Latest / Words & Numbers / Episode 464: The Ghost of Nixon Past

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Episode 464: The Ghost of Nixon Past · Words & Numbers

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Today on words and numbers, passports.
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Opting out of Social Security erotica and a return to the
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economic policies of the Nixon era.
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All this and more coming up on Words and Numbers, the Civil
0:12
original production. Check us out at civil.com.
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That's civl.com. Hi, I'm James.
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And I'm Anthony. And this is words and numbers.
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It's new and exciting in your world this weekend.
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We got a lot of listener e-mail following our episode on Social
0:34
Security and winding it down. I read some of that.
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Somebody posted a thing which I had known at one time and
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forgotten, and now I'm thinking about it a lot more, and that is
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that the Amish are exempt from Social Security.
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They neither pay in nor do they receive benefits, which was
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exactly the kind of thing we were talking about of opting out
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of it. And so I'm, I'm looking into
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this to see, OK, what's what's required here in the rules.
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And of course, I'm not a lawyer, but the rules sound like they
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step well over the line of separation of what's come to be
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known as separation of church and state.
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But nonetheless, here it is The core eligibility requirements to
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to not participate in Social Security, you must be a member
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of a recognized religious sect or division thereof as
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determined by the Social Security Administration.
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So right off the bat, we've got the government officially
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recognizing religious organizations.
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Well, I mean, there's a good reason for that.
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And, and I remember when the Religious Freedom Restoration
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Act got pushed through some years ago, people in prison,
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well, people in prison, prisoners decided that they
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needed outdoor sweat lodges in order to participate in the
1:57
religion. And that's where every drug deal
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in prison went through. Right.
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Yeah. Because they had to have privacy
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from the guards. And there there's all kinds of
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examples like this. And there's a fundamental
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friction, right? Whose children could be mandated
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to go to school, things like this.
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Can, can Catholic schools use town buses to get their kids
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into their schoolyards, right? There's all kinds of things
2:26
around the edges. But my first question here is
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can can I convert to Amish? I mean at at my advanced age
2:37
it's a little too late, but maybe my children would be well
2:40
advised to become Amish. Yeah, and that's a, that's A
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twist that I didn't look into to see what's required.
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I mean, can you just put up your hand and say, OK, I'm, I now
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proclaim that I'm Amish. Do you need to be particularly
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accepted into And if so, all of a sudden now we have the
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government deciding who is and who is not a member of a
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particular religion. That's.
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Really weird. The thing to do would be not to
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bother the poor Amish people with this, but to start your own
3:13
Amish community. Right.
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Well, but then the fine print You must be a member of a
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recognized religious sect or division thereof that has
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existed continuously since 1950. So you got to find an Amish
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person who went on, what do they call it, Rumspringa, and then
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didn't go back and then say come and be part of our Amish
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community. We embrace things like
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electricity here. Yeah, I, yeah, I, I don't know.
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I don't know. I'm just appalled.
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It's, I'm appalled, but I, I see some Social Security bureaucrats
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somewhere deciding what is and is not a religion, who is and is
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not a member. But, but it goes on.
3:57
It goes on. Your your religion has to be has
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to be opposed to accepting insurance benefits on the basis
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of religious principles specifically, not economic
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principles. Well, going to have an
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interesting Muslim problem if anybody ever reads that fine
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print. Why so?
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Because they don't. They don't.
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Insurance is a problem. Is it?
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I knew that interest was is insurance also.
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Yeah. Wow.
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The individual must personally waive all rights to receive
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Social Security or Medicare benefits.
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Oh, also, your sect must provide for its dependent members, so
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it's not just a matter of walking away.
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You have to show that you've got something on the back end that's
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going to support your your members like Social Security
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would. And, and here's where the Amish
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stand head and shoulders above everybody else in this respect,
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right? They are naturally a
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communitarian society. Right.
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Right it that they all hang together.
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It's not a radically individualist society like we
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would think of of our own. So you could see where it would
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work for them and not for others.
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And then finally there's this last piece that I think is the
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clincher. The exemption applies to
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self-employment income derived from a trade or business.
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That is, it's not you'd you'd have to have some trade, you're
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a Carpenter or or what have you. Self-employed wages from secular
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employment remain subject to regular Social Security tax
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unless both the employer and employee are exempt members of
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the same sect. So when you go to the Amish
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furniture store, that's fine. You know you can see why these
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rules are in place if you work for.
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Domino's forget it. It's it's just not happening.
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Your host. So I mean, look, I get this.
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Your main objection here is that somebody in a bureaucratic
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office is going to be passing judgement on who is and is not a
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member of a specific group and if that group is or is not
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beholden to the Social Security program.
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But in the end, somebody has to decide.
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Yeah, somebody does. So I mean, there, there is that
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problem. But it's also, to me, a ray of
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hope that we can point and say, look, our our argument that we
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should be allowed to opt out of Social Security is not without
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precedent. Yeah, well, not exactly where I
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would have thought we'd find the hope, but OK, I'll take it.
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Well, it's, but it's not. And it's not just a religious
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thing. If you recall, when we used to
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go to Kentucky, I at least it was news to me.
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Kentucky public school teachers are exempt from Social Security
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because Kentucky has its own version of Social Security for
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teachers. Right.
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But as those teachers used to tell us with alarming
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regularity, they weren't exempt. They couldn't get it.
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Oh, they were expelled from social, yes.
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They would have much preferred the Social Security option, so
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save your hate mail on that one, Kentucky teachers.
7:31
I want to talk about something a little strange that hit my my
7:37
feeds this morning. It's long been said, and
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rightfully so, that the US passport is the absolute gold
7:44
standard in passports. Right.
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AUS passport gets you out of so much grief and aggravation when
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you travel internationally. I can't even you can't overstate
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it. And and I mean, I, I told you
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about the story of when I was in Casablanca.
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Yeah. Do you remember that one?
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I was in the Casablanca airport. I'm at the end of a line that
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must have had 200 people in it. And a guy from the booth got out
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of the booth and came all the way to me in the back of the
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line and pointed and he said US. And I'm like, Oh no, Oh no.
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No, no, no. And I said yes, and he said come
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with me. And he walked me around the
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line, past all the guards and said you go now and point it
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into the airport. That's it.
