Monetary Literacy & Mastery Foundation

How much are you putting into your retirement? Do you think you have enough? Why or why not?

I see that things have been updated here, looks better in all formats but especially mobile.

Good morning, everyone, from Join the Dots. This should come to you Wednesday. Now, I say that because it's very important that you watch Monday and Tuesday's shows because there was an absolutely superb interview with Grant Williams. And it took two shows to dissect it and describe it. But they are vital for you to understand because everything that comes today, which is almost the whole world of finance, was covered in that Grant Williams interview. So, please make sure you watch Monday and Tuesday's shows.

Okay, so we're starting off today macro with London property market. And I've got a piece here I'm going to link and send to you from Savills talking about how the billionaire market is okay, but the millionaire market is really suffering. And it says that property prices in the millionaire range in Mayfair, St. James, Belgravia, Knightsbridge, Chelsea, Kensington, all the primaries of London, are down. Listen to this figure. More than 25% since Listen to this date. 2014. I kid you not.

Okay, so look at that look at that link to Savills report. Please, because tax changes, political uncertainty, higher rates, higher taxes, particularly, are leaving are lending themselves to make people leave the cities. And that leaves property crises developing. Not here yet, but developing. Okay, and again, the billionaires succeeding, K-shaped economy. The rich, the super rich, are getting super richer. And the normal middle class are being pushed down to the poor where they become dependent. Because that's the aim. That's the aim, at the end of the day, of this is to take away the middle class. Greg Mannarino's been talking about it for 3-4 years. Strip the middle class of their independence, right?

Now, we come on to Australian property because again, this was referred to me by Duncan Cook 3789. Thank you, Duncan. You're linking quite a few pieces. Quite interesting. Thank you. This is a guy we've featured two or three times before. He's an auctioneer in Australia and he describes the fact that he's been to six auctions and there's not one registration. Not one person has registered. I'm just going to get my phone to work here because I've got the Let's have a look at what he says. He says it is the worst auction time in his 30 years. His worst auction time in 30 years. There it is. Worst auction day in 30 years.

Okay, so that's link number two. Please watch it because again, join these dots. Please join these dots. Property prices falling in all capital cities across the Western world. That means Australia, Canada as well and Japan and other centers. They're falling. Actually, I won't say Japan because Japan, because of the weak yen, is actually attracting some buying.

Link number three, BTC liquidations, Bitcoin liquidations. Very briefly, there's a report out. It shows two companies selling their treasury assets. They aren't treasury assets, are they? They just bought some Bitcoin to try and make some money. All right? And now they're selling them because the price is going down. Of course, it starts to constrain their balance sheet, what they can do in their real business and they're selling off. So, to me, I see this as a fundamental risk to Bitcoin. All right? It's a fundamental risk that companies who bought Bitcoin and put it in their treasury and are oh, we're so clever, we're so clever, are suddenly finding that they're having to sell it to clean their balance sheet up. And as rates go up, as liquidity gets harder, they need more liquidity. They need to force their balance sheet to work more. And that's not sitting in Bitcoin. It's just a risk that I see a lot of people haven't talked about it. Maybe I'll be wrong. We don't know.

Okay, link of the day. And we're going back to our friend OG John AG and the source code. Now, he is getting a lot more limited on his presentations now, and I understand why because he was absolutely slammed by JP Morgan and Jane Street and anyone else in the manipulation game because he exposed them 100%. Do you remember? He exposed them 100%. And it was the day after he called out JP Morgan that his source code site went poof. Or OG John AG was just taken off the air. He's back as the source code. Watch it, please. Now, I'm going to take you through one episode, and I'm only going to take you through the first half in the rest of this link of the day presentation because there's so much in it. Because obviously doing less presentations means he can concentrate more on an awful lot of things. Or has to. So, first of all, take this insert. It's the first 2 minutes 28, and I want you to really understand what he's saying because it's your job to invest. It is not your job to listen to someone else and do what they said. It's your job to work hard to invest. You can make or lose more money in your investments than you can working for 5 years. So, you have to spend some time. You do not just listen to one person and do what they say. That's why I bring you join the dots. There are lots There are hundreds There are thousands of people out there all with different opinions, and we try and find those that are the very, very best opinions. So, please listen to the first 2 minutes 28.

OG John AG insert:

Someone dropped a comment under the last video. Should I hold my silver or should I sell it? That was the whole message. And before I go anywhere near a chart today, I have to stop on that question because the question is the problem. I do not like it. Not from you, not from anyone. Nobody on this earth should be able to walk up and talk you into or out of what you do with your own money. That part was never mine to carry for you. It is yours. It was always yours. Here's what I want to see in that comment box instead. OG, I pulled the data myself. I did the homework. Here is my plan. This is my time frame. My risk is defined to the dollar. And whether it is a 20-year hold or a 20-minute trade, it does not change a thing because the plan is mine and I can defend every line of it. That is the comment of a free person. The other one is the comment of a dependent one. Nobody talks me out of a position because I did the work to get into it, and I have been doing it for two decades. Most of you know me for the macro, the long game, the big picture, the metals. That is not the whole of it. I am also an active trader, and I trade markets that have nothing to do with metals down on the fast time frames. I have sat on the 1-minute chart. I have sat on the 15-second chart. To most people, that is gambling. To me, it is the furthest thing from gambling there is, because I know what I am doing before I do it. I know when. I know how. I know my exit before I am ever in the trade. I know my invalidation. I know my target. I know how long I expect to sit in that seat down to the detail. I have logged that data on myself for years, thousands of times over, until I built models for different market environments. So, by the time a setup is in front of me, it is almost mechanical. I do not get surprised inside a trade. And the metals are the opposite end of that same discipline. Those I hold for the long term, and nobody tells me when to buy them or when to sell them. Not the metal, not a single position I hold. I know exactly why I am in it and exactly how long I intend to stay. And I am telling you all of this today for one reason, and it is not to impress you. It is so you understand that none of it is a gift and none of it is luck. It is reps. It is years of logging my own decisions and being honest with myself about the bad ones over and over until the flinch was gone. Every piece of that is something you can build for yourself, and nobody, me included, can build it for you. So, when you send me that question, understand what it does. It does not help you. It exposes you. It says you do not have a plan of your own. It says you are leaning on mine. And leaning is exactly how you end up eaten. That is the line between prey and a predator. And I am not going to dress it up as anything gentler than that. I am not your financial advisor. I have never wanted to be, and I never will be.

And one piece you'll take out of that is metals are for the long term, the generational wealth. They're not trades. They're not trades. I had a look at the figures, and we started this service at the beginning of July 25, just over a year ago. Silver was then 35.50, so it's up 60%. Gold was 3312, so it's up 25%. I'm very happy with that. Extremely happy with those returns. As you know, I'm weighted towards silver, 70% silver, 30% gold, or 25% gold and 5% a bit of XRP as my HBAR and XLM as my crypto hedge. Not there to make money in per se, they're as a hedge in case we go into a crypto base world.

All right. So, let's turn on confidence. And he talks about this, and he talks about confidence is having experience, logic, a plan, a rationale, listening to the right voices who all have shown all those qualities, i.e. logic, a plan, experience, rationale, not just YouTube whizzes who pop up and tell you to do something and then disappear when it doesn't work. All right, all of these All of this experience is what I bring you in Join the Dots, and no more so Yes, I've done a lot of good in all linked a lot of good interviews, but that Grant Williams one was pretty special. All right. So, the last two episodes, Monday and Tuesday that you've seen, watch them again, watch them twice, maybe watch them three times, because they're worth listening to.

All right. So, what do we get to really in in what source code is telling us? We're at the end of financialization. How many times have I told you that in the last year? We're at the end of cheap debt. I've told you the same. We're at the end of no or low inflation. Commodities are all going to boom, aren't they? Doesn't matter which way the world turns. Either they're going to be secure assets, safe assets, or they're going to become necessary for the build-out of massive new infrastructure to cope with the world and the decoupling from China as it as the world's main source. The total dependence that China has created or the West has allowed to be created, it doesn't matter who's to blame, means they have to build out. The end of arrogant disregard, I call it. And that is obviously becoming dependent on someone that you can't rely on. The end of peace, again. The end of globalization, again. The end of the luxury of dependence. Yes, I like that one. The end of the luxury of dependence. We feasted on dependence, and now that dependence is turning against us. What are we going to do? So, I say that brings the end of freedom because all of those things are going to disappear. And that means to take you into the next world, they have to take your freedom away to be able to take you into that next world cuz you ain't going to want to go there on your own because it's going to be very very unsettling. And we've talked about that a lot in all the shows. We've talked about how the people now are being forced or will be forced into a new system. And you can't take them there. You can't say oh you can't explain it to them. No one wants to hear. No one's got the time. No one's got the patience. You can't sit down and say, "Oh, let's have a big discussion about how we're going to take you into No, it has to be forced. So, therefore, you need a crisis, and that's why you have the metals as your generational wealth. Gold is your safety. Silver, I think, is your investment.

So, Rick Rule sees it as well. So, insert 3 minutes to 4 minutes 15, an explanation of sentiment and the incorrect professional opinions through this period. Please listen.

OG John AG insert:

Purpose. Skip and you miss the point. I know this part is uncomfortable, but it is the part you actually need more than any level I am about to hand you. If a man is telling you to just follow him, walk away from him. If you are relying on anyone, me included, you will not make it, period. You will not survive this market. That is not me being harsh with you. That is the entire reason this channel exists, not to make you need me, to turn you into an apex predator who never does. And that, right there, is why a certain crowd cannot stand me. Not because I am loud, because they know I see more than they see. And worse than that, I can act on it. And I am handing it to you for nothing, the exact thing they could not deliver even when you paid them for it. One more thing before we touch a single chart, and it weighs as much as anything on the board today. Sentiment. Look around and half the room has quietly turned bearish on the metals. Gold is done, they tell you. Silver is finished. And why? Because of a retracement. That is the whole reason. Not the vaults, not the physical, not one number that actually matters. A pullback on a screen. These are the same people who would not touch gold or silver when it was cheap and hated, and who fall in love with it at the all-time high. They only want the asset when it is expensive and crowded. Sit with what that makes them the moment the move runs. It makes them the fuel. It makes them the exit liquidity for everybody who bought the discount they were too scared to touch. That is the entire role they play. That is all they

I think it's a brilliant description. Remember, no banks, no banks have been buying gold and silver since whenever. No banks have been buying gold and silver. They've got their 60/40 portfolio, haven't they? 60 equities, 40 40 bonds. And now the bonds have come to the end of that 40-year period of financialization, which has been created by low bond rates, low inflation, low inflation. No official inflation, anyway. Despite what we see in food prices.

So, the next clip I'm going to give you is 7 minutes 30 to 8 minutes 51. Please listen.

OG John AG insert:

Now, watch the part the president will not put on a poster. Diesel is still trading at levels you last saw when crude was above $100, and it ticked higher again today. Lower crude on the screen does not help you when the fuel the real economy actually runs on keeps getting more expensive. So, a man can stand up and say oil is only 85, victory. The truck that brings your food does not run on the screen price. It runs on diesel, and diesel is telling the truth. Here's the bigger read on energy, and it is the one the long-term holder needs. We have moved out of the old world where commodities moved mostly on demand. Growth slows, oil falls, growth picks up, oil rises. That was the whole game before this decade. That game is over. The danger now is not soft demand. It is supply stress in the things the system cannot run without. And the cleanest tell for supply stress is backwardation. When the barrel you can get today costs more than the barrel promised to you next year. When that happens, the market is screaming that people want it now, that inventory is thin, that the system is paying up for the present. That is why oil can do exactly what silver did. Silver is dangerous on the upside because you cannot conjure new mine supply overnight. It takes years. Oil is dangerous for the opposite reason, because you cannot kill demand overnight. The world still has to move and eat and ship, no matter the price. Same trap from two directions. Supply cannot answer fast enough. The physical gets tight, the shorts get caught, price starts to run, the shorts are forced to cover, and the covering pours fuel

This covers diesel and silver. Now, that was an excellent interview by uh Mario Manic 64 of Peter Carlin on the diesel issue a few days ago. Please go back and watch it. Please go back. Okay, diesel and silver. How do you link those? I do, and so does OC OG John AG in 7 minutes 30 to 8 minutes 51. So, there are supply stresses in these vital commodities. Diesel is vital, silver is vital. Diesel to move things, silver in the new electronics world, the missile world, the bomb world, the data world, every world, the TV world, the EV world, silver.

All right. Now, we come on to the next clip. And this is 10 minutes 01 through to 12 minutes 30. It's the last insert. Please listen. It covers so many things that Grant Williams covers and that I've covered before. The trust in relationships, the trust in the yen, the Japanese carry trade, the rate rises, the intervention all failing. Please listen.

