Speaker 1: There's a study of the FED recently by the Independent
Institute at Oakland, California, and the Board of Governors of
the FED. I think they're I'm of a staff staffers.
I think it was ninety seven Democrats and three Republicans. Okay,
So now that Trump is going to be president, that's
going to turn around. I think they're going to be
more realistic and inflation. They're going to report higher inflation
numbers and the higher unemployment members, which really existed during
the Biden administration, but they lied about that because they're Democrats.
Speaker 2: You're listening to Carrie Letz's Financial Survival Network where you
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Speaker 3: And welcome you are listening to and watching the Financial
Survivor Network. I'm your host, Carrie Letz got an amazing
guest for you today. It is a site that I
follow virtually daily, certainly every week, several times mesis dot
org and there you can find the.
Speaker 4: Teachings and the expansion of Ludwig.
Speaker 3: Von Mesis's theories, not just theories, but observations and proof
that free markets work best and truly, the government that
governs best is that which governs least. Tom de Lorenzo,
you are president of MESIS, and you know, I'm amazed,
like how relevant and how many young people have kind
of come over to the site and the libertarian mindset,
and you know, in the current political environment, it seems
like more and more people are gravitating towards it.
Speaker 4: They get it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we have more than three million readers a year
of our web site mesas dot org. And the free
books we have that can be downloaded, like Human Action
by von Mesas and Man Economy and State by Murray
Rothbard are downloaded thirty or forty thousand times a month,
every month, all year long, year in and year out.
And we have some videos that have nearly two million
views of video of this speech is giving in some
of some of our conferences. And you might remember Carrie
Ron Paul, who's been on our board forty years, was
running for the Republican nomination. He went to Michigan State
University to give a talk and he thought it was
going to be all very antagonistic, and the students started
spontaneously chanting and the fed because they'd heard Braun say that,
and they had read up on it, probably on our website,
because he talks about our website all the time, and
he's a good friend of ours. He was just here
several months ago given a talk. And so, yeah, a
lot of young people, and we have a big network
of professors all over the world who turn their students
onto our writings and our programs and uh, and so we're, uh,
we're sort of missionaries in that regard and uh, and
we love it when we discover smart young people who
are interested in our ideas.
Speaker 3: So to sum up Austrian school of economics, uh, for
those of you out there who aren't familiar with it,
just give us a brief encapsulation of the most important
points of it.
Speaker 1: Well, it uses the economic theory and to to understand
human behavior in general. We call it human action in general.
And we study markets, and we we we teach and
we do research on how markets actually work and how
they work much better than government. And we have a
lot of literature on why government seems to fail and
everything it does. I used to have a bumper a
sticker on my office door that I clipped out of
a newspaper by Ringos Are of all people and said
everything government touches turns to crap. And that's that's sort
of one of the themes of the Austrian School. But
it's based on one hundred and fifty years of research
by some pretty serious scholars. But you know, in Layman's term,
that's pretty much it.
Speaker 3: Well, I would I would just add to Ringo star
as you know, wisdom and say, if it doesn't turn
to crap, but then it goes up in flames.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that would be especially appropriate today, wouldn't it
for Californians?
Speaker 4: So perfect example.
Speaker 3: Just wasn't really on our list of things to talk about,
but it really is dominating the news cycle now, perfect
example of governmental failure every single level.
Speaker 4: The fire is going on in California now right, Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I published an article on Lou Rockwell dot com was
I'm a columnist for Lou Lou was the founder of
the Mesas Institute, and entitled California Bad Dreaming. And one
of the points I made is that quoted former New
York mayor Ed Koch, who once said it's hard to
hold a ribbon cutting ceremony for a new sewer line.
And the point he was making is that people were complaining,
why is the infrastructure crumbling in New York City? Well,
there's not much political hay to be made by opening
up a new sewer line or a new water line,
or making sure the water hydrants work for fires, because
there are so many other opportunities to spend tax dollars
that will win more votes and more campaign contributions in
other ways and doing the fundamental things that governments are
supposed to do. But keeping the infrastructure for firefighting intact
is not politically profitable compared to other things. So that's
why this happened. I don't think it's unique at all
to Los Angeles. I think every city has the same problem,
and they deal with it, and some deal with it
better than others. But the wacky politicians in call Off,
California are among the worst and the stupidest, and so
look what happened. I used to live in Maryland that
I always told people the Maryland left is probably the
dumbest of all leftists politician anywhere in America. That's saying
I'm gonna lose yet, but I'm gonna have to change
change that to California after.
