MM#349--Kamala's War on the Free Market

0:07 Welcome to the Theory to Action podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time, to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now here's your host, david Kaiser. Hello, I am David and welcome back to another Mojo Minute. Last night, the Democratic National Convention kicked off with a lot of fanfare, pomp and you want to say circumstance, but let's just say some 200 plus organizations that are pro-Palestinian are protesting the Democratic Party's support for Israel, and the sparks were flying by a coalition of, like I said, some 200 activist groups, including the Coalition to March on the DNC, which is planning significant demonstrations throughout the convention.

1:11 More specifically, these protesters are advocating an arms embargo on Israel and are critical of the US government's military support to Israel in light of the ongoing conflict in Gaza. What is the point of these protests? Well, they want to influence the Democratic Party's platform, with some groups, like the Delegates Against Genocide, pushing for amendments that would enforce laws prohibiting military assistance to forces involved in human rights abuses. Now they're also seeking to include provisions for an immediate and lasting ceasefire in the conflict.

1:57 There was such a ceasefire, agreed to by both sides. Well, at least Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to a ceasefire agreed to by both sides. Well, he's president. Uh, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to a ceasefire. Not sure if that will uh stop the protest, but despite all this, vice president Kamala Harris, her rise to the top of the democratic ticket and her radical nature, especially as being the most liberal senator, even moving left, of Bernie Sanders in her last two years in the Senate before becoming VP. None of those things are convincing the pro-Palestinian groups.

2:39 They remain unconvinced that her leadership will change the current US policies towards Israel and they view her as representing the current and existing administrations. Now these protests are expected to draw tens of thousands of participants. We saw that last night with these organizers. Now they were predicting a turnout to exceed some 100,000 individuals. Not sure if they reached that, but unlike in 1968, the city of Chicago has designated specific areas for the protest and security measures have been coordinated with local police and Secret Service.

3:21 In case you didn't see it, this is quite interesting they built a wall, a complete circular wall, around the whole United Center in Chicago. So the Democrats, who want an open border, ironically have built their own wall around their own convention and you need the proper ID to get in, so you can't be an illegal Democrat Party convention attendee without the required paperwork. If only they could extend that to our country.

4:03 Now, speaking of these protests, just over the weekend we released our latest Academy review, which was a fantastic book by independent journalist Andy Ngo. It's titled Unmasked Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy. That review is six pages long with six great key points. If you're a member of the Mojo Academy, you will absolutely enjoy reading and listening to that review, most especially because, as it looks right now, the DNC with its kickoff and with these protesters Yesterday I did see an Antifa flag among those protesting, so things could get squirrely once the night comes in Chicago.

4:53 So be sure to look out for those protesters most especially, uh, what they call wearing the black block of Antifa. That includes black clothing, black mask and other face coverings. This uniform appearance is used by Antifa to make it difficult for law enforcement to identify individuals within the group, and they use it as their own kind of personal branding. They take pride of place on the with with using the black block. Now, not all black, not all black clothing is Antifa or the person is is Antifa, but bet you dollars to donuts that 80 to 90% of them are.

5:33 So they believe it looks more menacing to others. Like I said, it's also their personal brand and right before we dropped this recording, we scanned and found this latest tweet about the protest, from the shadow of Ezra. That's the. That's the the name of the person tweeting. Updated GPS data reveals that over 88000 foreign and domestic Antifa members are in Chicago to protest the DNC 61000 foreign and over 27,000 domestic. Some of these Antifa members have been linked to past riots and have also accessed key card required FBI DOJ parking garages.

6:19 Hmm. How does that happen? In response, police have established a five-mile security perimeter around the United Center. That would be the wall that we talked about. This information was provided by Tona Saruga and the average Antifa member comes from white, wealthy, globalist elite families based in Europe. Globalist elite families based in Europe. Again, this was from Shadow at Shadow of Ezra Sorry, at Shadow of Ezra on Twitter or X as it's going now, and it's being reported now across all major networks. So again, Team Mojo Academy members can enjoy the latest review Unmasked by Andy Ngo Fantastic book.

7:05 I think you'll enjoy it, especially in light of what has taken place this week. And for those of you that are not members, you can sign up teammojoacademycom teammojoacademycom In the top right-hand corner. You'll get all the details. Now you might not know that we are facing one of the most radical tickets put forth on the Democratic side of the equation from the political party, the Democratic side, since the George McGovern days in 1972. Even George McGovern, back in 1972, moderated his ticket by selecting a more moderate VP selection nominee.