OG John AG insert:

That is the setup. The scarce assets keep rising even while the average person is struggling. Look at Japan, the clearest picture of a system out of tools. The yen just hit its weakest against the dollar since 1986, 40 years. And look at what they threw at it. In June, the Bank of Japan hiked to 1%, the highest since 1995, and normally that lifts a currency. The yen barely moved. Before that, they spent better than $73 billion buying yen directly. It firmed, then reversed. Then a push to force their giant pension fund into domestic assets. A pop, then nothing. Three tools, three failures, and the yen sits right back where it started. Adam Ferguson saw this in When Money Dies, his account of the Weimar collapse. The lesson is not the wheelbarrows of cash. It is that once a currency loses the trust of the people holding it, the official machinery stops working. It was never about which lever they pulled. It was confidence. Japan is not Weimar, and I will not pretend it is, but the mechanism is the same. A rate hike, a record intervention, a pension push, all shrugged off. That is what it looks like when the tools stop biting. And a weak yen is not just Japan's problem. It raises the cost of every barrel and every bit of food that island imports, feeding inflation already over target and eating into the real wages of ordinary households. And here is why that lands on you in America, whether you own a single yen or not. Japan is the largest foreign holder of United States debt, carrying its own debt worth better than 230% of its economy. To defend a sinking yen, Japan has two moves: hike rates or sell foreign assets. Selling foreign assets means selling US Treasuries. So, at the exact moment America is financing a war and paying more than 1.2 trillion dollars a year just in interest, its biggest foreign lender is being forced to become a seller. That is why yields are ripping higher across the whole developed world at once. And that is the quiet reversal almost nobody is pricing. For decades, cheap Japanese money flowed out and funded everything, every carry trade, every leveraged bet around the planet. That tide is turning home. The world was built around Japanese money leaving. Now it has to adjust to Japanese money coming back, which brings us to

Okay, so tomorrow we'll come back and we'll finish that show from 12 minutes 30 onwards cuz it starts to talk about bond markets then, which are so so so vital to what's going to happen. So, I hope you enjoyed today's show. Please watch that a few times. Please watch those clips from Source Code times. They are crucial to understand. And thank you very much man, from Craig, from me, and Mr. Fugly happily sleeping here. Cheers.

Woo!

Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises (1881–1973)

One of the most notable economists and social philosophers of the twentieth century, Ludwig von Mises, in the course of a long and highly productive life, developed an integrated, deduct­ive science of economics based on the fundamental axiom that in­dividual human beings act purposively to achieve desired goals. Even though his economic analysis itself was “value-free” — in the sense of being irrelevant to values held by economists — Mises concluded that the only viable economic policy for the human race was a policy of unrestricted laissez-faire, of free markets and the unhampered exercise of the right of private property, with government strictly limited to the defense of person and property within its territorial area.

For Mises was able to demonstrate (a) that the expansion of free markets, the division of labor, and private capital investment is the only possible path to the prosperity and flourishing of the human race; (b) that socialism would be disastrous for a modern economy because the absence of private ownership of land and capital goods prevents any sort of rational pricing, or estimate of costs, and (c) that government intervention, in addition to hampering and crippling the market, would prove counter-productive and cumulative, leading inevitably to socialism unless the entire tissue of interventions was repealed.

Holding these views, and hewing to truth indomitably in the face of a century increasingly devoted to statism and collectivism, Mises became famous for his “intransigence” in insisting on a non-inflationary gold standard and on laissez-faire.

Effectively barred from any paid university post in Austria and later in the United States, Mises pursued his course gallantly. As the chief economic adviser to the Austrian government in the 1920s, Mises was single-handedly able to slow down Austrian inflation; and he developed his own “private seminar” which attracted the out­standing young economists, social scientists, and philosophers throughout Europe. As the founder of the “neo-Austrian School” of economics, Mises’s business cycle theory, which blamed inflation and depressions on inflationary bank credit encouraged by Central Banks, was adopted by most younger economists in England in the early 1930s as the best explanation of the Great Depression.

Having fled the Nazis to the United States, Mises did some of his most important work here. In over two decades of teaching, he inspired an emerging Austrian School in the United States. The year after Mises died in 1973, his most distinguished follower, F.A. Hayek, was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for his work in elaborat­ing Mises’s business cycle theory during the later 1920s and 1930s.

Mises was born on Sept 29, 1881, in the city of Lemberg (now Lvov) in Galicia, where his father, a Viennese construction engineer working for the Austrian railroads, was then stationed. Both Mises’s father and mother came from prominent Viennese families; his mother’s uncle, Dr Joachim Landau, served as deputy from the Liberal Party in the Austrian Parliament.

Entering the University of Vienna at the turn of the century as a leftist interventionist, the young Mises discovered Principles of Economics by Carl Menger, the founding work of the Austrian School of economics, and was quickly converted to the Austrian emphasis on individual action rather than unrealistic mechanistic equations as the unit of economics analysis, and to the importance of a free-market economy.

Mises became a prominent post-doctoral student in the famous University of Vienna seminar of the great Austrian economist Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk (among whose many accomplishments was the devastating refutation of the Marxian labor theory of value).

During this period, in his first great work, The Theory of Money and Credit (1912) Mises performed what had been deemed an impossible task: to integrate the theory of money into the general theory of marginal utility and price (what would now be called integrating “macroeconomics” into “microeconomics.”) Since Bohm-Bawerk and his other Austrian colleagues did not accept Mises’s integration and remained without a monetary theory, he was therefore obliged to strike out on his own and found a “neo­-Austrian” school.

In his monetary theory, Mises revived the long forgotten British Currency School principle, prominent until the 1850s, that society does not at all benefit from any increase in the money supply, that increased money and bank credit only causes inflation and business cycles, and that therefore government policy should maintain the equivalent of a 100 percent gold standard.

Mises added to this insight the elements of his business cycle theory: that credit expansion by the banks, in addition to causing inflation, makes depressions inevitable by causing “malinvestment,” i.e. by inducing businessmen to overinvest in “higher orders” of capital goods (machine tools, construction, etc.) and to underinvest in consumer goods.

The problem is that inflationary bank credit, when loaned to business, masquerades as pseudo-savings, and makes businessmen believe that there are more savings available to invest in capital goods production than consumers are genuinely willing to save. Hence, an inflationary boom requires a recession which becomes a painful but necessary process by which the market liquidates unsound investments and reestablishes the investment and production structure that best satisfies consumer preferences and demands.

Mises, and his follower Hayek, developed this cycle theory during the 1920s, on the basis of which Mises was able to warn an unheeding world that the widely trumpeted “New Era” of permanent prosperity of the 192Os was a sham, and that its inevitable result would be bank panic and depression. When Hayek was invited to teach at the London School of Economics in 1931 by an influential former student at Mises’s private seminar, Lionel Robbins, Hayek was able to convert most of the younger English economists to this perspective. On a collision course with John Maynard Keynes and his disciples at Cambridge, Hayek demolished Keynes’s Treatise on Money, but lost the battle and most of his followers to the tidal wave of the Keynesian Revolution that swept the economic world after the publication of Keynes’s General Theory in 1936.

The policy prescriptions for business cycles of Mises-Hayek and of Keynes were diametrically opposed. During a boom period, Mises counseled the immediate end of all bank credit and monetary expansion; and, during a recession, he advised strict laissez-faire, allowing the readjustment forces of the recession to work themselves out as rapidly as possible.

Not only that: for Mises the worst form of intervention would be to prop up prices or wage rates, causing unemployment, to increase the money supply, or to boost government spending in order to stimulate consumption. For Mises, the recession was a problem of under-saving, and over-consumption, and it was therefore important to encourage savings and thrift rather than the opposite, to cut government spending rather than increase it. It is clear that, from 1936 on Mises was totally in opposition to the worldwide fashion in macroeconomic policy.

Socialism-communism had triumphed in Russia and in much of Europe during and after World War I, and Mises was moved to publish his famous article, “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,” (1920) in which he demonstrated that it would be impossible for a socialist planning board to plan a modern economic system; furthermore, no attempt at artificial “markets” would work, since a genuine pricing and costing system requires an exchange of property titles, and therefore private property in the means of production.

Mises developed the article into his book Socialism(1922), a comprehensive philosophical and sociological, as well as economic critique which still stands as the most thorough and devastating demolition of socialism ever written. Mises’s Socialism converted many prominent economists and social philosophers out of socialism, including Hayek, the German Wilhelm Ropke, and the Englishman Lionel Robbins.

In the United States, the publication of the English translation of Socialism in 1936 attracted the admiration of the prominent economic journalist Henry Hazlitt, who reviewed it in the New York Times, and converted one of America’s most prominent and learned Communist fellow-travelers of the period, J.B. Matthews, to a Misesian position and to opposition to all forms of socialism.

Socialists throughout Europe and the United States worried about the problem of economic calculation under socialism for about fifteen years, finally pronouncing the problem solved with the promulgation of the “market socialism” model of the Polish economist Oskar Lange in 1936. Lange returned to Poland after World War II to help plan Polish Communism. The collapse of socialist planning, in Poland and the other Communist countries in 1989, left Establishment economists across the ideological spectrum, all of whom bought the Lange “solution”, mightily embarrassed.

Some prominent socialists, such as Robert Heilbroner, have had the grace to admit publicly that “Mises was right” all along (the phrase “Mises was Right” was the title of a panel at the annual 1990 meeting of the Southern Economic Association at New Orleans).

If socialism was an economic catastrophe, government inter­vention could not work, and would tend to lead inevitably to socialism. Mises elaborated these insights in his Critique of Interventionism (1929), and set forth his political philosophy of laissez-faire liberalism in his Liberalism (1927).

In adition to setting himself against all the political trends of the twentieth century, Mises combated with equal fervor and eloquence what he considered the disastrous dominant philosophical and methodological trends, in economics and other disciplines. These included positivism, relativism, historicism, polylogism” the idea that each race and gender has its own “logic” and there­fore cannot communicate with other groups), and all forms of irrationalism and denial of objective truth. Mises also developed what he considered to be the proper methodology of economic theory--logical deduction from evident axioms, which he labeled “praxeo­logy”, and he leveled trenchant critiques of the growing tendency in economics and other disciplines to replace praxeology and histor­ical understanding by unrealistic mathematical models and statistical manipulations.

Emigrating to the United States in 1940, Mises’s first two books in English were important and influential. His Omnipotent Government (1944) was the first book to challenge the then-standard Marxian view that fascism and Nazism were imposed upon their nations by big business and the “capitalist class.” His Bureaucracy (1944) was a still unsurpassed analysis of why government operation must necessarily be “bureaucratic” and suffer from all the ills of bureaucracy.

Mises’s most monumental achievement was his Human Action (1949), the first comprehensive treatise on economic theory written since the first World War. Here Mises took up the challenge of his own methodology and research program and elaborated an integrated and massive structure of economic theory on his own deductive, “praxeological” principles. Published in an era when economists and governments generally were totally dedicated to statism and Keynesian inflation, Human Action was unread by the economics profession. Finally, in 1957 Mises published his last major work, Theory and History, which, in addition to refutations of Marxism and historicism, set forth the basic differences and functions of theory and of history in economics as well as all the various disciplines of human action.

In the United States as in his native Austria, Mises could not find a paid post in academia. New York University, where he taught from until 1945 until his retirement at the age of 88 in 1969, would only designate him as Visiting Professor, and his salary had to be paid by the conservative-libertarian William Volker Fund until 1962, and after that by a consortium of free-market foundations and businessmen. Despite the unfavorable climate, Mises inspired a growing group of students and admirers, cheer­fully encouraged their scholarship, and himself continued his remarkable productivity.

Mises was also sustained by and worked together with free­-market and libertarian admirers. From its origin in 1946 until his death, Mises was a part-time staff member of the Foundation for Economic Education at Irvington-on-Hudson, New York; and he was in the 1950s an economic advisor to the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) working with their laissez-faire wing which finally lost out to the tide of “enlightened” statism.

As a free trader and a classical liberal in the tradition of Cobden, Bright, and Spencer, Mises was a libertarian who champ­ioned reason and individual liberty in personal as well as eco­nomic matters. As a rationalist and an opponent of statism in all its forms, Mises would never call himself a “conservative,” but rather a liberal in the nineteenth-century sense.

Indeed, Mises was politically a laissez-faire radical, who denounced tariffs, immigration restrictions, or governmental attempts to enforce morality. On the other hand, Mises was a staunch cultural and sociological conservative, who attacked egalitarianism, strongly denounced political feminism as a facet of socialism. In contrast to many conservative critics of capitalism, Mises held that personal morality and the nuclear family were both essential to, and fostered by, a system of free-market capitalism.

Mises’s influence was remarkable, considering the unpopularity of his epistemological and political views. His students of the 1920s, even those who later became Keynesians, were permanently stamped by a visible Misesian influence. These students included, in addition to Hayek and Robbins, Fritz Machlup, Gottfried von Haberler, Oskar Morgenstern, Alfred Schutz, Hugh Gaitskell, Howard S. Ellis, John Van Sickle, and Erich Voegelin.

In France, General DeGaulle’s major economic and monetary adviser, who helped swing France away from socialism, was Jacques Rueff, an old-friend and admirer of Mises. And part of post-World War II Italy’s shift away from socialism was due to its President Luigi Einaudi, a distinguished economist and long-time friend and free-market colleague of Mises. In the United States, Mises was scarcely as influential. Under less promising academic conditions, his students and admirers included Henry Hazlitt, Lawrence Fertig, Percy Greaves, Jr., Bettina Bien Graeves, Hans F. Sennholz, William H. Peterson, Louis M. Spadaro, Israel M. Kirzner, Ralph Raico, George Reisman, and Murray N. Rothbard. But Mises was able to build a remarkably strong and loyal following among businessmen and other non-academics; his massive and complex Human Action has sold extraordinarily well ever since the year of its original publication.