Speaker 4: This, Hey, and look like good.
Speaker 3: We could argue anarcho capitalism and you know, limited government,
but the states that don't have income taxes by definition
are more limited in their scope than the states that do.
And the states that don't have income taxes, like Florida, Texas,
you know, the nine states that are out there.
Speaker 4: Have all grown much faster.
Speaker 3: And yet, like when there's a hurricane in Florida, whether
you think the government should be addressing it or not,
that's what happens.
Speaker 4: DeSantis and his.
Speaker 3: Predecessor Rick Scott and his predecessor Jeff Bush.
Speaker 4: That was when they were at their best in a disaster.
They were at their best.
Speaker 3: They weren't like rebuilding the bridges themselves, but they were
there making sure that the people who they appointed to
get this stuff done, we're getting it done. Newsome, he's
like out there, like in the wild. You know, you
get no confidence from the guy. He looks completely lost.
I mean he makes a deer in headlights. Look look confident.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, with the income with a state income tax,
the politicians can play Santa Claus they have so much
money that they're Santa Claus. They can become popular. And
that's why news was popular. He has so much money.
You know, they even like the mayor of Los Angeles
was spending They had a transgender cafe. There's things like that.
You know, any special interest group with any who wants
anything at all if you have income tax revenue problem.
But if you're restricted like Florida, if you want to
succeed as a governor or or in general as a politician,
you darn well beetter. Make sure you're prepared for hurricanes
and Florida because that's the one thing that's going to
get you kicked out of office. But in California, they
have so much money they just enjoy playing Santa Claus.
And like Mel Gibson said when he was interviewed after
he lost his home, Lori Ingram asked him if he
had anything he let to say to Governor Newsom, and
he said, yeah, use less hair.
Speaker 4: Gel had for him.
Speaker 3: Talk about the blow dried politician. So this brings us
to now many of you out there, You and I
Tom believe that the economy is in far worse condition
than we've been. A gas lit to believe, I mean
literally the past four years and politicians in general, it's
all about gas It's all about making you believe a
reality that doesn't exist, that is more favorable to them
to believe in. And I would go back to Trump's
first term. You know, the Democrats don't have a monopoly
on gas lighting. But the reality is inflation's way worse,
employment is way worse. All the metrics they use are distorted.
I mean, Murray Rothbordos used to say they shouldn't bother government,
shouldn't bother with statistics because they just use it as
an excuse to meddle in the economy.
Speaker 1: That's right, that's right. I've actually in my younger days,
when I was early in my career and I was
at George Mason University outside of DC, I was asked
to testify congressional hearings once in a while by the
Heritage Foundation back in the day. And yeah, they all
want a statistic of some kind. I was impressed, and
they all wanted us to get them some kind of
number that they would they would think it would make
them be authoritative and whatever they wanted to do. And
that's that's the racket of the statistics, and they keep
you know, when the statistics turn bad from their perspective,
they change the definition, Like they change the definition of inflation.
You know, they don't count gas proxies and food. You know,
you know who cares about that?
Speaker 4: Who you have?
Speaker 1: How much money do you spend on food? Anyway, it's irrelevant.
And so shadowstats dot com computes the inflation of the
way they did in the nineteen eighties, and inflation is
probably three or four or five times more than what
the government today says it is. And then all of
these jobs that they brag about, you know, a big chucklimber.
Governments make work jobs, so they're not real private sector
productive jobs. So they lie about unemployment also. But I
think that's going to turn around because these these agencies,
like the Department of Labor and the Department of Commerce,
they're all they're all like ninety ninety five percent ninety
nine percent Democrats who work there. There's a study of
the FED recently by the Independent Institute at Oakland, California,
and like the Board of Governors of the FED, I
think there I'm of a staff staffers. I think it
was ninety seven Democrats and three Republicans. Okay, so now
that Trump is going to be president, that's going to
turn around. I think they're going to be more realistic
and then fleation. They're going to report higher inflation numbers
and the higher unemployment members which really existed during the
Biden administration, but they lied about that because they're Democrats
and then Biden was their guy. And that's what I
think is going to happen.
Speaker 4: So now it looks like, you know, the most amazing thing.
