[00:00:02] Speaker A: KMUD Podcast presents.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Hey, KMUD listeners.
And Lambert, do I have you?
[00:00:20] Speaker A: I think you have me. Do you have me?
[00:00:22] Speaker B: Yes, I have you. You're coming in loud and clear. Thank you so much for joining us.
[00:00:27] Speaker A: Technology is wonderful.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: I don't know about that, but actually that's a good segue because after a little introduction, I think we're going to start talking about technology and the people who've made an awful lot of money from them and their political influence and how a lot of Magaland is starting to wonder if necessarily Mr. Trump is 100% on the workers side or not. But first, I'd like to thank you for joining Kaymond and say Barefoot Charlie is invited to join us too. I'm hoping that he shows up to give his pithy points of view. But, Lambert, a very quick introduction.
[00:01:11] Speaker A: Oh, I'm embarrassed.
I'm like, I'm an old school blogger. I've been blogging since 2003. I started out at Eschaton. I had my own blog for about five years at Corente, and for 13 years I blogged at Naked Capitalism. And I am now moving on to an as yet undetermined online venture. No, I don't mean a venture. It's not for profit. Good heavens.
Endeavor about which I'm excited, but which is not yet fully formed. Anyhow, I'll be at Naked Capitalism for two more months. So it's not like an imminent transition.
[00:02:02] Speaker B: And I'm glad that you're kind of branching out to being on kmud. So thank you very much.
[00:02:08] Speaker A: Well, I'm happy to be here. It's kind of amazing to be on the radio. So.
[00:02:11] Speaker B: Yes, and I'll let people know. So I stumbled upon naked capitalism.
Oh, 2015, I believe. I was actually doing research for this very talk show. I mean, since it's on a bunch of stuff. And on my own, I had started coming a little bit towards understanding financial systems as what I would now call modern monetary theory. Although I was not there at all. I was like maybe a quarter of the way there. And I was researching around, looking for.
My basic idea was like, well, there should be a bunch of debt for every citizen or every resident in America. There should be a million dollars printed and spent on infrastructure and this and that and the other thing. And that led me in looking around, doing Internet search to some comments on this website called Naked Capitalism. And I was like, huh, interesting. And I actually ended up having a professor from Reno who was a commenter who I was able to figure out who he was and Tracked him down and had him on the show. And also made Naked Capitalism part of my daily media intake, if not really. I look at Kim Kemp, our local aggregator first, and then right on to Naked Capitalism, where there's links, a bunch of original articles generally on economics, but very broadly, and then a water cooler, which Lambert has been responsible for, which is sort of another link section where you aggregate information and have little pithy comments and stuff. And it's a wealth of information from a lot of sources.
There are sources which, if I could maybe tease out what an editorial viewpoint is at Naked Capitalism, they put sources out which directly contradict their editorial point of view and are expecting us in the commentariat to read things and understand things and comment on things and not take the fact that, you know, foreign affairs was linked to as some sort of statement about their credibility in the larger sense. But so thank you so much for the time and energy you have put towards that. And I know people on my show have heard me talking about it before, but if you're not checking out Naked Capitalism, then you need to be. So, anyway, thank you for joining us.
[00:04:26] Speaker A: Yes.
I should say one thing in terms of mmt, the history of it is that the blogosphere really was instrumental in keeping the flame alive until it finally hit the mainstream. I wrote a long post on it that Brad delong of all people endorsed.
So it's just like a little piece of history. Nobody knows. So there we are.
[00:04:57] Speaker B: Excellent. Well, I was getting like, normally we take callers about halfway through, but we have. So I'm gonna. We have two callers already. Why don't we take these first couple callers and then no more callers till halfway through. But Lampert sounds great in the studio, which is better than last time he was on the air.
[00:05:15] Speaker A: So, you know, are we blipping in? Eureka is a great headline for some story. I don't know what the story is, but the headline is great.
[00:05:26] Speaker B: Great. So you were talking about how the blogosphere kept modern monetary theory kind of alive until the academics picked up again. What else would you credit with the blogosphere having done and shaped things maybe in the last 10 years? And how is that changing?
[00:05:43] Speaker A: Wow.
Well, thank you for asking, because I'm thinking a lot about that as I strike off into the blogosphere on my own once more back in the day, for those of us who remember who George W. Bush was when he was elected president, when he was elected again in 2004 after the Democrats ran the horrid John Kerry and he lost one of the Things that Bush said he was going to do was spend his political capital on reforming Social Security. And we all know what that means.
And in fact, back in the day, people on Capitol Hill read the blogosphere because it was the only way of getting in touch with activists digitally. Right. So they had a good deal of influence on Capitol Hill and in fact turned around the Democrats willingness and desire to cave to George W. Bush. And they resisted the entire effort and it stopped. And then they won in 2006, a lesson that they promptly forgot, of course, being Democrats.
But that was sort of the apogee, the height of the influence of the blogosphere. And then social media came along and decapitated it, unfortunately.