Since Mises’s death in New York City on October 10, 1973 at the age of 92, Misesian doctrine and influence has experienced a ren­aissance. The following year saw not only Hayek’s Nobel Prize for Misesian cycle theory, but also the first of many Austrian School conferences in the United States. Books by Mises have been reprinted and collections of his articles translated and published. Courses and programs in Austrian Economics have been taught and established throughout the country.

Taking the lead in this revival of Mises and in the study and expansion of Misesian doctrine has been the Ludwig von Mises Institute, founded by Lle­wellyn Rockwell, Jr. in 1982 and headquartered in Auburn, Alabama. The Mises Institute publishes scholarly journals and books, and offers courses in elementary, intermediate and advanced Austrian economics, which attract in­creasing numbers of students and professors. Undoubtedly, the collapse of socialism and the increased attractiveness of the free market have greatly contributed to this upsurge of popularity.

Most people never even noticed it happening. The label said gold standard, but the real question is what kind of gold standard were we on? The public was told nothing major had changed. But underneath the system was moving away from gold toward pure debt-based paper money.

So, Bill 457S9s asked a very important question and one that I've actually been wanting to answer for a really long time and have so told you I'm going to answer it. So, now I am. And here's Bill's question. But during the depression, we were on the gold standard. So, I believe what he's talking about is the big dip. and let's just take a look at what comes next because a lot of people say but during the Great Depression we were on the gold standard and that sounds really simple and and technically we were but the real question is what kind of gold standard were we on because just because something has the same name does not necessarily mean it is the same thing and we've talked about that regard art in confiscation quite a bit. All different names mean the same thing, but even the same names can mean completely different things. And that is why this story matters to you because the same thing has happened to our money over and over and over again. real money, sound money, was slowly replaced with paper promises, then debt, then digital debt, and most people never even noticed it happening. But frankly, you feel the result every day. You feel it when groceries cost more, when saving money feels harder, when your dollars buy less and less, and even though you've worked just as hard or even harder.

So today, I want to walk you through a simple fable, the ship of Thesus. This was a famous ship that was kept in harbor for many, many years. Over time, one old wooden board rots, so it was replaced with the new board. Later, another board is replaced, then another, and eventually every single part of the ship has been replaced. The bonds, the sails, the mast, everything.

And so the question is, if every part of a ship is replaced one piece at a time, is it still the same ship?

And if every part of money is replaced one piece at a time, is it still the same money?

And that is what we are going to answer. And I'm going to show you how they did it because they're doing it again. So having this recollection will help you understand what's really happening. So again, Bill asked, "But during the depression, we were on the gold standard." And I'm thinking it's because the US dollar lost purchasing power even while we're on the gold standard. That is the statement we're going to examine, not with options, not with politics, but by looking at what money actually was, how it changed, and what happened to its purchasing power. because the label said gold standard but the question again was it the same ship or had key parts already been replaced?

Now before we can answer that we need to know what real money is supposed to do. Sound money has four key jobs. First it is a unit of account and that means we can use it to price things and value things. Second, it is a medium of exchange, which means we use it to buy and sell or barter. Third, it is a standard of payment, which means it can settle debts fairly and you are fairly paid for your labor. And fourth, it is a store of value so that no matter when you use that money, you are always paid fairly for the labor that created it to begin with.

Now, gold and silver have served these roles for thousands and thousands of years. Proof of concept because they are not someone else's debt. They run no counterparty risk. They don't need a promise from a bank. They do not need a government guarantee. They are money in and of themselves because they have the broadest base of functionality and the broadest base of demand. It's why it overwhelms the systems ability to manipulate it. That, my friends, is the foundation of sound money. Now, let's look at what happened when that foundation began to change. So, look at this chart. In 1914, the consumer dollar had full purchasing power. So, $1 bought 100 cents worth of goods. But by 1933, that purchasing power had already fallen by over 50%.

So before gold was taken from the people in 1933, the dollar had already lost a large portion of its purchasing power. And I'm going to show you why in a moment because that is a very, very important clue. If we were truly on a strong, honest, sound gold standard, why was the dollar already losing so much purchasing power? Now, this is where this ship of Thesius story begins. Because the outside still looked familiar. People still they still used dollars, didn't they? People still talked about gold. It was part of our system. And people still thought the system was safe. But inside the system, parts were already being replaced. So now let's bring in the fable. The ship of Thesius asks a simple question. If you have a ship and you replace one wooden board, it still seems like the same ship. Then you replace another board, then another, then the sail, then the mass, then the steering wheel. At what point is it no longer the same ship?

That is what happened to money. Gold money was not replaced all at once. It was replaced one piece at a time. First, people used actual gold and silver coins. Then they used these paper certificates that that I mean these represented gold. You see this little gold image right there? Then they use Federal Reserve notes and those notes are debt instruments and the Federal Reserve is a private corporation. We'll come back to this. But in the end, the system was no longer sound money. And each step looked small, but it changed the money entirely. It was debt wearing the costume, the costume of money. Now, let's look at one of the first big pieces that were actually replaced because this slide shows a key phrase, elasticity in note issues. That's key because what that means at that the system wanted the ability to stretch and grow the money supply.

But sound money is not supposed to stretch just because banks or governments want more money. Gold and silver are disciplined. They cannot be created with the stroke of a pen or a push of a button. They cannot be printed or magically created into existence. But paper notes, I mean, that's easy. They can be expanded. So, when the system allowed more flexible note creation, it opened the door to inflation. This was one of those replaced boards in the ship. The name gold standard may still have been there, but the discipline of sound money was already being weakened. They destroyed the constitution at that moment in time.

Next, we see how people were made to think that nothing had changed. But I got news for you. This is one of the most important slides that I can show you because here, what do we see? We see a gold coin, a gold certificate, and a Federal Reserve note. To the average person, these may have felt the same because they were all used in circulation at the same time. They could all buy the same level of stated value. They were all $20. And they were all treated alike, like sound money. But they were not the same thing. A gold coin, this is money. A gold certificate is just a paper claim on real money. And a Federal Reserve note. Well, I got news for you. A Federal Reserve note is a debtbased instrument. That, my friends, is a huge difference. It's like replacing the solid wood boards of the ship with painted cardboard. From far away, it may look the same, but it is not the same.

And now we can see the whole transition a lot more clearly. And frankly this slide makes the point plainly because the note a note it's a debt instrument and that matters because gold is not debt silver is not debt but a note this thing it just represents a promise nothing more and promises can be broken promises can be changed and promises can be inflated away.

So here is another replaced piece of the ship. Money used to be an asset. Then it became a claim on an asset. Then it became a debt instrument. That is not a small change. That is the heart of the story. The system that we still call money. But it was no longer sound money in the same way. Now, let's see what happened when this new debt money system expanded because this is the piece that I have been dying to show you since Kelly created it. Now, I'm going to come back to that whole chart that you just saw, but this chart from the Federal Reserve shows the transition from a goldbased system into a paperbased system. And notice it did in the beginning happen in one dramatic moment, but then they backed off and it happened more gradually and that's why most people missed it. The ship still had the same name. The money still had familiar symbols. The public was told nothing major had changed, but underneath the system was moving away from gold toward pure debt-based paper money. And this is why saying we were on the gold standard during the depression is way too simple because we were transitioning off of it. The better question is, were we really on a true gold standard or were we on a weakened system where the gold had already been crowded out by paper claims on debt? And the answer becomes clearer when we look at what a Federal Reserve note really is. Like I showed you, the Federal Reserve is a private corporation and the note is a debt instrument. And I just want you to notice that little bit of gold on the bottom. Well, there's your 10 to one. That fractional reserve system because all that gray area did that's private corporate shortterm commercial debt. And that, my friends, was now turned into this Federal Reserve note. You and I and everybody everywhere in the world are working for debt, corporate debt. Why in the world is that okay with you? I'm coming back to the larger slide here in just a minute. But you can see that kickoff because this is where you saw that massive loss of purchasing power. This is the purchasing power and it shows the 1920s were not just a time of prosperity. They were also a time of credit expansion because once the government oops wish that happened to them but once the government prints all this money into existence. It's in the system. It goes someplace. And that's why the 1920s were so seemed so prosperous. And I also want to point out this 48% loss of purchasing power right out of the shoot when the Federal Reserve instead of 20th of an ounce supporting $1 in that note that I just showed you that 20th of an ounce now supported $2.40. This is not rocket science. They just printed almost two and a half times the amount of money into existence than they could before with the same amount of gold inside of the system. That's why we lost that 48% level of purchasing power. Can you see it? And you see that little blip up to 60 cents worth of purchasing power. We've talked about this before. When inflation heats up and pushes your price into the sky, if they pull back just a little bit, you go, "Oh, look it. Things are under control. Things are more normal." Even when that's just covering up the lie. So, it was all of that money creation that created the roaring 20s. And for the first time, the middle class could get credit. What an amazing thing. Yay. It could keep that whole game going because an inflated money supply means that things look in terms of of numbers that they're going up and up and up, but in reality, what they're doing is they're destroying your purchasing power. And when more debt money is created, it can push up those asset prices and create bubbles. And me, I mean, honestly, people feel richer. for a while. But there is a cost and that is the purchasing power falls. The dollar buys less. So the roaring 20s were not just built on real savings and sound money. They were built on pushed up credit. And credit can feel good on the way up. Look at this. I can buy so much more stuff. Happy days are here again. buddy, can you spare a dime?

But it can be painful when the bill comes due. And that brings us to the next image because people were being asked to trust those paper promises and that inflation was a good thing. This image of that period of time, Roosevelt reminds me and reminds all of us really that the public was being asked to trust the system and the system was based upon inflation. But trust is not the same as sound money. And a promise is not the same as payment. And a paper claim in your hand is not the same as gold in your hand.

This is another part of the fable because the ship may still be floating but if enough strong parts were replaced with weak parts eventually that ship cannot protect the passengers. And in a monetary system, we all of us, we're the passengers. Our savings are on that ship. Our retirement is on that ship. Our purchasing power is on that ship. Our future and our children's future is on that ship.

And this chart shows the growth of debt currency and checking accounts. compared to gold and silver. And you see that all the way on the bottom. The important point is this. The paper and debt claims grew much faster than the sound money foundation. And that means more and more claims were built on top of a smaller and smaller base.

So you can look at that and they withheld all of that debt that they created until they were ready to unleash it on the public. And when did that happen? Oh yeah, after they confiscated and took gold away from the public. That my friends is when they unleashed it. When you and I have no other options, we are fully tied to the system. Can you see why it is so critically important for you to have that shortity in food, water, energy, security, barter abability, wealth preservation, community, and shelter because this is what I think we're going to see with stable coins. And by the way, we saw it again after the 70s in the 1980s kickoff. This is always what happens. always and they really tell us that it's a all for our best interest but I don't know with this K-shaped recovery exactly whose best interest do you think this is really in because all of that is simply inflation and devaluation and the strong wood is replaced by weaker materials. The ship may still look fine for a while, but the strength is gone. That is what happens when a monetary system builds too many promises on too little real money. That's why you have to be your own central bank because eventually the promises become too large and the system needs inflation to keep it going. And that is why the debt money system creates a loop.

I'd like you to notice on the bottom the amount of gold that we held in deep storage storage for foreign governments. And in the 60s they were taking and pulling the gold out of our system. So by the time Nixon closed that gold window, which was really a confiscation from foreign governments of their gold, why they allowed it, I don't understand, but they did. That was the most current overt confiscation of gold and very significant. We had no choice. Had we not closed that gold window when we did, we would have less gold or who even knows how much gold we have in deep storage today. But that is something to really pay attention to. This is a very complicated slide. I'd like you to feel free to talk to your strategy specialists about it to make sure that you really understand it. And it's critical that you do because this is what we have going on right now as they transition us from this paper system into the next system which I hope we have a say in because there are six stages to the debt money doom loop and we're just going to do that simply put because the higher the debt the lower the interest rates need to be so that they could take on more debt and service it. This slide shows that debt money doom loop. Here's the simple version. When the system needs more money, it creates more debt. When more debt is created, interest rates often need to be pushed lower so that you could take on and service that debt. When rates are too low for too long, lots more borrowing happens. That creates more inflation pressure. Then confidence in the currency weakens. Then the same system needs even more debt to keep going. That is the loop. Debt money does not solve the problem. It feeds the problem and makes it bigger and bigger and bigger.

Sound money, physical gold, physical silver creates discipline in the system. Debt money demands expansion. And that is why your purchasing power keeps getting drained over time. They just want it to happen slowly enough that you don't make any changes. Now, let's move from history to where we are today because this chart shows federal debt rising from hundreds of billions to tens of trillions. This is not just a government problem. It affects every person who earns, save, invest or retires in do dollars or any other fiat money because debt at some point it has to be dealt with. It can be paid honestly. It can be defaulted on. It can be rolled over or it can be inflated away. And inflated away is what they've always depended on. Historically, governments often choose inflation because it is less obvious. It does not look like a tax bill, but it is. And it acts like one. Your dollars buy less and less. Your savings stretch less and less. Your labor has to work harder and harder just to stay in the same place, if you even can. And that brings us to the purchasing power of the modern dollar. Because this chart shows the long fall in the purchasing power of that dollar. This is the result of the replacement story. When money becomes debt and debt must keep growing, purchasing power is always sac it's always sacrificed. That's that K-shaped recovery. For most, it's sacrificed. For the few, it's better. That is why prices do not really go up in isolation. What is really happening is that the dollar is going down.

