With so many businesses shutdown, the U.S. economy is struggling. But while so many people want to blame the virus for the economy, it was the government who caused it to tumble.

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Links: 

• Feardom 
• Tuttle Twins and the Creature from Jekyll Island

Here’s a transcript of our conversation:

Connor: Hey, Brittany.

Brittany: Hi, Connor.

Connor: You know, this pains me to say. Well, we’ve been dealing with this, you know, pandemic situation for over a year now. And I mean, that’s just crazy, at this point. I mean, frankly, it’s hard, to remember what life before COVID was like. I find it interesting when I talked to young people about what it used to be like to go to the airport. Yeah. you know, anyone could go to the gate, you know, inside the airport to see off a friend or welcome someone, and, you know, you wouldn’t be kind of felt up and have them go through your belongings and all these things. And, that’s a world that young people today have never known. And, it kind of feels like we’re gonna have that happen as a result of COVID-19. There’s all these new normals that, even as the, you know, death rate subsides from COVID and the world moves on, we’re gonna still have all of these new behaviors and new restrictions, that kind of remain in place. I remember the first time I saw people walking around with masks on, I felt like, you know, this was some kind of like a dystopian nightmare, that’s now become the reality of our everyday life. And the troubling thing is people are kind of getting used to it. they’re climatizing to this. they’re being conditioned, I feel like, to accept this as the new normal and, are being told even now. Like, oh, yeah, okay, you’ll, you’re vaccinated. Fine. You still have to wear a mask. Oh, no not one mask, double masks.

Brittany: Yeah. Yeah. That’s hilarious.

Connor: Triple masks, right? Like the more the merrier. Even though we, the CDC once said that masks aren’t effective, and, you know, hint, they’re actually not, but no, still wear them. You know, that we’ve businesses closing companies that have had to shut down permanently because of these lockdowns that occurred during, COVID. And so what I wanna discuss with you today is this question of, you know, what has killed the economy with all the economic problems we’ve had over the last year of businesses closing? Was it COVID or was it the government’s response to COVID?

Brittany: I like this question, and I already know my answer, but we can, we can dig into that after. But I wanna bring an example. So just last night actually, I learned that one of my favorite restaurants closed, and I try not to let eat a lot of carbs, try to do the keto diet, but every Friday I order chicken, you know, fettuccini Alfredo from this Italian restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia that has been around since like the 1950s or sixties. So this is like an old mom-and-pop establishment. And I look forward to this every Friday. Like, that’s my thing. And I tried to order yesterday only to find out the restaurant is now permanently closed, thanks to COVID. They weren’t able to stay open. and this is not unusual, you know, this is in Arlington where I live in Virginia, I see this everywhere. There are businesses that are just closing permanently because they couldn’t afford to stay in business with the shutdowns, you know? So the last year has devastated the economy. A and the government’s response has been like, let’s print more money. Let’s give out stimulus checks to people. A and instead of just letting businesses open up and letting people choose whether or not they want to go to them, you know, if you are scared of COVID, if you are somebody who’s very high risk, don’t leave your house. And I’m sorry to be so blunt about that, but that’s how I feel for people like you and I Connor, who are relatively young and healthy, there’s no reason for us to not be going to these businesses and contributing to the economy. So, you know, you Yeah, I think you ask a great question.

Connor: I, to determine whether this is political or not, and, the sense of, is this true like public health and science, that’s, you know, shutting down businesses and, crippling the economy, or is it politics? I, two stories come to mind, of late, and we saw this recently with, California and New York, two of the heaviest lockdown states.

Brittany: And just regulated states in general.

Connor: Very true. Yeah. They’re blue liberal, very kind of big government states, in general. And that’s kind of the approach that the politicians in those states tend to take to problems. And so here comes COVID, and of course, these central, planning, you know, big government bureaucrats and, government leaders, they did what they know-how, and that is all these government orders and bossing people around. And so in California, right? You had Governor Newsom, issuing all these lockdown orders statewide and back at a point when, I don’t remember the exact numbers, but it’s something like, you know, 2000 cases a day or something like this, right? Oh. And we’re not gonna be able to reopen until you know, that number gets down. Well, of course, after many, many, many, many months, people are starting to get fed up and they’re starting to push back. And there’s a recall, petition. In other words, there were a bunch of people who wanted to get, governor Newsom to no longer be the governor. That’s a kinda a recall effort.

Brittany: That’s how Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor years ago. Wasn’t he?

