people will make some money, people are investing more, there's the stock prices in the American casinos, had a big boost a week or 10 days ago, because of this announcement by the, I think it's called the People's Bank of China, the Central Bank of China. And whenever I see the word "people's," I always know that the people have nothing whatsoever to do with it, whatever the politicians give anything, a name like that. I think we'll create a boom, a temporary boom, and all the investors will invest when they already have. But you know, there's a big risk, but the boom will bust eventually, because it's not genuine prosperity as being created, it's just a temporary sort of political prosperity by the Chinese Central Bank. You're listening to Carrie Lutz's Financial Survival Network, where you get valuable information you just can't find anywhere else. To thrive in today's trying times, you need the Financial Survival Network now more than ever. Go to financialsurvivalnetwork.com and get your free newsletter and gift, Financial Survival Network, now more than ever. And welcome. You are listening to and watching the Financial Survival Network. I'm your host, Carrie Lutz. Hey, got a special treat for you today. Thomas J. DiLorenzo is with us from nieces.org, and we're talking China and recent publication by him, Casino Economy. Tom, it's great to have you on the show, so we're talking pre-call. We see these third world economies make humongous strides, and the reason they make these strides is vastly misunderstood by the public at large, probably more deliberate than by accident, but they make these huge strides, and then they inevitably crash and burn, like Japan, like China, like many countries in Europe, in Western Europe. Isn't this just proof that, in the end, the best solution we have to improving living conditions, improving people's lives is through the free market? Well, sure. I think what China is doing recently is they're imitating our Federal Reserve, when you see some of these countries, like you mentioned, have temporary bursts of affluence. What was like us in the US in the early 2000s, we had a bit of a stock market crash in 2000, and the government responded by trying to create another bubble in housing, which it did in that bubble burst. For years, many years I've been calling the Fed our central planning agency. They have their fingers involved in regulating almost all aspects of every financial transaction in the country. In the Chinese central bank, which is run by the Communist Party, letting it in the last week or so, they're doing the same thing. They added the equivalent, according to news reports, of about $70 billion into their banking system, and they're hoping that'll create a bit of a bubble and more affluence, and then they're hoping that people will spend some of that money that they're supposed to make in the gambling casinos in Macau. American investors have been buying stocks, increasingly purchases of stocks in the American casinos that exist in Macau, and that seems to be their plan. Yes, we'll probably see this burst of affluence that is temporary, and it's weird. It's the Chinese Communist saying, "Oh, these are the Fed operates. This is how the Americans do it. Let's imitate that." And they're imitating one of the worst examples of what we do to our economy here, creating boom and bust cycles through monetary expansion by the Fed. They're learning exactly the wrong lessons. It looked like they were going to avoid the mistakes that the Japanese had made earlier in the '80s and '90s, and yet they're making all the same mistakes. The only maybe good thing they're doing is perhaps buying up gold. That's about... I remember the Japanese, they were supposed to be the savior of the world around 1980 or something like that, but then they basically adopted Keynesian economics. They decided, "Well, we can spend time to get the government to spend us all into prosperity." And of course, looking at how that worked out, they had a very, very long, what was it, a 20-year recession, basically in Japan. And so that's where they were. And like I said, the Chinese seem to be thinking that, "Well, we should ape or imitate the American Fed," which all the other central banks of the world have done for decades, and with the same result. I think that's the old definition of insanity. You keep doing the same thing over and over again with the same bad result. But politically, everything is short-sighted in politics. Politicians are always interested in the next election in the democratic countries. And so that's why it works for them. All they want to do is pump up the economy now because I have an election coming up. And I think that's why Powell, for example, tried to orchestrate a minor interest rate a couple of weeks ago to help the Kamala Harris campaign. And so in the other countries do much of the same thing, it's called the political business cycle in the economics literature. So it's a happy days are here again, huh? Yeah, temporarily, until the bus comes. Yeah, well, eventually, the Piper has got to get paid. How do you see this whole thing unwinding here? Well, I think people will make some money. I mean, people are investing more. There's the stock prices in the American casinos, had a big boost a week or 10 days ago because of this announcement by the, I think it's called the People's Bank of China, the Central Bank of China. And whenever I see the word "people's," I always know that the people have nothing whatsoever to do with it, whatever the politicians, so it gives anything a name like that. I think I'll create a boom, a temporary boom, and all the investors will invest when they already have. But, you know, there's a big risk, but the boom will bust eventually because it's not genuine prosperity is being created. It's just a temporary sort of political prosperity by the Chinese Central Bank in my view. So, you know, like, here's the question. It appears in America, the stock market is the greatest, the wealth creation mechanism ever created, known to man. But does it really create wealth or is it something else at play here? Oh, no, it redistributes wealth to the stock market investors, the real estate industry, and the banking industry, and people who make the big, big money through the stock market. But just look at the average American today. You know, if you say we're creating tremendous wealth, it would be average American today that's complaining about gas prices and food prices, and they can't pay the rent, and the young people get out of college, and they say things like, "I can never see being able to afford to buy a house," and things like that. But then, yeah, you