The measuring stick is shrinking. Imagine measuring your child's height with the ruler that gets shorter every year. It would look like your child is growing faster than they really are. That is what inflation does. It makes prices look like they're rising, but much of the time currency is just the currency losing value.

Now, let's compare that shrinking dollar to spot gold and spot silver. Because this slide brings the story home. Look at the difference between the cost of a basic food basket and spot silver and spot gold over time. I even happened to do it almost a year ago. So I thought I would leave that in there from last year because I thought it was really interesting in 613. So not quite but almost a year ago while the food basket had gone up a little bit more than 2300%. Spot silver had gone up over 3600% and spot gold glowing closer to 16.600,000 600,000%. But look what happened this year when I just ran those numbers the other day. Well, that basket had gone up a little bit to over 2400%. So, almost a full 100 percentage point. Spot silver basically more than doubled during that same period of time. And spot gold rather than the 16.6,000% 6,000% it went up almost 22,000%.

They are monetary assets that have always for thousands of years survived governments, currencies, wars, reset and debt cycles. They do not depend on someone else's promise to pay. This is why they matter. So the question is not whether or not gold and silver move up and down dayto day. Paper currencies come and they go. Debt systems expand and then they fall. But sound money sound money remains on task to protect your purchasing power over time. So now we come back to the fable and the final lesson.

Money was not replaced overnight. You'd notice it. It was replaced one piece at a time over time. First gold and silver coin were replaced by paper claims. There's that paper claim. Then that paper claim were replaced by these notes. And those notes then debt instruments. And then debt became the costume of money. And when debt wears the same costume of money, most people do not notice right away. They still see dollars. I mean, I can pull out a $20 today. They still see dollars. They still see bank balances. They still see numbers on a screen and the stock markets going up. But the substance has changed. The ship has changed. The money has changed. And the people who do not understand that are the ones most exposed and vulnerable when the system changes again.

That's why this story matters. It's not just history. It's a warning. And it is also an opportunity because sound money was never destroyed. Gold and silver. Look at they're still here from thousands and thousands of years. They are not promises, not debt, and not someone else's liability. They are the monetary foundation that outlasts every single paper system that has ever been in existence.

So, here's the question I want to leave you with today. If the monetary ship has been rebuilt with debt, paper, and promises, what part of your wealth is still anchored to sound money?

This is exactly why we do what we do here at Zang International. And it all has to start with your goals. We help people build a sound money strategy using physical gold and silver so that they are not depending only on a debt-based system that is designed to lose your purchasing power over time. If this story made any sense to you, don't wait until the next crisis to prepare. Call us and schedule a sound money strategy session because the best time to understand the ship is before it starts taking on water. And the best time to own sound money is before everyone else realizes why they need it. And it's too late to get it.

And without a doubt, while we need that local community, we need a global community to demand sound money, create that discipline in the next monetary system that we're transitioning into. And frankly, I know without a doubt that together we can do anything. Remember the dimes? If you're a client, you get the first one free and then the rest of them at our cost cuz you're the army. Let's get sound money back in the system again. Don't we have an obligation to do so? And until next we meet, please, wherever you are in the world, be safe out there. Bye-bye.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/07/gold-isn-t-returning-confidence-is-leaving/

Most people are framing the conversation regarding gold wrong.

They talk about gold making a comeback -- as though the metal changed. As though something happened to gold.

Nothing happened to gold. Gold is exactly what it has always been.

What's changed is the environment around it. And that distinction matters enormously, because it tells you where to look for better insights.

For decades, people treated fiat currency as the unquestioned foundation of global finance. Gold became an afterthought -- an inflation hedge, a crisis trade, insurance against events sophisticated investors assumed would never arrive. The system ran on confidence, and confidence was abundant. When confidence is abundant, nobody examines the collateral.

However: when confidence erodes, collateral suddenly matters again.

That is what is happening now. Not suddenly. Not dramatically. Systemically.

Central banks have been quietly adding gold reserves for years. Governments have grown uncomfortable with the political risk embedded in foreign currency holdings. Institutional investors are revisiting strategic allocations they long considered settled. Discussions have surfaced around gold-backed sovereign debt. Tokenization is making physical ownership practical inside a digital financial system.

Taken individually, none of this looks like a revolution. Taken together, it looks like a system beginning to search for a more trusted foundation.

The conventional gold debate obsesses over inflation forecasts, Federal Reserve policy, and price targets. That framing misses the structural issue entirely. Gold is not becoming more valuable because its characteristics changed. Its characteristics have been constant for centuries. What changed is how much those characteristics matter in the environment we now occupy.

Every period of monetary history forces the same question eventually: what asset sits outside the promises of everyone else? That question grows more urgent as sovereign debt expands, fiscal flexibility narrows, and geopolitical relationships become less predictable. In that environment, neutrality acquires real value. Gold carries no national allegiance, no corporate balance sheet, no counterparty obligation. Those qualities have always existed. Markets are simply beginning to price them again.

Although gold-backed money deserves serious consideration -- not as nostalgia, but as a return to the classical gold standard -- it remains highly improbable. Modern governments have little incentive to surrender the flexibility fiat systems afford them. The realistic scenario is quieter than that. Gold gradually resumes its role as a reference asset. Not circulating currency. Not legal tender. But foundational collateral, increasingly preferred when confidence elsewhere continues to weaken. This is what appears to be happening far away from all the sell-side headlines.

What makes this moment worth watching is the self-reinforcing nature of the process. Higher demand supports higher prices. Higher prices strengthen balance sheets. Stronger balance sheets make additional gold ownership easier to justify. Broader institutional acceptance encourages wider adoption. Wider adoption generates further demand. These are not isolated developments. They are feedback loops.

Today, whether this ever produces a formal gold-backed currency is secondary. The primary insight is: people and governments are actively adjusting the value of confidence. Quietly. Through behavior, not announcement. History repeatedly shows that monetary transitions rarely begin with a declaration. They begin when participants start acting differently -- and by the time the new consensus becomes obvious, most of the adjustment has already occurred.

So the right question is not whether gold deserves renewed attention. The right question is why increasingly sophisticated institutions believe it does -- and what that tells us about the system they are quietly hedging against.

That answer has nothing to do with nostalgia.

It has everything to do with architecture.

Financial systems are based on confidence.

When confidence begins to fragment, participants seek assets that require the fewest assumptions.

Gold has occupied that position before -- not because governments demanded it, but because markets eventually preferred it.

And while goldbugs wait, there is now an option to collect as much as 4% yield on physical, paid out as additional ounces of physical gold, something our friends at Monetary Metals have been perfecting for years.

Gold is not asking for a larger role in the current system.

The current system may be assigning it one.

Mark Moss delivers one of the clearest explanations yet of the four stages of Financialisation and why the global system may finally be reaching its limits.

The First Floor was the DotCom Bubble. Excess liquidity and speculation drove valuations to unsustainable levels before the collapse of 2000–2001.

The Second Floor became Residential Property. Supported by aggressive lending, derivatives and central bank policies, property evolved into the dominant asset class until the Global Financial Crisis exposed the risks.

The Third Floor was Sovereign Debt. Massive QE programmes, ultra-low interest rates and unprecedented money creation allowed governments to postpone the consequences of previous excesses. Covid accelerated this process dramatically.

Today that Sovereign Debt Bubble is showing signs of strain as bond yields rise, refinancing costs increase and global demand for government debt weakens.

The question becomes:

What is the Fourth Floor?

If confidence in fiat currencies, bonds and debt-based assets continues to erode, capital may increasingly seek scarce, tangible and trusted stores of value.

This is where Exter's Inverted Pyramid becomes highly relevant.

Gold, silver and selected real assets sit at the foundation of that pyramid. In a world carrying record debt levels and unprecedented money supply growth, even a modest reallocation of capital could have profound consequences for precious metals markets.

The road of Financialisation may be approaching its end.

The implications for investors could be enormous.

I've always been a victim of investing wrongly over the years which have made me lose so much money I don't even wish to remember because it breaks me whenever I recall my experiences.

Since I started using this community, I've picked one or two things that's very important about going into investment. As a result, I've been very careful with how I go about investing today.

Thank you so much for everything!

Pricing Assets in Dollars is Destroying Your Wealth: An Interview with Takoa D Silva

Mike: So now I guess it's finally the West's turn—or in this case specifically the United States—that they have their turn, so to speak, of rapid currency devaluation and asset prices of all kinds just going up at different speeds and confusing people who haven't personally experienced that before.

Tobacco same thing, it is out or near a 60-year low in price. Gold, coconut oil same thing, very low historically speaking. Gold very low in price from the standpoint of an American and many other people around the world. It may not feel that way because wages and salaries have not kept pace with the speed of this devaluation that's occurred in the US dollar over time. They've not increased in the same proportion. So the labor that people have on offer is not tied to inflation unless they have a job that's tied to inflation some way.

They're using this type of perspective in their day-to-day lives in terms of storing purchasing power and things like jewelry, other physical commodities such as food, processed foods to store purchasing power, certainly real estate, as opposed to keeping money in the bank. So it's another testament to the fact that deficit spending is occurring year after year, currency values decline, and it just magnifies moves causing a person to think that the bull markets are actually much larger than they really are when measured against gold.

Mike: Welcome to another RTD interview. Today I'm excited to have first-time guest Mr. Takoa D Silva, an emerging market analyst, commentator, as well as a private investor. Takoa has spent over 10 years as a licensed and registered financial professional, managing roles as an analyst, high net worth services, as well as a portfolio manager. Today he joins us to share his thoughts on the recent market activity, the commodity cycle, as well as the role of gold and pricing commodities from a historical standpoint.

So Takoa, welcome to our RTD interviews.

Takoa D Silva: Hey Mike, pleasure to be with you. Thank you for having me on.

Mike: Yes sir, I appreciate you taking time to join us and as always looking forward to getting more of your thoughts and analysis. And you've done a great job of actually sharing some PowerPoint presentation with us here we're going to get to in a moment. But before I do that I want to definitely make sure that the audience is able to connect with you to find out more of your work that you do. So here we have your Twitter account or your X account, forgive me, and it's @TakoaDSilva and then also you do a great job on YouTube and so I see a recent interview with Rick Rule here and so they can also check you out on YouTube as well for more analysis. And so I'm looking forward to getting your thoughts.

So based upon all the things happening in the world, you know the whole idea of rethinking the dollar, I think more people as well as nations are doing that. And so from where you're seated now as an analyst as well as an investor yourself, what are some things that concern you as well as maybe one or two things that excite you as well about what you're seeing?

Takoa D Silva: Great question. And I think that you know the branding of your business Rethinking the Dollar is really pertinent and I think it really explains the things that have been on my mind in recent days because that's something that I've had to rethink. And we'll find out about that here in just a few minutes with some of these slides that we'll go over. But I've had to rethink how I look at the measuring stick of everything that I look at—goods, services, asset prices—how can you know the real price or the value of anything if the measuring stick or the ruler that you're using is constantly changing, in this case shrinking in size. It can distort the way something looks.

And so I know that your viewers as well as yourself keep a close eye on gold and so I've in recent days begun using gold quite a bit more often in terms of the measuring stick, comparing it against other things in order to get an idea of whether or not something is cheap or expensive. It's not the only metric to be used of course, there are others. Just like the idea of could a sports player be picked out of a lineup just by looking at the person's height and body weight—a lot of other metrics are required to be used in terms of assessing anything. But as one replacement in terms of using it instead of just US dollars I found to be very useful.

And then there are some other things that I find really exciting and interesting and I know that you do as well and probably the viewers do as well and that is the shifts that are occurring. The BRICS nations now today as well as the emerging and other markets as a whole—there are some really big changes going on. And the most exciting thing about it I think is the pricing differences between what things cost in the West and in particular in the US and then what things may cost in some of these other countries and in particular their asset markets. So that's what I've been thinking about and looking at most of these days.

Mike: Appreciate you for sharing that. So the measuring stick is crucial and I think here in the Western World especially all we've known is the privilege of having the world reserve currency, a.k.a. the dollar or Federal Reserve Note as I also like to make sure I distinguish. And so now that things are changing I think it's also a great time for people to begin measuring and reassessing I guess their entire financial outlook and in different metrics. And so we're going to definitely dive into gold and so the whole idea of gold over the last centuries has always been a constant anchor and a store of value and a measurement tool in of itself.

And so with the fiat I guess decoupling now gold has reached all-time highs in all currencies. And so I remember throughout the last couple years focusing on how gold was doing. Gold was performing well in other currencies based upon the activity within their nations and all the debt deficits and stuff that other nations are experiencing. So here we are in the US and it's happening to us now.

So real quick I guess based upon the recent all-time high of gold what is that a signal of in your estimates? Like what are some things that it has exposed that the people should definitely pay attention to if they haven't already?

