May 8, 2025 • 22 mins
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Chris takes aim at Donald Trump’s recent analogy comparing America to a “super luxury department store” — and unpacks why it’s not only economically absurd, but rooted in a dangerous, quasi-socialist mindset. From tariffs to nationalism, Markowski dismantles the myth that government can—or should—set “fair prices” in a capitalist system. With references to Lenin, Mussolini, and Hayek, this episode is a no-holds-barred indictment of central planning disguised as conservative policy. www.watchdogonwallstreet.com
Apple Podcasts:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/watchdog-on-wall-street-with-chris-markowski/id570687608
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2PtgPvJvqc2gkpGIkNMR5i
Watch on: https://www.youtube.com/@WatchdogOnWallstreet/featured
Chris takes aim at Donald Trump’s recent analogy comparing America to a “super luxury department store” — and unpacks why it’s not only economically absurd, but rooted in a dangerous, quasi-socialist mindset. From tariffs to nationalism, Markowski dismantles the myth that government can—or should—set “fair prices” in a capitalist system. With references to Lenin, Mussolini, and Hayek, this episode is a no-holds-barred indictment of central planning disguised as conservative policy. www.watchdogonwallstreet.com
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Watchdog on Wall Street podcast explaining the news coming
out of the complex worlds of finance, economics, and politics
and the impact it we'll have on everyday Americans. Author,
investment banker, consumer advocate, analyst, and trader Chris Markowski.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Sorry, Donald, the United States is not a department store.
You also want to maybe throw this in here. It
looks like it looks like we're all socialists now, yeah,
the department store analogy. Eric Bohm had a great piece
and reason about this. We've had a myriad, a myriad
(00:41):
of different reasons for why we are imposing tariffs, taxes. Okay,
why don't you start thinking your head. Tariffs are taxes,
taxes that are going to make the country rich and strong.
It's going to boost tax revenue, reduce the trade deficit,
(01:01):
and we're going to have leverage in future trade negotiations.
The latest here and again he's running with this. He's
running with this. I guess maybe it's you know certain people.
That sounds good. Yeah, yeah, United States just like Bloomingdale's
(01:22):
just like Bloomingdale with Trump's running a store, right, Trump's
the general manager, general manager of department store us A
and I quote think of us as a super luxury store,
a store that has the goods. Again, he was saying
(01:43):
this when he was having his meeting with Canadian Prime
Minister Mark Carney. You're gonna come and you're gonna pay
a price, and we're going to give you a really
good price. Last month, in an interview with Time magazine,
Trump also said that Erica was a department store, and
we set the price. I meet with the companies, and
(02:05):
then I set a fair price what I consider to
be a fair price. Who knows, you may come up
with another analogy over the next couple of weeks. I
don't know, because he comes up with things all the time. Anyway,
country is not a department store. Think of the country
(02:28):
as a collectivist that socialist. I mean, I've been saying
this a lot lately. It's kind of a neo Marxist
idea that he's been coming up with, and it really
does fit. Now again, I'm sorry people, you might not
like what I have to say, but challenge me. Listen
(02:48):
to what I have to say. Okay, here are the facts. Okay,
the President of the United States is not a CEO. Okay,
it's not I don't work for the President of the
United States. I'm not an employee of d J T Okay,
(03:12):
I'm not. He doesn't he doesn't have the right to
determine what fair prices for transactions for individuals. I don't care,
in or out of the country. Every single part of
the department store analogy, quite frankly, is ridiculous. Uh in
(03:34):
the piece. In the piece, Boem rights here. So let's
set aside. Let's set aside the idea that, uh that
Trump is wrong. We'll say Trump is right. America is
a big store, and we have the goods kind of
like the RB's commercial. We have the meats. Well, we've
got the goods, and the president is the shopkeeper. So
we're gonna we're gonna run this as Donald Trump says
(03:57):
he's running it. First, Donald Trump is basically told all
of the suppliers of Department Store USA to go take
a walk, long walk off a short pier. We're all set,
We're all stocked up here. We don't need you suppliers anymore.
We're not gonna spend any money on new inventory. That
(04:19):
what he told Carney. So we don't. We don't want
Canadian steel, we don't want Canadian aluminum. We don't want
Canadian lumber. We don't need any of their stuff. We
all many American companies do want Canadian steel, Canadian aluminum,
and Canadian lumber. Again, these are raw materials, raw materials,
(04:48):
parts that we need that go into a myriad of
different items, stuff that manufacturers need to make. Things go
back to the department store. So Donald Trump, he's a shopkeeper.