Speaker 3: Trump gets elected, first first president to serve non consecutive
terms since Grover Cleveland, and since they don't study history anymore,
nobody really sees the parallels to Cleveland's second term.
Speaker 4: But there's an opportunity here with Doge.
Speaker 3: Between Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswami and all these things
to rethink and redefine government. Now, the last time we
really had this situation was when Reagan was elected, and
all he wound up doing was maybe slowing down the
growth of government a little bit. He was never really
successful in cutting spending and really limiting government to the
areas where it should be, where it's necessary. And by
the way, could you just tell us, Tom, what are
the major functions that a government should be performing, according
to Mesus Well.
Speaker 1: Mesa's was not an anarchist. He believed in limited constitutional government.
He was a fan of the US Constitution, and the
protection of life, liberty, and property is what government. If
you're going to have government, that's what should be done.
There's a famous old book called The Law by Friedrich Bastiato,
I'm sure you're you're familiar with, and he has one
statement in there, the law perverted. And how is it perverted? Well,
if it gets away from protecting life, liberty, and property
and it starts taxing one one group in order to
buy votes from another group, well that's the perversion of
the law. And so as a start, if you want
to know what the legitimate functions of the government are
in our system, it's Article one, Section eight of the Constitution.
The lists what are known as the delegated powers, and
they're mostly having to do with foreign policy and war
and things like that, coining money, not printing money, but
coining money, deciding who's to be a citizen, things like that,
punishing pirates on the high seats actually in their counterfeiting.
Speaker 4: And that's about it.
Speaker 1: And you know, the judicial system in that and then
that and also it did not provide for a standing army.
The army was to be funded for two years at
a time under the original constitution. And so of course
that that was the whittled away at the beginning in
George Washington's day as far as that goes, and it's
been need a largely destroyed since then. But that's what
what Mesius would would say is a function of government.
Speaker 3: And then it's just because that gets back to Ringo
Star again, it's that everything that the government touches turns to crap.
Now people will point at the railroads, you know, and
the highway system and all that is the need for government.
Speaker 4: There is a need. I mean, the interstate highway system.
Speaker 3: How did it had been built without the government involvement?
Speaker 1: Well, you know, they made They've all been making that
argument for two hundred years. And Alexander Hamilton made the
argument that we needed government spending for what they called
internal improve movements, and his day was roads and canals.
And then now when Thomas Jefferson became president, uh his
Treasury secretary made the same argument. We it was basically
a free rider argument that you know, you need to
force people through taxes to pay for this. But then
at the same time, beginning and before the nineteenth century began,
there were private there were one thousands of miles of
private road building. They were called turnpikes, and then they're
they're financed by investors, and people had an incentive in
the towns in America to connect their town to the
next town because they would It would enrich everybody. If
you're a merchant, it would increase the size of your
market if you made it easy to do there. And
so while these people were complaining that there's a free
rider problem. You people will not voluntarily pay to build roads.
People were were volunteer people in the towns were investing there,
buying stock in these turnpike companies. So historic speaking, that's
the way it actually happened, that we've we've forgotten our history.
Like you said, no one studies history anymore. And the
interstate system is not an unequivocal blessing anyway. There are
a lot of people who think they'd rather have their
privacy and that not rather have you know, crowds from
all over the planet driving through their cities and urban
sprawl and all that that people complain about so there
are people who complain about about that eminent domain. They've
stolen property from so many people to build all these roads,
and so there is a case for private, private road building.
And you do see some people now privatizing some roads
and turning them into toll roads in Los Angeles and
places like that. But so, yeah, you could have certain
things like that. You can make an argument that that's
a function of government, but that's it. You can't make
an argument that transvestite cafe is is a constitutional functional
government that tatty Bear should be forced to pay for.
Speaker 4: Wasn't there an amendment about that recently?
Speaker 1: I fought probably in the California Constitution that probably was.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I wouldn't doubt it.
Speaker 3: So doge imagine, you know, we have like eight hundred
agencies and they bring it down to one hundred agencies.
We still got all the debt. There's not much they
can do about that other than Martin Armstrong had the
best solution that I've heard, which is due a debt
to equity swap, where you just say, here's here's a coupon.