Takoa D Silva: Something's happening with the currency and it's happening pretty quickly. It's happening at a faster speed. I'm a fairly young guy still, you know both are you know I'm fairly young but during my lifetime as sure as it has been the speed of the inflation now, the price inflation that I'm seeing around and the asset price inflation in the US—it's happening at a faster speed than I've ever seen before. And I'm just speaking specifically in reference to the mid-2020 period up until today which is about mid-2024.

Maybe this is on the low side but my estimate is that my personal cost of living and a lot of things that I look at on average like let's say 100 different goods, product, services, commodity prices—I think on average these things are up by about 50% from 2020 to 2024. And so I just did some napkin math and that translates in my mind into something like sort of a stealthy 35% devaluation in the dollar without it being formally announced, without anybody being given forewarning.

And I'm reminded of looking at some of these foreign markets, other countries like Africa. A recent example that I looked at was Kazakhstan. When you're looking at stocks in some of these other countries the price may have gone sideways or up 50% or it may have doubled over a five or eight year period but when looking at it the person thinks to themselves well wait a second what has the currency done during that same time frame? Because sometimes the currency relative to the dollar or relative to gold priced in that foreign currency may have gone up four, five or six times. But if the price of a particular stock or let's say a piece of real estate as an example only went up 50% or only doubled it actually means it's declining in price in real terms when you measure it against gold.

So now I guess it's finally the West's turn or specifically in this case the United States to have their turn so to speak of rapid currency devaluation and asset prices of all kinds just going up at different speeds and kind of confusing people who haven't personally experienced that before.

Mike: Now if the measuring stick or the barometer, the determining factor for the value of an item and of itself is transitioned out of USD terms internationally speaking at some point and gold comes back into the equation whether done by the BRICS or any other unions that are forming out there. I guess I try to wrap my mind around the concept of like how do we then begin placing value on things? Do we use metric or do we use ounces or ounce as a measuring barometer on a broader landscape or perhaps grams? And I'm also referring to how I think it was in 2022 when the whole Russia Ukraine conflict kicked off and the Russian Central Bank opened up I guess the acquisition of gold and somehow linking it to the barrel of oil so one gram was one barrel. So we talked about that forever but in your estimates how could people begin measuring value in ounces, grams or what are just some hypothetical ways that people can look at this?

Takoa D Silva: Well I guess it's up to each person to decide for themselves. If you used a full gold ounce as opposed to a single gram the numbers might be skewed a little bit. If you like let's say as an example took the price of a 5 pound bag of organic flour because the price for that has probably gone up more than non-organic over time and you put together the prices over let's say a 20-year period and you plotted it on a chart, if you used an ounce of gold or if you used a gram of gold the display, the characteristic of the chart would probably look identical but the numbers, the ratio numbers would look different.

As an example if the 5lb bag of flour costs about $6.50 US and you divide that into let's say the gold price of about 2351 an ounce your fractional numbers are going to be sort of they might look a little bit confusing whereas if you took a full gold ounce at 2351 divided it into grams believe it's 31.1 per troy ounce and then use that as your figure to compare let's say the price of flour or the price of a car wash or something like that just to make a random example your numbers from a fractional standpoint would appear much smaller so it might be a little bit more digestible for your eyes or easy on your eyes in terms of looking at.

Mike: Great analysis there, great assessment there. And so moving forward gold is back into the equation clearly and so I remember doing some interviews in the past where a lot of mining experts as well as exploration companies were hinting at commodity super cycle and they were saying any minute when gold is going to break and it's going to really reveal to the world what's real and what's not.

And so I guess at this current moment with gold at all-time highs priced in fiats we're officially in a commodity cycle or a gold cycle with the commodities referring to other metals and assets soon to follow or what are you thinking?

Takoa D Silva: Gosh what a good question and it's tough to say. How do you define a super cycle? I know there's a technical definition for it that's available on Google but one way to achieve I guess a quote unquote super cycle could be a single round or a multiple round devaluation of currencies possibly led by the US dollar and that could produce enormous moves nominally speaking in many commodities, precious metals included, that could appear to most people as what they would describe as a super cycle. But would that actually translate into more consumption of various commodities and more actual economic activity in terms of construction and building and trade and so forth? That it might not necessarily translate into that but certainly nominally speaking it could turn into some serious fireworks for sure.

Mike: Alright now I'm curious now I'm ready to dive into the presentation. So for those who are tuned in part of what excites me to have you on is the work that you've done and work you've presented for us where this is my first type of master class type of I guess discussion where you're going to walk us through some things that really paints a very unique case that I haven't seen on the internet as of yet. So thank you for putting together for us and as I transition over I'll let you get behind the driving wheel and kind of lead us into your investigative work in this deep dive here that you have for us. So I guess have at it.

Takoa D Silva: Sure thanks Mike. So I'm not holding myself out to be an expert or claiming to be an expert or knowing anything more than anybody else. I just reached a point where I thought as we discussed with regard to not having a reliable ruler to measure things against I wanted something reliable durable to measure asset prices and commodity prices specifically against just to get a firm view of what I was seeing around me in terms of the increasing commodity prices. So I put together this information really just for myself. And so I've got the slides here and we'll get into them now.

But I should point out the second item here is just an important disclaimer that this information is just for educational informational purposes. Nobody should make an investment decision based on this information. You should always consult with a qualified financial advisor before making any financial decisions.

But the first slide here is just the very interesting chart that your viewers are already familiar with likely which is just the gold price priced in US dollars from about 1960 to today in 2024 or until May 2024. This shows the price of gold moving up from $35.20 an ounce based on the World Bank figures to today's price of $2,351 an ounce roughly. This is dated as of an earlier day in May but this translates into a 67 fold move for the price of gold or 6,700% increase.

So any asset price like let's just say a commodity that doesn't keep pace with the price of gold technically speaking becomes cheaper over time or any commodity that outpaces the price of gold in terms of its US dollar price increase could be said as becoming more expensive relative to gold over time.

And so this gold chart of course is interesting but what I did for I guess for my own entertainment purposes is I flipped the chart over and I priced US dollars priced in gold. And when you flip it over I just found it to be very interesting. It reminds me of those silver content charts of the Roman denarius. As the silver content of the coinage plunged over time the purchasing power plunged as well. And while their charts were charted over like a 200 year period this still is from about 1960 to 2024 but it basically shows that from around 1960 you could buy a single full ounce of gold for $35.20 and today roughly you can buy 0.015 ounce of gold for that same $35.20. So roughly speaking that implies loss of purchasing power of US dollars priced in gold, the loss of purchasing power of about 98.5%.

And each of those major plunges down that you see on this chart is basically the nominal all-time high price for those three periods which was in 1980 about $850 an ounce, 2011 was about $1,920 an ounce and 2024 so far I believe it's $2,449 an ounce that we've seen as the price. So this just basically showing how the dollar the purchasing power is just becoming smaller and smaller over time.

And so what I found to be very interesting was plotting with these World Bank figures the prices of various commodities against gold, pricing them in gold in other words and just using a gold ounce as opposed to a gold gram. And I went down this big list and I'll just flip through these very quickly Mike and please stop me at any time.

But the first one here is Australian coal. When I look at this 60-year price chart this is priced in gold. It doesn't look like it's at the upper right hand corner of the chart like a lot of other asset price US dollar denominated asset price charts are showing. This is in the bottom right hand corner. It's near its bottom trend that it's displayed over the last let's see about 30 years. And so what I did for a number of these charts was I took their peak, the peak pricing that was demonstrated compared to gold over the last 60 years and in this case the peak was in 1981. It was a ratio of 1.1448 a metric ton of Australian coal compared to an ounce of gold. And this chart tells me that priced in gold Australian coal along with many other commodities as these other charts will show is pretty cheap. And it would have to move up at about two or threefold in order to reach that same peak that was demonstrated in 1981.

So going through this list: Brent crude it's also not anywhere near its all-time high over the last 60 years as demonstrated against gold which was in 2008. It's toward the lower end of its range. Uranium same thing priced in gold it is nowhere near its 2007 peak.

If we go to the price of uranium on the right hand side of the chart this is just denominated in US dollars at $136.22 a pound that was the nominal price shown in 2007 but right now it's priced at about $91.75 cents a pound. It looks a bit more dramatic than if we flip back one page and we look at it from the perspective of gold. It looks sort of subtle this recent move that we've seen. And if you were to price it again using a peak price as demonstrated against gold in 2007 it would require a move greater than fivefold from here priced in gold in order for it to reach or exceed that prior peak in 2007.

And uranium as our uranium buffs or history students watching this will know demonstrated higher peak pricing in earlier years measured against gold. But going right down this list natural gas same thing it is very cheap historically speaking relative to gold. It would take an enormous move priced in gold to revisit its 2000 the year 2000 peak.

Platinum same thing. Our platinum viewers our students of platinum will and probably yourself too Mike I think will recall that priced against gold platinum is at something near a 100-year extreme. It doesn't mean that it has to be reversed but it's just it's very interesting to look at in gold terms.

Silver it is in the lower portion of its trading range as well and our precious metal students will certainly be familiar with the silver to gold ratio history as well.

Zinc bottom range of its history priced in gold same thing with lead same thing with tin despite the recent move in tin it's at the bottom of that range same thing with nickel copper as well despite recent copper's recent move the ratio peak that demonstrated in 1966 was far higher about 54.2 to 1 as a ratio against an ounce of gold. That would require from here to revisit or exceed that 1966 peak measured against gold it would require a move in copper greater than 12 times. Will that happen? I've got no clue I'm not calling for that or suggesting but it's just an observation.

Aluminum same thing as the other base metals. The industrial commodities are quite low measured in gold. Iron ore same thing. Potash is at the bottom of its range as well. Corn as along with the other agricultural commodities are very cheap when measured in gold looked at at a historical basis over the last 60 years. Same thing with soybeans wheat cotton oats rapeseed oil. Cocoa as well despite cocoa's recent move that has garnered the attention of the corporate mainstream press they've been circulating articles about cocoa being in a bull market but when we look at it priced in gold the recent move as seen in this nominal chart of cocoa priced in nominal US dollars this recent move looks really impressive it looks to be far larger than the move that was shown in 1977 I believe the prior peak about $4.25 a kilogram but once again when we flip back and we look at it from the perspective of gold the recent move is a tiny blip on the right hand side of the chart. When measured against gold you would need to probably move up more than about ninefold from here to reach or exceed its 1977 peak as measured in gold. So it's very interesting to think about how the currency devaluation or the loss of the purchasing power of the currency is really distorting the way things look and how things are described certainly by the popular mainstream press.

Coffee same thing bottom of its range it looks very cheap very available pricewise when priced in gold. Tea pulling pricing from three auctions in Colombo Kolkata and Mombasa shows just a wonderfully cheap and abundant tea market in terms of its price when priced in gold. Thai rice same thing absolutely cheap abundant commodity when priced in gold. Here it's just probably near its cheapest point that it's been in 60 years. Sugar same thing bananas same thing oranges have had a recent nominal US dollar increase in price as shown on another chart which I did include in this presentation but the recent move in the bottom right hand corner of this slide shows sort of a mild move when priced in gold the prices of oranges in terms of a kilogram priced against gold to reach or exceed its 1970 peak measured against gold we need to move up more than eightfold from here not saying that it will or that it could or that it should but it's just an observation.

Beef same thing at the bottom of its 60-year trend for chicken same thing very cheap very available historically speaking when looked at the price of gold. Milk same thing as well it is near or at a record low as far as this data that I was able to pull from the USDA World Bank. Palm oil a commodity produced in Southeast Asia wonderful commodity used for food and lots of other things wonderfully cheap as well when priced in gold. Tobacco same thing it is out or near a 60-year low in price when measured in gold. Coconut oil same thing very low historically speaking measured in gold. Rubber near historic lows as well when priced in gold. Malaysian logs at or near a 60-year record low when priced in gold measuring a cubic meter. When looking back at the 1993 peak when measured against gold would require if Malaysian logs were to revisit or exceed that peak would require a move over 17 fold from here in order to revisit that peak.

So as those charts described Mike commodity prices when compared against gold are historically still very cheap from the standpoint of an American and many other people around the world it may not feel that way because wages and salaries have not kept pace with the speed of this devaluation that's occurred in the US dollar over time. They've not increased in the same proportion so the labor that people have on offer is not tied to inflation unless they have a job that has that's tied to inflation some way. They're using this type of perspective in their day-to-day lives in terms of storing purchasing power and things like jewelry other physical commodities such as food processed foods to store purchasing power certainly real estate as opposed to keeping money in the bank. So it's another testament to the fact that deficit spending is occurring year after year currency values decline and it just magnifies moves causing a person to think that the bull markets are actually much larger than they really are when measured against gold. So those things have been I think shocking and I don't know if exciting is the right word to use but certainly concerning.

Mike: Wow. Just three or four items three or four angles there that you presented to us that really should get anybody to think because we're all on the same boat ultimately speaking. The remainder of this decade here we're going to probably witness some things that we couldn't have ever imagined whether it be geopolitical events we have the presidential season coming up and all the things to do with that we didn't really dive into but that definitely plays a major role in how things are how our financial affairs are conducted in this country and then the practical sound investment strategy now need to be restructured just because the 60/40 model that has been preached forever no longer carries the same value. And so that's something I'm sure you have some thoughts on as well but we're approaching an hour and I know you still have some slides to share with us but I figure we'll give a tease or a sample or a taste to the viewers to digest this because definitely you have to go back and rewatch this and really understand the magnitude of what you shared with us.