know, the Wall Streeters, the speculators, the real estate people with the artificially low interest rates, they do very well. But, you know, prosperity is created by saving money, investing money, working, and producing. That's what creates prosperity. But the financialization is financialization. It's not prosperity. It's just a means to an end, which could be, you know, help us along to become prosperous. We need the financial sector. We need the banking sector. But it's sort of become an end in itself in recent years, and it hasn't really spread the wealth that much. So the college kids were rioting and protesting over the 1% years ago, they did have a point. And I think that's why a lot of them hopped on the Ron Paul bandwagon when Ron was running for the Republican nominee in '08 in 2012, and that he was beating up on the Fed as creating this system of where, yeah, the 1% of them were getting most of the benefits from the system. Well, there's a rumor circulating that in the potential next Trump administration that Ron Paul's going to have a major job there, maybe a treasury. Well, just a couple of days ago, Elon Musk contacted Ron Paul and asked him, would you care to have a meeting to talk about this government efficiency commission? And Ron said, yes, I'd be glad to. And in three hours, it had, well, on X, it had four million views. Love that. So there's a lot of people that got very excited to hear that Ron is still alive and kicking and then willing to engage in battle. Wait, government efficiency, isn't that a lot like jumbo shrimp? And yeah, we're very challenged. Yeah. I mean, like, let's get real here. Well, probably would probably tell him the only way to make government efficient is to abolish as much of it as you can. I doubt that the wrong is not going to tell him to do this or that to make bureaucrats more efficient. Well, I suggest that anybody who's listening or watching this, try this exercise, go to chat GPT and tell it that you want to cut $2 trillion off the U.S. economy. And you don't want to raise taxes. And how would you go about doing it? And you will get a list of hundreds of useless government agencies, redundant government agencies. The only, the only department that didn't show up on that list was the Department of Redundancy Department. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we've got one, what do we have? We have something like 800 military installations all around the world. That would be easy pickings there, to be sure when when Ron Paul was first running for the Republican nomination in '08, he made the point that if we just abolish the income tax and replace it with nothing, that the federal budget would be, I thought if I could the exact date, but it would be about what it was around 15 years earlier. And even then, 15 years earlier, the government was grossly bloated, you know, far beyond the constitutional limits of what the government should be doing. And that would have created tremendous prosperity and solved a lot of problems. And with this lot is not nearly as cataclysmic as, you know, the establishment would make it out to be if we were to do that. Hey, how about if we get the federal government right now currently owns 45.4% of California, which is 48 million acres. Now, if they could get $1,000 an acre, it would be 48 billion, 10,480 billion, all these other states that the federal government owns most of that was never intended by the Constitution or anything that annexed these states for the federal government to own. You know, I think Nevada is even more extreme. I think it's more closer than 90% of the zone by the federal government. That's why if you go to Vegas, you get on the rooftop of one of these hotels where they have a restaurant, you see all the houses and the buildings and all of a sudden it's cut off and there's nothing at all. There's like a straight line and that's where the government owned land starts. And so that's why Vegas real estate is so expensive. There's more people want to live there, but they're running out of room. And you have to build up and not out. Colorado, Alaska, nobody wants to live in Alaska any way to speak of. But you know, Idaho, Idaho is a nice state. A lot more people would go there if it was cheaper. Yeah, Nevada is 80%. And God, Utah, another state, Wyoming. And it's just and they do a lousy job of keeping these lands of Mises.org has written numerous articles comparing private land ownership to government land ownership. And there's no comparison. The fact is that private ownership is far superior. Sure. People always take better care of their own property, especially when the if you look at the timber companies and all that there are timber companies that that the replan after they cut, they replan with what I call the super trees and mature in like 10 years because it's it's their assets. It's you know, their property is their asset. And if they despoil their asset, they're throwing money down the toilet, their own money. And whereas when the government gets involved and they lease some of federal lands to the sort of politically connected companies that do this, they practice something called clear cutting where they just they just pull all these trees out by the roots, drag them down the inside of the mountain and bring them to the lumber yard. And they don't replay anything because it's not their property. They don't own it. They're leasing it from the government and it makes a huge difference. And it creates a lot of problems, especially in the West. Like you just mentioned with the government owning all this property out there. One of the reasons where they own it is that the example I just gave is that it's patronage. They can they can win political support in votes, especially money campaign contributions from farmers, ranchers, timber companies by leasing in this land on the cheap below the free market price would be. And they use it as a sort of a political tool. Oh, for sure. Even Georgia and Florida, 13% owned by the federal government. I mean, this is just the very definition of madness. Say one story that just came up talking about government overreach and it's become a meme. It has stormed the internet. It's broken. It is the story of these people. They they rescue wild animals, take care of them in New York. They have a nonprofit and five or 10 people from the New York State Department of Conservancy, knock on the door guns drawn. They have a warrant. They take their wild squirrel, is the most popular squirrel on the internet and their raccoon. The squirrels been with them for seven years and they take them and then they kill them. And this is like, okay. No, it's cruel and heartless. And