Latest / The Junto Podcast / E46: 'The Law' vs. Big Government - Legal Plunder

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E46: 'The Law' vs. Big Government - Legal Plunder · The Junto Podcast

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Hello America, welcome to the Junto podcast where we promote the practical applications
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of critical thinking and bold creativity I'm your host Edgar Mills. Thank you for joining,
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Hello, good people. Welcome to episode 46 of the Junto podcast.
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Thank you so much for staying with me. I appreciate you guys.
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So today, what are we talking about? Today, we are comparing our current state
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of politics and the legal, well, politics with the law from Frederick Bastiat.
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Who, well, we'll get to it.
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So I quote, life, faculties, production.
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In other words, individuality, liberty, and property precede all human legislation
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and are superior to it. Yeah, that was from the law.
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Compare that to today, just never-ending government spending,
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regulatory overreach in every sector, no matter what.
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And then the gradual erosion of our personal liberties,
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yeah, but also our individual responsibility in the modern age of,
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you know, the welfare state and things like that.
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So The Law, written by Frederick Bastiat in 1850 And folks,
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it was every bit as brilliant now as it was then It's good stuff and you should read it It's short,
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short sort of essay outline. It kind of reads a little bit like a textbook even,
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and it goes on against the use of state force or state coercion for anything
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other than protecting natural rights.
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Bastiat was a French economist, and he warned strongly that turning the law.
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Into a tool for legal plunder will absolutely destroy our society as it looks like it's doing, right?
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I mean, it has been for decades and it just continues on.
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So we'll look at the principles that he outlines in the law and then we'll compare
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and contrast to modern U.S.
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Politics and we'll expose how the modern U.S.
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Government is bastardizing anything that may have been written into from Bastiat.
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And then I'll offer my sort of what I call clean bill fixes,
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right? I'm all about the clean bill.
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I think they should pass a clean
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bill that says all bills have to be clean bill. One subject, one topic.
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Instead of having these 8,000-page documents just full of all sorts of hidden
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nonsense or tying some spending that has nothing to do with a program you're trying to get past,
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but tying some other spending to it.
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And that's the reason everybody hates on Massey and everybody hates on the more
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libertarian-leaning politicians in Congress is because they refuse to support
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these gigantic bills that encompass all this spending.
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You know, the title of the bill will refer to one thing, but...
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It's just, it's greasy the way it shakes out.
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I think clean bills would be one of the first steps in restoring,
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you know, well, transparency for sure.
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Trust in our legislators, maybe. me.
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So Bastiat says the proper function of the law is to uphold justice in defense
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of our God-given rights.
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Now, you guys know not so much these days about the French, right?
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But back in the 1700s, 1800s, the French were all about liberty, right?
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Democracy, and that kind of thing. so I
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quote again from the law what then
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is the law it's the collective organization
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of the individual right to lawful defense
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the law is the organization of the
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natural right of lawful defense so it's
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just a collective of individuals exercising individual
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rights so what that means is common
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force this collective force is to
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do only what the individual forces
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have a natural and lawful right to do
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and that's where it goes south today folks that's
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where it goes south because the collective
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once once our corrupt politicians once they all agree upon a thing it makes
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no difference whether or not it it has a bearing on us and it does have a bearing
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on us by the way we have to pay for it.
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So common force is not meant to do
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anything that individual force doesn't
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have a natural and lawful right to do and that
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is to protect the person the liberties of that person and the properties of
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that person yeah that's it individual justice is collective justice folks but
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once the collective gets a hold of it it goes south that's the way that's the way it is,
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So Bastiat's writings, they align with the Constitution, or the preamble for
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sure, and the Declaration of Independence perfectly well.
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And I'm sure he used that, those two documents, as references as he was writing these things.
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I'm not sure when the law exactly was written. I know it was published in 1850.
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And modern sort of libertarian-leaning talking points and politicians like Rand
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Paul or Massey or whatever who rallies against the nanny state,
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they take a lot of principles from Bastiat.
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Yeah. So since the 1900s, the early 1900s.
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The government has deviated, right? The government's been deviating.
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Again, I always say that it started to go downhill somewhere around the Whiskey
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Rebellion, which was in like 1790-something.
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But especially ever since the early 1900s, especially since what?
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The 16th Amendment, right?
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The frigging Federal Reserve, the enactment of the Federal Reserve.
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And then especially in the 30s with the New Deal expansions from FDR,
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the federal government has morphed into, instead of a protector of our rights,
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it's just a middleman and a redistribution factory for our money.
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So throughout world
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war ii and in the building of the welfare state
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and and into the 60s when we got
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all the great society programs from lbj the
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law just our literal law just became a machine to churn out subsidies and the
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government started funding everything you know from frigging corporate bailouts
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to student loans to welfare.
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And any line there was between voluntary charity and then coerters of taxes
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kind of got smudged and erased.
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Folks, I'm not against charity as long as it's voluntary.
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That's it. That's the metric. It must be voluntary.
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We don't voluntarily pay taxes, folks. I guarantee you, given an option,
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90% of America would opt out.
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So what can we do for, what kind of bill could I propose, what kind of clean
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bill could I propose to fix this stuff?
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Well, we can make a constitutional amendment or statute that limits the federal
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powers back to what the enumerated powers, as they were written in Article 1,
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Section 8, and put any of these other general welfare programs, put a sunset date on.
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I mean, like two years, you know, three years, something like that.
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Where it's not just a never-ending program. Six years max.
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So I think Congress has six-year terms.
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So any general welfare program, at minimum, needs to be looked at every six years.
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And like automatically sunset. And if it doesn't get looked at,
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you know, gone. It's gone.
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And then if they want something to be permanent, it's got to go just like the
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amendment process, two-thirds congressional vote, state ratification.
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And then how do you enforce those things? Well, just audits,
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you know, the various commissions within Congress, these commissions that have
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veto power over the budgets for these programs.
