. All right. Oyvind. Oyvind.

What do you think of the case that so many ANCAPs praise Millais while, to my understanding, being way closer to an objectivist system in practice? I mean, I wouldn't say he's closer to objectivist. He's a free marketer. So, I mean, there's nothing objectivist about it. Objectivism is not free market politics or free market economics.

you know, there's no, I don't, you know, he doesn't, he's not pro-abortion, he's not pro, he's not pro-individual rights in the sense of objectivism. So I wouldn't put him that way. I'd say ANCAPs praise me less, some ANCAPs, because a lot of ANCAPs don't. They hate him. Like, like, what's his name? Hope hates him. But, um,

They admire him and they praise him because he's moving the country towards more free markets and some ANCAPs value freedom, value free markets. And they see him succeeding in moving in that direction and they embrace that. It's the same reason objectivists praise him. He's moving the country towards more freedom, more liberty.

He might not be completely philosophically aligned with us, but the actions he's taking are resulting in the country becoming more free. That's a good thing. That is something that is praiseworthy. Thomas, Trump signed an executive order lifting the ban on supersonic flight today. Do you think Congress will continue trying to pass the Sam Supersonic Act? I hope so, because executive orders can be easily reversed. Legislation cannot.

I don't see why not. I don't think they will be deterred by the executive order. It's good that Trump signed the executive order, but it's not his job. It's Congress's job. So it needs to go through Congress. And whatever lobbying is being done and whatever pro-freedom people are putting pressure, they need to put pressure on Congress and they need to get a supersonic act passed to

it's not good to do these things by executive order. We lose more than we gain. And I think Blake would agree with me. Blake Scholes, who's the head of Boom, who's building Supersonic and needs this act to pass. You don't want to be at the behest of every executive order that might pass. Get the law down. Get it out there. Michael, Hamas agreed to surrender if Sweden will take Greta Thunberg back.

That would be cool. That would be cool if Hamas had enough self-awareness to do that. William, will Elon Musk be the downfall of Trump? I doubt it. I doubt it. Trump is too solidly entrenched. Liam, did Trump and Elon plan to have an ugliest gay divorce during Pride Month? I doubt they planned any of this. I don't think so. No. Now, to have a job with them, is Trump the most nakedly nihilistic administration in American history?

Yeah, I think so. I think all the other bad administrations, an agenda, had an ideology, had ideas about what they wanted to achieve. They were wrong, like FDR. But Trump has none of that. He's a finger to the wind, do whatever, whatever.

I don't know if it's nihilistic, but it's certainly, it's the least ideological, which is amazing, right? Least ideological, the most thuggish, and there's definitely an element of nihilism there. I mean, the more I read about American history, the more I realize that there have been really, really, really bad things happening in America for a very long time. Trump didn't invent them. I mean, we've had awful tariffs. We've had awful laws against Americans.

immigrants we've done horrible things to people uh i mean racism in america has been horrible eugenics was basically to some extent american project in late 19th century early 20th century and endorsed by our our leading institutions um we treated blacks horrifically well into the 20th century i mean it's just been a lot of bad stuff that america's done in spite of all its goodness

James, how do you think immigration will change in the West based on the counter-elected officials? Do you think Canada will be the same in 10 years since it is becoming hard for H-1Bs? What happens to the U.S.? I think legal immigration all across the world is going to become harder. I think they're going to become much tougher on illegal immigrants, significantly harder. So I think movement of people...

particularly productive people, is going to become much harder in the decades to come. Populism is on the rise everywhere. Even the Labour Party in England is coming out with stiff regulation of immigration. I think you're going to see that across Europe. Denmark, which was one of the first countries to embrace stiff limits on immigration, that's going to be the model.

The country adopts. And I think that's going to be true of the U.S. and Canada as well. Canada is clamping down on immigration. So, yeah, a lot less, a lot less. Harper Campbell, will Trump remove the ban on supersonic flight be a game changer? No, because it's an executive order. And executive orders are too uncertain for people to go investing gazillions of dollars in.