[00:07:16] Speaker B: So how would you define the difference between the blogosphere and social media, especially for younger listeners? What was the difference?
[00:07:25] Speaker A: Well, there's a couple of things I'll say as a writer first. Okay. Well actually I'll say as a reader first.
Social media is a platform.
You know, it's Twitter or it's Facebook or it's meta or whatever it is, you know, it's calling itself or Blue sky or whatever. It's a platform and it's owned by like generally an oligarch or a small, you know, a profit making business. And Cory Doctorow has described a process he calls enshitification.
[00:08:01] Speaker B: Please don't. Yeah, don't. Do I have to do paperwork there? So I mean, that was a long word with that syllable, maybe in the middle, so maybe it doesn't count, but I'm going to do paperwork anyway.
[00:08:12] Speaker A: That really is the word. And I think it was made word of the day by word of the year by Oxford English Dictionary. And I'll have to have a euthana, you know, like, like a. And euphemism, ification.
In any case, the process is that they, the platform will get you in by giving you a free service, then they will bring other people who are willing to pay for your eyeballs because you are there for the free service. And they will then degrade the service both for the people they sell to and for you in order to extract as much profit from the platform as they can, after which the platform collapses.
And that is what happens with platforms. The blogosphere, by contrast, was distributed. It was a ton of WordPress sites and like other blog sites. And there was the process.
The process that we cannot name could not take place in a distributed system. And that's why it's like superior. And I hope there's a resurgence because there's a ton of good bloggers out there. The problem is we used to relate to each other directly by giving each other links, and now you go through social media to like, do the links and there is the middleman controlling what you can see or like supplying you with the links you want through the algorithm. None of that garbage happened with the blogosphere. And as from a, from a writer standpoint, writing on Twitter or Facebook or any of those vehicles is incredibly crippling because you don't have, you don't have access to the, to the HTML. Right. The code by which you create documents on the web. Right. So for example, you can't add, you can't customarily. You write a link and you put a word for the. You see, like a word that you can click on. Right. And like when you click on the word, the link is behind the word. That's not technically possible in the social media applications. Why? Because they don't want you to leave their application, they want you to stay there. Whereas the blogosphere was all about sending you somewhere else on a theory that that place would then send readership back to you.
And it's almost impossible to do long form on social media. Like, if I want to, you know, and I do, I want to write like a, like I want to put on my yellow waders and write a 5,000 word article on how CDC is like killing people by refusing to implement a universal masking policy in hospitals. Right. All which is true. Right. I can't do that on social media. Right.
[00:11:20] Speaker B: And I think that if you did do that, you would be so buried in people who are having emotional reactions and that you wouldn't generate thoughtful discussion. So I'm hardly on social media at all, but I just had another friend saying how they won't deal with this other friend because, you know, they're on Facebook and therefore there's all these people they just can't deal with in real life because you get in screaming matches with people or just people are rude on Facebook. And I mean it, it cripples our ability to come together as a community because we have this social media dividing us.
[00:11:56] Speaker A: Yeah, so called, so called social media. Or it's, you know, I mean, it's called, I think that the logic of it is called the dopamine whoop.
[00:12:05] Speaker B: And we're all a bunch of cokeheads.
[00:12:07] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Like, like, like people who are like terminal cokeheads just aren't fun to be around, you know, and, and that was harder to. It was harder. I mean, I cannot claim that our comment section on Naked Capitalism or any blog I've been on is like without conflict and serene. Right? Not so. People fight all the time, but it doesn't scale out so that you get canceled by like hundreds of thousands of people, for example. And it can't structurally again, because the blogosphere is distributed. So I'm really, really hoping, and I think, I think I'm just, well, hoping, I'm praying that people are getting tired of social media and that the blogosphere will undergo a quiet resurgence. That's what I'm hoping.
So we'll see. I mean, I'm sort of, I'm sort of placing a bet on that by going there right in my, my future endeavor. Right. But there's a lot of great blogging out there. The thing is that we can't connect anymore because the connections got decapitated by social media. And I've also got to say I'm on Twitter like 12 hours a day. Right. I love Twitter, but it's not the same and I want something better. So.
So does that help?
[00:13:31] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's you, you hit on it earlier, I think. Well, the two things, both that it's, it's the brains and the consciousness of the viewers that is for sale to the advertisers and the whole idea of a dopamine loop where you get addicted to whatever, whether it's, you know, cat videos are probably a less socially problematic addiction than pornography, but that's still going to be a problem and people get addicted.
I guess I'd like to step back a tiny, tiny little bit and talk about one of the things I had talked about maybe starting the show with, which was some definitions. And I'd like to just jump right into part of a definition of capitalism, which I think is very, very important to think of.
People think of, oh, well, capitalism means, oh, the capitalists get a whole bunch of money and so a bunch of resources and labor and ideas are brought together and a product is made. And this is the old fashioned idea. And if that product has social utility, then that product sells well and there's profit is made beyond what resources it took to bring together to make that product.