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Yeah. And any of those budgets that exceed 10% of the gross domestic product
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on non-defense functions, they can veto it.
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So, and that's what everybody says, right? Congress has the power of the purse, and that is correct.
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They're just too corrupt because they wheel and deal.
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But if you had clean bills, they wouldn't be able to wheel and deal as much.
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There wouldn't be as much, there would be maximum transparency,
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and they would have to go on record for one thing, one topic,
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and that's it. There you go.
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So enumerated powers of Congress. Let's look at it a little bit.
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I'm not trying to do a civics lesson here. I just want to hit some things.
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The Congress has the power to lay and collect taxes, duties,
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imposts, and excises, uniform nationwide, to pay debts and for the common defense.
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And then this is where the liberals love it. And then it says,
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and to promote the general welfare.
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Now, they've taken that and run with it, right? They will scrutinize the hell
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out of the Second Amendment for grammatical errors and whatever,
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but they take the phrase to promote the general welfare and run with it.
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Congress has the power to borrow money on credit of the United States.
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Congress has the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations and among the
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states, and also with Indian tribes, folks, and also with Indian tribes.
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Congress has the task to establish uniform rules for naturalization and bankruptcy laws also.
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Why they put those together is beyond me, but they do.
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Congress is responsible for immigration and naturalization, good people.
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So all this stuff you see going on today, you can yell at Trump all you want.
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You can hate on ICE dudes for being too gung-ho, but it's Congress's job to
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regulate naturalization and immigration.
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Congress has the power to coin money and regulate the value of said money and
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fix weights and measurements.
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But what did Congress do in 1913?
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What did Congress do in 1913? They ceded that power. They created the Federal
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Reserve to coin money and regulate its value.
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So Congress no longer has a power in that.
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That is solely the Federal Reserve function and is the Federal Reserve a government function.
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No, it absolutely is not. It's a private entity, good people.
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So for whatever reason, whatever wheeling and dealing went on in Jekyll Island
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in 1913, once the law got passed, Congress gave away the power to coin money and regulate its value.
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And then it's Congress's job to punish counterfeiting of U.S.
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Securities and coin, which they could arguably punish the chairman of the Federal
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Reserve because they're essentially counterfeiting money every time they print money.
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They're devaluing our money at any rate. What else does Congress have the power to do?
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Well, establish post offices and post roads.
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That is a congressional function. even though the post office loses millions of dollars a year. Yep.
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That's Congress's job. And guess what? That happened before income tax came along, folks.
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Yep. And then Congress has the power over patents and copyrights.
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Not to power over, but to regulate.
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To promote science and the arts by securing limited-time exclusive rights for
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authors and innovators.
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Congress has the power to constitute tribunals or courts that are below the Supreme Court.
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So any court doing business does so under the authority of Congress.
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So all these activist judges out in San Francisco, what is that,
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9th District or something?
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All these activist judges, Congress can dissolve those courts, good people.
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They can't dissolve the Supreme Court. Nope, they can't.
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And Congress has no authority over local municipalities, but all these other
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big federal court districts and whatnot, yeah, Congress has the power over those lower courts.
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Congress has the authority to find and punish piracy, felonies on the high seas,
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and offenses against the laws of nations, the laws of nations.
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Then war powers, clearly.
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Congress, not the president, Congress has the power to declare war,
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issue letters of market reprisal, and regulate capture on land and water.
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So what we do with captured enemies, right?
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Congress has the power to declare war, not the president. Now check this out.
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Periodically I bring this up to people.
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But Congress has the power to raise and support armies. But guess what?
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Appropriations were they were limited to two years only so if we're being legitimate
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here the defense budget the military with the exception of navy the navy is the only,
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named military force that's meant to be maintained permanently the navy and
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with that you know the navy underneath the navy falls the marines but the army
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and air force and all that stuff.
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They're meant to be relooked at every two years.
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Now, I don't know that the Army's ever passed an audit, but my point is this.
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We've taken things for granted, and we've drifted over the past 200 and whatever
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years, 50, we've drifted away from the Constitution as it was written.
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And then Congress makes laws of land warfare and naval warfare and all that stuff.
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And then Congress has the power to call forth militias to enforce laws,
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suppress insurrections, and repel invasions to organize, arm,
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and discipline these militias.
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And then the states appoint officers and do the training.
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Now, this is a paraphrased version of this, but is a militia truly a militia if it's under Congress?
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I mean, absolutely not, right? Do the states have the authority to raise militias?
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And even then, is the National Guard, see, we can go back, this is a whole nother
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episode, but the National Guard, good people, is not a militia.
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And then what else? What else does Congress do?
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They have legislative power over the District of Columbia, right?
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They built the... to create a federal district, which they did, but...
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To 10 square miles via state session. So, yep, Washington, D.C.
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Was created under Congress.
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And then other stuff, too, other on military bases and things like that with state consent.
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And then there's one, again, I'm paraphrasing, necessary and proper clause, the elastic clause.
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This is one that allows, this is where they, the founding fathers were clever
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enough to sneak in these things that could be shaped and reshaped as we go to
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make all laws necessary and proper for executing the above powers and other
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constitutional duties.
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The elastic clause, I think, needs to be gone via constitutional amendment.
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So what's legal versus illegal plunder? When we think of plunder,
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we think of pirates, right? Pirate ships and whatnot. That's what I think of.
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As per Bastiat, and I quote, See if the law takes from someone or some persons
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what belongs to them and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong.
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See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what
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the citizen himself cannot do without committing an injustice.
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When a portion of wealth is transferred from the person who owns it without
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his consent and without compensation, then I say that property is violated,
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that an act of plunder is committed.
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That was Basia in 1950, good people.
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That is just common practice. That is just what we do.
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That is income tax and every other tax that we pay involuntarily on every single paycheck. Yeah.
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Compared to modern politics, Right. Everybody carries on, especially the it's
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odd that the liberals, they carry on about tax the rich and eat the rich and all those things.