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Just leave. Wow.
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Whatever you like, you just go do it.
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And the, the US passport, there is something called the Henley
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Passport Index that keeps track of the strength, the relative
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strength of all the passports of the world.
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And the relative strength of the passports of the world are
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measured by how many places you can go without a visa.
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And, and that's actually a pretty fine metric, right?
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And the US has been near the top of that list every year for for
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the 20 years that it has been in existence, until this year, when
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it dropped out of the top 10 to #12.
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Yeah, because I I know that some European countries are now
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requiring visas. Yep.
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So turns out when you agitate other countries with various
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policies there, they will agitate back in a number of
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unexpected ways. And this is part of the whack A
9:37
mole game of unexpected of unanticipated or.
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Yeah, unintended consequences. Unintended consequences.
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Thank you. And and you wonder where this
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one's going to end, right? We already know that tourism in
9:52
is way down. And the more difficult other
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countries make it for us to leave, the fewer people will go
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other places. And there's an isolating factor
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in our isolationism. Go figure.
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And it it works. It works in both directions.
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But one of the immediate things that we can see now, one of the
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immediate consequences is this. Your passport isn't worth nearly
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what it was just a few years back.
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It's still a great passport to have, but there are 11 now that
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are better. And you've, you've said, you've
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touched on something that I've talked about a lot when I talk
10:35
about free trade, and that is that countries that engage in
10:41
free trade more trade will tend to have more peaceable
10:45
relations. And you can see this is very
10:47
clear in the data. And the argument I always gave
10:52
was, look, if there's lots of trade between countries, that
10:55
means there's lots of people in each country who have
10:59
relationships with people in the other country.
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Now they may own business relationship disconnections,
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right It be it makes it much harder for those two governments
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to argue to the people that the other one is the enemy, he said.
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No, I, I know these people, I deal with them all the time.
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But, but so to here, I think the harder we make it or the harder
11:19
anybody makes it for people to travel between countries, the
11:23
less, I should say, the less peaceable, the less opportunity
11:27
for peaceable relations exist. Well, it's it's a form of
11:31
cultural exchange. Right, right.
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Right. People show up, they do their
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thing, they spend some money, you meet them, you think, oh, I
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guess Mongolians are just like us or, you know, pick whatever
11:45
exotic nationality you want and toss it in that, that, that,
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that slot. But the, the less that happens,
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the worse things tend to get. And, and it's interesting
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because, OK, we're not at the top of the list.
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Who is Asian countries? Are the top three really
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Singapore, South Korea and Japan?
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Yeah, Singapore is not surprising.
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Yeah, come and go, come and go, right?
12:12
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Subscribe to Civil for $5 a month or $50.00 for an annual
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subscription. This brings us to the
13:37
foolishness of the week, and this is one that I've been
13:40
waiting to get to for a while. You know, Aunt, how I love
13:44
talking about all things AI and I like talking about all things
13:49
AI from a very different perspective than you do.
13:52
Sometimes I like to talk about how it will kill us all in the
13:55
end. Other times I like to talk about
13:58
how it it's so stupid it doesn't know who the president is right
14:02
now. But Ant the seismic news has
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finally hit, ChatGPT will soon allow quote erotica UN quote for
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adults in a major policy shift. No way way.
14:22
I see AI news all the time. I haven't seen that.
14:26
It's everywhere today, fresh off the digital press.
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I, I have to, I have to hold this up now as an example, and
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I'm neither endorsing it nor condemning it.
14:40
Are you sure you want to hold? Are you sure you want to hold
14:43
something up in this discussion? Of of competition.
14:49
So you're not going to hold something up physically, you're
14:51
going to just. There are stop it.
14:55
Why? Why?
14:57
Because it's hilarious. There are there are other AIS
15:01
whose market niche is this. The one that comes to mind is,
15:06
is Venice. And their big thing is, look,
15:09
you can say anything you want to the AI.
15:11
We're not going to censor you. In fact, I've had to use Venice
15:15
on occasion when I was asking, I was asking some what was I
15:20
doing? No, I was making a, a, a slide
15:23
for a presentation and I wanted Bill Gates.
15:27
They're doing something, trading stocks or whatever the slide
15:30
was. And ChatGPT refused to make it
15:35
because this is a, this is a public person.
15:37
I'm not going to make a picture involving this.
15:40
I had to go to some other AI to do this.
15:43
But what's happening here is ChatGPT largely I would believe
15:47
because of their lacklustre rollout of Five Point O are
15:52
seeing their market share, although there are the number
15:55
one, but I'm sure they're seeing their market share slip and
15:58
they're looking to gain back. This is the.
16:00
This is the way to do it. It it remains to be seen what
16:05
erotica for adults actually means.
16:08
I mean at the very least it it's going to be dirty talk with an
16:14
AI, right? People typing nonsense back and
16:17
forth. Now why this is exciting to
16:20
anyone, I will literally never understand.
16:24
Why not just go talk to your refrigerator?
16:27
It's the same damn thing. But that's all you want.
16:35
You know I'm right, Come on. But it's not going to be long
16:43
before people become directors of their own AI pornographic
16:48
movies. Oh yeah, that's going to happen
16:52
almost immediately. Well, there's already clips.
16:56
I'm regularly seeing clips on Facebook that are AI generated
17:00
and the only way I know they're AI generated is because it's a
17:04
ridiculous thing that I'm seeing, but it looks legitimate.
17:08
Yeah, that, that's right. And, and I get taken by them.
17:13
Sometimes I, I look at it and I say, Oh my God, right.
17:15
And then, and then I have to sit back and say, no, no, no, no,
17:18
no, no, no, that, that's not right.
17:20
And then you realize that guy had an extra finger or he ran
17:24
right through a flower pot, right?
17:27
That there are these giveaways. But we have an interesting
17:30
question, a series of interesting questions that we're
17:33
going to have to answer. When you can make pornography to
17:38
order, it's going to get weirder and weirder and weirder, and the
17:46
the typical niceties that occur between human beings in this
17:52
kind of section of human relationships are going to be
17:56
wholly absent. And for all the people who say
18:00
that pornography, traditional pornography, God, there's a term
18:05
I didn't think I was ever going to use.