And in capitalism, it's the capitalist who gets to keep all that extra profit after having paid off the labor and, you know, people for the ideas and the land and materials and stuff. And it's not so much the issue that the capitalist then gets to eat lots of cakes and go to the opera, it's more that that capitalist gets to send their children to private schools and get good Medical care, which is half of the equation. But even more importantly, the capitalist gets to decide what the next round of investment will be in. And I would say socialism is where the next round of investment is guided by the people, whether that's in a democracy with industrial planning or whatever, or. Whereas capitalism means that the next round of investment is designed by the people who made the most money off of the last round of investment. And that skews our investment decisions away from what is going to maximize social utility to what is going to maximize the return to my bank account. And instead of investing in high speed rail, we invested in dodgy airplanes, cutting all the corners there. And more important into things like Uber and things that are shifting our transportation network in a way which basically makes people earn less money and empowers with information and money. The capitalists, and then they take that next money and do the next round of investment and we get farther and farther away from some sort of technological utopia and further into the technological health scape. So I think there are several iterations into this. And now they're putting all their money into AI. And it's not because AI is going to make all our lives better, it's because they're going to make even more money. They're going to be able to squeeze the beat for that much more juice with AI, and that's why they're investing in it. And that's dangerous.
[00:16:41] Speaker A: So I, I wouldn't argue with any of that.
I should say that like one of my.
How can I say it's not a one of the realities of collecting as many links and reading as many resources at Naked Capitalism as we do.
Is that what they call the fire hose of Twitter and rss? And all of that is so overwhelming that there's almost no time to think. We can think in little bits as we react to events, but I can't remember the last time I sat down and read a book for two hours.
Right. I think I'm forgetting how. And one of the things I want to do in my future endeavor is I'm going to have time to read. And the first book I'm going to read is the new translation of Karl Marx's Capital. I'm going to start at chapter one and I'm going to hopefully go. I mean, it's like 600 pages or whatever and I've got like a shelf of like 600 page books I want to go through. But that's the first one. And if I can go through it, that's. I will, I will I will have like a. Like a. Like a level of rigor in my writing and thinking that I do not presently possess. I'm essentially going on Capital's brand fumes at this point. You know the stuff I read as a very young person when I worked in the factories. Right. But that was a long time ago, and the economy is very different today from what it is from what it is today. And if I.
If I may be permitted a brief rant on AI.
I see you're holding up a piece of paper. Is that the euphemism I can use?
[00:18:38] Speaker B: Well, no, actually, it's. It's our underwriter who. I forgot to. Oh, no, I did read this. Never mind. I read this. Lizard's plumbing.
[00:18:46] Speaker A: Okay, good. Well, we'll give the underwriter props again.
[00:18:49] Speaker B: Yay. Lizards, plumbing.
[00:18:51] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:18:55] Speaker A: I think the first thing to realize the thing that the framing is, the bearded one, as we call him, has this phrase, original accumulation. Like, how does capitalism bootstrap itself? And his answer is theft. Right. It isn't always theft. Right. But at some point, the cycle is started. It's initiated. You know, I can't even remember the word for turning on. Like a gasoline engine in a vehicle. The key is turned, the engine starts, and that's an act of theft. Capitalism by nature, when it's going, is not theft. That's too simple. But to start, we've got theft and the jargon word for that, and I don't know if the new translation uses this word, but the jargon word for that is original accumulation. What is the original accumulation for AI? It's the training sets. They scrape the entire Internet. All of my writing is somewhere in their training set. And they stole it from me. And they're not giving me any money or credit or anything. They just took it. And that's. It's just outrageous. And they're still doing it.
[00:20:12] Speaker B: And of course, and I hate to say this, but in the small print, I believe, of the several months ago, new zoom thing is, they get to scrape this.
[00:20:22] Speaker A: Of course they do. It's.
[00:20:24] Speaker B: But now we let them.
I really, really had a choice in that.
[00:20:28] Speaker A: No, we don't. And you know, honestly, if like some clever person, like, calls in immediately and gives me a way to poison my writing so that it screws up the training set, I would be so happy.
[00:20:44] Speaker B: I believe that exists. I've seen. I've heard about it on Naked Capitalism in the links. At least there. There are. Or maybe that's only for visual, for pictures and stuff.
[00:20:54] Speaker A: I think it's for images.
[00:20:55] Speaker B: I think you're right.
[00:20:57] Speaker A: And I don't know how to do it with text. There's gotta be a way. So, so the first thing is the whole, the entire AI industry, all those oligarchs making billions of dollars and sucking up giant like, like, like, like, you know, bubblicious money from stupid venture capitalists. All of it, all of it, 100% is based on theft.
And number two, it's all.
Now this is something. Oh, I'm sorry. I did it again. I did it again. I did it again. I'm so sorry. It's all bs.