it sounds like, you know, the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, but it's after a squirrel and a raccoon. You know, well, I read was their armed police that held you the homeowner outside. You stay outside and he had to go to the bathroom during the five hour search of his house for more squirrels. And he had to have a police escort to go into his own bathroom in his house during that five hour period. And that's truly a, you know, government out of control. What more can you say? And that's the Soviet Union, is what we've turned into when things like this can happen to us. Yeah, this is absolutely mind-boggling. And in some bureaucrats mind, though, this was all justified and well and good. Well, the bureaucrats are always, always all about justifying their budgets and their existence. And so they always, they're always plotting and scheming to create the perception of some sort of horror or perception of some sort of crisis. The civil society is always attacked, private enterprise is attacked. We need bureaucrats to protect us from everything, even a squirrel in our house. I guess they, the argument they gave is, well, they don't want rabies to spread. And like you said, the squirrel lived in this guy's house for seven years. Yeah, you thought it would have spread rabies at some point during that time of that rabies. So yeah, it's always, you know, when the government does these things, it's always for your own good, right? Yes. It's not because of their power craze, you know, insane bureaucrats. They're there to help, right? Was Reagan's old thing, the scariest words in the English language, hi, I'm from the government of here to help. Yeah. And my colleague here at the Mises Institute, Mark Thorne, he's written a book, sure, I know the articles on the war on drugs. And he made makes the argument that when you read about the war on drugs and people breaking down someone's home and say, sometimes it's the wrong home. And they brush in and they take everything and they confiscate your car and need to beat up your dog or shoot your dog and do all this. It's one of the things they're doing is they're teaching all the rest of us a lesson. You disobey and this can happen to you, not just about drugs, but anything. And that's what I thought of when I saw this story about these, these government thugs breaking into this guy's home and killing his pets is they're sending a message, you disobey us over anything. And this can happen to you. And it's time that we stop that and in one way or another, we can't have that. That's not in the public interest. I like these bureaucrats say that they're the criminals in doing this. Yeah, the Constitution means nothing. And you get some judge to rubber stamp it. I mean, I practiced law for a lot of years. And I saw a lot of travesties take place. Legal travesties. It's the legal ones that scare me a lot more than the illegal ones. Well, I guess, I guess we continue on. Is there any way to avoid the ultimate collapse? Do you think Tom? And well, I've been preaching secession for a long time, rather. Maybe after I'm gone, we'll see that in this country of people find some, some parts of the country are already, you know, sort of de facto seceding in small ways from the federal government. Nothing else moving out of New York to Florida or or something like that is sort of, they call it soft secession in some circles is a where there are some places in America where there's a little more freedom than others. And so that's happening. But I think, well, someday we'll see a full blown secession. And hopefully we'll have a president who's more like Michael Gorbachev than like Abraham Lincoln. And it will just throw up his hands and give up and let people walk away in peace. Hey, you know, it's, I did the same thing. I left New York after being there for 30 plus years. And I never looked back. The only thing I missed there is the pizza and the bagels and a couple other things and my kids. But one day they'll be following me here. They said, I used to live in Florida and the New Yorkers would come down and complain about the lack of good pizza and bagels. And I never understood it because New Yorkers have been immigrating to Florida for decades. And there are a lot of good New York based pizza and bagel places in South Florida. Well, they're if you look for it, you can find them. I need to go right at home. I know, but they're just not, it's not as good. But, you know, it's, but if that's the biggest price to pay for moving to Florida in which you gain, I mean, the Second Amendment, alive and well embraced here. And the federal government offered to send election monitors here. And our governor told them to stick it. And so it's amazing that Florida could be heading in the right direction. Relatively speaking, believe me, there's still way too much government here in Florida. And most of it corrupt. But because we don't have a state income tax, at least there's less of it, right? That's right. That's that's very important. I know that's something that needs to be kept in place forever in Florida. That's going to maintain any settlements freedom. And a number of other states also that like Tennessee doesn't have a state income. Yeah, nine say ass bills becoming so so popular. Right. And it's, it's also the lack of red tape. You know, sometimes, sometimes the lack of regulation in Florida, like when it comes to homeowners insurance, other types of insurance, it's, it feels like it's not for the best. But all the other benefits that come with it, I'll take it any day of the week for sure. Tell me how we connect with you, how we find you on the web. I know you're on Mises.org, but where else do we find you? Oh, I'm a columnist for Lou Rockwell.com. You can see my articles on Lou Rockwell.com, and you can check out my Amazon page. And I've written a whole bunch of books. The latest is called the Politically Incorrect Guide to Economics. And you can check me out on Amazon or Lou Rockwell.com. It's a man's name. Lou is a founder of the Mises Institute. I know. And hey, we're grateful. I've had Lou on the show a number of years ago. I'll have to have him on again. Appreciate you coming on. If you got a question for Tom, myself, shoot me an email kl@carrylutz.com. The link to Tom sites is in the show notes to this interview on financialsurvivalnetwork.com. When you go there, please sign up for your free newsletter. Like we're up to 50,000 subscribers now. I really appreciate you coming on, Tom. Thank you. That's right. McGarry thanks for listening to Carrie Lutz's financial survival network. Your solution to today's trying times. For the latest, go to financialsurvivalnetwork.com.