He thinks he's saving saving money by refusing to buy
(05:09):
products from suppliers. He said it again and again again.
So now the shopkeeper, okay, Donald Trump, Yeah, we're going
to raise the price on everything in the store because
that's going to bring in more revenue. Okay, that's that's
going to you know, basically, we're going to be making
more because of these tariffs. Here we go, mission accomplished. Well.
(05:35):
In the real world, customers are going to buy fewer
things because of the higher prices. Eventually the inventory will
be depleted. Uh. So we've got a store that has
higher prices, making it less competitive to alternative. It's going
to have fewer customers, it's going to have empty shells.
(05:59):
And again, we the employees are going to start looking
around saying who's going to get fired first? And I
have to mention you've already ticked off all of your suppliers,
you might have a more difficult time getting anybody to
sell you anything. Everybody in this equation is worse off.
(06:23):
Everyone in this equation is worse off. Suppliers they're selling less,
customers pay higher prices, Employees lose their job, store goes
out of business. There's a buying and selling component to capitalism.
(06:44):
Get it. Department stores, they have to buy and sell things.
No one will get rich. No one is going to
get rich in a capitalist society by hoarding and price
gouging customers. Nobody. Okay, I've called it neo Marxist and
(07:08):
been talking about this or some time. I've also made
the comparisons in the past, talking about the country and
our economic direction, comparing it almost like a Mussolini's Italy,
which is nationalism. Nationalism inherently is socialism if you actually
think about it. Great writer, I have a great deal
of respect for I'm excited him over the years. Kevin
(07:31):
Williamson just put out a piece and echoing, echoing many
of my sentiments here, and he's a brilliant writer. Starts
it off. Donald Trump is a socialist and I know,
come on the Harrison, not Bernie Sanders, no cackling socialists.
You don't most people don't even know what socialist means.
(07:54):
You want to ask, you know, yes, a lot of
people what socialist is. They're going to throw some sort
of mulke stuff out to start talking about welfare and
welfare state. Wrong, socialism has nothing to do with welfare, Okay.
I remember I talked about this on the show where
(08:15):
you had the lefties here in this country, and I
think it was Bernie Sanders and his ilk talking about
the wonders of Scandinavia and their socialist economy, and they
got ticked. They're like, we're not socialist, we're not socialist.
We have a large safety net, we have a bit
of a welfare state. But there's a big difference. Socialism,
(08:40):
Williamson rights doesn't mean high taxes or an expensive welfare state.
You don't need socialism to have a portfolio of social
welfare programs. Japan has an extensive social welfare apparatus and
is far from socialists. Singapore is super capitalist and it
as all sorts of welfare, actually gives direct money to
(09:04):
poor people. Scandinavians, like I said, have long abandoned the
experiments in socialism that wrecked their economies in the post
war decades. Even in Europe. Okay, and a lot of
progressives love, oh, look at look at all the stuff
that they have in Europe, all the free healthcare. They
(09:25):
have been slowly and again slowly but surely moving away
from state owned enterprises and central planning little by little. Again,
they've got nothing on we here in the United States,
but they're heading in that direction. Okay. Socialism is not
I mean, it's not government funded education or retirement benefits,
(09:51):
healthcare subsidies. That's welfare, two completely different things. Social socialism
is a centrally planned economy. It is dominated by state action,
irrespective of whether it is dominated by formal state enterprises,
(10:15):
food stamps, welfare. Socialism can mean state owned farms and
grocery stores, but more often it means the state apparatus
that runs the farms and the grocery stores as though
it owned them, setting prices, negotiating terms of employment, and
determining how business is to be done. Okay, Lenin. Lenin
(10:39):
said his ideal society as one managed as though it
was one big factory, one big factory. Sound familiar. How
about one big department store? Essentially, Lenin and Trump are
saying the same thing. Trump talks about this, and I've
(11:02):
discussed this for some time here, this Golden Age of America,
Golden age of Americas, like post Civil War leading up
to the Robber Banderan's Gilded Age type stuff, the robber
barons and many I I've talked about this before. Andrew
Carnegie would have loved love for socialism, love that if
(11:24):
we headed down that path, went further down that path,
because why he would have been the only game in town,
only game in town. And again so thought, but we're
richer at this point in time. Oh, the production was
more efficient. We eliminate wasteful duplication and work and products
and destructive competition. That's the robber barons wanted. Uh huh.
