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Good News! James is back! The whole crew is reunited. Even our guest Matthew Hennessey – a self-professed Ricochet nerd – was missing him. Matt’s got a new book heading our way. It’s called Visible Hand: A Wealth of Notions on the Miracle of the Market. Matthew proves to the hosts that Economics doesn’t have to be mind-numbingly boring. (And our host who’s had the pleasure of reading it goes so far as to say it belongs with Sowell and Friedman! Not too shabby.)
Also, Peter has some thoughts on the comparison of Joe Biden’s “gaffe” to a certain well-known Reagan speech; and the guys managed the nearly impossible feat of talking about the Oscars with little emphasis on a slap-happy star.
Music from this week’s podcast: Slap and Tickle by Squeeze
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If not for the assault and battery, why talk about the Oscars?
I’m sick of hearing about the stupid Oscars and stupid Will Smith.
I promise it was pretty interesting.
Very good, needed, and gets after the right as well as the kooky left. In a country of 300 plus million, the biggest economy, ever, by gobs, and the most diverse folks anywhere, the notion that a well intentioned top could run the economy if it had the right folks in charge is insane and worse now in this complex world than it was a century ago. If we can’t go back to bottom up somehow, we’re going to lose it all. That’s what the top does, always throughout history.
So many Republicans are so stupid about this.
I made one the opposite way.
It’s poor form for Rob to slight the most popular President in the history of the universe. It’s not Obama but Joe Biden. Eighty one million totally legitimate and not at all fraudulent people voted for the man. After all, the votes were certified. It was the cleanest, most secure election held in the history of elections. There is nothing at all suspicious about a dementia patient being more popular than the first affirmative action hire.
And not only was Trump removed “surgically,” but Biden did the surgery himself!
@jameslileks does it again! There is a video of Will Smith on Arsenio Hall saying a similar joke? NO WAY!
Yes way! It is here:
Which was funny enough. Then I found that Snopes ran a “fact check” on it! Hahaha. The fact check is titled, “Did Will Smith Make an Alopecia Joke on ‘The Arsenio Hall Show’?“
They slapped a “MISCAPTIONED” rating on it – and it’s in red so that’s like bad or something I guess?
The “fact check” proceeds to conflate alopecia [meaning balding, lack of hair, or hair loss] which the drummer most definitely has, and alopecia “areata,” [a sub-type of alopecia that Mrs. Smith has], which hasn’t been mentioned in any of the coverage of this event to my knowledge until this “fact-check.”
But the title of the fact check is not about “alopecia areata”, it was about alopecia.
Snopes takes the time to state that the drummer has never referred to having alopecia himself in all the interviews they have found from him over the years, but that is not how medical terminology works.
For example, if you say in multiple interviews that you have a headache – yet never say you had pyrexia (yes the medical term for a fever) – it does not discount someone referring to your condition as pyrexia – especially if there is a viral moment in pop culture regarding “pyrexia”.
Long post to say Snopes is just hilarious in the lengths it will go to not shrink into a corn cob.
Totally owned.
Yeah, but you gotta hand it to them for trying.
UPDATE: issuing correction on a previous line, regarding the fact-check group Snopes, you do not, under any circumstances, “gotta hand it to them”
You three and Matthew Hennessey kept mentioning his wife.
At some point he should have gotten mad and said, “Keep my wife’s name out of YOUR mouth!”
“If you fight the free market, you are going to lose.”
We did every single thing wrong in the face of the wage deflation and job destruction from automation and globalized labor after the Soviet Union fell.
This is where all of the industrial policy, socialism, and populism comes from.
The GOP should have gotten rid of the Fed dual mandate and forced massive libertarianism on everything while fixing all of the unfunded liabilities. How do you have a Central Bank produce inflation while almost everything is being automated and going down in price? It’s idiotic. Now we have both asset and CPI inflation and probably society can’t hold together unless they make it worse.
They probably should have paid bounties for people to procreate W-2 slaves.
You can’t expect the average person to understand the world with nominal conservative leadership like this. Then you get never Trump bitching about populism spewing out GOP boilerplate as if they are all righteous and brilliant.
