Transkripsjon
and and yesterday uh wall street journal and others went through that list and a wall street general reporter noticed that the iran institute was on the list that it received a ppp and immediately tweeted that because to the i don’t know innocent ignorant unthinking mind that seems like the height of hypocrisy he is an institution that doesn’t believe in government bailouts doesn’t believe in governments in government spending on any of this kind of stuff and it is receiving funds from the government and that of course created this massive storm anybody from you know people like the wall street journal uh but then of course uh
uh what’s his name robert had to step in and publish this old video which really slams in rand which i have posted a video response to a a few months ago and then stephanie kelton uh of modern monetary theory the the economic advisor to um uh to uh what’s his name bernie sanders uh jumped in uh accusing the admin institute of all kinds of things and it’s like everybody’s this shock and then people are just shocked i’m an institute taking ppp money horrific
if anybody had actually done their research which i know i know today in the world today you don’t expect reporters to do god forbid they were discovered that as far back as uh late april and may the einman institute put out an a a written piece by a board member harry ben swanger and by a board member by an employee chief philosophy officer at the institute on kagate which actually said we’re going to take bpp money and here’s why and the annual institute did an entire webinar i think it was over an hour long on why in times like this it’s it well not just in times like this generally it’s okay to take money from the government in the right context
and we link to an iran article where she talks about the fact that getting money from the government if you are against getting money from the government is moral that indeed nobody else is justified in getting money from the government because they’re the ones who are advocating for they’re the ones who are promoting theft but if you’re actually the one who is against theft who is promoting actively limited government limited to the protection of individual rights government that does not use the excuse of democracy to steal from some to take from some to give to others government does not destroy the economy by intervening and by oppressing us and by telling us what we can and cannot do
indeed if you’re advocating against all that you are the one you’re the only one for which it’s small to accept the money it would be immoral for you to say no no because i’m one of the good guys i’m not going to get the money and let and let the bad guys let the people promote these ideas let them benefit from this that would be absurd that would be suicidal that would be insane the fact is that the government takes our money if we can get some of it back why wouldn’t we i mean i know that when i do my taxes or when i have my account to do my taxes my ask of my accountant is use every loophole every exemption every possible thing to minimize the amount of money i pay taxes even though when i talk about taxes when i argue about taxes i either argue that there should be no taxes
but in the world today i don’t you know that’s that’s not realistic i argue that taxes should be flat simple with no deductions no exclusions and yet i take advantage of every deduction exclusion that there is i would be an idiot not to so i’m going to be penalized because i take a rational position now somebody asked does a right pay taxes no airway does not but its employees do every single one of them employees who during the crisis in march because we saw a shrinkage of contributions and we didn’t know where this was heading where the hours were cut dramatically and by the way we’ll talk about why why we didn’t know what was happening and why you know the economy did as badly as it is and why contributions went down and ppp is going to pay them salaries so they pay taxes they’re getting restitution for all the taxes they paid over the years our contributors pay taxes all those contributors who now had to cut their contributions pay taxes
but it’s more than that it’s not just the taxes taxes is one dimension of this where we’re getting restitution we’re getting some of our tax money back but it’s more than that the government actively engaged in destroying the economy yes there was a virus yes the virus was pretty horrific maybe certainly in some places it was it is the government our government at the federal and state level that did not get its act together that held up testing indeed you know made it impossible for the private enterprise to test to develop tests to roll out tests treatments are being held up by the fda by the cdc so we have a government that completely utterly unequivocally screwed up their response to covert and then they scooted up so badly that the virus got a control which led state governments which had already screwed it up by not testing you know uh testing and isolating and tracking they’d screwed it up
so they shut down the economy by shutting down economy they took away people’s livelihood they destroyed businesses and there was a good chance they were going to destroy the iron man institute because we rely on contributions from people who have businesses who are now being destroyed through government action to compensate for this this is typical government you do something statist which is irrational and emo and then you try to compensate it by doing more irrationally more stuff like distributing future savings by printing money and handing it out well as an organization that was advocating for a rational approach to the virus a rational response that would not have required shutting down the economy
would have not have acquired isolating everybody who at home would have not have acquired lockdowns suffering as a consequence of what the government had done why would we not take the money as compensation for the damage they were causing us compensation for their irrationality in allah’s fair economy in a larger fair world there would be nobody to get this from we advocate against government bloods we advocate against government stimuli we get advocates against government involvement and we out argue against government prohibitions and restrictions that made this crisis
