Speaker 1: People will make some money. People are investing more. There's
the stock prices in the American casinos got a big
boost a week or ten days ago because of this
announcement by the I think it's called the People's Bank
of China, the Central Bank of China. And whenever I
see the word People's I always know that the people
have nothing whatsoever to do with it. Whatever the politicians
give anything a name like that, if you don't create
a boom, a temporary boom, and all the investors will invest,
and they already have, and but you know there's a
big risk, but the boom will bust eventually because it's
not genuine prosperity as being created. It's just a temporary
sort of political prosperity by the Chinese Central Bank.
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Speaker 3: Ever, and welcome you are listening to and watching the
Financial Survival Network I'm your host, Carrie Lutz. Hey got
a special treat for you today. Thomas Jay de Lorenzo
is with us from nieces dot Org, and we're talking
China and recent publication by him Casino Economy, and Tom,
it's great to have you on the show. So we're
talking pre call. We see these third world economies make
humongous strides, and the reason they make these strides is
vastly misunderstood by the public at large, probably probably more
by deliberate than by accident. But they make these huge
strides and then they inevitably crash and burn, like Japan,
like China, like many countries in Europe and Western Europe.
Isn't this just proof that in the end, the best
solution we have to improving living conditions, improving people's people's lives,
is through the free market.
Speaker 1: Well, sure, I think what China is doing recently is
they're imitating our federal Reserve. When you see some of
these countries like you mentioned, have sort of temporary bursts
of affluence. What was like us in the US in
the early two thousands after the stock we had a
bit of a stock market crash in two thousand and
the government responded by trying to create a bubble, another
bubble in housing, which it did in that bubble burst.
And so for years, many years, I've been calling the
FED our central playing agency. They have their fingers involved
in and regulating almost all aspects of every financial transaction
in the country. And in the Chinese Central Bank, which
is run by the Communist Party. Uh, you know, in
the last week or so, they're doing the same thing.
They're they're they're, they're they added the equivalent, according to
news reports, of about seventy billion dollars into their banking system,
and they're hoping that'll create a bit of a bubble
and more affluence and that. And then they're hoping that
people will spend some of that money that they that
they're supposedly going to make in the gambling casinos in Macau.
And so American investors have blooded uh, have been buying stocks,
you know, increasing the purchase of stocks in the in
the American casinos that exist in Macau. And and that
seems to be their plan. So yes, we'll probably see
this burst of affluence that is temporary, and it's it's weird,
you know, it's the jepe. The Chinese communists saying, oh,
these other FED operates is how the Americans do it.
Let's imitate that, And they're imitating so, you know, one
of the worst examples of what we do to our
economy here creating boom and bus cycles through monetary expansion
by the Fed.
Speaker 3: You know, it's they're learning exactly the wrong lessons. It
looked like they were going to avoid the mistakes that
the Japanese had made, you know, earlier in the eighties
and nineties, and yet they're making all the same mistakes.
The only maybe good thing they're doing is is perhaps
buying up gold.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's about I remember. I remember the Japanese
what they was supposed to be the savior of the
world about nineteen eighty or something like that. But then
they basically adopted Keynes and economics. They decided, well, we
can spend to get the government to spend us all
into prosperity. And then, of course, look how that worked out.
They had a you know, they have very very long,
what was a twenty year recession basically in Japan. And
so that's that's where they were. And like I said,
the Chinese seemed to be thinking that, well, we should
we should ape or imitate the American Fed, and which
which all the other central banks of the world have
done for decades and with the same result. And I
think that's you know, the old definition of insanity. You
keep doing the same thing over and over again with
the same bad result. But politically, everything, you know, everything
is shortsighted in politics. Politicians are always interested in the
next election in the democratic countries, and so that's why
it works for them.
Speaker 4: They get all they want to do.
Speaker 1: Is pump up the economy now because I had an
election coming up. And I think that's why Powell, for example,
uh you know, tried to orchestrate a minor interest rate
a couple of weeks ago to help the Kamala Harris campaign.
And so in the other countries do much of the
same thing. It's called the political business cycle and the
economics literature.
Speaker 3: So it's a happy days are here again.
Speaker 1: Huh yeah, temporarily until the bus comes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Well, eventually the piper has got to get paid.