But hopefully I have you back on in the future and dive even deeper because I of course I nerd out over things like these as well just because I mean how could you not be concerned with things being done around you that impact your life and when you see the manipulation of assets and different categories occur because of the currency it just really should make people rethink some things. So let me just share with the people once again where they can find you at. Here you are on x.com go take a look and subscribe as well as on YouTube. Yeah that'd be a great way to follow you or what not. Any other places you want to point them or give the viewers a sample as to what they can expect when they connect with you?

Takoa D Silva: Well yeah they can chat to me on those social media channels. I don't really have anything for sale but they can friend me on there or send me a message or something like that. Be happy to befriend anybody.

And so for those who are plugged in and enjoyed the demonstration here I'll actually put the link down to the PDF format so they can grab a hold of all those charts you put together so they can plug in. So once again thanks for putting that together and of course thanks for joining us on RTD interviews.

Takoa D Silva: Hey Mike it was a pleasure to be with you and I have to quickly just mention that Rethinking the Dollar is on my daily read list. So for anybody watching make sure to subscribe to Mike's channels he puts out just spectacular work and sign up for his email list. I think as you mentioned the slides are going to be available underneath this video. But hey thank you very much for having me on it was very nice to speak with you and your audience.

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Full Readable Transcript: Keith Knight's Top Ten Problems with Democratic Socialism

Human Action Podcast with Dr. Bob Murphy

[Music Intro]

Bob Murphy: This is the Human Action Podcast where we debunk the economic, political, and even cultural myths of the day. Here's your host, Dr. Bob Murphy.

Hey folks, before we dive into the episode, I wanted to mention that this year would have been Murray Rothbard’s 100th birthday. So we at the Mises Institute are calling it the Year of Rothbard, and we’re giving away one of his books free every month throughout the rest of 2026. July’s pick is The Origins of the Federal Reserve, which is a short, sharp look at how the Fed really came to be and who was behind it. Grab your free copy at mises.org/hapodfree. We’ll also put a link to that URL in the show notes page for this episode. Go ahead and get your free copy of Murray Rothbard’s The Origins of the Federal Reserve if you act now in July.

Okay, let’s now go to the episode. Keith, welcome to the Human Action Podcast.

Keith Knight: Bob, thank you so much for having me on. I appreciate it, man.

Bob Murphy: Well, you’ve released a heroic video detailing 64 problems with democratic socialism. So why don’t we do a little teaser? We’re going to go through 10 of them—we’ll see how it goes. But before we start, can you just explain how you got this idea? What made you want to create such a thing?

Keith Knight: Probably because so many people in my generation see that the Republicans and Democrats do not offer desirable resolutions to any of the issues we face. So they’re looking for an alternative. Now, once you hate something so much like the Democrats or the Republicans, you start to have really low standards for what counts as an alternative. So people are generally looking to democratic socialism.

The mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, was also a democratic socialist. He had publicly said that ideally every square inch of New York City would have collective decision-making through the democratic process. But now you have someone who explicitly brags about calling himself a democratic socialist, in the case of Zoran Mamdani, and he was celebrating victories in recent elections—I think they were congressional seats. So a number of people are upset with the status quo and want basically anything that they could be offered.

An interesting thing that happened was although there’s been this point of unification between libertarians and democratic socialists where they oppose the warfare state—libertarians oppose it because it violates the non-aggression principle. Democratic socialists, I don’t know if they really oppose the crimes of the Soviet Union or any of the other crimes throughout history, but at least they’re against the mass murder operation in Gaza or the bombing of Iran. So there was a great deal of overlap between us recently in the realm of foreign policy.

And then after the Strait of Hormuz closed, it was so clear when there was a drastic increase in the price of gas. It was so obvious that what happened was the government intervened and forcibly limited the supply of a product or service and the price for that product drastically increased as a causal result of the government limiting the supply. Usually whenever we see high prices the democratic socialists will say obviously things are privatized, people are greedy, and under capitalism you can charge whatever you want. But in this case, it was so clear that the restricted supply led to much higher prices, making it so everyone was paying more dollars at the pump, that the democratic socialist was more or less saying, well, in this case, yes, the government limiting the supply caused a nearly 100% increase in the price.

So I thought, hey, this might be a good opportunity for me to explain a multitude of reasons as to why I think democratic socialism is not the correct alternative for those who care about increasing living standards and behaving morally.

Bob Murphy: Okay, great. And then just one last little caveat before we dive into this. It seems that there’s been a lot of emphasis lately on the “democratic” part. And I assume the point of that is to say, oh, we’re not like Stalinists. Like, yeah, we admit that in some cases there have been some mistakes made under previous regimes, but that’s because they were authoritarian. There wasn’t any problem with socialism. That’s still a great idea. And so as long as it’s like a majority rule, it’s power to the people, people going to the ballot box and elected officials having socialism, then it will be nice, American, fair for everybody and not concentration camps. Is that kind of what that term is doing?

Keith Knight: Yes, that has been my understanding. So the way Bernie Sanders explained it is bringing the voting box into people’s everyday lives. I think he used the term “ballot box into people’s everyday lives.” When he was on The View, he said that democratic socialism means that everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and respect. So those are the kinds of things that they’re gearing towards as opposed to Pol Pot, Chairman Mao, or Joseph Stalin.

That’s why right at the beginning of this video I lay out the definitions. The democracy aspect is so difficult to pin down. When I refer to democracy, I simply mean large-scale decision making within a general population as opposed to there being a monarch who’s in charge of decision-making. But when it comes to the terms, I summarize communism, according to Marx’s 1848 Manifesto, as the abolition of private property, implying the abolition of contracts between consenting adults. Socialism being the institutionalized aggression against private property and contracting agents within a society. And capitalism—I’m using that term interchangeably with the free market—meaning a social system based on the explicit recognition of private property and non-aggressive contractual exchanges between private property owners.

So by getting those definitions down, I think that at least lets us know we’re either going in the same direction because we at least agree on the definitions, or if we don’t, well, then we have a little more digging to do. But so often I hear a lot of disagreements just come down to a different way of defining terms.

Bob Murphy: Okay. So I think we’ve made the people wait long enough. Let’s start diving in here. What are the problems, Keith, with this democratic socialism? If it’s just dignity for everybody, that seems like a good idea.

Keith Knight: One thing that I wanted to mention to you specifically is the problem of diversification. That’s what I call it. This is the 61st problem that I mention. Now the assumption is under democratic socialism instead of having a boss or capitalists or private stock owners who should own the company, Noam Chomsky asks himself, he says obviously the people who work there. So of course you get into the issue of well if I’ve worked there 10 years and I’m very productive do I get as much pay as someone who is on day one on the job or still in training? That’s interesting but it’s not the hard part I’m getting at.

If I work at Amazon, I don’t think it necessarily makes sense that I would want to own stock in Amazon. I would want to diversify my portfolio. I might want to own a little Walmart, a little Discount Tire, a little Apple because in case the company I’m working for goes down, well then all my eggs are in one single basket. So democratic socialism literally means there is no private ownership of production. There is no stock market. This being Mises’ rule of thumb in determining whether a society is capitalist or socialist: Is there a stock market? Is there private ownership in the means of production? If there is not a stock market, then I as the worker am forcibly being deprived of diversifying my portfolio and I am forced to put all my eggs in the basket of where I’m currently working. Only private enterprise and a stock market allow me to actually diversify my portfolio so I can make responsible financial decisions. Democratic socialism by definition in every case means I’m deprived of this. What do you think about that?

Bob Murphy: It’s intriguing. I’ve never heard anyone bring that up. And you’re right. Like I might go at it a different way and just say to the person who’s advocating that the workers of the car factory should own the car plants and the people working at the power plant should own the power plant and blah blah blah and say okay we have that on day one and then like you say down the road what if some of the workers are playing cards or something and reading poetry whatnot and then what if they agree among themselves let’s do a 50-50 swap and just now we each own 50% of the other person’s thing. Just for purposes of diversification, would they be allowed to do that? I don’t know. In other words, if the democratic socialist is conceding that the worker should own the place where they work, can they then voluntarily trade among themselves? I don’t know what the person would say. So that’s interesting. But yeah, I think it’s a great point. I’ve never heard someone bring that up.

Keith Knight: The next one, point 36, is apartheid entitlement. That is how I summarize the issue. So if you imagine a society where only some people can vote once every four years between two politicians and other people can’t and the way the state decides this is partially based on your age, partially based on your income, partially based on your race and your background. They don’t give you the specifics, but you know these things are taken into account and because of things like your age, race, gender, your income level, they will determine whether or not you have a vote once every four years between two politicians. We would obviously say, well, this is an apartheid state where different people have different sets of rights.

However, whether or not you get that vote counted once every four years between two politicians who are probably going to end up lying anyways, what’s more important is how you’re able to acquire resources in your everyday life. So now consider the different rights: you can vote, I can’t. All right, that’s not ideal, but it’s going to be okay. Now consider you—in order for you to put food on the table for your family, you have to go to a job, work; in exchange for doing the work, you get money. With that money, you go to the store and allocate your scarce dollars to the store in exchange for food to feed your family. I have a different set of rights where I have SNAP EBT or food stamps. This means I have a right to acquire, using the mechanism of the state, resources absent the consent of any other party. I don’t have to be productive. I don’t have to be a kind, virtuous person and make sure I’m engaging in mutually beneficial contractual exchanges. I literally have a right that you don’t have and it affects every aspect of your life.

If I can acquire resources this way, you need to find someone voluntarily to interact with. I don’t have to do such a thing. There’s the apartheid aspect. The entitlement aspect is asking why is it that with all the welfare—and democratic socialists are right, the biggest welfare queens are the military-industrial complex, politicians like Lindsey Graham, a lot of banks using the benefit of the Federal Reserve’s discount window. You can say that even the rich are big welfare queens to a very large extent. There seems to be a level of entitlement. I don’t feel the appreciation from police officers, teachers, soldiers. I’m always asked to thank them for their service. And I’ve never once been thanked for being a net taxpayer, even though I’ve been one since I was 14 years old. That would be 16 years as of now.

So it’s not only immoral in creating a sense of apartheid, it creates this level of entitlement where people on the involuntary aspect of the spectrum—the food stamp recipients, the members of the state apparatus—they do not seem like they’re on their heels to please consumers at all. They feel completely entitled. And if you ever talk about cuts, the only motivation you could have for wanting cuts is because you hate the poor, you don’t care about the climate, or you just want the rich to rule over the rest of us. So this sense of entitlement that’s created as a causal result of this apartheid state that’s being ushered in is another reason to oppose democratic socialism.

Bob Murphy: Okay. Let me say what the objection is. Again folks, what I’ll do here is either elaborate on or play devil’s advocate just to get both sides put out here. So I imagine what someone would say and I’ll say this objection Keith or this pushback and then if you have a subsequent one that you were going to cover you can just say we’ll get to that on number two or something. But I could imagine someone saying whoa whoa whoa Keith the way you’re framing this it is all wrong here. What you’re calling coercion and involuntary—that’s the function. That’s why it’s democratic. So yeah maybe if Stalin ran the system down your throat but no we vote on it and so we as a society voluntarily choose this system and it is fair that there’s criteria for if you don’t earn enough then you get food stamps. It’s just that you’re privileged enough that you don’t qualify. But again, it’s not that it’s taken from you against your will and given to this other person. No, we all agreed. If you didn’t like it, then make a pitch for voting for a politician. We’ll change the rules and we’ll all decide next ballot, next election if we want to do that or not. So, it’s voluntary.

Keith Knight: I appreciate the feedback. I will address that in the social contract aspect of our discussion.

Bob Murphy: Great.

Keith Knight: The next number 39 is I call this Böhm-Bawerk’s apartment complex. Imagine you’re a democratic socialist and you say, you know, I don’t really think coming up with the idea of what to sell really adds any value to a company. I don’t think getting the property beforehand and engaging in investment and on-the-job training—that just adds no value. All the value is created by the workers. Okay, if you believe something that ridiculous, there is still the Böhm-Bawerk’s apartment complex issue that you must face.

Here’s how I summarize this from his book Capital and Interest, trying to bring it into the 21st century. We have 30 construction workers who are just walking about and they see a plot of land with a bunch of property and materials and it says “Former capitalist, move to Jamaica. Please homestead these scarce resources and they’re up for grabs.” So the 30 construction workers say, “Perfect. We’re going to homestead this, claim it to be our own, and we the workers will own this, all of this property. We don’t need to come up with the idea. We see the blueprints. We know that it’s going to be a complex. We don’t need to come up with the property. We don’t have to get it financed because all of the property is right here. So now this is democratic socialism and there’s no need for a capitalist.”

To which Böhm-Bawerk says, “Not so fast.” How long is it going to take to put the pipes together? How long is it going to take to decide which construction worker is doing what? How long is it going to take to get from the ground up to just start building the foundations, then putting the roofs on, then waiting for the concrete to dry, and then you have to start marketing the complex to people. Hey, move-in special. Here’s how much you can spend. Once people even move in, we’re talking it’s maybe 6 months, maybe even a year at best. You got to get through all the regulations. And then once people move in, maybe they’re delinquent. Maybe the people who move in break a bunch of stuff and you have to repair it. Now you have to take even more money out. It could very well be multiple years before you ever make money, let alone make a profit off of this apartment complex.