May I go on?
Okay, it's all bs and the reason. And, and to be fair, there are some things that AI can do correctly.
If it's. What it's doing is it's scraping up text. Right. Some text is like rigidly structured and mechanical. Right. For example, programming. Programmers love AI because it helps them program. Why? Because their language is structured so machines can understand it. The same thing goes for math. That does not go for natural language.
Healthcare in general. Blah, blah, blah, blah.
AI has no way of determining what is true and what is false.
The AI tech people think that there's some kind of bolt on, there's some kind of kludge that can add on later to fix what's wrong. And they may be right. Like 80% of the stupid questions will, like, have real answers. They can get their program to feed, but in essence, AI has no way to determine whether a claim is true or false.
[00:22:58] Speaker B: And now they're getting trained on AI. There's AI generated garbage that they got wrong, which is now in training sets.
[00:23:05] Speaker A: Absolutely. So there's like a death spiral. The word. I'll give you the Latin word for that. And your regulator won't go crazy if I use the word autocoprofaggy. Autocoprofaggy. That is the word to look up, because that's what's going on. So I'm hoping, I'm praying it's all a gigantic horrible bubble that will explode and punish many rich people. What I think will happen is that it will just get embedded everywhere and not work. So it will degrade the daily experience of everybody who encounters it. For example, in call centers. Right. It used to be with a level of effort you could reach a human. Right. But if you had an AI call center, you can cut the humans out of the loop entirely.
You know, like Philip K. Dick's famous story Ubik, where you've got to put a nickel in the refrigerator to open the door well, that's what AI is going to be doing for us, right in this bright new technological future they're planning.
[00:24:15] Speaker B: Yeah, I advise anybody to read lots of Philip K. Dick short stories and novellas. And he had an eerie presence, I would say, in a bad way.
[00:24:28] Speaker A: He's very good on the quality of daily life in the future.
[00:24:32] Speaker B: And so. Sorry, do you consider yourself a big Philip Dick fan? Oh, yeah. Let me throw this. This theory out to you. So to me, two of the things that really, really set him apart or kind of are at the heart of his writing is one is empathy. You know, what is it that makes a human human, and that is empathy. And another is sort of this idea of authenticity, what is authentic and what is real.
And I think that essentially. Oh, and the third thing being that that which you find beautiful or that which. That which is evil also contains within it that which is beautiful and vice versa. And I think that Arnold Schwarzenegger's career is 100% due to the fact that his writers really liked Philip K. Dick and a couple of his movies they credited to him and like Terminator is one where they just kind of put a bunch of little stories and themes together and came out with this idea of Terminator. But if you see, Running man was based on one of his.
One of his was turned in his book, now we remember it for you wholesale, got turned into another one of his. And so I see Philip Dick's creative genius having enabled Arnold Schwarzenegger to become this political leader who is exactly the opposite of what Philip K. Dick would have wanted. And to me, that's a very Dickian sort of a theme that, you know, he put out this beautiful idea and it got all perverted and. Well, I mean, it's a horrible idea in its own way. But his creativity got turned into Arnold Schwarzenegger's success.
[00:26:20] Speaker A: That's very Philip K. Dickian in a way.
[00:26:23] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:26:25] Speaker A: I would argue.
Well, arguing is good, I guess.
[00:26:29] Speaker B: Discussing. We're discussing.
[00:26:30] Speaker A: I would posit that none of the movies that claim to have Philip K. Dick as a source convey anything like the feeling of Philip K. Dick book. And it's nothing like, oh, it's not the same Lord of the Rings. No, no, no. It's entirely different.
[00:26:55] Speaker B: Absolutely. And one of my favorite books was, oh, I'm spacing the one that got turned into the cartoon movie A Scanner Darkly. A Scanner Darkly is an excellent book and it's an okay movie, but it 100% ruins at the ending. I won't any spoilers anywhere, but The Hollywood version 100, 1000% lets off the system where it's like, it's an intense enough ending, but not nearly the truth that Philip K. Dick was trying to put out there. And so they took all the glitz and they took the great sci fi story, but they were unable to actually really have the true ending because it was too insightful a damnation.
[00:27:41] Speaker A: I guess I like beside sort of my theory of the author. If I had become like an English professor, I would have said a couple of things.
One is that to my mind, he has like about five absolutely miraculous years from like 1967 to, I think, from like 1963 to maybe 1967 or eight. And I would place A Scanner Darkly at the end of his miraculous period. And after that we go off into the like, the vast active living intelligence stuff where, like, we're still living in the Roman Empire. And I just think that's nutty.
[00:28:26] Speaker B: And all the methamphetamine caught up with him and he was having, you know, a religious experience or a mental break or I know methamphetamine induced psychosis and he was broke and constantly, like hammering out little.
[00:28:40] Speaker A: But, you know.
