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America never fails to be interesting, and she tends to kick it into high gear around Election Day. Take Pennsylvania, for example. The Keystone state has shaped into one that is a much watch around this time – and on this go around, we’re watch Dr. Oz and John Fetterman… This is why we’re lucky to have our new friend Charles McElwee of RealClearPennsylvania to take us into the trenches of this fractious purple state.
Next we get a chance to catch up again with Larry Kudlow. (If you haven’t already, be sure to check out his show on Fox.) Larry goes through the regulatory wet blanket that’s suffocating our ambitions. He has many thoughts on the green crusade and the auxiliary burdens on the economy. Plus, he’s got big predictions for the midterms!
Lastly, the guys chat on Biden’s big pot pardon and the crazy people walking the streets.
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It will be good to hear from Larry Kudlow again. I always loved him as a guest.
Why is Rob Long shown holding a chromatic B-system button accordion (sometimes known as the Russian B-system), also known as a bayan, popularly used in Russia and Eastern Europe? At least he’s showing good posture. Somebody give Rob a piano accordion.
Maybe that was the only photo they could find that they wouldn’t get sued over?
He’s obviously a Putin stooge.
It drives me absolutely insane when “experts” come on and worry about an industry being carbon intensive. CO2 is a trace gas in the atmosphere: about 0.04%. And Kudlow seems to believe we have some impact on climate change – he is worried about the next 100 years. He would do well to worry about this:
Wind and solar are a scam – we don’t need Kudlow out there praising it as part of the solution.
It is not reliable or as green as the environmentalist claim
It’s like oil from Saudi, lithium by child slave labor, etc, they don’t seem to care if it pollutes somewhere else and other people.
Kudlow is such a happy warrior. I sure hope his election predictions are accurate.
I’m with James in having serious misgivings when it comes to the legalization of recreational drugs. It’s all very well for Rob to say that it all comes down to “personal responsibility”, but that’s emphatically not in play here – it’s the taxpayer who ends up responsible for the stoner or drunk who spends his days in a fog. If it were truly the case that those who choose poorly (yes, Indiana Jones reference) were in fact solely responsible for their lives, there might develop something of an incentive to make good choices, and a stigma (I am becoming increasingly pro-stigma even as they disappear, as I think they served as guardrails) associated with poor choices. I don’t have any ready solutions for the more complex problems of serious mental illness and rampant homelessness, but I would like to think we would give some pause before potentially adding to those problems by green-lighting today’s more powerful marijuana and its use.
More “A” than “B.” For some reason the stock photography service we subscribe to does not seem to have the breadth and width of polka performers that one would expect. (That is, if you were expecting them to operate as an obscure, non-profit entity.) If Oktoberfest weren’t a thing the lone tuba guy would be out on the street begging.
I had toyed with the idea of presenting them as Patty, Maxine and Laverne (Google it, kids) but I am contractually obligated not to reference WWII culture unless it is specifically addressed in the podcast. Plus, these days, if I were to present our men in women’s dress, someone might take that as cue to medically transition them without their consent.
If the government doesn’t sell hard drugs at cost, the cartels and organize crime grow. In fact, it’s too late to even try that. They have too much capital for other things.
Sorry @jameslileks but even if inflation “stopped” completely today that doesn’t mean prices come back down, including for eggs. It just means they don’t keep getting higher.
At least in terms of actual currency-type inflation. Some prices can come down some if they stopped blocking energy production, for example.
If you like the opioid epidemic you’ll love legalized marijuana. No, it’s not as deadly as opioids. But it’s just as good for making you a waste of oxygen..
I just assumed that was an actual picture of Rob playing his accordion and you photoshopped the rest in…
Yup. By the way, another factor contributing to the rise in egg prices is avian influenza. I think we would have seen egg prices rise regardless of economic conditions because of it, though certainly those conditions have contributed to the amount of the rise.
The government can’t sell hard drugs, or have American businesses produce and sell drugs, as cheaply as can cartels because of the regulations they would have to abide by. Contrast this with fentanyl production in China, where perhaps the labs are staffed with what is essentially slave labor. This is already the case with marijuana – illegal marijuana still thrives because American marijuana farmers have to follow all kinds of regulations, which illegal operations do not. This seems obvious.
I have never heard this. It doesn’t change the fact that they should have taken the illicit profit out of it. The other options are patently not working. Too late now.
I am strictly talking about hard drugs, for the record.
Sorry @roblong but if/when legalized “recreational” drugs make people psychotic and they start pushing people in front of subway cars and setting each other on fire etc, what do you do then?
You have to force them to be consumed in limited areas.
Only consuming the actual drugs in limited areas doesn’t mean they will only be psychotic in those limited areas.
Nobody has a better plan.
Just make it clear that their fellow citizens are helping them kill themselves as fast as they can.
A long time ago,
Discovery channel had a series of documentaries on the drug trade. It’s unbelievable how vertically organized it is. Mexico to the hood.
Now they have effectively infinite capital.
Seems like if you don’t have cops etc gathering up the drug-users and locking them up just for using the drugs, you’ll still have to have cops etc protecting the non-drug-users from the drug-users once they become psychotic and start pushing people in front of train cars, setting them on fire, etc. Or just because they end up stealing to buy the drugs etc.
I have chosen all of my words very carefully, here. Public policy failed.
Maybe, but the common belief seems to be that legalizing “all” drugs would somehow cost less, require less police, etc. I don’t believe it. At most, the costs would just shift locations.
How could they have taken the illicit profit out of it? China doesn’t have the quality controls over its labs that any legitimate American lab would have to abide by. It can always undercut an American lab – ditto for the cartels. How could they have done what you think they should have done?
That is not my point at all. I’m talking about how we created a monster out of organized crime in the cartels. I got this from Megan McArdle of Bloomberg and the Washington Post. She flat out said it’s too late to do anything about it.
The government could give it away for free. The government could pay them to take it. This isn’t an issue.
I have never, ever heard that there was a slave labor component to the hard drug trade, but it doesn’t matter.
I could see and maybe even support a free-drugs type thing, as long as it doesn’t include a lifetime “safety net” for those who choose to destroy themselves that way.
If you become unable to work because of some regular medical thing, work-related injury, etc, okay. But if you ruin yourself with hard drugs, you get nothing. No “disablity,” no “unemployment,” no free housing, no “food stamps”… Except maybe a free coffin or cremation.
Those people need to be on “skid row” as an example of how NOT to live.
Is there a public policy that does succeed here? How does a government solve what is essentially a spiritual problem, with people choosing to make messes of their lives? I don’t think there’s much that government can do. I mentioned earlier that I was in favor of stigmas, because they tended to act as guardrails. These weren’t government stigmas, they were cultural. And we’ve dropped most of them. I’d like to think that we could at least not add to the problems, but the rush towards the legalization of recreational drugs makes we wonder if we can even do that.