Connor: That’s right. And, so this recall effort starts gaining steam, which just means that there were a lot of people who were really upset with them, and they were trying to find a way to remove him from office. And so he starts changing his tune, and he starts saying, oh, well, you know, yeah, we’re gonna start reopening the economy and things are going great, and, so let’s reopen. And, but if you look at the numbers when he starts saying this, they’re, three times as bad as they were back when he shut everything down and said, oh, we can’t. And so, of course, like I, if you’re going off of their statistics about case numbers, which I think is problematic on its own because just because there’s cases doesn’t mean, you know, that those are horrible cases. I had COVID, it was hardly anything for me. Like, it was like a cold plus I lost my sense of, smell and taste for a few days, but then it came back and I’m fine. And so, even though there’s a lot of cases, that doesn’t mean that like people are dying left and right? And, it just means, could mean that they’re testing more. And so as they test even more than, of course, the case number is gonna go up. I mean, think of the flu, right? everyone’s saying, get the flu shot. Get the flu shot every single year people aren’t going out and getting their nose swabbed and spitting in tubes to test for the flu. And, if they were, then, you know, the nightly news would say, oh my gosh, there’s all these cases of the flu.

Brittany: And the flu is gone. Now. Have you seen this? There’s no flu cases.

Connor: Yeah. Poof. Poof. And so here in California, here’s the governor when the numbers that he was relying on to shut the economy, which again, I think those numbers are silly, but the numbers that he’s relying on, were now three times as bad as when he shut down the economy. And he is trying to say, oh, oh yeah, let’s reopen. Well, of course, it’s because he’s facing political pressure. He wants to keep his power. And, so he’s responding to similarly in New York, Governor Cuomo, you know, is, pushing, to close everything long ago. And, oh, the numbers look bad. And, you know, until we can get those numbers down, we can’t reopen restaurants. And of course, you know, New York city especially depends on a lot of tourism and all these vibrant restaurants with amazing different types of foods and so forth. And, if there’s no customers there, right? They out of business, many of them did and have. And, so now again, the numbers are way worse using those same numbers that they relied upon. And they’re already reopening stuff. Oh, we gotta rebuild the economy, let’s reopen New York. And it’s like, well, wait a minute. You, shut everything down using the government based on these numbers that were way better back then than they are today. So why, after you’ve destroyed all these businesses, are you now saying, Hey, things look great, let’s reopen when the numbers you relied on are worse than they were. When you shut down the economy to begin with, that’s when, you know, it’s not about the science. It’s not about the actual public health problem. This is politics. And these politicians are now trying to shift blame and, evade accountability. In other words, they don’t wanna be held responsible for what they did. And so they’re gonna make up these stories of, oh, things are looking better now. And Oh, buy Biden is president. Now we can reopen the economy. It’s it that to me screams it’s the government and not a virus that is causing the problems with our economy.

Brittany: Absolutely. And there, are two points I wanna make. The first one is, we have to be very careful about this because as we’ve mentioned on numerous past episodes, you know when nine 11 happened, I don’t think any of us thought the changes were gonna be permanent. You know, I don’t think we thought we were gonna have to deal with TSA all, you know, and that these, you know, the Patriot Act was gonna go into effect, which only exacerbated made worse, you know, the government spying, which we later found out. But here we are, what, how many years for over 20 years.

Connor: Wow. Yeah.

Brittany: Right? Or about, yeah. This will be the 20th year of nine 11, and we’re still dealing with this. TSA has proven itself to be useless. They fail their security tests when people can test there, you know, their ability to sense out threats, they fail 95% of the time, and we never get that back. Now, something else I wanna bring up that is related, but is, it just makes my blood boil, is a lot of local, governments have been offering relief to small businesses, but in the state of Colorado, they allocated 4 million to help small businesses. Here’s the problem. You cannot be a white-owned business to get the money. and this is, I mean, a quality under the law, this is a problem. So you can only be a minority-owned business to get the money back. And I understand that everybody is struggling, right? So I think it’s great that minorities can get this money, but there’s actually, they’re leaving a big part of the population out. So the government is actually choosing who gets to survive and who doesn’t get to survive. And that’s something that people of all races should be just angry about. You know, we have equality under the law for a reason. Nobody is supposed to be judged based on the color of their skin. You know, we’re supposed to be just on being individuals. And here you have the state of Colorado saying, Nope, you get to get relief. Nope. You don’t get to get relief based on the color of your skin. So the government has botched this in so many ways. And it’s really showing the government’s true colors, I think.