[00:28:41] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:28:45] Speaker A: That'S the thing. That's the thing. You have to understand. He's writing all this. He's writing what was described as pulp fiction because that was the cheap paper it was printed on. He was an absolute bottom feeder as far as the publishers he worked for. So he was cranking this stuff out for like 2 cents a word. And so the economics of it very clearly show up in the extremely utilitarian style that he writes in. And in a lot of ways, I wouldn't have it any other way. There's no frills at all. He may go off the rails, but there's no. There aren't any cute little touches. There aren't any frills and furbelows. It's like just straightforward utilitarian writing where you end up with things like opening your refrigerator for a nickel, you know.
He's so wonderful.
[00:29:34] Speaker B: Anyhow, anyhow, great little sideline there.
[00:29:38] Speaker A: How did we get to.
[00:29:40] Speaker B: Not sure.
Yeah, I'd like to. First of all, we'll open up the phone lines so 923-3911. If you want to call in and bring up a subject for discussion or comment or something. And I would like to. We'll start talking about Tech Bros. And I wanted to start off by saying, so there's a whole cast of characters who made a bunch of money starting their careers off with paypal or kind of towards the beginning of the career, Elon Musk, David Sachs, Peter Thiel, none of whom are definitely who we want guiding our future, but they seem to be doing it anyway. And I just wanted to point out that. So there's a whole lot of, if you look in all sorts of media spheres, but more so on the right wing, it seems that there's a lot of talk about central bank digital currencies and how bad and scary and evil those are. And I just want to point out that.
So that could be bad and scary and evil. And it's only as bad and scary and evil as the central bank who, you know, if every American resident got an account at the central bank and we were able to have some funds in there and we got paid, you know, the market rate for, or you know, the, you know, the whatchamacallit rate for the, for what our investments are there and we were able to transfer those to any other central bank account there.
That to me kind of seems what the basic monopoly of the holding of the money and kind of the. Dude, the job of the government is to provide that sort of thing. Whereas instead we have a private banking system and all of these people created their own central bank digital currency. Except for that it's a privatized central bank and they get to make money off of every single time we ship stuff and they get to. Or we exchange funds and they get to get all the information about all of that. And to me, that is actually they privatized what should be a social government function and they've made literally billions of dollars off of it. And they go around running around saying how we have to be all afraid of a central bank digital currency. Whereas I think they're really more, more protecting their own interests because they're the central bank digital currency. And if you're worried about the central bank saying no, you can't spend this welfare check on tobacco or whatever, you should worry if not a lot more about PayPal saying no. Kmud said something that we don't approve of. And therefore you're not allowed to use our service to give KMUD money, you're giving over that power to an entirely different unelected oligocracy.
Anyway. 923-3911. Let us know what you think about that. And could you tell us what you think about the Tech Bros and their seeming ascendancy within. Certainly right wing politics, but American politics in general.
[00:32:40] Speaker A: Well, I hope PayPal's AI isn't like churning away right now as we speak because I'm entirely dependent on PayPal operating in essence like a public utility, right?
And man, I fear central bank digital currency. But you're right, if it were socialized, yes, absolutely. It would be great.
As things are, the concept of like, I mean I'm going to sound like a libertarian and I'm really not, but the, the concept of the government knowing my every single transaction, like I don't like that at all. I think cash is good. And if you believe in any kind of collapse, right, Any kind of like, like, you know, maybe the Internet won't always be present, right? If you believe in any kind of collapse scenario, which seems to me to be not unreasonable, then you want cash, right? You don't want central, you don't want digital currency to kill off cash because one day you might need cash.
[00:33:53] Speaker B: I think I agree with you in large part, but in sort of a larger picture, what sort of collapse are you talking about? And is cash really going to do you any good? Is gold gonna do you any good?
[00:34:06] Speaker A: Well, it depends on the degree, right?
[00:34:09] Speaker B: I say maybe invest in heirloom seeds and building community around you.
[00:34:15] Speaker A: I guess you could probably trade seeds, right? Because they're, you know, you probably could. Yeah.
Who is. Did you ever read the Arch Druids?
I think it was called Retrotopia.
He. It's the Arch. There is a blog, a blog called that was called the Arch Druid. I think he went on to some other venue but he wrote some really good long form fiction and one of them was a retrotopia and it was the United States collapsed after something horrible that happened to the climate. And it like, like one of the retrotopias, everything reverted to like the 1930s, right. Where you could like go and have a suit made at the tailor, right. It was a really good future and they used cash. There were other retrotopias that like were entirely digital and they had like, like plastic raincoats that fell apart and stuff. So for, for the readers, the listeners, rather I would dig out Retrotopia for like the most positive collapse scenario.
[00:35:26] Speaker B: KMUD is a community radio station in the Redwood region of Northern California. Donate to support people powered
[email protected] and we've got a phone call. Caller, you're on the air.
[00:35:45] Speaker C: Hi.