7:50 Not so with Kamala Harris. In fact, she is doubling down in her radical nature of her candidacy, A candidacy, mind you, that was never vetted through the primary season and was never supported by millions of Americans. In fact, she got stomped the last time she ran in 2019. This candidacy is, in fact, the old-fashioned coup, with Nancy Pelosi playing the part of Brutus sticking the knife in deeply to destroy Joe Biden's presidency and his re-nomination efforts.

8:31 If you don't believe me, you can consult one of their own, Maureen Dowd, in the New York Times talking about this. She said it was indeed a coup and she's happy that a coup took place. She doesn't even downplay that a coup actually did take place. So much for the Democrats talking about them saving us from the radical Republicans and saving our democracy. Huh, man, oh man. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black Geesh. We found it absolutely astonishing, though and I mean holy smokes, astonishing, Holy smokes.

9:13 Yes, we agree, Holy smokes is right. We found it absolutely astonishing that, on last Friday, VP nominee Kamala Harris came out to give her first formal policy speech, and what did she propose? Not the run-of-the-mill economic vision that most of us have been watching for the last two to three to four decades. You know an increase in spending here and there from most Democratic nominees. Nope, she came out with a version of Richard Nixon's price controls. I mean, holy smokes, what?

9:56 Yes, you cannot make this stuff up. In fact, let's go to the Wall Street Journal editorial page who, based on this writing, was even more dumbfounded. Let's go to the article we wrote on Friday that Kamala Harris was likely to continue President Biden's unfinished Build Back Better agenda. But it turns out we were far too optimistic. The policy priorities the Vice President laid out Friday are much worse, including a plan to impose national price controls on food and groceries.

10:38 Ms Harris's political problem is that the Biden-Harris economic policies have delivered inflation and declining real incomes. The high price of food is a particular sore point and the vice president's response is to make it worse by resorting to the Venezuela style left-wing populism and that's no exaggeration, Absolutely correct, Venezuela style left-wing populism. I mean, what in the world are they thinking over there? Holy moly, price controls has she lost her mind?

11:18 I can't believe. Sitting around a conference table and someone proposes our economic policy should be, I don't know, Price controls, that was super successful. Jeez, read some history, folks. Let's keep going. On Friday she floated a quote first ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries. Including quote new authority for the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general to punish companies for charging too much. Not sure who's going to be able to say they charge too much, but that's what Kamala Harris believes they can do at the Federal Trade Commission.

12:03 This sounds like legislation introduced by Senator Elizabeth Warren that would ban grossly excessive prices as determined by the Federal Trade Commission. Business violations would carry a penalty of up to 5% of annual revenue. This would effectively let the FTC set prices. But what is an excessive price Exactly? Is $4 too much for a gallon of milk in Omaha? Is it a different price? Perhaps in Miami, FTC Chair Lena Kahn and her army of bureaucrats would presumably decide, and that would be an absolute nightmare.

12:46 And that would be an absolute nightmare. Now she wants the FTC to regulate the and deeper scrutiny on all their administrative rules and regulations. This is not the 1990s, when the Chevron doctrine was at its highest and the administrative state could and would run among the country as they were super drunk with power.

13:31 But this is just absurd. Let's go back to the article. There is also no evidence that supermarkets or other food retailers are gouging anyone. Food prices are higher than they have ever been, than they were before the Biden presidency, but that is because of inflation. Retail grocery prices have risen roughly in tandem with wholesale prices. Supermarkets also have narrow margins on sales, roughly 2% compared to 8% on average for other businesses. Fixing prices is a recipe for shortages, as controls would discourage grocery suppliers.

14:17 Voila empty store shelves. Price controls have led to shortages everywhere, everywhere they have been tried, from Moscow to Caracas. Yes, they failed everywhere. We have to read our history. We have to understand our history. We have done all this garbage before. In fact, it was even a Republican president in the United States who started this garbage. Let's go back to the article for this. The last American president to impose wage and price controls was Richard Nixon in the early 1970s.

15:02 He had to stage a humiliating retreat amid shortages and market dislocations, and prices immediately soared when controls were lifted. If Ms Harris really believes in this price fixing, she lacks the most basic understanding of economics. She is merely floating it to be able to get price gouging into a speech, and her cynicism is also telling. Yes, exactly, my Lord. Can we have leaders who are not part of the JV team, please, and have some reasonable modicum of what the hell is actually going on?

15:47 here, what are they talking about, mary and Joseph, holy man? In fact, let's go to a simple book that Kamala Harris could read to know. This is absolutely a terrible, terrible idea. Let's go to the book for our first pull quote idea. Let's go to the book for our first pull quote. Attempts to control and fix prices and wages span most of recorded history, as Robert Schittenegger and Iman Butler record, and such an illuminating and interesting detail in this book Praise and Price and wage controls over the times, from Hammurabi in ancient Egypt 4,000 years ago to this morning's newspaper accounts of rent controls in New York, boston and other US cities, the Carter Administration's program of voluntary price controls and the mandatory and wage price controls in Norway, denmark, iran and so forth.