How do you see this whole thing unwinding here?
Speaker 1: Well, I think people will make some money. People are
investing more. There's the stock prices in the American casinos
got a big boost a week or ten days ago
because of this announcement by the I think it's called
the People's Bank of China, the Central Bank of China.
And whenever I see the word people's I always know
that the people have nothing whatsoever to do with it.
Whatever the politicians give anything a name like that, if
you don't create a boom, a temporary boom, and all
the investors will invest, and they already have, and but
you know, there's a big risk, but the boom will
bust eventually because it's not it's not genuine prosperity is
being created. It's just a temporary sort of political prosperity
by the Chinese Central Bank in my view.
Speaker 3: So you know, like, here's the question, peers. In America,
the stock market is the greatest the wealth creation mechanism
ever created known to man. But does it really create
wealth or is it something else at play here?
Speaker 1: Well, no, it redistributes wealth to the stock market investors,
the real estate industry, and the banking industry, and people
who make the big, big money through the stock market.
But just look at the average American today. You know,
if you say we're creating tremendous wealth with the average
American today that's complaining about gas prices and food prices.
They can't pay the rent. And the young people get
out of college and they say things like I can
never see being able to afford to buy a house
and things like that. But then yeah, the the Wall streeters,
the speculators and real estate people with the artificially low instrates,
they do very well. But you know, prosperity is created
by saving money, investing money, working and producing. That's what
creates prosperity. But the financialization is financialization. It's not prosperity.
It's just a means to an end, which could be,
you know, help us along to become prosperous. We need
the financial sector, we need the banking sector. But it's
sort of become an end in itself in recent years,
and it hasn't really spread the wealth that much. So
that the college kids that were they're rioting and protesting
over the one percenters years ago, they did have a
points and I think that's why a lot of them
hopped on the Ron Paul bandwagon. When Ron was running
for the Republican nominee eight in twenty twelve, that he
was beating up on the fed as creating this system
of where yeah, the one percent of we're getting most
of the benefits from the system.
Speaker 3: Well, there's a rumor circulating that in the potential next
Trump administration that Ron Paul is going to have a
major job there, maybe a Treasury.
Speaker 1: Well, just just a couple of days ago, Elon Musk
contacted Ron Paul and asked him, would you have care
to have a meeting talk about this Government Efficiency Commission?
And Ron said yes, I'd be glad to And in
three hours it had on on X it had four
million views.
Speaker 4: Love that.
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of people who got very excited
with it here that Ron is still alive in kicking
and willing to engage in battle.
Speaker 3: Wait, government efficiency, Isn't that a lot like jumbo shrimp
and youl?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Or vert diligence.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, like, let's get real here.
Speaker 1: Well wrong, We'll probably would probably tell him the only
way to make government efficient is to abolish as much
of it as you can. I doubt if Rad is
not going to tell him to do this or that
to make bureaucrafts more efficient.
Speaker 3: Well, I suggest that anybody who's listening or watching this
try this exercise go to chat EPT and tell it
that you want to cut two trillion dollars off the
US economy and you don't want to raise taxes, and
how would you go about doing it? And you will
get a list of hundreds of useless government agencies, redundant
government agencies. The only the only department that didn't show
up on that list was the Department of Redundancy Department.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, well we've got what do we have?
Speaker 1: We have something like eight hundred military installations all around
the world. That would be easy pickings there, to be sure.
When Ron Paul was first running for the Republican nomination eight,
he made the point that if we just abolish the
income tax and replaced it with nothing, that the federal
budget would be I thought, if I've got the exact date,
but it would be about what it was around fifteen
years earlier. And even then, fifteen years earlier, the government
was grossly bloated, you know, far beyond the constitutional limits
of what government should be doing. And that would have
created tremendous prosperity and solved a lot of problems.
Speaker 4: But it's not as nearly as.
Speaker 1: Cataclysmic as you know, the establishment would make it out
to be if we were to do.
Speaker 3: That, Hey, how about if we get the federal government
right now currently owns forty five point four percent of California,
which is forty eight million acres. Now, if they could
get one thousand dollars an acre, it would be forty
eight billion, ten thousand, four hundred and eighty billion. All
these other states that the federal government owns most of
that was never intended by the Constitution or any anything
that annects these states for the federal government to own.