[00:35:46] Speaker D: I'm so happy you guys are talking about everything you're talking about, especially economics and our monetary system I think is something that most of us don't think a whole lot about and don't know that much about. And it's probably the seems to me, maybe the primary, most important thing that is controlling, you know, society and not just ours, but, you know, worldwide.
I was. I wanted to ask if either of you have watched that documentary called the Great Taking by David Webb on YouTube? I mean, have you guys heard of that?
[00:36:30] Speaker B: No, I haven't.
[00:36:32] Speaker D: Okay. It's definitely worth watching. David Webb is. He also wrote a book, and that's what the documentary is kind of about. But he's a hedge, and the book is called the Great Taking.
[00:36:48] Speaker B: He said he's a hedge. Hedge fund manager or a hedge.
[00:36:52] Speaker D: He was up until the very early 2000s, and essentially he said he was able to make a lot of money by watching, you know, the money flow in terms of, like, money production, basically, you know, printing money by the Federal Reserve. So he said basically right around the early 2000s when he got out, he basically said that used to be that, you know, you saw one thing go up and the other stuff would come down. He said around that time, all of a sudden the old models didn't make any sense anymore. And the bottom line that I wanted to say is that he basically makes a very solid case based on facts in terms of case law and banking, financial law, that essentially he claims that basically the, you know, the big collapse, I don't know if that was 2008, where Lehman Brothers, you know, went bankrupt.
That essentially was a test case to see that this particular banking law that has. That the banking industry has gone through state by state making these changes, that basically allows the primary.
I forget what the term is, but essentially whoever was holding, like, your stocks and your. And your accounts and all that stuff in. In some kind of, you know, bank or something like that, like Lehman Brothers, essentially. It wasn't the people who, who had those stocks to begin with that would be able to have a claim on them. It was the, like, primary kind of boulder.
So essentially I'm not describing it well and I just encourage people to go look at that. But essentially it made me realize, like, you can't trust your money in. The bank is not secure. And if there's a financial crisis, which seems like they're kind of in the middle of creating one, that all are, you know, pinning our hopes on our retirements. And so society, security and all that stuff is really highly questionable. But I'm going to get off the air. Thank you, guys. I love your show. Thank you.
[00:39:31] Speaker A: Can I. We. We. We went off on an MMT loop. But I don't think the readers, the readers, your listeners let me.
I don't know If I can. I'm. I'm. I don't even play an economist on tv. Right?
[00:39:46] Speaker B: Take a shot at it.
[00:39:48] Speaker A: All right. The book to read is the Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton, who is very smart, very good, very lucid, and she writes in English. She doesn't, like, have like, you know, like, she's not a mainstream economist writing in stupid italics and blah, blah, blah. So the deficit Myth, and this is relevant because in Washington right now, we're going to have an enormous discussion about how bad the deficit is and blah, blah, blah, and Elon Musk is tweeting on it and blah, blah, blah. And let me see if I can.
The essential concept behind mmt, I would say, is that if society has the resources to perform, to provision the population for some service, the government can provision the population for that service. It's not the money that's relevant, it's the resources.
So that is that. Once you get that in your mind, it's really easy to see why, look, we're sending all this money to Ukraine and the Pentagon and blah, blah, blah. And then the very same people will turn around and say, oh, we don't have the money to provide every American with dental care. Say, right, well, we have the resources. They just don't want to distribute the resources. So, number one, watch the resources like, not the money.
And number two, the slogan is government is not like a household. Right? Everybody thinks that, like, the government sits down at its giant kitchen table and says, how much money do we have coming in? Well, that's how much we can have going out. But that's not so. There is no agency or instrumentality or governmental function to even check that. Right? The government does. Nobody asks what are our revenues and what do the expenditures have to be? That's because government is not like a household and it's not like a business either. The government can never go bankrupt because the government controls the money.
The government, like, go ahead.
[00:42:18] Speaker B: I'll take a stab at it. When people, you know, describe monetary system in two words or less, and callers, when you do call in, you'll just hear a couple clicks and you'll be on hold and you'll come in at the next little break. So to me, I say, you need a certain amount of money in the system for people to spend the money they have, and you need a certain amount to spend and consume. And if there's more money than people need, then you get inflation. And if there's less money than people need, then you get deflation because there's less money to go around. So things are going to be, you know, it's going to mess with the prices because you don't have that same amount you're changing in. And so the government, if there are the resources available, the government can print more money if there is things that people need to spend it on and those things exist for them to buy it on. So instead of saying oh, and so where does the money come from in our society now enough to give us what we need? It comes from the private banking system which is loaned out to people who already have assets at interest. So there is literally trillions of dollars being created out of thin air. And that does have effects on inflation and whatnot. And it's mainly because they give that to people who already have assets to bid up asset prices. So essentially, you know, rich people get a bunch of money printed and it gets piled into their assets and their assets get worth more and more and more and more, but farther and farther divorced from the real economy. And at some point we have a crash where people say all this money doesn't really exist. All the resources to back up all this money that the banks have loaned us and now we've given back all this interest and there's not more money being loaned for us to give back as interest and it's all going to fall apart. And that's when the government steps in and uses everybody's resources to pay off the debts of those multi billionaires and you know, multi hundred millionaires. And so they take the fake, non existent, frothy, not real money and turn it real at the expense of everybody's dollars that they have in their pocket. But when you make a bad business deal, you are not going to get bailed out by the federal government, you know, because you're not a job creator or some crazy notion like that. So you don't need to worry about the creation of the money. You need to worry. So if we need more education, it's not an issue of writing a billion dollar check for the Department of education to hire more teachers. The question is, have we invested enough in teachers colleges so that we have more teachers to hire? Because if there's more teachers to hire and there's more construction people and more boards to make more schools, then you can print that money and put them to work, no problem. The problem is if there aren't more teachers or more doctors or whatever, and you're trying to throw money at that system without creating more of the resources, well then you're going to have Inflation.