16:55 The experience under price controls is as vast as essentially all of recorded history, which gives us an unparalleled opportunity to explore what price controls do and do not accomplish. I know of no other economic or public policy measure whose effects have been tested over such diverse historical experience in different times, places and peoples, modes of government and systems of economic organization, except perhaps for the studies of the relationship between inflation and increases in the quantity of money. The results of this investigation would merit attention for the light it sheds on economic and political phenomena, even if wage and price controls were no longer seriously considered as tools of economic policy.

17:51 I'm trying not to laugh folks. The fact that wage and price controls exist in many countries and markets and are seriously being considered by others, including the United States, compels attention to the historical record of wage and price controls this book presents. And now here's your nugget of wisdom, quote what, then, have price controls achieved in the recurrent struggle to restrain inflation and overcome shortages? The historical record is as grimly uniform sequence of a repeated failure.

18:32 Indeed, there is not a single episode where price controls have worked to stop inflation or cure shortages. Let me repeat that nugget of wisdom for you. Indeed, there is not a single episode where price controls have worked to stop inflation or cure shortages. Instead of curbing inflation, price controls and other complications to the inflation disease, such as black markets and shortages that reflect the waste and misallocation of resources caused by the price controls themselves. Instead of eliminating shortages, price controls cause and worsen shortages by giving producers and consumers the wrong signals because, quote low prices to producers limit supply and low prices to consumers stimulate demand.

19:29 Price controls widen the gap between supply and demand. Basic Economics 101. Despite the clear lessons of history, many government and public officials still hold the erroneous belief that price controls can and do control inflation. They thereby pursue monetary and fiscal policies that cause inflation. I don't know, $4 billion or $4 trillion in 22 months. Joe Biden, going back to the book, convinced that the inevitable cannot happen here. When the inevitable does happen, public policy fails and hopes are dashed.

20:11 Blunders mount in faith in governments and government officials whose policies cause the mess declines, political and economic freedoms are impaired and general civility suffers. Civility suffers. So again, it's a very short book. 40 Centuries of Wage and Price Controls how Not to Fight Inflation, by Robert Schuttinger and Iman F Butler. The foreword, which I've read, is written by David Messelman. It was written back in 1979, when the American public had just suffered under 10 years of this epic failure of price and wage controls.

20:54 From Richard Nixon, then Gerald Ford, followed by Jimmy Carter, it took three presidents to royally screw up the American economy. Only Ronald Reagan discarded this rubbish thinking in 1980 when he was elected. But what about other Ms Harris economic policies? What else did she talk about? Well, let's go back to the article to see and hear about more garbage. Ms Harris' other ideas aren't much better. She wants to expand the child tax credit by $3,600, with a bonus to $6,000 for newborns, which together would cost more than $1.2 trillion over the decade.

21:42 Would be essentially a guaranteed income. Since Ms Harris wants to make the credits fully refundable, ie available for people who don't work, that's going the wrong way, ms Harris. She also wants to revive the American Rescue Plan's earned income tax credit boost for childless homes, roughly tripling it to $1,500 from $600. Democrats claim the credit promotes work, but studies show otherwise. It's also rife with fraud. The Internal Revenue Service estimates the improper payment rate to be wait for it 25%.

22:26 The IRS estimates the improper payment rate to be 25%. 25% of fraud, folks, man, oh man, a Chevy, the Biden-Harris. Inflation has made homes unaffordable for most young families and her brainstorm for that is more subsidies. Ms Harris wants $25,000 in down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers, but this would merely drive home prices higher. Duh, they're just going to add on $25,000 to the price. States and localities mainly regulate housing, but Ms Harris wants to federalize it with a bonanza of Washington programs to encourage quote affordable home construction.

23:15 Can we all collectively vomit in our mouths, please? Vomit in our mouths, please. Ms Harris has endorsed the Biden plan to condition tax breaks for developers on rent caps, which will, yes, discourage new housing investment. No state has spent more on housing than her native California. Yet it has, wait for it, the nation's highest home prices Duh as a result of sundry regulations. It costs more than an unbelievable $1 million to build a quote affordable home housing unit in the Golden State.

23:58 We could go on about her other ideas, such as her embrace of Mr Biden's $5 trillion with a T in tax increases Way wrong way to go. That's the equivalent of a fat kid handing you candy, tons of candy bars and telling you to eat it and then say you're going to lose weight. That is what $5 trillion in tax increases should be analogized to A fat kid giving you tons of candy bars and telling you with utter conviction on his face that you will lose weight when you eat these candy bars.