Here lies the third essential aspect of the capitalist. The capitalist can finance a project and give those workers money in a closer time frame than if they would have had to wait for it to be profitable. Also, if the enterprise may or may not be profitable, there is no guarantee that you will get customers. So the capitalist is not only accounting for some risk, he’s also allocating scarce resources toward you in a closer time frame than if you would have had to wait in order for something to be profitable. And I believe that the research I’ve done shows that most businesses, small businesses, are not profitable in a few years and end up going under. So in that case, it makes a hell of a lot more sense. If you like the proletariat, don’t make them take on any unnecessary risk because you might not find the customers. So that is the value of the capitalist—usually seen as they come up with the idea, they provide the property. Those are absolutely essential. But Böhm-Bawerk’s apartment complex, I think, is a decent enough analogy to explain another benefit of having the capitalist as a potential option for the proletariats to contract with.

Bob Murphy: Okay. And just to make sure people get it—the point being the capitalist is advancing, like paying the workers ahead of time. So the worker gets the food and gets the enjoyments up front even though the thing that he worked on technically might not come to fruition for years until years later.

Keith Knight: That’s the insight.

Bob Murphy: Okay, great. Okay, hit us with your next one, Keith.

Keith Knight: The next one is the social contract myth. Imagine you go to Red Robin. You go down. You say, “I want these items off the menu.” They bring you the food. And then they bring you the bill. This could sort of be seen as a social contract. You never explicitly said, “I will pay this price for this item.” But there’s a general understanding between both parties that this is how you operate.

Now, imagine you go into Red Robin. You say, “I’ll have item numbers 1, 2, and 3.” And Red Robin says, “Oh, we went to the kitchen. We actually don’t have the food, but here’s your bill, and you have to pay it.” No one in their right mind would think that you should have to pay that bill if they didn’t bring you the food. And this is the nature of a contract where there’s a sense of consideration. I will give something in exchange for the value of something else.

Now, compare this to what the state laughably calls a social contract. If you don’t pay your taxes or you’re caught disobeying the law, well then you could potentially go to jail for not upholding your end of the social contract. However, what happens if the state does not hold up their end of the social contract and keep the population safe? What if there’s a crime problem, which there is in many American cities? What if the state starts a war based on faulty information which leads to blowback which makes your country less safe? What if they don’t protect you on December 7th of 1941? What if they don’t protect you on September 11th of 2001? This is not a contract because when the state fails to uphold their end, the obligation is still on the population to uphold their end of the contract and there’s no opting out.

So getting back to your earlier point, well we can vote once every two, four and six years between two politicians. I think the best evidence that this is not a justifiable solution is because the assumption is the state has a right to our income and then we get to vote. The best proof that this is a facetious justification would be if it were justifiable, then any institution in society could just allow us to vote for their CEO once every four years and then that company would have the right to tax our income. If anyone should be able to tax our income, it’s probably the grocery stores who provide us food and make sure that we’re alive. Without the food, we’re absolutely dead. Police force probably be privatized afterwards. So the inability to apply their ethics universally with regard to voting is why voting is not a sufficient response to the failure of the social contract myth. What do you think about that one?

Bob Murphy: I like it. One thing that occurred to me too when you’re talking about like December 7th and 9/11 and whatever—one that I like to cite is like the FAA. Every time a plane—I mean fortunately it’s very rare now—but when I was growing up there was some plane that crashed in the Everglades and I think the airline was called ValueJet and they changed their name to something else but in any event it was, you know, as they investigated it there was all these clear violations that the existing regulations were not adequately enforced. The plane had no business taking off that day. And so, of course, what happened is the FAA got more funding and someone wrote an op-ed in my local paper saying how some crazy libertarians want to abolish the FAA, but the rest of us want them to get more funding because they’re understaffed. And so I wrote a thing and it got in the paper saying, you know, what else would have to happen to conclude the FAA did a bad job. In other words, it’s not like we had a laissez-faire unregulated airline market and then a plane crash happened and people say the government should probably get involved here. No, we had the FAA. The day before the crash, why do we have the FAA? Because otherwise planes will be falling out of the sky, the crazy free market. They won’t be doing adequate safety checks. And so then a plane does fall out of the sky, then what does everyone say? Oh, the FAA obviously needs more money. And so that’s kind of a screwy system where when they screw up, they get more money. What would have to happen for us to say let’s try getting rid of that and having competing voluntary associations that sign off on flights and insurance companies vouching for it and if they screw up then it’s their money on the line. So anyway, yeah I like that there’s no way under this system for them to ever be held liable and like okay you had your shot let’s try something else now. Like that’s never an option.

Keith Knight: Exactly. We see it with the case of education all the time. What’s the problem with education? Never enough funding is what they tell us. It’s never a problem of management. And even with increased access to the internet and millions of books now available for free, the problem is still not enough funding. The teachers have the information and they want to give it to the children, but they’re being stopped and they just need money. And then they’re going to give all this wisdom to the students. It’s completely fake. And then the cases of what happened after December 7th of ’41. FDR had more money and more access to power than most previous presidents probably since Lincoln or Woodrow Wilson. After George Bush didn’t keep us safe on 9/11, his approval rating went to 91% and the federal budget continuously increased. Even when we won the Cold War, we now have people coming out and saying we need a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget and conscription, selective service needs automatic registration. So I think your point is very well taken.

Keith Knight: Next we have the argument from praxeology. This is number 25. There is a book titled Economic Science and the Austrian Method by Hans-Hermann Hoppe and he talks about the fact that you would think looking at the case of East and West Germany where there was so clearly a choice on behalf of East Germans to want to immigrate that Khrushchev in ’61 had to build a wall, erect barbed wire, have soldiers with machine guns using them to stop people from leaving East Germany and going into West Germany. There’s also the obvious case of North and South Korea where there’s a big disparity in the standards of living.

So Hans Hoppe says, looking at this, shouldn’t we easily say, well, obviously the difference between East and West Germany, North and South Korea—there’s a heck of a lot of private property in West Germany and South Korea, and there’s very little private property and freedom to contract and exchange in East Germany and North Korea. He gave the speech in 1989, I believe. How is it that anyone still says there’s an argument for collectivizing the means of production under the rulership of a caretaker class?

His thesis is that it is so difficult to engage in controlled experiments with human beings in societies because there are so many variables. What’s the problem with communism in Cuba? Well, it’s actually the fault of the U.S. government sanctioning them. The problem with North Korea? Well, unfortunately, they took much more of a toll during the Korean War than anyone else. The problem with East Germany? Well, they didn’t get enough Marshall aid. That’s the only reason East Germany was not as successful as West Germany. They can always, always, always come up with an excuse. What’s the problem in Venezuela? Well, the U.S. has the Monroe Doctrine and would never allow democratic socialism to flourish.

So again and again and again whenever we run these extremely costly experiments with giving governments tons of power over the lives of individual human beings and all the decisions they make, there’s never a lesson to be extracted. So Hans Hoppe says instead of using the empiricist approach of saying there’s nothing we can know unless we engage in an experiment and then constantly disregarding the experiments, he says we need to use a process of logical deduction.

So under socialism, the institutionalized aggression against private property means the homesteader and the non-homesteader are treated equally. This raises the cost of homesteading. This means that the more hurdles you have between people homesteading property, acquiring property, producing goods, offering employee contracts, the more hurdles you put in between producers and consumers, the fewer people you will have in those latter roles. This means you will have higher prices than you otherwise would because you have fewer employers. You have lower wages than you otherwise would because there’s fewer employers competing for employees. You would have lower quality of products and services available to the population because there’s not competition amongst producers of those services.

So we attempt to engage in a logical deduction of saying that the more hurdles you put in between producers, consumers and giving people the right to contract, the lower standard of living you’re going to have. And that explains the disparity between East and West Germany, North and South Korea.

But then he says there’s another side to this coin, the sociological effect of socialism. What ends up happening is instead of having a population that focuses on how do I meet consumer demand, how do I be a good employee, how do I provide value in exchange for the money of consumers, you then have people focused on developing political talents. And this creates a more or less low-intensity civil war where instead of people competing to produce, people are competing to consume. That is the actual dog-eat-dog society that the democratic socialists are always warning us about.

Here’s the analogy I use. Imagine you take two groups of 100 people. You tell one group of 100 people, “All of you are being conscripted to run for Congress. You must run for Congress. You have no choice.” Think of the types of personalities those people would develop. Because in order to get money and survive, they’re going to have to get a job in Congress. And then the other group of 100 people, you tell them, you have to go on the show Shark Tank. You have to get money from the investors. You have to come up with a product or service that the investors are going to want to invest in. And the only way you could do that is by making something that they know they could sell to a significant number of consumers. Think of the different types of personalities that would be developed between these two groups of people.

Anyone who is being forced to run for Congress is inevitably going to have to start working on campaign slogans. And it’s not going to be very in-depth because they have to get a majority of votes under democratic socialism. So instead of being complex, they’re going to use bumper sticker lines in order to rally the masses. And compare that to the people in Shark Tank who know they can’t get any money from the investors unless they persuade them. The investors know they can’t get their money back unless they find a consumer base who are willing to part with their scarce dollars in exchange for a new product or service. So the Shark Tank / Congress analogy I think really gets to the heart of the sociological effect that Hans Hoppe brought to light in his book A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism. The first part is from Economic Science and the Austrian Method. So what are your thoughts on that one?

Bob Murphy: Yeah, I think it follows like you say it’s hitting both angles that we can sit there and do it logically in a deductive fashion then someone’s oh yeah but let’s be empirical and it’s you know what more could we offer here in terms of a controlled experiment in the social sciences but like you say those examples are pretty good. One of my favorite anecdotes the spirit of this is definitely right. I think I talked about it in my book Lessons for the Young Economist, but it was listening to some guy who had compiled a bunch of case studies of defectors from North Korea. There was one guy working for the propaganda division. The higher-ups gave them some photos that in South Korea there had been a labor strike. They said take these photos and tell our people you’re so lucky to be living up here in North Korea because look at down there how bad the workers have it. The guy looking at this photo ended up defecting. He said three things stood out: people were in cars, they were allowed to protest, and the guy holding the sign had a ballpoint pen. Up here regular people didn’t have cars or pens. So the higher-ups were so out of touch they had no idea that photo contained evidence of how much better life was across the border.

Keith Knight: I love that story. I have never heard that one.

Bob Murphy: Yeah. The thing that got me was the ballpoint pen one. They got pens down there. You guys have pens. So okay, we might be able to get through all 10 if we keep the pace up.

Keith Knight: Let’s do it. Number 12. This is a line that I had heard from Bryan Caplan. He just simply said the secret to mass consumption is mass production. Now, this is completely contrary to anything that democratic socialists advocate. They say if something is privatized, it doesn’t matter whether there’s one product. There’s no such thing as diminishing marginal utility, whether there’s only one microphone in the world or there’s 10 million. If they’re privatized, it doesn’t matter because the capitalist is just going to charge a super duper high rate that only the 1% are going to be able to afford. This is literally how they explain the current state of healthcare and housing. That there’s no incentive to increase the supply. There’s no incentive to appeal to mass consumers and because they’re privatized and this terrible unregulated market has yielded us our current circumstance.

Ryan McMaken recently came out and displays how roughly 60% of healthcare expenditures are covered by state and federal governments in America today. Not to mention occupational licensing, certificate of need laws, the FDA. So the current problems in healthcare have nothing to do with there being too much freedom to contract. But this is important because if you hear the way democratic socialists describe economics, it would make no sense to hear that companies like Walmart and Amazon are really rich. They’re the monopolies or oligopolies. They just throw out the word monopoly as if it doesn’t mean one seller. So even when there’s competitors, they call big companies monopolies. According to their worldview, these big companies should have the highest prices. But what do we see? We actually see the absolute opposite. The way they’ve gained large market share is as a result of meeting a large number of consumer demands throughout a wide variety of products and services that they offer. Nothing within the democratic socialist framework explains this.

Historically, we also see it with Cornelius Vanderbilt making large amounts of money by increasing the number of people who could travel by steamship. John D. Rockefeller drastically decreased the price of oil not because he was such a nice guy but because he wanted more customers. As Rothbard says in Making Economic Sense, the firms are constantly courting the customer whereas governments are at war with the customers. They literally make demands on the taxpayer and if the taxpayer doesn’t concede to the demands the state will use violence against them. That is a completely different way of analyzing a situation than when you’re in the voluntary sector and you have to meet consumer demand in order to get money out of people’s pockets.

But how does the democratic socialist even explain things within the healthcare realm that are more privatized and you don’t have to get a prescription and the state is not requiring you to have insurance? How are things like Tylenol so cheap? According to democratic socialist theory, Tylenol should be extremely expensive since it’s privatized. Dayquil and Nyquil should be extremely expensive. LASIK eye surgery should be drastically increasing in price. And we shouldn’t expect there to be any increase in quality after all this time. The most beneficial healthcare that I’ve gotten access to has been massage therapy, which is not covered by any insurance, and watching free online videos describing what the ketogenic diet is. That was never some big government plan. Those things were provided to me at an extremely low cost because fortunately there was a free market. Democratic socialists have no explanation in all of their theories as to why such things are widely available at a very low cost.