18:07
But. Traditional pornography has made
18:10
us a more coarse society or somehow less refined as human
18:18
beings than we might have otherwise been.
18:21
By taking the, the, the interaction, the human, the
18:24
human interaction out of this one thing, you, you best buckle
18:32
up. Because if you think that was
18:35
bad, wait until you see what comes next and and it's going to
18:40
be a problem. Well, there's going to be some
18:45
weirdness that goes on as well. ChatGPT has a memory function so
18:50
that you can come back to it, and even if it's a new chat that
18:55
you're dealing with, it will remember stuff.
18:58
So, you know, we're going to end up in a situation where somebody
19:00
logs on at the office to ask what's the Stock Exchange doing,
19:04
and the thing starts coming on to him because it has a memory
19:07
of that. Well, and then there's going to
19:10
be another batch of problems that became a problem.
19:14
This sort of problem became a problem when our lives became
19:18
almost fully digitalized right in the kind of early 2000s.
19:23
And I used to tell young people at the time when I was teaching
19:26
in colleges, be very careful about what photographs and
19:31
videos you put online. Be very, very careful because
19:35
potential employers will see them.
19:38
What happens when there's a data leak from ChatGPT and we get to
19:44
see the twisted things that people are creating?
19:51
And what happens when they run for Congress or become CEO of a
19:56
company or or become a nominee for the Supreme Court, right?
20:02
But we're going to have to examine all of this and it's
20:07
going to be a disaster. To people who would point to
20:10
this and say this is one more example of the decline of
20:12
civilization, I remind you that pornography is historically the
20:19
first application of any new tech, going all the way back to
20:23
painting on the sides of cave walls.
20:27
And if if you don't want to call that technology, I believe the
20:29
first film ever made or the second was pornographic.
20:33
Oh yeah, the printing press right after the Gutenberg Bible.
20:36
Possibly right before it. Was pornography.
20:42
So yeah, I, I wrote on this a long, long time ago.
20:45
Porn drives every technological innovation that we that we've
20:49
had one way or another. And as a matter of fact, you can
20:54
make a very good case that the Internet didn't proliferate
20:57
without it. Yeah, the Internet, well, even
21:00
going back to I was a kid at the time, but video stores before,
21:05
before video stores like Blockbuster became a thing,
21:09
there were the sleazy video stores.
21:12
That's right where you got porn. Or, or, or the mom and pop video
21:15
store that had that Greg Brady stream of buttons and and
21:20
doodads keep, you know, keeping kids from looking in.
21:23
But you can walk right into that magical backroom where they had
21:27
all the filthy, filthy things, right?
21:30
And you know, this is going to be very, very interesting
21:35
because I don't think anybody would say that our technological
21:41
advance hasn't made us coarser. It has.
21:45
It's made us less humane in many, many ways.
21:50
And this will accelerate that to some degree.
21:55
Now, whether it it's a flash in the pan or it just keeps right
21:59
on going, who knows. But ChatGPT is responding to
22:03
market pressure and they are going to do this and it's going
22:07
to be a fantastic hit and more people will decry it than is
22:15
possible given the numbers that we will see people using it.
22:19
Right. Yeah.
22:20
So there you go, the. Word.
22:21
The word you're looking for may be profane.
22:27
That's a that's a hard word, yeah.
22:29
There's a a theologian who I like very much who said the
22:34
profane is making public that which is properly private.
22:39
Yeah, that was crap. Father.
22:44
Father, jeez. He ran in the same circles I
22:49
did. He ran in Straussian political,
22:52
philosophical circles. And his name escapes me now, and
22:57
it will forever, but that was his definition of pornography,
23:00
making, making the public, making the private public.
23:04
But I mean, you could see the flaw in that right off the bat,
23:08
going in, going to the bathroom in public as pornography.
23:12
No, it's not. Well, he can say.
23:15
Maybe not about the things the profane it's not.
23:18
Profane either just go to the bathroom.
23:21
I don't know. Look, there's always going to be
23:23
a definitional problem. This is why when it got to the
23:27
Supreme Court, what's pornography?
23:29
I can't define it when I know it when I see it, right?
23:32
Right. And I think there's something
23:34
fundamentally correct about that, that that assertion.
23:38
I can't define it. I I mean, I can talk all about
23:41
it. I can give you a word cloud that
23:44
would capture it, but I can't give you a pithy definition, but
23:49
I know it when I see it. I remember on Parks and
23:52
Recreation, they had a, one of the kind of minor characters was
23:57
a a porn star. And she was running for
24:01
political office and everybody's going on and on and on and on
24:04
about what pornography is. And they asked her and she went
24:07
easy. It's when the penis goes in.
24:11
Well, I mean look, it is a practical.
24:13
Definition I guess. It's pretty easy when you think
24:16
about it, but but that leaves out lots of things.
24:20
Right. And, and you can see that no
24:22
matter how you approach these things, you're never going to
24:25
hit the nail squarely on that. It's just not possible.
24:29
So what ChatGPT comes to offer will be desirable to many, many,
24:37
many people. That doesn't make it good.
24:40
That doesn't make it right or best doesn't make it wrong
24:43
either. I'm just saying that a lot of
24:46
people are going to want to use it for this purpose and there
24:49
will be downstream consequences of that.
24:51
And I'm, I'm interested in the downstream consequences.
24:55
I, I honestly don't really know what they're going to be.
24:59
I have my suspicions, but I don't really know.
25:01
And I mean, I've, I've made the case that if we could make
25:06
artificial child pornography for people, for pedophiles, that
25:12
would be better than any other option that the pedophile
25:15
wanted. Yeah, I'm, I'm listening to you
25:18
say this and hoping that you keep speaking because I can see
25:22
someone taking a clip of what you just said.
25:24
No, look. You're running with it.
25:27
Pedophiles are tremendous recidivists.
25:32
They don't stop doing what they do.
25:35
The only way to stop them is to imprison them forever or kill
25:38
them. Or maybe technology solves that
25:43
problem. Redirect their their and and
25:46
when and whenever I bring this up to well educated people who
25:51
can think things through and I say would you prefer this?
25:55
Their immediate response is always EW no.
25:59
Right. Yeah, yeah.