You could buy stocks with it, and that's all. You
could do nothing else. Yeah, and because otherwise the choice
is to default, and you know, all sorts of bad
things happen then, even though inflation is a form of
defaulting on your obligations.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, I'm optimistic about Elon Musk and Vivek and
the doge things because, like Robert Kennedy Junior also said,
if he gets in, he wouldn't have the authority to
abolish the FDA, but there are a lot of subdivisions
at the FDA that he thinks have been harmful to
Americans for decades, and he could abolish them without the
whole agency. And every American business spends a significant part
of their day complying with regulations instead of producing things.
And if there could be just a ten percent cut,
or look at the other way, ten percent increase in
the time American business has spent actually being productive. That's
a huge increase in productivity just ten percent and twenty
percent would be a boom. And you're increasing what could
do you know what else in the world. The invention
of the personal computer might be a comparison to what
you know what would boost productivity. And you know, on
the same level of a twenty percent cutting in wasted
time col telling to faceless bureaucrats one thousand miles away.
And so that's I'm optimistic about that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and combine that with AI, which is really having
a profound impact. I mean, just little things that I do,
like show notes for like this interview will be AI
generated in part.
Speaker 4: You still got to have.
Speaker 3: Some involvement and and just running a lot of the
government on AI. You wouldn't know the difference, right, I figure,
how much worse can AI be than in the bureaucracy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, then the government. There's so many bureaucrats in the government.
It says though government it still runs like a nineteenth
century woolen coat factory where it had a lot of people,
you know, sewing the buttons on everything that we wouldn't
close without technology, before technology came along and eliminated the
need for all these people to do all these things.
And on technology to the government is so bad on technolo.
We talked earlier about the incentive to not spend that
much money, enough money on infrastructure like fire fire prevention. Well,
here's a fact for you. It was only twenty nineteen
that the government, the US government quit using eight inch
floppy discs in the nineteen seventies for its nuclear arsenal,
nuclear power.
Speaker 4: That's rud bombs. I did read that, how I go.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And that's not just an isolated example. It's the
same phenomenon that was more politically profitable for the politicians
to spend money on other things than things that actually
help us.
Speaker 3: You know, like my kids don't even know what a
floppy disc is. Sure, yeah, never, it's the choice. I
having a spack of the things, and you'd load your
programs in and you know, I go back to the
early days the PC and yeah, pretty amazing. So we're
at a unique time and the fact is the change
has to come. Either the change is going to happen
on its own and could be totally unmanageable, or we
we basically open things up and we embrace the change.
I hate to use cliches like that. The only constant
in life is change, right, But we have to do
something here because we're failing.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well freed with Hayak One said in one of
his books, Excuse Me, Law, Legislation, and Liberty that the
thing about economic growth is that when your time comes
to change, say that, you know, those may a product
that your work for a company, The product has become outdated.
If you want of a prosperous society, you have to
accept that and adapt. If you don't want to accept
that and adapt, then you're going to give up prosperity.
And Americans need to be taught that so that they
realize that there's a benefit to adapting. That you have
a more prosperous life and a better life, and your
children and grandchildren will have a better life if you
if you adapt to these changes. And because it's going
to be for the better, and and so I'm a
bit optimistic the fact that the the left is becoming
more and more hysterical and they seem so defeated, and
the wokism is sort of fading. It'll it'll go back
to the universities where it came from for now. But
it's like a cancer. It'll be it'll be. It'll be
at the university. It's going to still be growing there
and we'll see what will happen in the next twenty years.
Maybe I won't to see what happened in the next
twenty years. If somebody will, that's the way it's going
to go.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's on the way. And then they call it
the woke mind. Virus. And you know it's interesting Tom.
Speaker 3: Anyone whose job or business or livelihood is threatened, you know,
quickly becomes a luddite, right yeah, oh sure, yeah. I
guess my business, my industry, my job is valuable. People
need it. They just don't know how much we need it.
But that force of creative destruction is key to moving forward.
You know, we look at where self driving vehicles will
just kind of cut it off at this, but you know,
ten million people, it's the largest job category in the
United States driver and I'm telling you from my latest
experiences driving test LISK, it's not going to be long
before those people are surplus. Oh yeah, they're not going
to be needed. It's certainly a large number of them.
There might be instances where you want the car not
driving itself, but we're almost there, and we'll see how
quickly society adapts to this, because this is major. And
that's just one small example or one large example of
the chain that's that's coming towards us. Factory work robotics
another one that's going to be and it's going to
happen so fast. It's happening now so quickly that most
of you out there don't even know it's happening.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, we adapted pretty well when we went from
horses to automobiles, and hopefully we'll do the same thing.