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And then, of course, the right wing calls rich people the job creators,
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which may or may not be true. Right. Right.
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Democrats love like progressive tax and they want the more money you make,
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the more tax you got to pay, which is kind of the way it is now.
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And then you got some Republicans out there who call that socialism,
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which I kind of agree with.
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But both sides, both sides engage in this sort of selective outrage and this
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selective plunder. They both plunder, but...
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Side plunders by, well, they're both the same way,
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subsidies for their chosen little pet projects, all these green energy subsidies,
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and these electric car subsidies, and blah, blah, blah.
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But then on the other side, you get farm subsidies, right?
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So they will pay a farmer to grow certain crops,
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whether or not that's what this farmer you know started out doing or not it's
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whatever the government's going to pay he's probably probably going to do else
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risk going out of business right going under,
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which is how and why farm aid came to be
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back in the 80s so both sides they both have their pet project they both have
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ways that they plunder because believe me these subsidies going to whichever
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side there's kickbacks folks there's kickbacks you don't have to believe me
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you just You can research it if you want.
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That's the comparison to modern politics. Our government deviation from these
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principles of the Constitution and the law, Bastiat's law,
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they're never more clear than they are in FDR's New Deal.
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Because what came from the New Deal? Social Security, 1935. I say it,
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I always say it, and I'll continue to say it.
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Social Security is the biggest scam perpetrated on America ever.
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And Basiat defines it clearly as legal plunder.
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Yeah. And Social Security, well, I mean, it's got unfunded liability.
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Right now, current unfunded liabilities are somewhere upwards of $100 trillion. Right.
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Unless a whole bunch of people die real soon, yeah, they can't.
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It's going to run out of money. And we all know this. It's coming.
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They want to hang on to it. They want to use it as a campaign arguing point.
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But it's coming. And then when it runs out of money, then what?
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All these old people that were told, oh, it's Social Security.
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It's a safety net. You know, when you can retire and you don't have to work anymore.
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And now you see all these people when you're watching your morning news and,
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you know, and there was some kind of, some kind of major event and you got some old lady on there.
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I'm on a fixed income. I'm on the social securities.
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I only get $438 a month.
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Yeah, man. Well, that's social security for you.
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Some money guy, and I can't remember who it was, did a comparison.
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If you, if you take from the time you started working, cause that's when you
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pay, once you have a legal, you know, legitimate job, you're paying into social security.
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If all the money you put into social security, if that were going into a commercial,
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you know, IRA, for instance, Roth IRA,
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you're over the course of your life, when you hit 65, you would have like a
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few million dollars saved up.
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And then that few million dollars spread out over the And your money,
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by the way, and that's your money.
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Now, if your spouse dies, you collect their social security.
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But if you're a single guy and you die, who gets your social security?
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What if you have kids? What if you're divorced or a widower?
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And you're in your 60s, maybe 62, 63, have a heart attack because you drink
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heavy and you don't exercise.
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You have a heart attack and die. And you got kids in their 20s, 30s struggling.
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Where's all your money gone? Well, it was your money.
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You paid into it for the guarantee that you'd get something out of it.
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And then you checked out early before you were able to collect.
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It's just, yeah, man. Well, that's going to somebody else now, isn't it?
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Very potentially an illegal alien.
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Tell me if that isn't plunder, what is? If that isn't legal plunder,
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what is? Yeah. Social security should go away.
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We can, you know, comment, you know what I mean? Hit me up. And then what happened in 2008?
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Yeah, the financial crisis, the bailouts, the troubled asset recovery program,
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where taxpayers, you and me,
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covered all of these too big to fail Wall Street hedge funds and all these people.
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All these CEOs, by the way, that maintained all their bonuses,
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their yearly bonuses or their whatever performance bonuses.
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Well, they're too big to fail. That was the catchphrase that was going around.
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And if that wasn't a clue for you, if that, you know, I tell you,
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you get clues sometimes that are pretty slap in the face, obvious clues.
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And I'll give you a recent example. It was Pam Bondi, and it was on a subject,
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you know, she was getting grilled by Congress or Senate or whoever,
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and she says, but the Dow is over 50,000.
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And we're talking about, you know, child sex trafficking.
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And she says, yeah, but the Dow is over 50,000.
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Well, that's what too big to fail. that's the same exact vibe.
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Right. That's when you knew it was all sham. Well, that that was one one time that was a freebie.
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So what is my what is my clean bill to no plunder to no plunder amendment? Right.
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We pass legislation that requires all federal spending to include a plunder impact statement.
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And that it details in that statement any involuntary transfer,
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like taxes to specific whoever, whatever checks those are meant to be automatically
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coming out of, that's highlighted and detailed.
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And then any bill where benefits will be distributed to less than 50% of the taxpaying population,
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then that gets nixed and that goes to some other thing, block grants or something
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like that, to the states to go toward voluntary programs.
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And then give citizens the ability to bring lawsuits against the government
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for these involuntary programs.
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Yeah, the plunder statement, actual detailed and open to the public and anything
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that's going to come out of your paycheck in any way,
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that gets highlighted.
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And then if it's going to benefit less than 50% of taxpayers –.
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Scratched as a tax and goes to
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some other program to where states can voluntarily manage those programs.
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All right, let's talk about the law and charity.
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Well, voluntary charity versus, you know, coerced, forced charity,
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because that's what, again, taxes, if there's anything charitable about them, it's coerced.
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If we're voluntary, then you guys would be doing it, right?
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If you had money to. If you hadn't, okay, never mind. Let's keep going.
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And I quote Bastiat, you say there are persons who have no money and you turn to the law,
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but the law is not a breast that fills itself with milk, nor are the lactal
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veins of the law supplied with milk from a source outside the society.
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Nothing can enter the public treasury for the benefit of one citizen or one
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class unless other citizens and other classes have been forced to send it in.
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If every person draws from the treasury the amount that he's put in,
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it's true that the law then plunders nobody.
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But this procedure does nothing for the persons who have no money.
