Civics 101 (Part I)

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
For a long time, I convinced myself that I was
an average student. Average in grade school, average in high school,
average in college. I got by, got some good grades,
did well in the classes I liked. I remember studying
in college, cramming from midterms and finals. Some of it
must have stuck, because when I hear some of the
so called experts talking on television, podcasts, and radio these days,

(00:23):
I'm astounded, stupefied at how little they know about basic
American civics. They appear to have little grasp of the
basics of our judicial system, due process, the appellate process,
how Congress works, the three branches of government, basic foreign affairs,
and economics. I learned all that stuff forty five years ago,

(00:48):
but today I wonder how many else really get it,
And it's kind of depressing. This past weekend, hearing partisans
lamb based the President and the White House over tariffs
and the subsequent effect on the US stock market and
economy was infuriating. Watching as a collection of low information
fellow Americans, including US Senators, assembled to protest doze in

(01:11):
President Trump, I was struck by the depth and the
breadth of their ignorance. It was clear they don't know
against what they are protesting. At least, during the Civil
Rights movement in the Vietnam War, protesters knew why they
were there, what they were protesting, and what they wanted
in return. But today you must deduce that they want

(01:34):
criminal aliens brought back to this country. They want waste,
fraud and abuse in government, and they want the United
States economy to die. In short, these folks don't know
and don't know that they don't know. So here goes.
There have been two industrial revolutions in American history, from

(01:55):
seventeen fifty to eighteen fifty and from eighteen fifty to
nineteen thirteen. During those combined one hundred and sixty three years,
the United States dwarfed the world in manufacturing. We built
more things, bigger, better, and faster than mortal man had
ever known. We invented things like the telephone, electricity, gasoline

(02:17):
to power the automobile. We just invented air planes. We
modernized steel, concrete, plastics, which allowed us to build bridges
and tunnels. We found cures for diseases, perfected surgical techniques,
lowered infant mortality rates to near zero. And we did
it without one dime of income tax. We did it

(02:39):
with one source of income tariffs. Ninety five percent of
our country's revenue before nineteen thirteen came from tariffs on imports.
We've also had two major depressions in this country, from
eighteen seventy three to eighteen seventy nine and from nineteen
twenty nine to nineteen thirty nine. That's it, just two.
The first one thanks to over speculation on railroads after

(03:02):
the Civil War. That's all we built. There were also
some man made disasters like fires in Chicago and Boston,
and we had an influenza outbreak, and we demonetized silver
bad stuff. The second one, in nineteen twenty nine, came
after a Wall Street crash of the stock market. At
the time, the Dow Jones Industrial average was five thousand.

(03:23):
Bottomed out three years later at twelve hundred seventy five
percent drop. For comparison, in the last week, the Dow
has dropped sixteen percent, but started at forty four thousand.
It was bad in twenty nine, but the government's monetary
policy made it much worse. The Fed those days literally

(03:44):
contracted the money supply. There was no cash to buy, borrow,
or invest, so that's when the economy collapsed man made,
which in nineteen thirty two led to Franklin Roosevelt's rise.
He was a raw socialist, cloaking his massive government spending,
massive deficits, massive taxes, and what he called the New Deal. Well,

(04:05):
history proves it was a bad deal. Today some say
the same thing is about to happen and economic collapse.
That is categorically, factually, definitively historically not possible. Trump is
trying to shrink the government, shrink spending, cut taxes, relax
access to credit, designed to do two things. Wean the

(04:26):
economy off of government money and provide for the consumer.
His plan is to start a third Industrial revolution. Did
you realize that in twenty twenty three we imported eight
hundred and fifty nine billion in capital goods, not including cars,
electric devices, computers, teleco equipment, industrial machinery, semiconductors. Translation, we

(04:47):
don't make anything anymore either. That changes our our economic
future is very iffy. In Part two, Tomorrow