(11:49):
Williams And writes Lenin did not dream up the idea
of society as one big factory on his own. American
capitalists got there before him. Donald Trump doesn't know, let's
be honest, he on you really think he knows how
a factory operates, department store operates, and quite frankly, you
(12:14):
know the amount of people that work on Wall Street
private equity. Again, some of these so called wizards are
smart that he has working in his administration. You know,
Fox News pundits. You think that they get it. You
think that those you know, even the people the pundits
(12:35):
out there and they start talking about the economy. It's embarrassing,
quite frankly, they don't they don't know, they don't know
what they don't know. But they claim to know how
the world works, how a business works. Again, I've railed
about this for a long time. When it comes to
professors and so called experts out there, their theories, They've
never done it. They never signed the front of a check,
(12:58):
never had to go out to build anything, anything, market anything.
The Again, these these are the people that are around
Donald Trump. Yeah, he's he understands. I mean again, he
sold products in Macy's again, the department store. Do you
remember the the Donald Trump Donald Trump close that they
(13:20):
had there got discontinued. One way to describe it is
Gordon Gecko meets Liberaci. Let's just leave it at that. Anyway,
this is this is Trump's version of a quasi monarchical Leninism.
(13:45):
It's one big Macy's and Donald Trump is leading the parade.
And I'm going to quote Donald Trump directly. Here, we
are a department store, and we set the price. I
meet with the companies and then I said what I
consider to be a fair price, and they can pay it,
or they don't have to pay it. They don't have
(14:07):
to do business with the United States. But I set
a tariff on countries. What I'm doing is I will,
at a certain point in the not two distant future,
I will set a fair price of tariffs for different countries.
These are countries. Some of them have made hundreds of
billions of dollars, and some of them have made just
a lot of money. Very few of them have made nothing.
(14:30):
Because the United States was being ripped off by every
almost every country in the world, in the entire world.
So I will set a price. And when I set
the price, and I will set it fairly according to
the statistics and according to everything else. I am this
giant store. It's a giant, beautiful store, and everybody wants
(14:54):
to go shopping there, and on behalf of the American people.
I own the store, and I set prices, and I'll say,
if you want a shop here, this is what you
have to pay. End quote. Okay, so we got a
(15:17):
United States giant department store run by a guy who
has no clue on how a department store works. Williamson writes,
this is funny. If you ask the President what the
US balance of trade with u or Tria is should
(15:38):
should be, and if you then explained to him that
unlike Nambia, Okay or Tree is a country, he'll give
you an answer, dumb answer. But the problem won't be
that the answer goes off in one direction or another,
but that he and people like him actually think that
(16:00):
there is an answer. Again, what do I mean by that?
What it's going to be an answer? I've spoke about
this several weeks ago. We talked about I pencil and
the beauty of the free market. Okay, he thinks that
there's an answer to this, and it's his job, or
the federal government's job, to provide one and actually act
(16:25):
on it, and that the President of the United States
can somehow determine, according to the statistics and everything else,
what it should be. I when asked, when I asked
what the what the United States should be getting and
(16:45):
reciprocal from Canada, he didn't have a clue. He said,
friendship said friendship according to everything else. That's what he said,
statistics and according to everything else. Just take a grocery store,
(17:07):
Williamson gives us example, and this is math. Okay, play
a little math game here. The grocery store has anywhere
between forty to fifty thousand unique products. If you want
to determine what the correct price of each product should be,
even within a fairly narrow range, and how much product
(17:27):
should be stocked relative to current inventory, again within a
fairly narrow range. Throw in a few other important variables,
and then consider all the possible permutations. You end up
with a number of possible distributions expressed by a number
that has about two hundred thousand digits. Now, if you
(17:50):
took one second to consider each possibility, because of course
you are the great central planner. You run the store,
and you're so smart you can consider every option, it
would take you more time to run the numbers for
a single suburban grocery store than has passed since the
(18:10):
Big Bang. All the time in the world wouldn't be enough.
So you think Trump is going to figure out what
the price of imported bananas should be from country X
(18:31):
relative to country Why, because of course he knows all
and sees all. You think that, right, Okay, this is
this is classic. This is what we are, Donald Trump.
This is classic socialism. Classic socialism or nationalism, they're basically
(18:59):
the same thing. Nationalized industries are socialized industries. Socialized industries
are nationalized industries. Nationalized medicine is socialized medicine. That's Jonah
Goldberg wrote that Barack Obama, Barack Obama's economic views that
we railed against were explicitly nationalists. Trump's view of a
(19:26):
man he can sit there at a desk and he's
going to be able to move chess pieces on a board.