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It does not promote equality of income.
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The law can be an instrument of equalization only as it takes from some persons
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and gives to other persons.
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And I wish I could remember the quote right now. I don't know if you guys know this.
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Was it Daniel Boone, who was a member of Congress?
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And he said something to the effect that it's not the government's job.
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The government is not in the business of charity. That's not what we are meant to do.
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And this speaks directly to that.
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This speaks directly to that. And there's, so let me give you,
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for example, some of these lefties out there, if you guys remember the dude that ran, well,
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was a candidate, Andrew Yang, came up with the freedom dividend or whatever,
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essentially universal basic income.
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If I mean, one, there's no voluntarism in that whatsoever.
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There's plenty of private philanthropy out there.
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Where is this universal basic income going to come from?
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And who gets it? It says universal basic income.
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So does that mean, does everyone get that? And where does the money come from?
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Are you just going to hit Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos,
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and whoever the other frigging billionaires are and make them pay for it year on year?
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Because they're just going to move.
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I think there's something along those lines. I want to say that Zuckerberg just
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moved out of California and possibly to Florida or somewhere.
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California's taxable income from the state dropped by a literal billion dollars,
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from $2 billion to $1 billion. Yeah.
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That, that is a hit to the state coffers folks.
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So when a billionaire leaves and moves away, I don't know if Zuckerberg's a
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billionaire, maybe he probably is.
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So when they move away, you feel it. And guess what, man?
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They're not going to move to Europe. They're not going to move to France, right?
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They're not going to move to Canada. They're going to move to frigging Thailand
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or somewhere where, or there's, or a frigging some Caribbean islands down there
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somewhere and put all their money somewhere else.
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So you guys keep saying that, well, why don't we make them pay?
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Why don't we make them pay?
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Well, you can try that, but if it unfair is still unfair.
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And if you impose that on them, they're just going to leave. I would.
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So I don't know where this universal basic income is supposed to come from,
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but that's, that's what we're talking about here.
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That's, that's that coerced charity.
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It's not natural. It's not real. And it's just going to cost somebody else money.
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I guess if you have no job and no money and the, and the government wants to give you money.
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Yeah. You're why not take it? But I can't blame the hustler out on the streets
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who refuses to work or don't want to work or can't get a job because of a criminal
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record or just simply rich,
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poor, otherwise wants to stand on principle or just don't want to be told what
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to do by anyone, whatever.
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I can't fault that guy for the government just giving him, I don't know what,
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$25,000 a year, whatever. I don't know what the numbers that were thrown around were.
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Universal basic income. If you think that's a good idea, by all means, hit me up.
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Sounds good. Do the math. And that coming from somebody who don't math very well.
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Well, where did our government go off for rails?
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Well, you know, England has been doing this for a long time and they used to
34:31
have, they had what was called a poor laws back in the, back in the day.
34:36
And they had a lot of influence on some of the laws in America,
34:41
but it was most visible in the 60s.
34:47
And again, who was it? LBJ. They came out with the freaking Great Society, the War on Poverty.
34:54
Well, what did the War on Poverty do, folks? It did the same thing that the
34:58
War on Drugs did. It just exacerbated a problem.
35:02
That is all it did. And it created dependency just like the War on Drugs,
35:06
the War on Poverty created dependency. Right?
35:11
And now we got everybody's, you know, the snap.
35:14
Remember when the snap wasn't going to get funded a few months back and everybody
35:19
was losing their damn minds?
35:21
I think it was during some sort of maybe government shutdown sort of thing or something.
35:27
I can remember when, and this wasn't that long ago, and everybody was losing their damn minds.
35:33
Oh, the Republicans are trying to starve the poor people.
35:37
Well if you're dependent upon it and you're
35:41
not truly needy and you are capable of
35:44
working but you're just taking it anyway i
35:47
guess i can't blame you though because the government's stupid enough to
35:50
just just give it out but things
35:54
like that gets you in this in a cycle and it gets you in a dependent state and
36:01
it keeps you in a dependent state and these programs cost a trillion plus every
36:07
year and somebody's getting fat off of it.
36:12
The middlemen in there are getting fat off of it.
36:15
The bureaucrats, nevermind the name,
36:19
nevermind the senators and the representatives that you know about,
36:23
but all the faceless bureaucrats that are in the middle,
36:27
they're seeing some of that well what clean build is old edgar voluntary aid restoration act yeah.
36:39
Whatever you want, phase out federal welfare programs, you know, over what,
36:48
maybe five years and give a hundred percent tax credit to individual private charitable donations.
37:00
Yep. Individual private charitable donations.
37:03
So if I donate, I mean like up to, you know, maybe 50% of your income or even more possibly.
37:16
On how charitable you are, but yeah, you should get a tax credit.
37:20
If you give to charity voluntarily, then yeah, you should get a tax credit for
37:27
it and take the government out of that picture whatsoever.
37:31
No government transfer of money.
37:36
Instead, you can have opt-in state options.
37:42
So if there's a certain thing that you want funded, that should be an option for you to opt into.
37:48
You know what? I strongly believe in the SNAP program.
37:52
I'm going to give, you know, maybe a few percent of my income to that every
37:59
month or every however long.
38:01
And then what that does, though, and that's it forces you to put your money where your mouth is.
38:09
And if the government's not taking your money, then what, then what,
38:14
then you're just not a charitable person if you, or what, I don't know.
38:18
That opens up a whole nother can of worms on a bunch of judgments and things.
38:23
But if people have the option to opt in to what taxes they want to pay,
38:26
because there's a whole lot of lefties out there.
38:28
They, well, my taxes, I don't want them to pay for the government.
38:32
That's not what I'm paying taxes for, to pay for the army or to pay for ICE
38:36
or to pay for whatever. Well, guess what?
38:39
If you're a lefty and you pay taxes, that's too bad, too sad.
38:45
You don't get a choice in where your money goes as it stands right now.
38:50
You just know that your income tax is going to the IRS.
