Episode 208: “How Policy Responses to the Pandemic Continue to Shatter Our World” with Jeffrey Tucker
Release Date: 11/23/2022
The Bill Walton Show
This week, Americans for Limited Government published a provocative and insightful piece about the banking system asking, "Has the United States banking system become too big to save?” In the past three years, to finance massive federal spending, the Treasury has issued almost $8 trillion new treasury bonds with almost $4 trillion bought by US banks during the tail-end of the Fed’s era of zero interest rates. US Treasury Bonds? Sounds like a safe investment for a bank, but here’s the problem. After 40 years of relatively stable prices, we now have raging inflation...
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Newly released documents show that the White House has played a major role in censoring Americans on social media. Email exchanges between Rob Flaherty, the White House’s director of digital media, and social-media executives prove the companies put Covid censorship policies in place in response to relentless, coercive pressure from the White House—not voluntarily as the government has claimed. The emails emerged last month in the discovery phase of Missouri v. Biden, a free-speech case brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana and four private...
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The Biden Administration - and a majority of Republicans in Congress - persist in their bellicose rhetoric about an “existential war to defend Ukraine” telling the Russians that “we're going to destroy your regime and dissolve the Russian Federation.” Really? After sending more than $100 billion to Ukraine to fight a proxy war against Russia, have they thought through whether the US is capable of doing this? They are calling for actions that only a global hegemon might possess. But a hegemon that no longer controls its own borders, has crumbling critical infrastructure, hollowed...
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For an excellent primer about how the politics of our over-complicated state and local tax systems operate, this conversation with Grover Norquist is absolutely the place to start. It's comprehensive, easy to understand and often humorous, as only Grover knows how to make it. (When Grover is not doing taxes, he’s doing stand-up comedy. For real, and he’s good at it.) As founder of Americans for Tax Reform, which opposes all tax increases as a matter of principle, no one in modern times has fought harder than Grover Norquist to shrink the state by keeping the issue of high taxes...
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Events are picking up pace rapidly on the world stage and I’ve asked my frequent guest Brandon Weichert to join me to help explain what’s happening. Brandon, geopolitical analyst and publisher of The Weichert Report, is among the best at connecting the dots globally with his bold and unnerving forecasts. Among the many issues brewing that we get into: Russia is amassing up to 400 thousand troops on Ukraine's borders for a winter offensive, objectives unknown. Nuclear escalation looms. The Chinese sent a satellite balloon hovering ominously across the entire United States as it...
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As the Russian invasion of Ukraine grinds on, it’s nearly impossible for the ordinary observer to figure out what's really happening. One of the problems is that war news is generated primarily by Ukrainian propaganda, which is endlessly parroted in the Western media. Anytime there is contradictory information – for example, mention of Ukraine’s high casualties – Kiev pushes back so hard that Western leaders go silent. But what is clear is that looming on the horizon is the very real possibility of a nuclear war, as more and more European countries are drawn in to the...
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“This whole climate hysteria seems to focus on a molecule - carbon dioxide (CO2) - which we humans exhale and which we release into the atmosphere by burning so-called fossil fuels,” explains my guest on this episode Jerome Corsi, PhD. But what are realities of CO2, who is behind the agenda to demonize it and - most importantly - who benefits? Dr. Corsi, author of the tour de force book The Truth about Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change: Exposing Climate Lies in an Age of Disinformation, has the answers. Drawing extensively on scholarly published peer-reviewed...
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If someone wanted to weaken, then destroy a sovereign and free United States, what would they do? Well they might start with surrendering its energy independence. Make war on reliable fossil fuels oil and gas, coal and nuclear power. Induce it to rely on wind and solar energy sources that are certain to lead to rolling blackouts and the ultimate failure of America’s electrical grid. And while they’re at it, persuade America to rely on China for most all of its wind and solar energy production technologies. Inflate its currency. Have the Federal Reserve print trillions of dollars of...
info_outlineThe world has suffered and continues to suffer catastrophic economic and social damage from the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 - but not from the virus itself.
Rather we’re in the midst of a continuing global crisis created by governments’ policy responses to the pandemic.
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Trillions of dollars of Federal “relief” spending
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Financed by the Federal Reserve massively increasing the money supply
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And the countless coercive rules and restrictions implemented to stop a Covid virus that came anyway.
The result is the highest inflation in 40 years, which is not slowing down but accelerating. Of course there are other forces at work, like the Biden Administration’s war on fossil fuels, but the root causes of inflation were in place before that.
To understand this better and what we need to be concerned about next, in this episode I talk with the great Jeffrey A. Tucker, the founder of the Brownstone Institute and author of the recently published “Liberty or Lockdown.” Our topic: his speech at Hillsdale College and related article about“The Economic Disaster of the Pandemic Response.”
From the beginning - and starting with Donald Trump’s response - the idea of “the economy” – viewed as mechanistic, money-centered, mostly about the stock market, and detached from anything truly important – was pitted against public health and lives,” reminds Jeffrey.
When governments started declaring some businesses essential and others non-essential what they did not understand is that everything in a economy is interconnected. It's woven. It’s never obvious, but if you cut even one thread, all of a sudden the whole fabric can start to unravel. You cannot just turn off an economy and expect that you can restart it with a snap of your fingers.
The same thing was done with medical procedures and treatments and hospital beds. Some were declared “essential”, others not. Perversely, spending on healthcare plummeted during the pandemic. Non-virus health conditions worsened and life expectancy in America fell.
“We lost two years of education, substance abuse and addiction rose and hundreds of thousands of businesses were destroyed,” says Jeffrey. “Vaccine mandates led to more than a million people being displaced from their jobs.”
In the almost three years after the virus emerged from Wuhan China, “we face an economic crisis without precedent in our lifetimes, the longest period of declining real income in the post-war period, a health and educational crisis, an exploding national debt plus inflation at a 40-year high, continued and seemingly random shortages, dysfunction in labor markets that defies all models, the breakdown of international trade, a collapse in consumer confidence not seen since we started tracking it, and a combustible level of political division.”
So here we are. We all need to be deeply concerned about not just this one crisis, but authorities response to the inevitable next “crises” as well.
“To this day, the educated elites in the public health establishment defend every last thing they did. Not a single power that they used to lock us down before has been diminished,” worries Jeffrey. “Yes, the courts have cut this policy or that policy a little bit here and there, too little, too late. But in general, all the policy, all the powers that they had before, they have now still, and they will use them again.”
We can’t afford to sit on the sidelines and let this happen. Listen in as Jeffrey and I explore what happened and what we need to do to prevent it next time.