Nick Gillespie
speaker
229 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Feb 2025
Nick Gillespie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I hear you, but we will disagree with this to a large degree on this. Oh, okay. I don't think it changed. And I'm not saying that there weren't times where capitalism was red in tooth and claw and exploitative. When was it not? I guess that would be the easier question.
Well, the reason what I'm getting at is saying that when you, you know, if you go back and this is something there's a type of school of economic thought called public choice economics, which talks about how, you know, the story that progressives tell, capital P progressives in particular tell about capitalism is that it was awful
First off, nobody paid those tax rates because those were the printed rates. No, seriously. But that's why people, that's why things like expense accounts and all sorts of things were invented for upper level people. Sure.
The main engine of things like people being able to buy their own homes and whatnot, it was increases in productivity through industrialization and mechanization. It was not, I would argue, it was not unionization. It wasn't the GI Bill.
I'm not saying those things didn't have an effect, but that it's because we became wealthier because suddenly we were building an economy that used machines and other things to become massively more productive. Wages went up.
Sometimes they're higher, sometimes they're higher, sometimes they're lower. But like right now in America, we're basically, we have like the highest median household income that we've ever had adjusted for inflation.
No, you have to look into what that means. 60 plus percent of Americans own their own home compared to in the 50s, it was much lower. They have college educations, they have more stuff.
Massively higher. And food is cheaper. You know, everything is more abundant. Plus, you get the personal liberty stuff, which I think is part of capitalism. I don't think, you know, it's not like capitalism is an economic thing and then, you know, it's the weekend and you're going to go to Plato's Retreat or Studio 54. You know, they're all part of the same system, right? Yeah. Right.
Having said all of that, I mean, just to get back to it, it's like what capitalism does and there's an economist named Joseph Schumpeter, the guy who created, he coined the term creative destruction and in a book during World War II called Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, he said, you know, the great achievement of capitalism was not making more silk stockings for Queens, the Queens of England, the Queens of Europe, but bringing them in reach of factory girls.
So you've heard of the massive economic crash that happened in the early 20s. That was bigger than the stock market crash in 1929. No. Yeah. And the government didn't do anything, and the stock market recovered very quickly.
I'm not saying everything would have been fine and it would have been difficult. But the New Deal, it's worth going back and looking at how did the New Deal affect the economy? And did it string out bad times? Because there are two economic depressions in the 30s that economists talk about. And that every government intervention has costs and benefits. And oftentimes, we have lost sight of things.
Sure.
And particularly if I might, that was behavior that was heavily incentivized by the federal government in terms of guaranteeing mortgage loans and things like that.
No, I mean, but it was the Federal Reserve, first off, like kept interest rates artificially low for a long time. And then the government had a policy of its government sponsored entities buying up all of the mortgage paper that was going. So banks did not do the due diligence. But they jumped into that later. Everybody has some schmutz on their hands from all of this. The schmutz.
I would argue that it's also, you know, we would probably agree on, you know, on a similar path because I suspect, I mean, you know, we went, I was looking this up beforehand in 2000, in 2001, which was Bill Clinton's final budget year as president. You know, he left office in 2000 or early 2001. Fiscal year lasts, you know, a little bit longer. He spent less than $2 trillion.
That was the entire federal budget. We are over $7 trillion now. In 2019, the year before COVID, we were spending $4.4 trillion a year. That went up to $6.6 trillion in 2020. It is now $7.2 trillion. um, in spending. And I suspect that you would agree with me that we should not be, it's not clear why we're spending $7.2 trillion.
But like, why at all? Like, how do you go from, you know, we're post COVID, right?
Yeah, no, we can definitely be more effective in intervening in economic, you know, Yeah, I don't think part of the government's role should be like, it's not like going to a personal trainer and you come in and they're like, hey, you're looking a little fat. Let's do some abs today and have the government constantly be smoothing the economy.
Or I think it's hubris to think that it can control things. It's one thing when you have a catastrophic adventure.
No, but it's also like, remember, you know, in the early 2000s, you know, we had the tech bubble crash. Yes. And then we had a bunch of, you know, accounting rules that were going to make sure that, you know, big, you know, the financial sector never fucked around with shit anymore.
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