26:00
Because because it is disgusting.
26:03
If you think about it, it just may be less corrosive than any
26:08
other option. And I, you know, I think that's
26:11
an interesting line of questioning to, to get into and
26:17
ChatGPT may answer this for us. So we'll see, as as always, we
26:22
end up by saying. So we'll see because that's
26:25
always the answer. Well, that conversation went
26:27
sideways real fast. I kind of liked it.
26:33
This is fascinating. It it it is.
26:36
I just don't want to talk about it anymore.
26:38
Well then, talk about something else, smart guy.
26:41
Yeah, something else uplifting. How about Nixon?
26:46
Well. You know, now that you bring him
26:48
up, he comes up a lot because people ask me things like,
26:54
should Nixon really been impeached?
26:56
It didn't seem like he did anything nearly as bad as every
26:59
president since Nixon is done. And there's, there's, there's
27:04
something to that. It is kind of quaint if you you
27:07
think about it in today's terms. It it does, it seems kind of
27:10
cute, right? That that, that a bunch of Jack
27:12
wagons broke into the the Watergate Hotel, taped the lock
27:16
over a door the way you do, went in and messed about in the DNC
27:21
headquarters and forgot to remove the tape.
27:25
Who is in charge of that, by the way?
27:27
G Gordon Liddy, who used to say on his radio show and in
27:31
everything he ever wrote, I have an IQ of 155.
27:36
Well, Mr. 155, how come you didn't remember to just take
27:39
your tape back? You think you would have had a
27:43
checklist or something, but no. And you know, when we look back
27:46
on Nixon, we generally think of of only the end of, of the term,
27:53
right when he he was told in no uncertain terms that he would be
27:58
compeached, he would be impeached and he would be
28:00
convicted and that it was time to go.
28:04
And he said, all right, and signed his resignation paper
28:09
and, and off he went, elevating Gerald Ford to the presidency.
28:13
Interestingly, the only president we've ever had who
28:16
never stood for a national federal election.
28:19
That's right, because he was. He was.
28:23
From the House of Representatives, Agnew, Spiro
28:25
Agnew, Spiro Agnew who was a bad man for for for the
28:29
administration who had every reason to disappear.
28:34
And and Ford came in a representative from Michigan,
28:39
elected by one House district to the presidency.
28:44
Yeah. Never elected Vice President
28:46
ascends to the presidency. Of course, never elected there
28:48
either. And and then pardons Nixon
28:51
because what the hell is he going to do?
28:54
He said. And he gave his reason.
28:56
I was spending 90% of my time on one man and I thought maybe I
29:00
should spend all of my time on the American people.
29:04
So he pardoned him and said to hell with this.
29:06
And it cost him dearly. He didn't win.
29:09
He probably would have had he not done that.
29:12
But you know, woulda, shoulda, coulda.
29:15
And and that's what we think of when we think of Nixon.
29:19
But and he, Nixon himself was rehabilitated in later life.
29:23
And it was kind of a a grand old man of politics.
29:26
And we would see him on the news discussing things and he was
29:30
more or less forgiven. And you know, he won the
29:35
presidency twice, relatively comfortably, massively.
29:40
One time. It came damn close in 1960.
29:45
If it didn't go on television to debate, Kennedy probably would
29:48
have won that one too. Well, not that one too.
29:52
That one instead of the last one 'cause you can only serve 2
29:55
terms. Memo to Donald Trump, but.
29:58
And that's an interesting case, one of the first.
30:01
Was it the first or one of the first televised presidential
30:04
first? It was first.
30:06
And Nixon had tremendous back pain, something I'm very
30:12
sympathetic to. And he was on stage sweating
30:17
bullets, and he looked uncomfortable and he looked
30:20
angry the way that people in real pain often look.
30:24
And people who watched it on TV overwhelmingly thought that
30:29
Kennedy had won the debate. People who listened to it on the
30:32
radio overwhelmingly thought that Nixon had won the debate.
30:37
How interesting. Fascinating.
30:39
Fascinating. But you know, it is what it is.
30:42
It was a tight election, a squeaker.
30:45
Republicans are still claiming to this day that it was stolen,
30:49
right? That the dead in Chicago swung
30:51
the election that they didn't. But they still make hay about
30:54
this. People love to talk about stolen
30:57
elections. We, we don't really have any,
30:59
but they love talking about them.
31:01
The Democrats are doing it right now.
31:02
As a matter of fact, Trump stole the last election.
31:04
Don't you know? Somehow it's only the elections
31:07
they lose. Yeah, of course.
31:08
Yeah, of course. But anyway, the the thing with
31:12
Nixon that we all forget very casually is that he wasn't all
31:16
that conservative, right? He was a Republican, but he was
31:21
not a terribly conservative man opened up China, which I think
31:28
only a Republican could have done.
31:30
I think if a Democrat had done that, he would have been labeled
31:33
A communist sympathizer immediately, especially at the
31:36
time. So, all right, that's a big win.
31:40
But domestic policies very problematic under under Nixon if
31:47
you're a conservative. And I'm, I'm thinking and we're
31:50
going to talk about wage and price controls back in 1971.
31:54
Yeah, and we should probably preface it by saying why we're
31:59
talking about it. I suspect that's right.
32:02
And you ran across the article, I haven't seen it, that the our
32:05
current Treasury Secretary is talking about the administration
32:10
imposing. Price floors.
32:13
He's talking about a number of things, price floors chief among
32:16
them, across a number of industries.
32:20
Industries. Industry goods industries.
32:22
Industries. Those industries are not listed
32:26
yet. He's also, in the same breath,
32:30
also said that the United States government will very likely take
32:35
stakes in more American companies in the form of stock
32:39
purchases. And you might recall, wow.
32:45
Yeah. You might recall that we did
32:47
this with Intel not too long ago.
32:50
And if you put these two things together and asked, oh, I don't
32:55
know, six years ago, if you asked Bernie Sanders if this was
32:59
a good idea, he would have said unqualified, yes.
33:02
Oh yeah, yeah, this is Sanders platform right here.
33:05
That's right. This would say it now.