Speaker 1: You know, I think Nevada is even more extremely I
think it's more closer than ninety percent of us z
owned by the federal government. That's why if you go
to Vegas, you get on the rooftop of one of
these hotels where they have a restaurant, you see all
the houses and the buildings that all of a sudden
it's cut off and there's nothing. It's like a straight line,
and that's where the government owned land starts. And so
that's that's why Vegas real estate is so expensive, is
there's more people want to live there, but there's no
more They're running out of a room, and you have to
build up in not out.
Speaker 3: A Colorado, Alaska. Nobody wants to live in Alaska anywhere
to speak of. But you know, Idaho, Idaho is a
nice state. A lot more people would go there if
it was cheaper. Yeah, Nevada is eighty percent and god Utah.
Another state, Wyoming, and it's it's just and they do
a lousy job of keeping these lands of mesas. Dot
Org has written numerous articles comparing private land ownership to
government landownership, and there's no comparison. The fact is that
private ownership is far superior.
Speaker 1: Sure, people always take better care of their own property,
especially when they if you look at the timber companies
and all that, there are timber companies that replant after
they cut, They replan with what are called super trees
and mature in like ten years because it's their assets.
It's you know, their property is their asset, and if
they despoil their asset, they're throwing money down the toilet,
their own money. Whereas when the government gets involved and
they lease some of the federal lands to the sort
of politically connected companies that do this, they practice something
called clear.
Speaker 4: Cutting, where they they just you know.
Speaker 1: Pull all these trees out by the roots, drag them
down the side of the mountain and bring them to
the lumberyard and they don't replant anything because it's lot
their property.
Speaker 4: They don't own it.
Speaker 1: They're leasing it from the government, and as it makes
a huge difference, and it creates a lot of problems,
especially in the West, like you just mentioned, with the
government owning all this property out there. But one of
the reasons why they own it is that the example
I just gave is that it's patronage. They can they
can win political support in votes, especially money campaign contributions
from farmers, ranchers, the timber companies by leasing in this
land on the cheap below the free market price would be.
And they use it as a sort of political tool.
Speaker 3: Oh for sure. Even Georgia and Florida thirteen percent owned
by the federal government. I mean, this is just the
very definition of madness. Say one story that just came
up talking about government overreach and it's become a meme.
It has stormed, the Internet's broken. It is the story
of these people. They rescue wild animals, take care of
him in New York. They have a nonprofit and five
or ten people from the New York State Department of
Conservancy knock on the door, guns drawn, they have a warrant.
They take their wild squirrel, who is the most popular
squirrel on the internet, and their raccoon. The squirrel's been
with them for seven years and they take them and
then they kill them.
Speaker 1: And this is like, okay, does Chris is cruel and
heartless and uh and it sounds like, you know, the
the FBI raid on mar Alogo. But it's after a
squirrel and a raccoon, you know. And what I read
was there armed police that held you the homeowner outside.
He would stay outside and he had to go to
the bathroom during the five hour search of his house
for more squirrels, and he had to have a police
escort to go into his own bathroom in his house
during that five hour period. And that's truly a you know,
government out of control, you know what, what what more
can you say? That's that's so the Soviet Union is
what we've turned into when things like this can happen
to us.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is absolutely mind boggling. And in some bureaucrats
mind though, this was all justified and and well and good.
Speaker 1: Well, the bureaucrats are always always all about justifying their
budgets and their existence. And so they always they're always
flouding and scheming to create the perception of some sort
of horror, perception of some sort of crisis. A civil
society is always attacked. Private enterprise is attack. We need
bureaucrats to protect us from from everything, even a squirrel
in our house. Like I said, there was the argument
they gave is, well, they don't want rabies to spread.
Like you said, the squirrel lived in this guy's house
seven years, you thought it would have spread rabies at
some point during that time of that rabies.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, it's always you know, when the government does
these things, it's always for your own good, right, Yes,
it's not because of their their power crazed, you know,
insane bureaucrats. They're there to help, right was Reagan's the
old thing, the scariest words in the English language. High
and from the government are here to.