a crisis there was no need if the government had approached this crisis appropriately no need to shut down the economy no need to destroy people’s livelihoods destroy people’s businesses destroy people’s jobs there’s no need to have a three trillion dollar stimulus package and then to tax people in order to pay that stimulus package back because they borrowed all the money or printed all the money either way we’re all gonna pay for it either way it’s taxes on us and while the iron man institute per se doesn’t pay taxes everybody else does including its employees so of course she should take the money while arguing against the government distributing it you should take it so
so only the enemies of capitalism should take their money only the socialists should take the money well we all starve while we all get destroyed well we all have to fire our employees and have to shut down our businesses that that is ludicrous suicidal martyrdom self-sacrificial just as i when i reach the age i’m gonna take social security i paid taxes all these years i’m gonna take my social security back i’m going to take my money back this shouldn’t be social security they should never stolen the money from me to begin with and what option
do i have but to use medicare when you’re you take medicare or you have nothing the government doesn’t allow you to buy private health insurance so of course i’m going to take medicaid not to mention that i paid gazillions of dollars into it why would i subsidize everybody else and not take money out when it’s my time and if the government wants to return some of the money it has taken from me to me i’m going to take it i take it every tax season by taking as many deductions exclusions that i possibly can and and don’t pretend that you paid into social security or into medicare that is a fallacy medicare and social security are welfare programs no welfare for everybody but they’re not you don’t pay for anything the money isn’t sitting there waiting for you
it’s a redistribution program the money you paid into medicaid social security was paid out years ago to old people who all them every time you send a check to social security medicare that money immediately goes out the other door there’s a little piece of paper that’s left in a closet that says i owe you but you didn’t pay in the money was taken from you and given to other people and when you take the money out you’re not going to count to see ooh how much did i pay and how much should i take out you’ll take out as much as you can because you paid huge amounts of taxes social security medicare and everything else this isn’t hypocrisy this is justice this is justice a little bit of reparations a little bit of compensation for all the damage government programs have done to my life
done to my bank account to my well-being and to the institute’s will be and to its donor’s well-being and to its employees will be so yes the iron man institute took ppp money it said it was going to take it in april and it did and good for them for getting some of their money that’s been taken from them back so there’s no hypocrisy here what there is is justice we’ve always said and i man said this in the s in an essay that you can find online it’s called the question of scholarship she said in the s that how much taxes you pay given the cost that the government imposes on you through regulations controls and manipulation of the economy particularly post covert yeah if you can get some of it back go for it
do it and use it to fight government programs use it to fight the programs of the government that they use in order to attack you so this is partial restitution for all the government-inflicted losses all of us have received you know all of its regulatory agencies its orders you know just the fact that there’s an fda out there that is preventing new testing equipment to get out there preventing or slowing down development of vaccines not allowing people to take risks and experiment treatments that could have been developed and have not been developed because think about how your life has been damaged from the existence of just the fda and how much it’s damaged now during this crisis yeah and what a ppp for it’s two months two and a half months a payroll that’s what it is and to turn it into a so-called grant all you have to do is show that you spend it on payroll now i don’t think ppp
screwed anybody over quite the country quite the country nobody’s screwed um all right we’ve got a lot of super chat questions i’m trying to keep up here um so i say to all you pro capitalists out there if the government’s handing out stuff and you qualify take it take it and use it to live and use it to fight the government don’t let only the anti-capitalists benefit as upton notes in his comment here he says he alone is paid more in taxes than aoi took yeah so you know he’s allocated some of his tax money to aoi [Laughter] here we are talking about ppp and that people on my chat who all they want to talk about is race because they are single-minded racists who who can’t imagine anything else of having any importance in the world and yet one or two of them if they continue i’ll just block them that’s okay all right um let’s see anything else let’s see if there’s any other questions about
this particular issue [Music] in art the deposition scene is common christ taken from the cross with men and mother nearby do you think grant intended to give a nod to this even ironically obvious differences with similar imagery imagery to what you’re gonna have to i don’t get the question so you’re gonna have to add something maybe a one dollar super chat just explaining to me what you mean um okay do you have any idea what the limits of this unprecedented money printing would be what’s stopping them from putting trillion instead of just three nothing really nothing legally um and uh yeah cato nothing legally is stopping them from the year billion i think i
think what’s stopping them is just um i don’t know just the sense that maybe there’s a limit but you know stephanie kelton doesn’t believe that there’s a limit i mean the limit is uh you would stop printing once the economy achieved full capacity everybody in the economy working and all the factories are working for capacity and there’s no uh idle resources what they call idle resources but who gets to decide that well the politicians stephanie kelton gets the site when we’re at full capacity and when is that how many trillions does that have to have to be printed so they’