So anyway, we have. Oh yeah, please do.
[00:45:31] Speaker A: I'm going to like, like step onto dangerous territory for me here because I'm not an economist. But if you. We don't really quote, unquote, print money because think about it, right? It isn't like we print it and it just like vanishes into the air. What we do is we issue bonds that somebody buys and collects interest on, right? So those bondholders are also extremely rich people. So we have the rich people whining. The first thing we do is we have the rich people collecting all this interest on the money that we don't even have to loan them in the first place. And then they whine because there's too much of it. It's really quite remarkable.
[00:46:12] Speaker B: And so instead we should have an asset tax because I think the theory is, well, these capitalists, they made all this money because they invest so wisely, they're making good return on their investment. So how about saying if you've got more than $100 million, then we're going to have a 5% asset tax on that because obviously you're good at investing. So if you're able to make 10% on it, then your nest egg will grow. But at some point people are not able to make wiser investments. So they're really glad to have something safe to put it in at the treasury at a couple percent profit because they don't have to worry about it and it's not going to be at risk. So I think everybody should be able to put their meager savings in at that small amount of interest. And we shouldn't go around begging for excess capital from the capitalists. We should be taxing it at 5%.
So anyway, we've got a phone call. Caller, you're on the air.
[00:47:06] Speaker C: Hi. Thanks. I like what you were saying just a couple minutes ago. I felt like you were really on the right track, but then you started getting idealistic again about teachers and education and that's not what the people in charge want. And I have a pretty different view of this whole situation, like about the country being broke or the government can't grow broke. I think the national debt now is like over $30 trillion, isn't it?
[00:47:36] Speaker B: That sounds about right.
[00:47:38] Speaker C: Yeah, it's pretty high.
And you know exactly to who that is owed is a big question. And I would just really encourage people to go to GlobalResearch CA and type in CBDC Central Bank Digital currency so they could decide for themselves by reading like 30 articles. They got 30 short articles on there in the archives about what exactly these central bank digital currencies are. And then they can decide for themselves, you know, because for me to explain it would not be good because I would just go straight to the fact that it's a gargantuan, heinous Jewish conspiracy. And I would take it from that perspective. But anyway, people around here ought to be interested in the fact that it's a cash factor. You know, that's one thing you don't seem to have brought up is that the control that they're going to have is, is like the difference between cash and having, you know, digital records of.
[00:48:40] Speaker B: Everything you've ever done. Hey, caller, how, how in your mind is a CBDC different than a Visa card?
[00:48:50] Speaker C: Right. The, the thing that I want to. I agree with a lot of what you were saying about that, but, but like I said, it's a big subject. And the thing I want to bring up was what happened. Somebody said 2008 and that bailout and how you guys talked about too, how like the rich get these things that we don't get and people really don't understand what happened with that too big to fail thing. The, the, the government actually said that they shelled out $835 billion. I think it was the number that they said.
[00:49:25] Speaker B: Yeah, the quantitative easing, which just means the Fed printed money to buy the bonds instead of.
[00:49:31] Speaker A: They did a lot more.
[00:49:32] Speaker B: Yeah, I thought it was more like.
[00:49:34] Speaker C: 5 trillion altogether that they gave this money, no questions asked, to these companies like Merrill lynch and Citibank and AIG. AIG, that was founded by guy from Fort Bragg, actually. Yeah, the CIA agent.
[00:49:51] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, I always, I heard 75 billion.
[00:49:54] Speaker C: Now I remember exactly. They said it was $875 billion that they gave of our tax money to these giant criminal operations like aig. They call it an insurance company. It's a money laundering thing. Intelligence agencies. And Citibank was the other poster child that that is the most notorious firm on Wall street for ties to drug cartels. The biggest drug cartel, of course, is our own government. But anyway, like this whole notion of idealism and what's going on, like they sit at a kitchen table or something. And everything that people think about how these things work is. I disagree 100%. And some of the evidence is what, what came out about that 875 billion, no questions asked. They eventually came out later and said that that was a number that they just made up. They actually said this in a press conference. They said that we just made up this number $875 billion.