That's what socialism is all about. You know. The joke
is that the tyrants in Moscow back in the day,
(19:46):
they you know, they had a committee, you know that
they had they had a committee of experts that would
they would see what was necessary to manage the economy
according to their iientific principles. Trump thinks he can do
it all buy him, so he didn't need a committee. Okay,
(20:10):
this is funny because I'm a big money Python fan,
and I also he talks about you know, high explode
to surf them, which I've called over the years of
called you know, highway to hell road to serf them
highway to help. This is uh money, Python's version of
Trump's policies. These policies are going to make it more
(20:34):
expensive to buy Christmas presents for my kids. Will maybe
your kids don't need so many presents, But wasn't your
plan supposed to make us all rich? It will think
of all the money you'll save when you can't afford
to buy anything. Okay, That's that's what we're dealing with
(21:00):
right now. And again, I don't know where the there's
no Conservative Republican Party. I mean, you got you know,
rand Paul Thomas Massey. Most of the other Republicans are
running and hiding the ones that would uh, you know,
chied and make fun of the Russians and their five
year plans and the Chinese and their various different plans
(21:23):
from wheat production. And again now they're all, you know,
they're bending the knee. They're bending the knee to uh
Comrade Trump. They're not because because Trump knows Williams and writes,
Trump knows Comrade Trump knows where the Hallmark Channel should
(21:45):
be filming its next Christmas theme rom com and what
percentage of sub components for the flux capacitors should be
manufactured in Canada. You know it's not it's not Mala Harris,
not a cackling socialist. It's not Adam Smith. It's not
(22:07):
Milton Friedman. This is not Ronald Reagan. Congratulations, we're socialists.
Watchdog on Wall Street dot com
The Watchdog on Wall Street podcast explaining the news coming
out of the complex worlds of finance, economics, and politics
and the impact it we'll have on everyday Americans. Author,
investment banker, consumer advocate, analyst, and trader Chris Markowski.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Sorry, Donald, the United States is not a department store.
You also want to maybe throw this in here. It
looks like it looks like we're all socialists now, yeah,
the department store analogy. Eric Bohm had a great piece
and reason about this. We've had a myriad, a myriad
(00:41):
of different reasons for why we are imposing tariffs, taxes. Okay,
why don't you start thinking your head. Tariffs are taxes,
taxes that are going to make the country rich and strong.
It's going to boost tax revenue, reduce the trade deficit,
(01:01):
and we're going to have leverage in future trade negotiations.
The latest here and again he's running with this. He's
running with this. I guess maybe it's you know certain people.
That sounds good. Yeah, yeah, United States just like Bloomingdale's
(01:22):
just like Bloomingdale with Trump's running a store, right, Trump's
the general manager, general manager of department store us A
and I quote think of us as a super luxury store,
a store that has the goods. Again, he was saying
(01:43):
this when he was having his meeting with Canadian Prime
Minister Mark Carney. You're gonna come and you're gonna pay
a price, and we're going to give you a really
good price. Last month, in an interview with Time magazine,
Trump also said that Erica was a department store, and
we set the price. I meet with the companies, and
(02:05):
then I set a fair price what I consider to
be a fair price. Who knows, you may come up
with another analogy over the next couple of weeks. I
don't know, because he comes up with things all the time. Anyway,
country is not a department store. Think of the country
(02:28):
as a collectivist that socialist. I mean, I've been saying
this a lot lately. It's kind of a neo Marxist
idea that he's been coming up with, and it really
does fit. Now again, I'm sorry people, you might not
like what I have to say, but challenge me. Listen
(02:48):
to what I have to say. Okay, here are the facts. Okay,
the President of the United States is not a CEO. Okay,
it's not I don't work for the President of the
United States. I'm not an employee of d J T Okay,
(03:12):
I'm not. He doesn't he doesn't have the right to
determine what fair prices for transactions for individuals. I don't care,
in or out of the country. Every single part of
the department store analogy, quite frankly, is ridiculous. Uh in
(03:34):
the piece. In the piece, Boem rights here. So let's
set aside. Let's set aside the idea that, uh that
Trump is wrong. We'll say Trump is right. America is
a big store, and we have the goods kind of
like the RB's commercial. We have the meats. Well, we've
got the goods, and the president is the shopkeeper. So
we're gonna we're gonna run this as Donald Trump says
(03:57):
he's running it. First, Donald Trump is basically told all
of the suppliers of Department Store USA to go take
a walk, long walk off a short pier. We're all set,
We're all stocked up here. We don't need you suppliers anymore.