If you want to hear all of the issues explained listen to the Mike Green interview at Gestalt University, including preserving the reserve currency status. The guy is a Democrat and these are democrat policies he’s talking about, but he hits all of the issues. I think I’ve heard him say that we are too stupid and corrupt to do this until everything falls apart. He’s less into harder money like conservatives nominally are, so he has a different way of doing it which I think would be pretty difficult.
Seriously, what is Mises.org wrong on?
All of the central planning and fighting uncertainty is about avoiding natural deflation. It has scared the hell out of everyone since 1914.
Did it really work? It obviously works like hell right now.
Little known fact, at some point 100% of the government could not get the taxes they required unless we were constantly creating CPI and asset inflation.
You can make the case that we require a UBI because we have screwed everything up so much.
I am so glad Glenn Reynolds is joining ricochet. I’ve always thought that this place needed a libertarian / Austrian ombudsman. It would do the GOP a lot of good if he would interview this guy about why he switched to the Austrian school.
lIbERtaRiAns dOn’t lIVe iN tHe rEAl woRld
With the amount of corruption at the highest levels of all areas of our (and the global) society – I am afraid he might be right.
Look I vote Right and work at my local county-level to help realign the GOP into a hopeful new coalition that can bring about change at a policy level (culture is largely up to us, but good policy helps revert bad), but if there is no reckoning with the bipartisan global “market” corruption – we lack virtue and honesty.
Folks like Romney (through his kids as well), Kerry (through his kids as well), Biden (through.. you get the point), McCain, and COUNTLESS folks (most not in politics) are involved with the pilfering of cash through illicit dealings with China, Russia, Ukraine, various African nations, etc., etc. – these people slosh the ranks with “dark” money in our domestic politics, run ruinous foundations and “state” departments world-wide, devalue nation’s currencies, their peoples, and otherwise enrich themselves to play Caesar and Senate with their friends.
MartyrMade’s recent podcast on his thoughts on Ukraine was a sobering reminder and a good example of how much these people are involved in that particular mess – since like 1992! There is a wealth of other info about what these people have done worldwide -and often times been celebrated by both the Right and Left as “good” people! I really think we as a party (for those of you in it) need to reckon with this history, engage with a different foreign policy (sorry Krauthammer – that was the wrong approach you pushed post Soviet fall, but RIP brother) that doesn’t push our values (which go from free markets to free abortions and multi-colored celebration flags within twenty years) so intensely, and focuses on like-minded nations, and superior military might.
Long rant, but your comment reminded me how so much corruption and world ruin can be laid at the feet of both parties here. The American People are largely good, decent, and moral folks (hopefully more uninformed than stupid), but this swamp of jackals has to be called out and like the snakes in Ireland, driven out
Just to be super accurate about what I’m saying. He’s a hugely wealthy Democrat hedge fund guy. I think he’s only a Democrat in the sense of theoretically if everybody paid attention to him we would have a better system and it would involve more government.
He’s getting at why the government prints so damn much money and how we hold onto our geopolitical power. He’s really got all of the parts and issues down really well. You basically have to figure out how to expand credit without resorting to inflationism as we do now. You need to get comrades procreating w-2 slaves and get their human capital developed.
This is why all of that GOPe Never Trump crap is so undeveloped. They think they are so sophisticated, they aren’t.
Since they won’t do the right thing and since they are using the system to steal for themselves, everybody needs to use the system to steal as much as they can before it collapses.
It was a good episode just to hear something different than the general consensus on Ukraine.
Well, now it’s dementia PLUS a diversity hire, so that explains it.
I joked after 2020 that what was shown was that people love Biden and turned out big when he was number two on the ticket. When he was at the top they really turned out. Joementum, catch the fever.
What was the song at the end of this week’s podcast?
Props to Peter for pronouncing “primer” properly and not as most podcasters these days, who seem to think they’re dealing with pistols or paint.
Peter, wouldn’t this be a basic economics book that would be added to the other three?
Amazon.com: The Wealth of Nations: 9781494844738: Smith, Adam: Books
James, I love going to the movies in a theater as well.
Rob, The Sopranos was not “unimaginable ten or fifteen years ago.” Since it ended 15 years ago.
Well, y’see, it was unimaginable right after it ended… :-)