So, I mean, it's good. It's a step in the right direction. But you need the legislation. Kim, yesterday you said to spoil your kids. What do you mean by that? And how can they be independent and spoiled at the same time? I don't know. I mean, look, independence is something, a completely different concept. So spoiling a kid, I don't think you spoil a kid by being a helicopter parent. You spoil a kid by showing a lot of love.

You spoil a kid by, you know, giving them cool and fun things to do and fun stuff and not withholding stuff from your kid. The way to make a kid independent is at the same time to give them a lot of time alone, to encourage them to go out into the world unsupervised, to try to work at a relatively young age, get a job,

do chores around the house, take responsibility for certain aspects of the household of which he is a part of. So I think you can separate the two out. Lavish emotional affection and nice things on your kids while at the same time holding them to high standards and letting them loose emotionally.

not hovering over them, not trying to regulate and control every aspect of their lives. Raymond, why do you believe growth can hit four to five percent annually? Is it that the general sense of optimism is based on fact, specific, updated potential? I mean, it's based on history, growth rates in free countries throughout history, Hong Kong, the United States in the 19th century, you know, other places, China. Granted, it started from a very low rate.

It's based on growth rates today. Step into the world of power, loyalty, and luck. I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse. With family, cannolis, and spins mean everything. Now, you want to get mixed up in the family business. Introducing the Godfather at ChapaCasino.com.

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I think 4%, 5% I think is conservative. I think it's moderate. I think 6%, 7% growth is definitely – I don't see why not, I guess, is my point. If we can generate 2% to 3% with our current heavily, heavily regulated monetary system-controlled growth,

investment-controlled, government spending up the kazoo and sucking investment capital away from productive investments. Imagine if all that goes away and everything is, we have laissez-faire capitalism. We could grow 6%, 7%, 8%. I just don't see why not. I just extrapolate from what we have and from what's happened under freedom. Raymond says, you support assisted suicide, but not consented murder violence.

I understand the moral distinction, but how would the law draw the line and enforce? Well, I mean, it's difficult. I don't think it's easy to set up laws that protect people from murder and protect people from stupid contracts, but where somebody who has clearly expressed an interest in ending their lives...

and is given rational reasons for doing so, and then somebody assists them with it. That would be a different category, and you'd have to figure out how legally to define that and what kind of discovery, what kind of proof you would want. I mean, in Switzerland, I'm looking into—I haven't done it yet, but I'm looking into assisted suicide in Switzerland, and it seems like you have to fill out a bunch of forms—

You have to explain yourself and consent, you know, and you have to do it while you're healthy and sane and non-demented well in advance of when it's going to happen. And you have to specify the terms. So they want it really, really, really well documented that you've agreed to this. And I can understand that and something like that. So I haven't I haven't got the forms yet. I haven't looked at it carefully. But, you know, I think Switzerland probably has a pretty good system.

Raymond, why did Ayn Rand so honor the office of the presidency? Was this because of the office demanded a fully integrated person? I think because she had such profound respect for the system of government that the founders created. She had such profound respect for America, what it stood for, and again, the system of government that it represented, and then the president being its head, its executive, commander-in-chief,

You know, and so it comes from a respect of the country as created, the constitution as written, rather than kind of what it's become. Raymond, can you explain the separation of powers? Is there any philosophical reason for the structure? Or is it just arbitrary lines to prevent pure democracy?

Well, to prevent pure democracy is a philosophical reason, right? So not wanting pure democracy is good philosophical reason. But it's more than that. You want to be able to – you want to make sure that there is deliberation before new laws are passed, that are really thought through and that people have really –

challenge themselves. And, you know, it's a recognition of the fact that coercion is dangerous, that government is coercion, government is force, and that if it's going to use that force, it needs to use it thoughtfully and in a deliberative manner. And for that, you want to make legislation slow. And for that, you want to, for example, have two houses, and you want to make sure that the population doesn't have too much influence. Again, this is

of democracy, but also encouraging of deliberation. So the Senate is not populist in a sense. And at the time, of course, it was elected by the states, not by a vote. And you want to make sure that a president can't attain too much power because you look at history and

power corrupts and power corrupts. The more power you give, the more corrupting it is. It has. So you want to make sure that in a situation where it's corrupted, there are mechanisms right to which to prevent it. And then, of course, there's the philosophical idea that all of this is based on a constitution and a founding document. And that is that is the constitution. So you want to have a court system to protect you from that. So, I mean, it's all based on luck. And then there's a lot of writing, monoskew writing.