33:08
Because now it's Donald Trump's idea, and Bernie Sanders doesn't
33:11
care about the ideas nearly as much as he cares about partisan
33:15
hackery. The government taking stakes in
33:19
U.S. companies is a bad, bad, bad, bad, bad idea.
33:23
Everybody who's listening, go and tell your you do not,
33:28
absolutely do not want the government messing around with
33:32
stock and bond prices. Leave that to markets.
33:36
You're going to create all kinds of havoc with people's
33:39
retirements, and we need those things because Social Security
33:42
has gone bankrupt. But but what you also have to
33:46
stress is bad is the United States government deciding what
33:51
things are going to cost. Right.
33:56
And that's what a price floor does.
33:58
Why don't you explain what a price floor is in basic
34:01
terminology so we're all on the same page?
34:03
The price what there's two flavors of this of price
34:06
controls, the price ceiling and the price floor.
34:08
Both price controls the government steps in and says in
34:13
the case of a price floor, you may not sell the product for
34:17
less than X pick a number. In the case of price ceiling,
34:22
you may not sell the product for more than X.
34:26
Now we tend to see price ceilings when when we see price
34:30
controls, they tend to be price ceilings and they tend to come
34:33
on the heels of some natural disaster.
34:36
So you gas, you can't get water. And you know, people are selling
34:40
a pint of water for $10 and the government comes in and says,
34:43
Oh, no, no, that's not you're not allowed to do that.
34:46
And what happens is you get a shortage.
34:50
That's right. Because in this is the thing I
34:52
always tell my students when I talk about price controls is a
34:56
price is a metric. It's not a lever.
35:00
It's not something the government can go and throw in
35:03
reality changes. And the analogy I give is your
35:06
your kid has a is running a temperature and so you take the
35:11
thermometer and you stick it in the kid and the thermometer
35:13
says, you know, 101. Now there's two ways to deal
35:17
with this. One is you give the kid medicine
35:20
to cure the problem. The other is you take a
35:22
thermometer and you scratch off the numbers and you write in
35:25
other numbers. And of course that's stupid, but
35:28
that's exactly what a price control is.
35:30
The price control is not changing the value of the
35:33
product, it's simply changing the number.
35:36
And so you exchange what would have been a shortage for waiting
35:40
in line for hours to get the product.
35:44
Right. So a price ceiling always yields
35:47
shortages. No, yes, yes, yes.
35:50
The price ceiling, yield shortages, yeah.
35:52
For a product people actually want, I mean, I guess you could
35:55
have a performative price ceiling that would do nothing.
35:58
Yeah, that's correct. You could say, you know, no one
36:01
can sell a car for less than $1,000,000.
36:04
Well, nobody wants to, so it doesn't matter.
36:08
More than $1,000,000. Or more than, excuse me, more
36:10
than $1,000,000. Right.
36:12
I see I'm not used to talking about price floors.
36:14
I've got to reverse everything. Right.
36:17
So you know, think about a price floor.
36:18
A price floor The the easiest example, although it will
36:22
confuse some people, is a minimum wage.
36:25
Yes, very good. Yes, yes, where the government
36:30
comes along and says you may not sell your labor for less than
36:34
$15.00 an hour. And that's kind of interesting
36:38
because we think of the minimum wage as a restriction on
36:41
employers. And that's the way politicians
36:43
phrase it. They say, well, we're going to
36:45
make those employers pay you $15.00 an hour.
36:48
And that's one way to look at it.
36:50
But an equally valid way to look at it is a is a constraint on
36:54
the worker. It's my labor.
36:56
Yes, I'd like $15.00 an hour, but if the alternative is
36:59
nothing, I'll take 10 until the government comes along and says
37:03
no. No, you can't sell your labor
37:04
for 10. You must sell it for 15.
37:06
Right. And when Nixon in 71 had wage
37:10
and price control so you couldn't change a workers wage
37:17
and prices had both a ceiling and a floor because they had to
37:22
remain exactly where they are right now.
37:25
What ended up what ended up happening is that there were
37:29
vast market shortages because people, producers of goods and,
37:37
and I would suspect producers of services, but let's just stick
37:42
with goods. Producers of goods couldn't get
37:45
those goods to market at the price that was already
37:48
predetermined and still make a profit.
37:51
Matter of fact, many of them would have ended up losing money
37:54
bringing goods to market. So you had reports at the time
37:59
of farmers drowning all of their chickens because what else you
38:05
going to do with them if they, if you keep them alive, you have
38:07
to keep feeding them. That's just an ongoing cost to
38:11
you. But you can't sell them because
38:13
if you did, you'd lose money on every sale.
38:15
Yeah, there's that in in the stories of government destroying
38:22
milk, pouring milk out into the streets.
38:25
Why? Because there there was a price
38:27
floor and that creates a surplus of this stuff.
38:30
And there. You've got to get rid of it now.
38:33
And the cost of milk differs widely from state to state
38:39
because there are price floors on milk at the state level in a
38:42
lot of places. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
38:47
I'd heard one strange one about the the price control was based
38:51
on how far you were from some arbitrary geographic point in
38:57
the state. I forget which state that is.
39:00
It's hard to make sense of these things when you start digging
39:03
into them, right? Because when you start taking
39:05
into them, all you see is economic disaster.
39:10
And in the case of in the case of Nixon, every inflation was
39:17
running at about 6% in 71, which is, you know, it's high, but
39:24
it's not absurd. And this was an effort to kind
39:28
of tamp that down, get it under control, because if prices can't
39:32
go up or down and wages can't go up or down, the politician
39:36
thinks I've just solved inflation.
39:38
Yeah, and and this was coming from the oil crisis of the early
39:44
70s where the oil producing nations got together and they
39:47
restricted their output. So the price of oil goes up and
39:51
of course it's pushing prices up.
39:53
But but again, it comes back to the scratching the numbers off
39:56
the thermometer coming in and saying you can't charge more
40:00
than X isn't addressing the problem.
40:03
The problem is there wasn't enough oil going around.
40:06
The price was was very high, caused everything else to be
40:09
high. You're just hiding the problem,
40:12
which I guess if you're a politician is a win.
40:15
And in fairness, OPEC is a cartel.