38:54
Where that money goes from there? Yeah, we can go on different websites and see shit. Foreign aid?
39:00
Yeah, to Israel. That's right. If you're a lefty and you're an Israel hater, yeah.
39:07
Spend a lot of money every year. Saudi Arabia. Yeah.
39:12
Almost every country on the planet gets money from us every year.
39:15
There's a state department website you can go to or foreignaid.gov or something
39:20
like that. Go check it out.
39:22
And then it breaks, it gives these bullshit charts of how that money's divided
39:27
up, you know, within that kind of, you know, for military assistance,
39:31
for education, for infrastructure, for medical,
39:34
this and that and the other, for agriculture.
39:40
They call it that. They put a number next to that. But the trick is here,
39:46
there's zero oversight.
39:47
Once that money goes to that country, that money's gone.
39:52
We have no, we got no stake in that game anymore.
39:57
And that's why when we're subsidizing some third world African nation,
40:05
we're giving money to Burkina Faso.
40:07
Now, I'm just using that as an example. I don't know that we are.
40:12
I would guess that we are.
40:16
Of, I don't know, $400 million to Burkina Faso, the president of Burkina Faso
40:24
is going to be living very large.
40:27
His staff is going to be living very large.
40:30
Everybody else is still chopping off people's arms and heads and doing kidnap for ransom and whatnot.
40:39
But man, what if there was an opt-in for whatever tax you thought was important.
40:44
Guess what? Then the government would have to look, okay, 360 million taxpayers,
40:50
however many, let's say half of those opt-in because half of them would be like,
40:55
F that, I ain't paying no taxes to the government.
40:58
I'll just pay for whatever services I want, whatever, and I'll give money to my church.
41:03
Okay whatever that's fine let's say half of
41:08
360 so is
41:11
that you know 165,000 people or a million people are paying tax but they get
41:20
to opt in on what taxes they're paying then the government gets to see what's
41:24
important and what isn't to the
41:25
american people now that's representative government right there, folks.
41:30
Yeah, that's representative government right there. That'd be crazy,
41:35
wouldn't it? Wouldn't that be awesome? I think that would be so awesome.
41:38
Now, I don't know a lot about blockchain. Here's what I know. I read...
41:44
Talking about cryptocurrency, I'm just telling you that cryptocurrency runs
41:47
on blockchain technology.
41:49
I read Bitcoin evangelism maybe three times already, and I still don't know
41:57
about blockchain technology, but what I'm understanding is it's very secure, right?
42:02
So if we had opt-in.
42:09
State-run opt-in options that were blockchain technology that would be able
42:17
to help us with transparency and hacking and all those things,
42:22
then we could put a, on the IRS, you know what I'm saying?
42:27
Because I'm all about getting rid of the IRS as well. And if the states were
42:32
managing voluntary tax, yeah, Well,
42:38
IRS is just a middleman who's taking money from you and giving it to somebody else.
42:43
Phase it out. Or at minimum, just skeletonize the IRS.
42:50
Just for auditing purposes, I guess, maybe.
42:53
But that's what, you know, I guess Treasury does that too, so I should do that.
42:58
All right, how's it going on about that? I like the idea of voluntary taxes,
43:02
but voluntary opt-in. opt-in for what you think is important.
43:08
Well, you're just a peon. You don't know what's important. That's the way the government thinks.
43:13
That's the way the elite class thinks. That's the way the academic class thinks.
43:18
You're just a peon. You don't know what's important. We need your money,
43:22
but you don't understand how important it is the things we want to spend money on.
43:28
So we're not going to give you that option.
43:31
That's what's going on right now.
43:34
What about education? Did Bastiat have anything about education? Let's see.
43:40
And I quote, Education, like everything else, must be free and not forced.
43:47
But in this second case, the law commits legal plunder by violating liberty and property.
43:54
If it's replied that the people benefit from it, I answer that the people cannot
44:00
benefit from a violation of their own rights.
44:04
Force cannot produce anything in the moral realm except that which is immoral.
44:11
That speaks directly to all this mandatory public school shit or this truancy.
44:18
Your kids have to be enrolled in some school, even if it's homeschool. They have to be, right?
44:24
I'm not saying get rid of education. Don't get me wrong here.
44:27
Don't confuse what I'm saying.
44:31
I'm saying at what point, when and why did the government get involved in education?
44:38
Now, we have debates about school vouchers,
44:43
school of choice, right, to kind of fight against the public school monopolies
44:50
and these frickin' teachers unions and whatnot.
44:53
Because, again, I've said it before and I'll say it again, public schools are
44:58
just conformity factories. That is all they are.
45:01
They're not producing exceptional people.
45:06
The kids that are exceptional aren't getting that from school.
45:10
They're getting that at home. They're getting that from other environmental factors.
45:17
They're getting from public school is just conformity.
45:22
And that conformity, you know, stifles innovation. Yeah.
45:27
And it stifles individuality. And if you got gifted students who are being neglected,
45:36
and then you got challenged students that are being neglected,
45:41
because public school doesn't deal with the extremes very well at all.
45:46
So this push for, in the 1830s, when they started pushing for the common school,
45:51
and me and my daughter, we do agree on a couple things.
45:54
Well, we agree on a lot of things, but Industrial Revolution created a need
46:00
for these common schools, right?
46:04
Because, again, these are factory-based.
46:08
This whole model is a factory-based model. And then when the schools, they got federalized.
46:15
Now, we talk about Department of Education, which came around 72, I want to say.
46:22
But the elementary and secondary education
46:25
act that came around in 1965 and
46:29
that's when schools got federalized right there and then
46:32
you guys remember i don't know some of you who a little older in 01 they had
46:37
no child left behind what was that what was that and then you had this a shift
46:44
in the Obama years to core something.
46:49
I don't even remember what it was, but I remember they changed the way math
46:52
was done. I remember that.
46:54
At some point they stopped teaching civics in school and started teaching social studies.