writes a lot about government. So it's definitely philosophical in the sense that it's taking the philosophy and applying it. How do we minimize democracy while giving people a voice? How do we, you know, slow down authoritarianism? How do we ensure that the laws are consistent with the Constitution? How do we ensure that laws are only considered slowly and thoughtfully? All of those are philosophical ideas.

Lucinda, in my old school, police came to school to explain how public offense against honor is a crime and how the offended decides what counts as an offense. Yeah, I mean, that's insane. And it gives people the ability to cry offense at anything. And it's completely subjective and arbitrary. Makanu Teo, is populism viable as tactic? Is Millet a populist?

No, I mean, populism is viable to attain power. So it's a tactic for the achievement of what? It's never viable for the achievement of freedom. And Millet is not a populist, absolutely not a populist. And you can see that by the fact that in his talks, when you're in front of big groups, he's talking about economic principles and he gives them lectures about economics. He's not feeding the crowd candy.

He's demanding from the crowd thought. And that's really different, really different. Millet is very, very different than Trump and the other populist politicians around the world in that he is intellectual. He has ideas. He has principles that he's fighting towards. He doesn't put his finger into the wind. He tells his audience, here's how economics works. This is what I'm going to do because this is the cause and effect relationship. You don't see politicians like that anyway.

Shah's bot, I worked overtime today in a very hot building with no air conditioning. Hasn't been powered up yet. Now I can say that I've worked in a sweatshop. I hope they paid you sweatshop bonus, a bonus for being in a sweatshop. Mary Alene, the reason I said 15% of government land was because if you flood the market, you'd get less money. True. Yeah, that's true. Although it's diverse enough.

And if you're doing it over time and everybody knows it's going to be done over time, you're still going to get the same effect. People are going to jockey for that. Yeah, I mean, 15% at a time is not bad. It's also more doable that way. But ultimately, you want it all. You could auction more later. Yeah, I mean, you need to auction over time, but you need to have a plan to auction all of it.

All right, John, Nick Fuentes said Jews are behind 100% of world problems. They murdered Kennedy, caused 9-11, and are using the U.S. military to destroy the Middle East. Will you send him email for debate? No, God, no. You don't debate people like that. You can't debate people who are just lying and making stuff up out of nowhere.

You can't debate pure evil and pure irrationality. There's no point. By debating him, I would be granting him a sanction. I would be acknowledging that he is worthy of a debate. He is the lowest scum of the earth, and he's not worthy of anything. He's not worthy to be on a stage with me. I'm too valuable to waste my time being on a stage with a scumbag like Nick Fuentes. I value myself too much.

John says, Fuentes also said America will have its house in order once women shut up, blacks are in prison, and perfidious Jews are removed from power. Jews. I get Jews as Jews. Codename for Jews. Yeah, I mean, there's nothing to—the guy's a complete—I don't know why anybody listens to him. You should stop listening to him, John. He's a disgrace, and a disgrace to humanity, and an embarrassment to humanity.

And beneath contempt, he's the most disgusting, one of the most disgusting commentators out there. I wouldn't debate him. I wouldn't debate Candace Owen. I wouldn't debate any of these complete nutcases. There's no point. There's nothing to be gained. What am I going to prove to him? The Jews are not behind it all. How do you even prove that? It's complete arbitrary irrationality and cannot be debated and must not be debated. It must be ignored. All right, guys.

That is it for today. I will see you tomorrow for an AMA. I'll also probably do a show on Sunday, but AMA tomorrow, 2 p.m. Eastern time. I will see you then. Have a great weekend. Bye, everybody.

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