[00:50:52] Speaker B: And we're almost out of time to.
[00:50:54] Speaker C: The American people that it was a large number and the actual number was more like 14 trillion. Okay, you guys carry on. And it's a good subject. Thanks a lot.
Check out global research to learn about central bank digital currencies. A lot of good short articles on there.
[00:51:12] Speaker B: Okay, well, first of all, I'd like to say that as a Scotsman, I think you can make an awfully good case to say that the Scotsmen are to blame and are responsible for capitalism and all the great bankers and the Astors and all those people. So I support the Scottish conspiracy personally. And what do you think of the news source he was mentioning or do you know it?
[00:51:37] Speaker A: I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole.
[00:51:40] Speaker B: Okay, and do you have other. I guess we're getting towards the end. Would you like to recommend news organizations that you would like to touch? Actually, here we have one more caller. I usually don't do this, but caller, you get 10 seconds. What do you think?
[00:52:01] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:52:04] Speaker B: Five seconds.
Three, two, one. Okay, thanks for calling.
Back to you, Lambert.
[00:52:15] Speaker A: That last call was so interesting.
There is a.
Let's do this again and have like. And think about disentangling facts and myths. Like, for example, the 108, $75 billion is in fact correct. That was the money Congress allocated and before that the Fed allocated trillions. So that part is factual. Other pieces were not so factual. And it's hard to like, our discourse is like really corrupt at this point. It would be great to think about disentangling it.
[00:53:01] Speaker B: Okay, could you maybe in our last five minutes, and I'm sorry, I'm not going to be taking this last caller because we are out of time. We have about four minutes left. Although Shaka isn't here, so, you know, we'll go up to the wire and maybe a little longer, but he usually slides in in just about 30 seconds or so. Could you maybe give some.
Maybe both, other than Naked Capitalism, of course. Maybe information sources that are useful to you and maybe even some general sort of advice on how to assess an information source.
[00:53:34] Speaker A: Oh, that's challenging.
Back in the day, when the crash was happening, there were a ton of good economics blogs. Just an absolute. It was just a. It was glorious. It's not so glorious now.
I'm hard pressed to think of another generalist venue other than Naked Capitalism.
Boy.
And I'm also hard pressed because I have an enormous list of sources that I go through.
[00:54:13] Speaker B: Yeah, I know. Exactly. Every day. I know you're going through hundreds together.
[00:54:17] Speaker A: In my mind.
[00:54:21] Speaker B: I guess I could say look at water cooler every weekday at 2:00pm well, sorry, 11:11am here on the west coast you have a lot of links to things and you can.
[00:54:34] Speaker A: Start figuring stuff out forces there. In my own like aphoristic way, you've got to like, kind of like read it for a bit to get all the jokes. But the jokes are there to like help you decode things.
Like for just numbers Economics generally, like if you accept capitalism, calculated risk is good because it follows the government statistics. You know, if you accept the government statistics, I go in the business section, I go for numbers. I go to a place called Trading Economics, which just has all the government reports like from the BLS and blah, blah, blah. That's very good.
There is a, like, if you can stand like academics, but you sort of have to read what the professional people write through a prism to have it make sense. But at least they're not out there trying to like control your brain with dopamine. Whoops. So there's like a publication called Vox EU that has a lot of good academic writing and there's also a source called INET Economics, which is MMT focused and it has very, very good writing on political economy generally.
So INET Economics is also very good.
Boy, I don't know. We should have this discussion again and I'll make a list.
How would that be?
[00:56:15] Speaker B: Okay, well, yeah, you're welcome to come back. I'm hopefully. I mean, yeah, maybe even next month. I have a couple feelers out there and Dan, if you're listening, we're trying to do cold weather olives and I.
[00:56:27] Speaker A: Don'T mean to be pushy, I'm just.
[00:56:29] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I love having you be pushy. Excellent. Well, you're always welcome to come back. And people who might not have heard of the beginning as Lambert is retiring from Naked Capitalism in the next couple of months. And I'm glad if that means he has more time for the KMUD community because this has been a lot of fun.
[00:56:46] Speaker A: I'm going to have a new endeavor of some sort. So that will. That will. That will. I'll still be writing online. I think so. So we'll have to see.
[00:56:56] Speaker B: Okay, well, maybe I'll just bring up the theme music. And thank you for joining us. So, Lambert Streetther, any last statements?
[00:57:05] Speaker A: Oh, I should have like a clever tagline. Insert clever tagline here, close bracket.
[00:57:10] Speaker B: Okay, thank you so much and I look forward to having you back.
[00:57:15] Speaker A: Very good. Thank you. Bye bye.
[00:57:19] Speaker B: This has been a K Mutt Podcast to listen to other shows and more episodes of this show. Find us on all platforms where you get your podcast and also on our website kmud.org.