ve got kind of a theory on how much should be printed and notice that stephanie kelton is not in power right now and yet everybody’s behaving like she is right she’s in a sense running because this idea of printing money even she’s she’s on one of biden’s economic committees and yet the republicans are doing her bidding right they’re printing as much money as if stephanie kelton was treasury secretary so the limit is when the fed or the government thinks that it’s inflationary in some way and that’s what the full capacity you know when the money is is when the economy is at full employment at full capacity then the idea is additional money is inflationary i’m skeptical
about that because then you can’t explain stagflation of the s but um so i think it’s just the limited the limit is just emotional i’m sure they’ve got a model but fundamentally it’s emotional right right alex says i keep you keep posting this article about scholarships but that as it excuse for taking ppp but that relates to students um if you actually look at the article she doesn’t only talk about students she talks about unemployment insurance she talks about social security she talks about other forms of getting money from the government and she talks about it in students you could you would think well the student hasn’t paid any taxes she talks about it as restitution of taxes you paid and you know what if you can’t generalize from a principle which she articulates in the article then you need to take a course in thinking you need to train yourself better at actually thinking because
come on yeah no i don’t pay taxes now and i don’t get money from the institute now or very little money from the institute now that’s not my point but i don’t i’m trying not to pay taxes that’s my point i’m trying to minimize my taxes so i moved to puerto rico but i don’t have a salary and when i did i paid taxes on it but i don’t anymore you can check my salary now it’s minimal so i don’t pay federal taxes now that is my achievement but that’s i don’t i’m not an employee of the unmanaged student either so if you want to come after me come after me that’s great i made you know i paid i
paid over the over the last uh years i have paid well over you know several million dollars of taxes so you know just my taxes what what the institute took in ppp is less than what i paid in taxes over the last years so chairmans of the board don’t get salaries i get a small salary i’m not saying i get zero but it’s small you know i get a month for helping with with fundraising and i get paid just for full disclosure since we’re non-profit i get a month for help with fundraising and i get paid per lecture uh and the fact is that since the uh financial since the uh sorry since the government shut down travel
and shut down everything else i have no lectures i’ve got paid almost nothing this year from the admin institute you can check that it’s all publicly available information check the when we get the tax returns for you can check that out luckily i have other income but right now i moved to puerto rico two and a half years ago to stop paying taxes but before that i paid well over a million dollars in taxes over the years so i’m not sure what you’re trying to do you think you’re gonna catch me at something i’m completely open book i have nothing to hide nothing to hide no shame in what i’ve
done no embarrassment of what i’ve done i’m actually pretty proud of the fact that i’m i can live in in uh in puerto rico and not pay taxes yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah you guys can’t think or alex can’t think so he’s projecting unto other people uh leonidas says cato and mises did not take ppp that’s too bad well mises i’m glad because i don’t like mises but cato should have taken ppp i mean it’s too bad that cato didn’t take ppp but leftist think tanks did so how does how does that
make any sense how does that make any sense the cato contributors don’t pay taxes the cato employees don’t pay taxes why why is the government now funding through this ppp in a sense supporting organizations that are going to argue for even more government intervention for even more government involvement for even more government distortion of the economy and those who believe in free markets will not have the ability to do that because they will have not they will just
suffer the downside of what the government does but are not willing to be compensated not willing to take restitution for the damage done to them i think that’s wrong now i get it a superficial understanding of what it means to have integrity but that this this isn’t about integrity this is about justice and there’s nothing wrong with taking money from the government when you’re arguing
against what they are doing um but yes you guys can and and again for all of you who are in doubt and all of you uh read and vans all of you would doubt that and rand would have supported this i encourage you to read and rand’s um article on scholarships and and come back to me and tell me it’s only about scholarships that’s such a you know narrow-minded view you know where you can’t
take a principle and extrapolate even though in article itself she broadens it beyond scholarships but this is the fight we have the fight we have is is is in a culture where a lot of people can’t do that thinking all right um let’s see oh wow thank you uh nicholas that is very very um you know very very generous contribution uh thank you uh he says i don’t have a question just wanted to say that i appreciate what you do you got me into iran six years ago when i was a sophomore in college and i
told myself that i donate when i graduated had a job still doesn’t make up for the years of value i’ve gotten from you well thank you that was incredibly generous and it’s stories like that that make it worthwhile for me to do what i do when i go to colleges you never know who you’re gonna speak to you never know if anybody’s listening you never know if if if if there’s somebody on the other side in the audience who’s actually getting something from what you’re doing and the fact that they are the fact that you come back years later and say i had an impact got you to read on rand that means the world to me so uh thank you thank you um all right all right let’s see um we’ve got a ton of super
chat questions and i’m trying to copy and paste them into this other page because on youtube they disappear after a little while they kind of scroll up and you can’t access them um all right let me just see if there’s anything else um is objective uh why do you act skeptically ah do you believe it all right so we have a ton of super chat questions so i’m going to go through some of the other topics and then uh i’m going to go over these super chat questions some really good ones and um and and i want to have plenty of time to go over them so hopefully this ppp stuff said enough about that