Connor: And, what’s important to note here, Britney, where does that money come from? Us right? The right, the government does not have money. They don’t have, you know, a savings account with all this magic money that they can use, right? It’s, as you know, from the Tuttle twins, and the creature from Jekyll Island, they’re printing this money, they’re creating it out of thin air. The Federal Reserve just says, poof. You know, the economy now has all this extra money. And what does that do? It devalues all of our existing money. So all the moms and dads out there that have been working hard at their job and saving for retirement and putting money in the savings account, that money that we worked so hard for is now worth less than it was when we earned it, because they’ve printed new money into the economy, and they’ve gone into debt. Are the government’s debt is you know, doesn’t, what is it? It’s, I think it’s nearing $30 trillion.

Brittany: Yeah. Ridiculous.

Connor: And, who has to pay for that? Well, you know, it’s, basically making our kids and our grandkids have to deal with those financial consequences. We’re just kicking the can down the road and saying, let’s make up all this new money and let’s give it out and we’ll deal with the consequences later. And, I don’t like that. I like personal accountability. I want to hold people responsible for their actions. I want to figure out my own economic situation. I don’t want my unborn grandchildren or frankly, other people’s grandchildren to have to pay for me. if my business is destroyed, I wanna hold the government accountable today. I don’t want them to bribe me with, you know, this new money that we’re gonna make people in the future be the ones to kind of pay the price. If you look at the purchasing power of a dollar, there’s these interesting charts. You can just Google this online, you know, purchasing power of the dollar over time. And you’ll see it’s, cratering. I think it’s lost like 94% since 1913, what the dollar used to be versus, because they keep print, print, print, printing more money right now, the dollar’s worthless that we talk about this in the creature from the Jekyll Island book when the kids are, you know, hearing from, their grandma and grandpa, how the, what was it? The ticket to go into the movies popcorn, and candy, right? These things all used to be, oh, this was a nickel back in my day, and now it’s like $4. Right? And, so that is the problem that the government is, is crippling the economy, and then it’s making matters worse by flooding the economy with new money to, put a bandaid on the problem. The wound that they created, oh, sorry, sorry, we shut down the economy here, have all this money that we’re just gonna make things worse because now we’re inflating the currency and, creating these challenges. That, to me is just the height of irresponsibility. It’s almost like a double problem. They’ve created one problem with COVID shutting down these businesses, and then they’ve created this longer-lasting economic problem by, the response and the, all these trillions of dollars that they’re injecting into the economy.

Brittany: I think to answer your original question, Connor, this is not covid, right? And, and you’ll hear politicians say, COVID ruined the economy. No, covid didn’t ruin the economy. The government’s response and this is mostly actually local government’s response, and we might see this change under Biden, but local governments, especially governors abusing their emergency powers, that’s who’s ruined the economy. Those are the people who’ve ruined the economy.

Connor: I think that’s exactly right. And we need to be on the watch because these politicians are going to try and escape accountability. They’re gonna try, oh, we’re, in it with you. No sorry, you caused this mess. You’re, not in this with me, right? Like, this is your fault. And, we need to make that very clear. This is not a virus. We can, get through any public health problem and not cripple the economy and not shut things down. As you said, Brittany, people can manage their own risk, and if they’re at a higher risk, they can change their behavior. You know, maybe have, Uber Eats or DoorDash deliver all your meals so you don’t have to go out.

Brittany: Which I do.

Connor: Yeah. Some of us do it and we’re perfectly healthy. We’re just maybe lazy or busy. and so, you know, ma manage your own risks, but for other people who, you know, I mean, it’s silly now, they’re still saying, oh, even if you’ve already had COVID, and even for those who get the vaccine, you still have to wear masks and social distance. And then I’m like, where is the science in all of this? right? Like they’re just making this stuff up on the fly. And the double Ma, like, this is political. This is the government. And, for the parents out there, in fact, we’ll put this in the show notes page, wrote a book, I wrote a book years ago called Feardom, which we’ve discussed before, how the government uses fear to control our behavior, to take power from us. And this is precisely what we’re seeing today. People are scared. They want the government to solve the problem. The government says, sure, I’ll solve the problem. Just give me more of your freedoms. And so we do. And then we have the new normal, right? And we have the new restrictions that we live under, and the government has grown, and they’re never gonna give it back. As Ronald Reagan said, the closest thing to Eternal Life on Earth is a government program. And, we see that time and time again. So that is the worry. That is something we need to be on guard against. so parents, check out Feardom, all you kids out there, keep reading your Tuttletwins books. That’s how we save the world. And until next time, Brittany, we’ll talk to you later.

Brittany: Talk to you later.