47:00
And people equate social studies with, I guess, you know, you get geography
47:05
in there and stuff like that, but they're,
47:09
And well, I'll go with it. But at any rate, the federalization of public schools,
47:16
what did that do? The same thing that everything that federalizes does.
47:19
It ties you to money, to a budget that is now you're beholden to the federal government.
47:30
So here's what I got.
47:32
Education Freedom Act, clean bill.
47:35
Yep. Get rid of the Department of Education. completely at the federal level.
47:42
K-12 funding is a state responsibility for a public school, but that doesn't mean anything.
47:50
Unrestricted block grants and full tax deductions for all educational expenses
47:58
for both public or all public, private, and homeschool,
48:03
and all in between charters and Montessori's and all those different systems and styles, right?
48:11
All education created or treated equally.
48:16
Get rid of all federal curriculum mandates and give parents...
48:23
That are equal to the per pupil spending, which, you know, that's less and more
48:31
depending on what districts you're in.
48:32
But I want to say nationally, the average is somewhere around $13,000 per pupil per year.
48:41
So if parents had portable vouchers, now look, that means school choice.
48:46
That means I don't care if I live in Rome. If I want to drive my kid to Chattanooga
48:51
every morning to school, whatever, that's on me, right?
48:55
But they can still go to school wherever we choose.
48:58
And then when it comes to college, hey man, no more subsidies,
49:03
no more government-backed student
49:06
loans, and let the market dictate the tuition and not the government.
49:13
Because as long as the government subsidizes, the tuition is going to keep going
49:17
up. And then guess what you got when the tuition goes up?
49:20
Then you got federal loans. You got school loans that got to be paid back.
49:26
And guess what? This loan forgiveness business of just blanket saying,
49:31
okay, well, if you owe college, you're off the hook.
49:37
Now, why wouldn't you do that for my house or my car or my business loan?
49:44
Yeah, education is good and important. And if we're getting proper education
49:48
early, untainted by government coercion, federal government coercion, well, and state too.
49:57
But, I mean, well, that's a whole other state autonomy, 10th Amendment,
50:04
all that stuff. That's a whole other episode, but without any federal coercion
50:09
is where I'm going right now.
50:11
And that's just a few things. I mean, yeah, there's nuance to all that,
50:15
and we could argue it all, but why is the government in the education business?
50:21
There is no enumerated power that addresses education.
50:26
And that's what I mentioned earlier was with a giggle, is they like to use that
50:32
general welfare to promote the general welfare.
50:35
Well, almost literally everything in the federal government right now falls
50:40
under that little bitty two-word statement, general welfare.
50:44
All right, moving on, moving on.
50:48
Bastiat, I quote, Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways.
50:57
Thus, we have an infinite number of plans for organizing it.
51:00
Tariffs, protections, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive tax,
51:05
public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages.
51:10
All of these plans as a whole constitute, yep, socialism.
51:16
Legal plunder has many names. Universal suffrage, free education, progressive taxation.
51:23
The choice before us is, one, the few plunder the many. Two,
51:30
everybody plunders everybody.
51:32
Or three, nobody plunders anybody.
51:39
Those are the choices that that's what we're, that's what we're given.
51:43
That's what we're down to.
51:45
What are we living today? Let's right now, libertarians would argue that the
51:50
bipartisan sort of the, the two party system is just two sides of the same coin
51:56
and it's all like socialism light. You know what I mean?
52:00
The Republicans can say what they want. They are not for small government.
52:05
They might be pro-business or pro-corporation like big business.
52:09
I don't even know that they're necessarily pro-small business. You know, maybe.
52:14
I guess if it's to do with their homies and their cronies.
52:18
But yeah, we're living in socialism light right now.
52:22
All these college students and high school students that want to criticize capitalism as the problem—.
52:31
We're not living in a free market society, folks.
52:35
The government's had their dirty fingers in it at least since 1913.
52:41
At least since 1913, even before.
52:46
I don't know if you guys remember Ocasio-Cortez, the Green New Deal.
52:51
That was outright overt plunder, folks. That wasn't even any subterfuge there.
52:59
But where is there subterfuge? Tariffs, right? A lot of people bemoan tariffs, a lot of libertarians.
53:08
Now, I would say the Democrats only bemoan tariffs because Trump is the one
53:15
who's implementing this.
53:16
If it was Biden or Obama or somebody, they wouldn't.
53:20
So because, you know, the intellectual inconsistency that comes from the left.
53:25
But tariffs are a form of protectionism and a tax.
53:32
We do end up paying more for these higher taxed items that countries who import
53:41
and things like that. We end up paying more for that.
53:45
Of those things either all this this environmental
53:49
shit that they want to charge everybody
53:52
everything for breathing air you know i mean it's all both
53:57
of those things just fuel identity politics that just both both voting blocks
54:04
right the blues and the reds they just want a piece of the pie they They look
54:10
at everything as a fixed sum,
54:13
and they want their piece of the pie to be bigger. That's what it is.
54:18
And ultimately, whether it's red or blue, it's still the government taking money away from you.
54:27
It's still the government devaluing your dollar, the dollars that are in your pocket.
54:32
The Federal Reserve just made the dollar, well, fiat.
54:37
They just made it fiat currency. And they did it to fund endless wars and endless
54:43
deficits and whatever, whatever.
54:46
And a good example of the fraud that came from that, the printing of the money,
54:52
is all those COVID area stimuluses that went out in 2021.
54:57
Six trillion plus bucks where people got checks, you know, for these COVID,
55:05
these personnel, whatever.
55:08
I didn't get a check. But there's millionaires out there that got these interest-free
55:16
loans that then got forgiven.
55:18
Or these business loans that, yeah, well, ultimately got forgiven because of this COVID stuff.
55:25
If you just claim, oh, yeah, I lost employees or I had whatever,
55:29
whatever, whatever, and all that money that went out, all that did was just devalue your money.
55:35
And our national debt shot up to somewhere, you know, 35 trillion or so.