40:17
It's their job to keep supply limited, which keeps prices
40:21
high. That's what they that's what
40:23
cartels do. And you and you have to put
40:25
enough pressure on a cartel for one of them to peel off and say,
40:30
all right, I'm going to break this deal.
40:32
It makes more sense for us to just sell you this oil at this
40:36
price. Towel with it.
40:37
James and I are delighted to be working with Civil.
40:40
For years we have been pushing people to think about how we can
40:45
make the world a better place. Civil's mission of upgrading
40:48
society fits exactly with what James and I have been talking
40:52
about for years. Civil helps us by allowing us to
40:55
do what we do best, which is researching topics that are
40:59
important and communicating these to our listeners in ways
41:03
that we hope that they find enjoyable.
41:05
To see Civil's extensive list of content and including our
41:08
podcast, Words and Numbers and our new lecture series, Words
41:12
and Numbers Live, visit civil.com.
41:15
That's civl.com. When you think about it, what's
41:19
happening now with this price floor business, we haven't even
41:22
gotten into the the, but you hate to even call it a reason
41:27
because it's just so stupid. We're going to combat China with
41:34
industrial policy, and the minute you hear industrial
41:37
policy, you should get very concerned.
41:40
I'm not saying that there's never a reason for it.
41:42
I'm just saying when politicians start throwing that term around,
41:45
you're probably about to get blindsided with something.
41:49
Yeah. Well, the fundamental question
41:51
is, do you want decisions at the industrial level being made by
41:58
consumers and producers as they wrangle over what they want and
42:02
what's possible, what they're willing to pay?
42:04
Or do you want it made by politicians who have no skin in
42:08
that game? Yeah.
42:10
And when the Trump tariffs went into effect, Americans, yes,
42:16
paid them. But what's the the secondary
42:20
effect? The secondary effect is that we
42:23
buy, we buy fewer things from countries that have this massive
42:28
tariff, China, for example. And when we buy fewer things
42:31
from China, that hurts Chinese people.
42:34
Too, which means they can't buy as much from us.
42:39
And then the Chinese government gets involved and said, well,
42:42
you know what we should do? We should have tariffs because
42:45
if the American politicians are so stupid to do it, we should be
42:49
too. And then you've got a real
42:52
problem because everybody keeps upping the tariffs until nobody
42:56
buys a damn thing, right? And, and here's where the
42:59
problem lies. And China has some stuff that we
43:03
have to buy. It tends to be rare earth
43:07
metals, right, that we do not have here.
43:12
And so the same thing when when you have these tariffs and the
43:17
United States doesn't grow coffee.
43:20
So why have tariffs on coffee? Well, there's literally no
43:24
reason. But the net effect is, is that
43:27
when you go to buy coffee, it's going to be horrifically
43:30
expensive compared to before. Same thing with rare earth
43:35
metals. If we don't produce them, why on
43:38
earth are we tariffing them? Right.
43:41
And I think, look, I would rather make the case that you
43:44
shouldn't tariff anything, but you should absolutely never
43:47
tariff something that you can't produce yourself.
43:50
Yeah, it's not like you can point to American jobs that
43:53
you're saving from competition. What's the benefit here?
43:56
You're you're literally only creating harm.
44:00
It's usually concentrated benefits and dispersed costs,
44:04
but here it's just costs. Right.
44:08
There's not even the concentrated benefit to point
44:11
to. So now we've got a a trade
44:14
problem of our own making. And in order to fix this
44:20
problem, we're going to institute, implement price
44:24
floors across multiple industries and increase the
44:28
government stake in ownership of multiple American companies.
44:32
What do you think might happen as this plays out?
44:35
Because I think this plays out very clearly.
44:38
Well, what you get is a slowing of the economy.
44:42
So we've managed to avoid recession up until this point.
44:45
You can kiss that goodbye right off.
44:48
Secondly, we can look for examples and if you look at the
44:51
economic data, that period from to 1970 through to 1980 stands
44:59
out it you, I can show you an economic graph of some arbitrary
45:04
thing and you'll immediately point to that and say, hey, what
45:06
was going on there? They're all that way.
45:09
Inflation went. From you said that inflation,
45:13
you're correct about 6% at 1970% it went it went up to 11% by
45:19
1974 and 14% by 1980. That's inflation then.
45:25
Then you had real interest rates doing the same thing you.
45:29
I can recall a time when mortgage rates were like double
45:33
digits easily. Yeah, they were.
45:36
They were above 15%. Yeah, yeah.
45:39
And you know, you literally you could, you could get fifteen
45:43
1617% on a certificate of deposit at your local bank,
45:48
something that now pays roughly 4% and you could get 17, even
45:52
18% and still not keep up with inflation by the time you got to
45:58
798081. Yeah.
46:00
And if there, if there's anything, inflation is already
46:02
running a bit hot. If we managed to slow down the
46:06
economy, not to mention put upward pressure on prices
46:10
because of the total tariff business, we're we're never
46:13
going to get back to. Well, I don't think we're going
46:15
to get back to where we were prior to COVID anyway, but we're
46:17
just going to make a bad problem worse.
46:20
That's right when when Nixon implemented wage and price
46:23
controls, Milton Friedman said something along the lines of,
46:27
and I'm paraphrasing here. Oh my God.
46:33
That's far right, yeah. That that inflation like you
46:38
have never known will follow this.
46:42
And Milton Friedman wasn't wrong very often, and he certainly
46:47
wasn't wrong with this. Yeah, yeah, you got this.
46:50
And that continued. That continued despite all the
46:54
government efforts. I can remember under Ford it was
46:58
he had the the wind buttons whip inflation now and it was a major
47:02
platform of Jimmy Carter's campaign.
47:06
Jimmy Carter's malaise speech, right?
47:10
One of the one of the all time idiotic presidential speeches.
47:15
And we made no headway on inflation until Paul Volcker
47:20
came along, the chairman of the Fed and said that's it and took
47:23
the to quote, Greenspan took the the punch bowl away.
47:27
He dramatically reduced the the money supply and.
47:33
And it was. Painful back on inflation.
47:36
And it was. Oh, it was painful.
47:37
It was painful for about a decade.
47:40
Yeah, for, for everybody. Yeah, you think for young people
47:45
who think they can't buy houses now, oh boy, do I have a period
47:49
for you to go look at? Yeah.
