Larry Schweikert

And he soon came to dominate all that.

Yeah, these special licenses and privileges that were given out to the British East India Company, for example, proved to be a major problem for the government.

As you know, they had a Tea Act passed.

that lowered the price of tea.

Most Americans don't really understand that the Tea Act lowered the price of tea, but it didn't matter because Americans weren't getting their tea from the British anyway.

They were getting their tea from smugglers at a much, much, much lower price.

So I liken it to the fact that you're on the freeway, and let's say the speed limit is 65, but what do most people go?

Most people go 70, 75.

And the government passes an edict, a law saying, oh, we're going to allow you to go 67 miles an hour, but we're going to quadruple our enforcement.

If we're caught going one mile over 67 miles an hour, we'll throw you in jail for a year.

Well, what happens to the overall speeds?

They all fall because now the penalty for getting caught is not worth the chance of going too much faster.

And that's why the colonists revolted.

They said, we're just going to throw this tea into the drink and nobody's going to be able to have it.

Well, interestingly, we started the 21st century with a virus, the Y2K virus, that wasn't what it was cracked up to be, in large part because American industry took it seriously and had already fixed their computers by then.

For those who don't remember, the Y2K virus was a computer virus, supposedly, where computers that only had two numerals like...

1999 for 1999, or 1998 for 1998.

No one knew what was going to happen when it flipped over to a new century.

And many insiders were greatly concerned that it would revert to 1900 and that everything would shut down.

I mean, I was hearing horror stories that the jails were going to open and the Social Security checks weren't going to go out and welfare checks weren't going to go out.