Speaker 1: Help you, my colleague here at the mess Institute, Mark
Thornton was written, sure, I only articles on the war
on drugs, and he made makes the argument that when
you read about the war on drugs and people breaking
down someone's home and saying sometimes it's the wrong home,
and then they brush in and they take everything, and
they confiscate your car, and you know, beat up your
dog or shoot your dog and do all this. It's
one of the things they're doing is they're teaching all
the rest of us a lesson. You disobey and this
can happen to you, not just about drugs, but anything.
And so that's what I thought of when I saw
this story about these these government thugs breaking into this
guy's home and killing his pets, is they're sending a
message you disobey us over anything, and this can happen
to you, and it's time but that we stop that.
And in one way or another, we can't have that.
That's that's not in the public interest. Like these bureaucrats say,
there are the criminals in doing this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the constitution means nothing, and you get some judge
to rubb or stamp it. I mean, I practice law
for years and I saw a lot of travesties take place. Yeah,
legal travesties. It's the legal ones that scare me a
lot more than the illegal ones. Yeah, well, I guess,
I guess we continue on. Is there any way to
avoid the ultimate collapse? Do you think Tom and Well
I've been preaching secession for a long time. Rather, maybe
after I'm gone, we'll see that in this country of
people find some parts of the country or already you know,
sort of de facto seceding in small ways from the
federal government nothing else. Moving out of New York to
Florida or something like that is sort of They call
it soft secession in some circles, as where there are
some places in America where there's a little more freedom
than others, and so that's happening.
Speaker 1: But I think, well, someday we'll see a full blown secession,
and hopefully we'll have a president who's more like Mikhail
Gorbachev than like Abraham Lincoln, and it will just throw
up his hands and give up.
Speaker 3: Let people walk away in peace. Hey, you know it's
I did the same thing. I left New York after
being there for thirty plus years, and I never looked back.
The only thing I missed there is the pizza and
the bagels and a couple other things, and my kids.
But one day they'll be following me. Here this note.
Speaker 1: I used to live in Florida and the New Yorkers
would come down and complain about the lack of good
pizza and bagels. And I never understood it because New
Yorkers have been immigrating to Florida for decades and there
are a lot of good New York based pizza and
bagel places in South Florida. Well, if you look for them,
you can find I mean, I can go right at home.
Speaker 3: I know, but they're just not it's not as good,
but you know it's But if that's the biggest price
to pay for moving to Florida, and what you gain,
I mean the Second Amendment alive and well embraced here,
and and the federal government to offer to send election
monitors here and our governor told them to stick it.
And so it's amazing that Florida could be heading in
the right direction relatively speaking. Believe me, there's still way
too much government here in Florida, and most of it corrupt,
But because we don't have a state income tax, at
least there's less of it.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: That's right, That's very important, and that's something that needs
to be kept in place forever in Florida. That's going
to maintain any settlas freedom. And a number of other
states also that I like Tennessee doesn't have a state incltry. Yeah,
nine state ashmill is becoming so popular, right, And it's
it's also the lack of red tape, you know.
Speaker 3: Sometimes sometimes the lack of regulation in Florida, like when
it comes to homeowners insurance other types of insurance. It's
it feels like it's not for the best, but all
the other benefits that come with it. I'll take it
any day of the week for sure. Tom. Tell me
how we connect with you, how we find you on
the web. I know you're on mess dot org, but
where else do we find you?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 1: I'm a column this form Lou Rockwell dot com. You
can see my articles on Lou Rockwell dot com and
you can check out my Amazon page. And I've written
a whole bunch of books. The latest is called The
Politically Incorrect Guide to Economics, and you can check me
out on Amazon or Lou Rockwell dot com.
Speaker 4: It's a man's name.
Speaker 1: Lou is a founder of the Mesas Institute.
Speaker 3: I know, and hey, we're grateful. I've had Lou on
the show a number of years ago. Have to have
them on again. Appreciate you coming on. If you've got
a question for Tom myself, shoot me an email. K
l at Kerrie lets dot com. The link to com
sites is in the show notes to this interview on
Financial Survival Network dot com. When you go there, please
sign up for your free newsletter like we're up to
fifty thousand subscribers now. Really appreciate you coming on, Tom.
Speaker 2: Thank you, thanks for having me gery, thanks for listening
to carry Letz's Financial Survival Network, your solution to today's
trying times. For the latest, go to Financial Survivalnetwork dot com.
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