24:39 Absolute, dead panned lie to your face. But the idea she claimed on her own Friday reveal a candidate whose economic judgment is deeply flawed. And there is the understatement of the decade, because it's more than flawed, folks. Kamala Harris is an amateur's amateur. She has no idea what she's doing. She has no idea what she even believes in. She's flip-flopped all over the place. The only thing she believes in is radical big government socialism.

25:20 God help our country. And to put a cherry on top of this, one of all the people that could agree with us on the right, the Washington Post, catherine Rampell, who's an opinion columnist over there, has just a blistering piece about Kamala Harris's price and wage controls. Check this out. Going to the opinion piece, it's very short but hang in there, folks. This is brutal. It's hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is. It is, in all but name, a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food.

26:06 Supply and demand would no longer determine prices or profit levels. Far off Washington bureaucrats would. The FTC would be able to tell, say, a Kroger in Ohio the acceptable price it can charge for milk, berger and Ohio the acceptable price it can charge for milk. At best this would lead to shortages, black markets and hoarding, among other distortions seen in previous times and in countries who tried to limit price growth by fiat. There's a reason. Narrower price gouging laws that exist in some US states are rarely invoked. At worst it might accidentally raise prices.

26:50 And then this final paragraph. This is especially brutal from their own Democrat Washington Post quote. But more to the point, if your opponent claims you're a communist, maybe don't start with an economic agenda that can accurately be labeled as federal price controls. Whoa, it is not often when you see such truth spouted from the Washington Post.

27:34 There's a circular firing squad out now, and rightly so. Catherine nailed it. This is pure communism and it is called that for a reason, because it is true. So in today's Mojo Minute, as the radical Democrat left embraces economic ideas that have failed since the time of the Code of Hammurabi, seriously, you can review in the appendix of our book of the day the wage price control statutes from the Code of Hammurabi. Can we please, please, not have a war on the free market? I know communism really appeals to some segment of Americans but, folks, it has failed everywhere it has been tried.

28:17 And I know half of Americans hate the United States for one reason or the other. And I know half of Americans hate the United States for one reason or the other. I know they have a mental illness episode every four years and most likely, frankly, they've probably been reading too much Howard Zinn. It's like an IV line into their bloodstream. But, folks, we have to get the economy moving again and that is not going to happen by spending government by the government, spending billions and trillions of dollars. That only causes inflation. See our previous Liberty Minute episode back in 2022, where Steve Forbes walked us through how to beat inflation.

29:04 And it's a wonderful book and it's titled inflation by Steve Forbes, what it is, why it's bad and how to fix it. And the first step to not do is what the Biden and Harris administration did in 2021. And that is spend trillions of dollars. That is actually what caused the whole mess we are in. They have it exactly backward. You can certainly well, you certainly don't offer price controls, because that's just flat-out communism. Now you might be asking how do you fix inflation If you don't want to go back and listen to the Liberty Minute podcast where we talked about it?

29:46 Well, first you have to have a return to sound money. We haven't had that for a while. You have to peg the US dollar, the greenback, to gold. And because official Washington, I know, has no idea what that actually entails or even means what that actually entails or even means, because they're so much into navel gazing from both parties and they lack any amount of political courage. Let's take another step back and say the first minor, minor step, the tiny step you have to take, is stop spending huge amounts of money from both political parties. Can they do that? Can the Republican Party actually stop spending money?

30:26 Because we need to cut up the government credit card? We cannot spend $4 trillion again like we did in 22 months from 2021 to 2023, stop this spending of huge amounts of taxpayer money and inflation will get reined in with a Fed policy that actually tightens the money supply just enough to choke off inflation. Then the second step is, after that, a large across-the-board tax cut that will get the country moving again. If we do that, we'll start to grow again. Four to five percent growth rates for three to four years will get the world settled down and allow us, the United States, to grow ourselves out of the inflationary moment and period we're in right now.

31:13 And then, if you can return the US greenback, the dollar, peg it back to gold again, that would create a firm anchor of price stability and sound money. And then, when all of that is done, then you will have watched what real economic leadership looks like and what a flourishing country looks like, because you will watch the shackles come off this economy and you will get real growth rates like we had in the 20s, the 60s and the 80s. And that is what real, very real leadership looks like. Until then, we're going to watch this disastrous war on the free market continue to happen by radical, radical amateurs and communists.

31:59 God help us all. Let's keep fighting, trying, but let's keep fighting the good fight. Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this Theory to Action podcast. Be sure to check out our show page at teammojoacademycom, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast, as well as other great resources. Until next time, keep getting your mojo on.