55:41
The less your dollar is worth. And then when the Federal Reserve prints money,
55:47
the less your dollar is worth.
55:51
Well, what clean bill could we do? I don't know. Let's see.
55:56
The balanced budget amendment that at least requires a balanced budget.
56:02
But even then, even in, let's say if we're not in a time of war,
56:09
which we always are, we're perpetually at war, right?
56:12
But if we're not in a time of war, a declared war, there should be a surplus in our budget, right?
56:18
But we should at least, via the law, require a balanced budget.
56:23
Not loans, not debt, not in the red.
56:28
And then there needs to be a serious, detailed audit of the Federal Reserve in order to phase it out.
56:40
I don't want to hear, no, we're going to audit the Fed, then they audit it,
56:44
and here's our findings, and then everything just goes on business as usual.
56:47
There needs to be an audit of the Federal Reserve for the sole purpose to phase
56:53
out the Federal Reserve.
56:55
The Federal Reserve needs to go away. It's a product of evil. It is evil.
57:02
And it keeps you and me at what modern-day debt slaves, good people. We are debt slaves.
57:09
And our grandkids are going to be feeling the pain way more than we are because
57:19
of the Federal Reserve and because of their devaluing of money.
57:23
We need to get back on a gold standard. Yep.
57:28
Gold standard now i know it was nixon that took
57:31
us off the gold standard 70 but guess what back in
57:35
the 30s what happened does anybody know what happened under under the the glorious
57:42
leader fdr who was fdr was a communist good people essentially what happened
57:49
under fdr when it come to gold. Yeah.
57:53
He, he essentially mandated, not essentially, he did mandate that all people
57:59
turn in all gold, unless it was some like rare coin thing,
58:04
but like gold as tender all and, and, and mass, you know, masses of gold,
58:11
all gold was to be turned into the federal government to be collected and,
58:15
and stored, I guess at Fort Knox. Right.
58:18
And then they paid, you know, chump change, you know, pennies on a dollar as
58:25
a compensation for that.
58:27
But even though the dollar was still on the gold standard, technically that
58:32
essentially took the dollar off the gold standard in practice back in the 30s.
58:39
And then it just got solidified in the 70s.
58:43
So there you go. The dollar, this is one of my favorite arguments to hear people
58:49
who shit on Bitcoin, that Bitcoin is just made up and it's not backed by anything.
58:58
Well, what is the dollar? What the fuck is a federal note?
59:05
What is the dollar backed by? The word of the Federal Reserve?
59:11
What does that mean to me? That doesn't mean anything to me.
59:16
There's not a human being. Well, that's not true. There's probably,
59:21
I would say, conservatively, 10 human beings in Washington, D.C. that I would trust.
59:31
The rest of them can go take a flying leap. I don't trust a single thing that
59:36
comes out of any of those offices.
59:38
So tell me, what backs the dollar, good people? What makes the dollar more valuable than Bitcoin?
59:44
Well, the dollar's not more valuable than Bitcoin. I don't know what is Bitcoin at right now.
59:52
Well, I can't find my phone. Oh, there it is. I'm going to see what,
59:58
where's Bitcoin at right now.
1:00:04
I invest in Bitcoin, folks.
1:00:08
I do. I believe that it's a good thing.
1:00:12
I trust it. I like the idea that it's a, I like the idea of the blockchain stuff.
1:00:20
I like, let's see, where is it at? Bitcoin.
1:00:24
Oh, it's pretty low. I need to buy. It's at $68,000 right now.
1:00:29
One Bitcoin is worth $68,000.
1:00:34
Now that's down considerably. It hit a hundred thousand dollars.
1:00:38
Let's look at the last year. Yeah.
1:00:43
68,000. Now in the lifetime, let's look at the lifetime.
1:00:51
We can't get a lifetime. Only over the past five years can I see.
1:00:56
So over the past five years, Bitcoin is up $20,000.
1:01:01
You know, it goes up and down, but at any rate, I encourage you to read,
1:01:06
excuse me, Bitcoin Evangelism by, I can't remember the guy, I think his name is Dement.
1:01:13
I think, I can't remember the guy's name, Bitcoin evangelism.
1:01:18
Anyway. Yeah. And that, and that's finite.
1:01:23
There, there is scarcity there. You know, every, I can't, I think every four
1:01:28
years they do what's called a halvening.
1:01:29
So they, they decrease the amount of Bitcoin being what they call mined.
1:01:37
And at some point there is going to be a finite amount of Bitcoin in existence.
1:01:44
And that right there is going to skyrocket the value of that Bitcoin.
1:01:50
So anyway, it has value.
1:01:56
I wish I could figure out how to take Bitcoin on my website right now.
1:02:00
I'm going to eventually do that.
1:02:03
I've got other priorities at the moment. All right, anyway, enough about Bitcoin,
1:02:07
enough about that. The Federal Reserve needs to go away. Clean. Let's see.
1:02:16
Plunder audits. Well, yeah, every agency should be audited. Now, check that out.
1:02:22
That's not practical to audit every agency.
1:02:25
Now, I don't know if I said this. I've done a trial and error on a couple of
1:02:29
podcasts here with the numbers.
1:02:31
There are somewhere around 450 agencies and sub-agencies in the federal government.
1:02:39
And that's not all folks.
1:02:41
That's just like major, that's just like major agencies and then sub-agents, a few major subs.
1:02:47
There's still offices below those.
1:02:50
And anyway, let's just say 450 is the number.
1:02:53
That's 450 budgets.
1:02:57
Yeah, it is. No, no, Edgar, there's a budget for this and then,
1:03:02
you know, blah, blah, blah. No, no, man.
1:03:05
That's 450 budgets. That's 450 directors,
1:03:09
and assistant or deputy directors and
1:03:12
each with a staff and whatever
1:03:17
secretaries and whatever agents that enforce whatever
1:03:20
that that agency deals with and there's so
1:03:23
much redundancy in there and there's so much it's such
1:03:26
garbage every one of them have a budget folks and guess who pays it well if
1:03:32
we could opt in on what taxes where our taxes go that that would change yeah
1:03:38
i want to see i want to see it over i want to see agency audits you know like
1:03:43
living like every two four year.