47:51
I mean it, it was a train wreck. Just what you hear at I've got
47:58
in not, not not just the interest rate, but the inflation
48:03
adjusted interest rate for 10 year Treasury bills.
48:08
So the safest, the safest investment there is out there in
48:12
today's Treasury bills, inflation adjusted or probably
48:16
running. I know nominal they're like 4
48:18
point something 4.4% take away let's say 3% inflation.
48:24
So treasuries are running about 1 1/2% real.
48:29
So real interest. That's what you, that's what.
48:31
You 1 1/2. It was 7 in 1980.
48:33
Two, 7% on the safest investment, right?
48:38
I mean, you can't get 7% on, you know, well anything.
48:41
You know, let's, let's not forget that, yes, Volcker did
48:44
those things, and then Reagan came in and radically slashed
48:47
the tax code. Yes, and slashing the tax code
48:51
made a big deal. It has nothing to well, it has
48:54
less to do with whether how much money the government's bringing
48:57
in. What he did was alter people's
49:00
incentives, because up until that point, if I'm remembering
49:04
correctly, there were like maybe a dozen tax brackets running all
49:09
the way up to like 70% or something.
49:11
I think, I think it might have been even 78 that one stands out
49:15
and he he cut that top, he cut it down to I think 3 and the top
49:19
rate was 27%. Yeah, the top rate was 27.
49:23
It was a massive reduction. And and what's going on there,
49:26
again, it's less about how much money the government collects.
49:29
What was happening is you had a bunch of people, particularly
49:33
all the way down to the middle class, say, realizing that it's
49:37
not worth it to work harder because the government's just
49:40
going to take a bigger chunk of your paycheck than they're
49:43
currently taking. Yep, and come to find out, and
49:45
this, this is, you know, the, the, the famous Laffer curve
49:51
that was written on the back of a napkin in ADC bar.
49:54
If you go to look up the article in which Art Laffer invents
49:58
Laffer curve doesn't exist, you never, you know, it's, it was
50:01
literally on the back of a napkin.
50:03
And he said if you cut rates enough, economic activity will
50:08
pick up so much that the government will actually collect
50:12
more. Right.
50:13
And intuitively people understand this.
50:16
And I use the thought experiment all the time.
50:17
Well, let's raise the income tax to 100%.
50:22
How much will the government collect?
50:24
And it's 0. The government will collect 0
50:27
because nobody will go to work anymore.
50:28
If we cut it to 0, what would the government collect?
50:32
0 But if if we raised it from zero to 10%, the government
50:39
would make a fortune. Right.
50:41
Yeah, they. 'D make more if we raised it to
50:44
20 and they'd make more if we raised it to 30.
50:46
And when we raised it to 40. Now that it, it actually starts
50:50
to come down because people say things, crazy things like well,
50:55
I'm comfortable enough. I don't need to waste all my
50:57
time working my ass off for no good reason.
51:00
Right, exactly. I don't need to invest my money
51:04
and put all kinds of other people to work when I could just
51:07
retire. Well, tell me this is it the
51:10
case that there's a political benefit to higher tax rates?
51:15
Because the higher the rate is, the more I as a politician have
51:20
to offer constituents. If they elect me, elect me and
51:25
I'll cut the rate down from 50% to 45, but I can't say that the
51:29
rate's 15 because I can't cut it from 15 to 10.
51:33
Yeah, but if it's 50, politicians love it because then
51:37
they can tell entire industries or entire classes of people.
51:41
I'll cut, I'll cut it for you. Right.
51:45
Not those, not those bastards over there.
51:48
You and and the tax code becomes a living, breathing tool that
51:53
politicians can use. And I take the very simple
51:56
approach that the tax code should exist only to raise a
52:01
revenue, right? It shouldn't be used to modify
52:05
behavior. It shouldn't be used to reward
52:07
friends and punish enemies. It should simply be a method to
52:11
raise a revenue, which means we should have a flat tax with a
52:15
standard exemption should be as easy as as humanly possible.
52:19
You should be able to file your taxes on the back of a postcard
52:22
in the space of about two minutes.
52:25
Yeah. And that's possible.
52:26
And everybody knows that's possible.
52:28
And yet the tax code is so voluminous that there is not a
52:33
single human being in the United States of America who has read
52:38
it, let alone understands it. Well, I'll go you one further.
52:43
I would. I would surmise it is impossible
52:46
to read. It it is it is.
52:47
Absolutely impossible. By the time you reach the end,
52:51
so much of it would have changed.
52:53
You have to go back and reread those sections, and while you're
52:55
rereading that, other things are changing.
52:57
Do you know how many volumes it? Is and look, we, we figured this
53:00
out once and and that that was reading 24 hours a day for an
53:05
entire. Year, yes, Yeah.
53:08
I forget that they would show up to work and read for 8 hours a
53:11
day for a year. No, no, no, 365 days, 24 hours
53:16
can't be done. I'm asking ChatGPT I've I
53:19
haven't looked at this in a while.
53:21
How many pages? OK, 106,000 pages in the Federal
53:26
Register. The Federal Register is the
53:28
official set of volumes. That is the tax code 106,000
53:34
pages. And I I bet that that is
53:38
incorrect. And I bet the answer is much
53:41
higher. Oh yeah, because I'm sure this
53:44
is leaving out all the appendices and supporting
53:48
documentation. I bet that's right.
53:51
So when when we think about our present government and we've got
53:57
Nixon in the rearview and Reagan in the rearview, the present
54:01
government is much more like Nixon than Reagan.
54:05
It's it's policies are very Nixonian.
54:07
Yeah. Very.
54:08
And, and and that really means we're dealing with a leftist
54:14
government in a lot of respects Now, people, people aren't going
54:19
to want to hear that. But ask yourself, would Ronald
54:21
Reagan be even welcome in today's Republican Party?
54:25
And I don't think he would. He's need to be a radical.
54:28
Yeah, I'll throw out another president, FDR. The current
54:32
president's policies are very similar to policies that he had,
54:36
for example. People are going to, people are
54:38
going to hate what you just said.
54:42
Under FD Rs administration, the government imposed price sealing
54:47
on wages to help control inflation.