Bob Murphy: Just two quick ones on that. If people haven’t read it, Burt Folsom’s The Myth of the Robber Barons. It’s just awesome. He goes through market entrepreneurs versus political entrepreneurs to show that like you’re saying Keith that yeah, John D. Rockefeller drastically reduced the price of kerosene. Same thing with Carnegie and so forth. And then the other thing too just on the government agencies looking at their customers as a nuisance whereas private companies, like beer companies, do they say “Hey, don’t drink so much beer.” No, they’re like “Oh, you want more? Okay, here.” Right? So that just showing again it’s not because there’s something so intrinsically different about electricity and water versus beer. It’s that one is privately owned and marketed and has competing companies. The other one doesn’t.

Keith Knight: Precisely the point. Next point is competition protects workers better than the state. So when I had this debate with Ben Burgess who’s a professor at Rutgers, he was advocating democratic socialism. After I gave the examples all the way from Vanderbilt through Rockefeller all the way to Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos and all these other things, he basically conceded everything. He goes, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree with all those.” He didn’t even refute the industrial revolution point. He goes, “Yeah, but you’re just talking about things that people buy. Most of people’s lives are spent at work and work is where we need to focus on.”

Okay. So now that they’ve conceded the markets produce better for consumers than a state apparatus would, we have to ask ourselves why is it that such a small percentage of workers get the minimum wage. According to democratic socialist theory, companies do the absolute bare minimum. So if there were any lower they could go, they would. But they’re legally being stopped from going past the floor of standards that the state was kind enough to provide for us. So with this theory, we would expect roughly 99% of people to be getting the minimum wage. And once people started getting the minimum wage, they would just get that wage forever.

The two ways that we can easily refute this is look at the percentage of people who currently earn the federal minimum wage. The numbers I came across are roughly 1.4%. It’s very difficult to account for state minimum wages. Let’s say it’s 5% of people who are earning the minimum wage. How is any of this explained with the concept of democratic socialism which says companies only do the bare minimum? Well, what ends up happening is companies try to incentivize customers to come to their store so they provide products and they try to incentivize employees to work for them. So they offer things like higher wages or more compensation or very entertaining break rooms or time off or fun events at work. In other words, companies competing for customers has given us lower prices and customers competing for employees will yield higher wages.

This is not just some theory. We see it every single day. Second, when Paul Krugman comes out and says wages are stagnating, the way he describes it is by looking at a demographic. He looks at wages within a bracket to see if they’ve increased or decreased. First of all, why would I care if my wage stays the same over time if there’s a competitive marketplace where prices are consistently coming down? He also doesn’t address the concept of time prices. But the ultimate fallacy comes in. If wages are not growing, we would see people at age 16 have similar wages to people at age 46. We see the opposite. We see people getting on-the-job experience and with this experience being able to demand a higher wage at later points in their life. The analogy I use is imagine a guy goes to a college in 1980 and surveys 500 freshmen who are 18 years old. Twenty years later he goes back and they’re still 18. He could conclude that no one at this college ages. Well, the flaw is these are different human beings.

Bob Murphy: Yeah, great stuff. When I was younger I really got into people arguing about the 80s and Reaganomics and trickle down and it was fun to look through the statistics about income mobility. There was a lot of chicanery involved there. Another thing too that this is a basic contradiction in the whole democratic socialist thing—the rich just pay the bare minimum. All these greedy capitalists. These same people will say with a straight face oh, and in the United States women get paid 83 cents on the dollar for the same work as a man. So why don’t the greedy capitalists lay off all the men and just hire all the women? Then if they get the same work, they’re 17% cheaper. And all of a sudden, oh no, their hatred for women is even stronger than their money-grubbing greed. So it’s interesting how that works.

Keith Knight: They must really hate them. Absolutely fascinating.

Keith Knight: Number nine is the monopoly contradiction. So my general thesis is if you want good products and services and employment opportunities, you would want voluntarily funded competing agencies generally tend to provide better service than a coercively funded monopoly. Here’s the contradiction. The democratic socialist tells us to be terrified of the potential of there being a monopoly in the private sector. They say if there is a monopoly, one seller of computers, then we would get higher costs and much lower quality. Well, first of all, they don’t consider the fact that people could use alternatives to that type of product. But let’s say computers are a human right. Everyone must access them. The contradiction comes in when the democratic socialist explicitly says we should have single-payer healthcare. This by definition is a monopoly. They also want the state to have a monopoly on certain firearms. They want the state to monopolize the currency with the central bank. They want the state to monopolize selective service. A number of democratic socialists do advocate military conscription under the justification that if everyone has to be forced into these wars, this will make the rich less likely to advocate provoking wars. As if Tsar Nicholas and Kaiser Wilhelm and Stalin and Hitler didn’t have military conscription. Absolutely absurd. So that is the monopoly contradiction.

Bob Murphy: I love the term that Hans Hoppe uses: the state is an expropriating property protector. That is the monopoly contradiction.

Keith Knight: The Donald Trump test. The claim is by democratic socialists, the public sector serves the public, the private sector serves the private, the capitalist, the bourgeoisie, the 1%. So one of the ways we could see whether or not people serve the public in the public sector or serve the private in the private sector is take someone and have him experience most of his life mostly imperfectly in the private sector and then take that same exact person and then switch him to being in the public sector and then ask not just the libertarians but then ask the democratic socialists was this person more of a danger in the private sector or in the public sector.

In the case of Donald Trump it should make it very clear that he has credibly threatened to end a whole civilization in one night. He starts wars based on lies, murdered 156 innocent civilians... He was not doing those things when he was in the evil greedy private sector. So it’s actually if we take the empirical cases it’s the complete opposite of what the democratic socialists tell us. What did George Bush Jr. own some stock in the Rangers? You should have been relieved when he was elected president because now he has to serve the public. No, the reality is in the private sector they can’t get a penny out of your pocket or a second of your time unless you voluntarily give it to them.

So if we agree that human beings are inherently self-interested, you would want human beings operating with the constraints of the free market where they can be freely disassociated from and where they have to compete in order to access your scarce time and resources. So, the Donald Trump test, I think, is critical to the democratic socialist narrative.

Bob Murphy: I like that. I hadn’t thought of it that way. I imagine what they would say... but the fact that Donald Trump got elected twice, they need to deal with that. And all the awful leaders in history who have been elected. In the private sector the damage is limited. If the wrong person becomes CEO then the people who have skin in the game have an incentive to move him pretty quickly. The worst case outcomes are much more limited in the private sector. Whereas under democratic socialism you better make sure the wrong guy doesn’t win that democratic election.

Keith Knight: There’s a reason why voters are so irrational. It is because they don’t care enough based on the effect they will have on the outcome. So, it is irrational to say that the average person is going to spend a ton of their scarce time in order to make sure they vote for a kind, virtuous, economically literate person when at the end of the day they get a one in maybe 5 million vote. It’s very unrealistic or utopian to think that people would spend so much of their scarce time doing something that yields them so little of an effect on the outcome.

Even if you’re focused on getting the right people in, this is still a very important analogy to take the same human beings, change their incentive structure. This is an empirical example of taking the same person, changing their incentive structure, and then that being the factor. He now has access to the public purse. That is the variable that we’re measuring to see if it’s beneficial or costly to the public. And even according to the democratic socialists, Trump, Bush, any of the politicians that they hate are more of a threat to civilization in this public sector than they are in the private sector. So, I believe that sufficiently addresses it. Even if it doesn’t convince them, hopefully it will increase the amount of insecurity they have when advocating this nonsense.

Bob Murphy: Okay, looking at the clock here. Is it all right if we wrap up or am I cutting you off right with your favorite one?

Keith Knight: Let’s do two more. I’ll keep it absolutely right.

Bob Murphy: Let’s blast it.

Keith Knight: Number four. The welfare state turns human beings from assets to liabilities. In the marketplace, any additional person who’s born or immigrates is someone I can trade with, someone I could be friends with, someone I can employ, someone I could make value-for-value exchanges with. The welfare state means every additional person is a potential liability on me. This means whether I have one kid or 10 kids, the more kids I have, that puts more of an obligation on you. This puts people against each other and creates more of a low-intensity civil war than would otherwise exist. The welfare state turns humans from assets to liabilities.

Bob Murphy: There was something I noticed when I was a student manager in college. This one kid that was obnoxious and people couldn’t stand him. People would get annoyed because a lot of times he would miss his shift. At a party or in class if he showed up people like oh geez. But at work if he didn’t show up that was the reason people got mad at him. Isn’t that interesting that in the productive private sector even the kid that’s real annoying and no one wants him to be around—unless it’s in a job and then they do want him to show up. The market makes everybody valued.

Keith Knight: Very important observation. The number one argument against democratic socialism is their adherence to hyperindividualism. This is something usually thrown at us. We are individualists. We only care about one person, the individual. That person being ourselves. However, the marketplace is a cooperative enterprise where I’m constantly competing to cooperate with other people. I can only get money if I exchange value in exchange for it. This is a harmonious cooperative enterprise. The socialist only thinking about themselves puts massive obligations on millions of strangers without having any idea of what the outcome would be. It’s actually the socialist who says to themselves, “I don’t care what the outcome is. Everyone has to chip in for this healthcare program, this education program, this housing program. Anyone who doesn’t chip in, I support sending the police to their house, putting them in jail, and shooting them if they resist.” That is hyperindividualism. Whereas the market is a collective, cooperative, voluntary enterprise. So if you’re against selfishness, oppose democratic socialism.

Bob Murphy: All right. Last big picture here for you, Keith. Have you gotten any feedback from either democratic socialists or like people on the left in general on this stuff? And like, is this working? Is this helping? Or is it more like we’re all just giving each other high fives?

Keith Knight: Yes. Especially my book, Domestic Imperialism: Nine Reasons I Left Progressivism. You can get a free PDF of that at libertarianinstitute.org or buy it on Amazon. I have had a number of people who came to me and said that they were curious about these ideas because the popularity of Bernie Sanders and AOC at the time was significantly increasing. So, I’ve had a great number of people tell me and I experience it in my everyday life. I see people with 100% confidence in democratic socialism stop bringing politics up altogether. So if I could at least get them to shut up about it, that’s a realistic step in the right direction. Changing people’s minds is hard. Making them so insecure they’re terrified to advocate this completely immoral, economically illiterate nonsense, that’s also a victory we shouldn’t shy away from.

[Laughter]

Bob Murphy: Keith with the shock and awe campaign with the arguments. Okay. So you mentioned your book. If people want to read more of your stuff, where do they go?

Keith Knight: libertarianinstitute.org. My name is right up on the top. You can see my articles. And podcasts—I have 1,100 podcast episodes as of recently. I will sometimes do five minute episodes and still put those out as a podcast just to reach a different audience. This presentation is 3 hours and 58 minutes. So I try to have a wide variety.

Bob Murphy: Sure. Great. Okay. And so folks, yeah, we’ll link to Keith’s archives, the Libertarian Institute, this the video he did that we’re giving you a teaser for the 64 issues or objections to democratic socialism, your book. And I’ll throw in other things too if I can find it. All right. Well, why don’t we wrap it up there? My guest folks has been Keith Knight. Keith, thanks so much for everything you’ve been doing.

Keith Knight: Thank you, Bob.

Bob Murphy: Thanks everybody for tuning in. See you next time.

The cost of living has become absolutely suffocating for millions of Americans. For years, the bureaucrats in Washington have been feeding us numbers that show that the rate of inflation is low, but it is obvious to everyone that what they are telling us is simply not true. Many of the items that I regularly purchase at the grocery store have more than doubled in price over the past decade. Some have more than tripled in price. When I get to the register to check out, I feel like asking the cashier which organ I should donate to pay for my groceries.

We have reached a stage where grocery prices are causing extreme financial stress for families all over America. One man recently caused quite a stir on social media when he revealed that a grocery order from Target that cost $64.50 in 2020 is now $158.30 in 2026…

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Everyone knows that grocery prices have risen to absurd levels, and yet the statisticians in Washington keep assuring us that everything is fine.

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Do you?

The Washington Post just conducted a poll that found that 66 percent of Americans consider the cost of groceries to be unaffordable.

That figure has risen by 21 percent just since February…

https://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/a-28-item-grocery-order-from-target-that-cost-64-50-in-2020-is-now-158-30-in-2026/

I work at a bank in operations, and my manager got on the subject of having a financial advisor in a meeting she had with myself and a few other people who were new to the department. She mentioned that she has one, it makes sense to have one right? Or are you better off just managing your spending and budgeting on your own?

When it comes to generating capital that is used for certain businesses, there are a lot of ways that one can do it. As a person who has a business, what was the best way that you used to build capital for the business that you are doing at the moment?

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Even though I have debit card as well as credit card, I like to use credit card more than debit card. With credit card, I can use bank's money for 45 days for free. secondly, I also get cash backs and points for using credit cards, I can use cash backs towards purchases and convert points into purchase credit. Why should I use my money when I can use bank's money for free for 45 days?

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