And they've been using robotics for decades now, you know,
the car car companies. You know, back in the old days,
people had to stick their arms in the into a
moving assembly line with sharp pieces of the metal going
past and uh, and then these robotic arms to do
all that now, so that's really nothing new. I've been
doing that for a long time, and it's it's historically
what always happens with technology like that is that new
types of jobs are created. When when they got rid
of operators. I'm old enough to remember a lot of
listens telephone service. You had to call and you talk
to somebody, and AT and T hired millions of call
them operators and they would connect you to your long
distance call. And the AT and T unions thought this
would be a disaster. Direct dialing telephone wuld be a disaster,
but they'd expanded the telephone business so much that they
ended up having more union members and not fewer union
members after direct dialing for long distance. And that's always
been the history of technological advance, but people need to
understand that and they need to adapt. And the sooner
you adapt, the better, of course.
Speaker 3: Yeah, can you actually dial zero and get an operator? Now,
I don't think you can do it. I don't think so.
I don't think you can. And that was everybody did
that and then collect calls and information, so information's gone.
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 3: Can you call for one one? And actually I think
it's all I think it's all robotic anyway up to
someone from Pakistan if you do that. I have an
older relative. She's she's passed away now, but she was
an operator and I've I've been to her workplace when
I was young, and they had all these women. There's
like hundreds of them all, you know, like a telemarketing place.
Speaker 4: But it was at and t Oh.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a huge well we call them now call
centers and and things like the typing pool. Remember like
companies would have like one hundred ellis and settlers on. Yeah,
and Wall Street's back office like they used to manually
figure out, manually handle share transfers, accrued interest to crewed
dividends actually on adding machines. Up until the early sixties
when the calculator came out. That was a big innovation.
And now basically there is no back office of Wall Street.
It's all the big boxes computers.
Speaker 1: Sure, yeah, yeah, we have We could probably cite a
thousand exams like that. But people need to know these
things that we you know, we've been pretty good at
adapting these over the years. We still have an economy,
we still have the problem prospects for prosperity. But you
need to learn that lesson. And there are a lot
of people who just think, oh, I'll never get another
job for the rest of my life. I grew up
in western Pennsylvania during the steel era in the sixties
and seventies and when the steel mills all disappeared. But
Pittsburgh today is a very very different place than The
types of businesses are totally different, and they succeeded. It
took me, It was painful at the beginning, but it
didn't take Pittsburgh very long to shift to the new economy.
Speaker 4: Hey, well, we go back to the Luddites.
Speaker 3: Really, they were the first, the first recorded instance of
anti tech, anti progress, if you will, and they were
smashing the looms because it automated a drudgery of making,
you know, conn wool and uh, it was a big
movement in the nineteenth century and you know now that's
all automated.
Speaker 1: So yeah, the dock workers today are complaining about automation
because there's a lot of automation coming along with the
taking stuff off of the ships. Dock workers and Trump
seems to be sympathetic to them, but that's their luodites basically, Yeah,
they don't They don't want to see the automation of
some of the some of their work either.
Speaker 3: Ye, it's pretty the container totally revolutionized that industry, but
there's still is the long Charman. Well, Tom, really appreciate
you coming back on. You know, like I said, I
can't say enough good things about.
Speaker 4: Mesas dot Org.
Speaker 3: I have referred countless people to the site to try
to get them to open up, to get you to
open up, to understand the way the economy really works,
which is, like you said, it comes down to human action.
People acting in their own self interest, whatever that might be,
hopefully within the conflin confines of the law, to further
their economic and their family's economic position. It's really that
simple when you get down to it is. But when
it's billions of people doing it all at the same time.
It gets very complicated very quickly. And you know, the
greatest force for change is unleashing the human mind and
allowing people allowing you to pursue your best interests. So
mesas dot org link is in the show notes this
interview on Financial Survival Network dot com.
Speaker 4: Appreciate it.
Speaker 3: Welcome here anytime and we will talk to you again soon.
Speaker 1: Okay, kerriy I have a great day.
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to carry lets this Financial survival Network
your solution to today's trying times. For the latest go
to Financial Survival Network dot com. Financial Survival Network now
more than ever,