54:50
So it said, you know, you cannot pay your workers more than a
54:52
certain amount. And what do you do if you're an
54:55
employer and you need to hire people?
54:58
And normally the way you hire people, as you offer them more
55:01
money to entice them away from the jobs that they're currently
55:05
at, you can't do that. And so employers came up with
55:10
the idea that, well, OK, according to the law, I can't
55:13
offer you more money. But how about if I offer you the
55:16
same amount of money you're earning now, plus I'll give you
55:19
health insurance. And the health insurance went
55:22
around the law. Just stop right there for a
55:25
second. That's how health insurance
55:28
became linked to jobs. Yes, yes.
55:32
It's how health insurance became linked to jobs.
55:35
And eventually when the price controls are taken away on
55:38
wages, you can now pay your workers more.
55:40
But by that time, the employers had lobbied the government to
55:45
make these this health insurance, the health benefits
55:49
tax free. And now both the employer and
55:52
the employee wanted to keep the health benefits coming through
55:55
the employer because there was no taxes on that.
55:59
We all have that today as we understand that.
56:01
But that brings us from FDR all the way to Obama where with the
56:06
Affordable Care Act, what's the problem he's trying to solve?
56:09
He's trying to solve the problem of pre-existing condition that
56:13
you're sick and because you're sick you can't work.
56:15
You can't work, you lose your job, you lose your job, you lose
56:18
your insurance because your insurance comes through your
56:20
employer. You go to get new insurance and
56:22
the new insurance company says no, we're not covering you,
56:26
you're already sick. pre-existing condition problem.
56:29
It exists because of FDR back in the 19 whatevers imposing wage
56:35
controls. That's right.
56:37
And the Affordable Care Act, I might add, was designed to make
56:42
care affordable. Yeah.
56:45
How's, how's that worked out for everybody?
56:49
If we only, if only two guys could have predicted back when
56:53
this was first introduced that this was going to yield a spike
56:58
in healthcare costs like we had never seen before.
57:02
If only wait a second, we did that.
57:05
Not only did we say it, we went back, I want to say five years
57:09
later, and we published an op-ed saying, OK, here's what we were
57:14
promised with the Affordable Care Act.
57:16
And we took it verbatim from President Obama's speeches.
57:20
This, this, this. Here's where it promised.
57:23
Here's the reality. Nothing that we were promised
57:26
came out. We were promised everyone would
57:29
be insured. No.
57:30
Now, to his credit, there are fewer uninsured people after the
57:34
Affordable Care Act than before, but we're still talking.
57:38
I think it was 10 or 20 million still uninsured despite
57:44
Affordable Care Act. I mean, the short lesson here,
57:48
given everything we we've just said, if you want to tie it all
57:51
up in a neat bow, is that when government gets involved in
57:55
markets, market distortions occur.
57:58
When market distortions occur, bad things happen for regular
58:03
people. Yeah, and the market distortions
58:06
are occurring because the thing the government is trying to
58:10
control is in effect. It's not a 'cause that's right.
58:14
If you want to fix the problem, find out what the cause is and
58:17
address that. Yep.
58:19
And politicians don't like doing that because it's hard.
58:23
It's complicated. And usually they're the cause.
58:27
And it doesn't fit neatly into partisan paradigms.
58:32
Right, right. Right it it's a little from
58:34
here, a little from there, and oh God, we were kind of
58:37
responsible for this ourselves. Well, let's just pass another
58:42
law saying, but this time we mean it.
58:47
Right. Yeah.
58:48
Let's do the same damn thing, only harder.
58:52
Well, that's what we're doing. What is the right?
58:54
What is the joke? Literally right now.
58:57
What is the the joke about the mafia?
58:59
That they'll break your legs and then sell you crutches?
59:03
That is exactly that is exactly what the government does.
59:07
We're having this conversation at all because of what prices
59:10
are doing, and prices are doing that because of the very same
59:14
politicians who imposed these trade controls.
59:17
That's right. And the massive inflation that
59:19
came when Nixon monkeyed about and things he should never have
59:22
been bothering with is about to come back.
59:27
What What we're looking at doing right now will yield far worse
59:30
inflation than we have right this second, and it's not great
59:34
right this second. And what happens when 510 years
59:39
from now we have a progressive president who points back to
59:44
this and says, you know, President Trump controlled
59:47
prices. I should.
59:49
I'm going to control them as well for social reasons.
59:52
That's right, President AOC will say exactly that because why the
59:57
hell wouldn't she? We make the case whether people
1:00:00
realize it or not, because we don't say it out loud all the
1:00:03
time. But.
1:00:04
We make the case week after week for limited government, and we
1:00:09
do it in the face of unlimited government.
1:00:13
Is there something that the United States government can't
1:00:15
do right now because it was designed not to be able to do a
1:00:19
lot of things? Yeah, it was deliberately
1:00:21
designed not to do things. Not to do things.
1:00:24
And boy, that ship has sailed. And we pay for that every day.
1:00:31
And it's getting worse now, not better.
1:00:33
So here we are. And you know, we'll be back in
1:00:38
the future to tell you about what what we said today, just
1:00:42
like we always do. But it sure would be nice if
1:00:45
somebody to listen. You got any other bright ideas
1:00:48
for the weekend? I have nothing.
1:00:50
Well, in that case, I know it's hard.
1:00:55
I always know it's hard. But just try, in these difficult
1:00:59
times, to be a little nicer. I'm not even saying this week to
1:01:02
be nice to each other. This has been a particularly
1:01:04
nasty week. But let's be a little nicer to
1:01:08
each other. It'll be worth it in the end, I
1:01:11
promise you. See you next time, man.
1:01:13
See you next time, James. At Words and Numbers we spend a
1:01:16
lot of time talking about what's going on in the economy and the
1:01:20
government, but fundamentally, all of this boils down to one
1:01:23
thing. The greatest threat facing
1:01:27
modern society is a lack of respect that people who disagree
1:01:31
somehow find it difficult, if not impossible, to discuss their
1:01:36
differences in civil manner. We at Civil are interested in
1:01:40
upgrading civilization by encouraging people to engage
1:01:43
with new ideas and ultimately engage civilly with each other.
1:01:47
If you share this idea, please join us by subscribing at
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