1:03:45
Well, a cycle of audits that would take a government agency of an army of auditors,
1:03:53
just to audit all the government agencies.
1:03:59
To get through 450 agencies? A few years?
1:04:04
Probably a couple years? Anyway, man, it's madness.
1:04:08
The government is a behemoth, and it's out of control, and it exists just to continue existing.
1:04:14
How can we bring more into the government without producing anything?
1:04:19
That's what, what does the government produce, folks?
1:04:22
It doesn't produce anything.
1:04:25
Now, well, yeah, the Navy and Air Force have all these big, sexy planes.
1:04:29
The government doesn't build those.
1:04:31
The government spends billions of dollars to Lockheed and Sikorsky and all these
1:04:38
other, and I don't even know who the shipbuilders are. I can't even imagine.
1:04:43
Everybody always talks about how expensive a fighter jet is.
1:04:46
How much does one of these God dang carriers cost?
1:04:49
I don't know, man. But guess what?
1:04:52
At very minimum, Congress is mandated to maintain a Navy. So that's at least
1:04:58
some justification, isn't it?
1:05:00
But what about all this other shit? That's madness.
1:05:04
All right. I've gone on. I've ranted enough.
1:05:09
Bastiat, I encourage you to read the law.
1:05:13
It's short. It's very short. It reads very quick.
1:05:17
But based on what he said, what we've chosen, what we're living in America today
1:05:23
is those three options I gave you.
1:05:27
We're living in option number two where everybody plunders everybody.
1:05:30
But the government is the arm of that. Yeah.
1:05:35
Conflict. It breeds conflict amongst the two sides because each side is just
1:05:42
looking to see how much they can get out of it.
1:05:46
They see it as a finite piece of pie and they want their piece to be bigger.
1:05:50
And that's what pure democracy is, folks.
1:05:54
Whoever's got the biggest piece of the pie dictates life for everybody else.
1:06:00
But we need to be living under option number three, Right? Nobody plunders anybody.
1:06:07
Everybody's free and uncoerced and uncompelled to create and build and work
1:06:15
for their own ends and to be charitable as they choose and to build and to educate as they choose.
1:06:25
Yeah, it's simple. It's economical.
1:06:30
It has limited government coercion. It's not oppressive.
1:06:36
Right? What about the poor people, Edgar?
1:06:39
Look, given the opportunity, if you, everybody listening to this right now,
1:06:45
if you had $10 million, would you give to some charity?
1:06:50
Would you donate a sizable amount to some, whether it's a children's hospital
1:06:55
or a homeless shelter or homeless veterans, or would you?
1:07:00
Think about that. Now, there's a big segment of society that wouldn't,
1:07:04
folks, but there's also a big segment that would.
1:07:07
Folks, right now, we are in a hyper-polarized political landscape. That's the way it is.
1:07:15
If we had clean bills, we would be able to pass meaningful,
1:07:23
easily understood, meaningful laws that were nonpartisan because there wouldn't
1:07:31
be any wheeling and dealing in the back rooms.
1:07:34
It would be, this is the vote. How do you vote?
1:07:39
And it would sort of create, it would tamp down this polarization,
1:07:44
and we could get back to sort of a nonpartisan,
1:07:48
well, the government's always been partisan, always will be,
1:07:51
but we need to get out of the two-party thing anyway.
1:07:55
Clean bills, I think, would empower individuals because you can write a letter
1:08:01
to your congressman and go, hey, man,
1:08:05
this this this this educational freedom act, I want it passed. And here's why.
1:08:12
If you do that right now, the way bills are, you know, there's so much shit
1:08:16
in there that he's already wheeled and dealed on.
1:08:19
He's just going to be, your concerns are noted, but you don't understand the
1:08:24
complexities, blah, blah, blah.
1:08:25
Well, if they're clean bills, folks, you would have a little more juice with your representative.
1:08:34
Yeah, I believe that. So look, folks, here's what I'm asking of you here.
1:08:40
Read the law from Frederick Bastiat.
1:08:43
And then, you know, hit me up on thejunetopodcast.com and what would your clean bill be?
1:08:51
Do you have something that you think would change the face of politics or that
1:08:55
would be good for America like as a whole that, you know, you'd put through
1:09:01
the clean bill process to where there's no,
1:09:06
no secret projects in there. There's no secret.
1:09:09
Well, we got to fund abortion for the next 20 years in order to vote for freedom of education.
1:09:14
You know what I mean? What would your clean bill be?
1:09:18
What, what do you think would, would, would be good for America that all of
1:09:24
America, not just one segment of America, all of America.
1:09:29
I don't know if folks write me, hit me up. Let me know. I, I,
1:09:32
I want your, your feedback.
1:09:35
I'm always soliciting your feedback.
1:09:38
Tell me what you think about the things we're talking about here.
1:09:41
Tell me, do you think I'm a nug and then I'm just mumbling my way through podcast
1:09:45
after podcast, or do you see, or, or am I tickling some,
1:09:52
some critical thought there?
1:09:54
I don't know. Yeah.
1:09:58
Frederick Bastiat, 1850. Read it.
1:10:01
Send me your proposal for a clean bill.
1:10:05
There you go, folks. I appreciate you guys listening. I really do.
1:10:09
I got a few diehard listeners.
1:10:11
And for those of you out there, thank you so much. I love you guys.
1:10:15
You guys are awesome for immediately listening to my podcasts when I put them out.
1:10:21
I just put one out about alcoholism and things like that. But I felt pretty good about it.
1:10:29
Give me your feedback on it, though. And other than that, just check out our
1:10:33
other stuff, the shooting stuff and the training stuff.
1:10:36
Yeah. And just hit me up. Drop me a line. Just say hello. I love you guys.