We're not gonna spend any money on new inventory. That
(04:19):
what he told Carney. So we don't. We don't want
Canadian steel, we don't want Canadian aluminum. We don't want
Canadian lumber. We don't need any of their stuff. We
all many American companies do want Canadian steel, Canadian aluminum,
and Canadian lumber. Again, these are raw materials, raw materials,
(04:48):
parts that we need that go into a myriad of
different items, stuff that manufacturers need to make. Things go
back to the department store. So Donald Trump, he's a shopkeeper.
He thinks he's saving saving money by refusing to buy
(05:09):
products from suppliers. He said it again and again again.
So now the shopkeeper, okay, Donald Trump, Yeah, we're going
to raise the price on everything in the store because
that's going to bring in more revenue. Okay, that's that's
going to you know, basically, we're going to be making
more because of these tariffs. Here we go, mission accomplished. Well.
(05:35):
In the real world, customers are going to buy fewer
things because of the higher prices. Eventually the inventory will
be depleted. Uh. So we've got a store that has
higher prices, making it less competitive to alternative. It's going
to have fewer customers, it's going to have empty shells.
(05:59):
And again, we the employees are going to start looking
around saying who's going to get fired first? And I
have to mention you've already ticked off all of your suppliers,
you might have a more difficult time getting anybody to
sell you anything. Everybody in this equation is worse off.
(06:23):
Everyone in this equation is worse off. Suppliers they're selling less,
customers pay higher prices, Employees lose their job, store goes
out of business. There's a buying and selling component to capitalism.
(06:44):
Get it. Department stores, they have to buy and sell things.
No one will get rich. No one is going to
get rich in a capitalist society by hoarding and price
gouging customers. Nobody. Okay, I've called it neo Marxist and
(07:08):
been talking about this or some time. I've also made
the comparisons in the past, talking about the country and
our economic direction, comparing it almost like a Mussolini's Italy,
which is nationalism. Nationalism inherently is socialism if you actually
think about it. Great writer, I have a great deal
of respect for I'm excited him over the years. Kevin
(07:31):
Williamson just put out a piece and echoing, echoing many
of my sentiments here, and he's a brilliant writer. Starts
it off. Donald Trump is a socialist and I know,
come on the Harrison, not Bernie Sanders, no cackling socialists.
You don't most people don't even know what socialist means.
(07:54):
You want to ask, you know, yes, a lot of
people what socialist is. They're going to throw some sort
of mulke stuff out to start talking about welfare and
welfare state. Wrong, socialism has nothing to do with welfare, Okay.
I remember I talked about this on the show where
(08:15):
you had the lefties here in this country, and I
think it was Bernie Sanders and his ilk talking about
the wonders of Scandinavia and their socialist economy, and they
got ticked. They're like, we're not socialist, we're not socialist.
We have a large safety net, we have a bit
of a welfare state. But there's a big difference. Socialism,
(08:40):
Williamson rights doesn't mean high taxes or an expensive welfare state.
You don't need socialism to have a portfolio of social
welfare programs. Japan has an extensive social welfare apparatus and
is far from socialists. Singapore is super capitalist and it
as all sorts of welfare, actually gives direct money to
(09:04):
poor people. Scandinavians, like I said, have long abandoned the
experiments in socialism that wrecked their economies in the post
war decades. Even in Europe. Okay, and a lot of
progressives love, oh, look at look at all the stuff
that they have in Europe, all the free healthcare. They
(09:25):
have been slowly and again slowly but surely moving away
from state owned enterprises and central planning little by little. Again,
they've got nothing on we here in the United States,
but they're heading in that direction. Okay. Socialism is not
I mean, it's not government funded education or retirement benefits,
(09:51):
healthcare subsidies. That's welfare, two completely different things. Social socialism
is a centrally planned economy. It is dominated by state action,
irrespective of whether it is dominated by formal state enterprises,
(10:15):
food stamps, welfare. Socialism can mean state owned farms and
grocery stores, but more often it means the state apparatus
that runs the farms and the grocery stores as though
it owned them, setting prices, negotiating terms of employment, and
determining how business is to be done. Okay, Lenin. Lenin
(10:39):
said his ideal society as one managed as though it
was one big factory, one big factory. Sound familiar. How
about one big department store? Essentially, Lenin and Trump are
saying the same thing. Trump talks about this, and I've
(11:02):
discussed this for some time here, this Golden Age of America,
Golden age of Americas, like post Civil War leading up
to the Robber Banderan's Gilded Age type stuff, the robber
barons and many I I've talked about this before. Andrew
Carnegie would have loved love for socialism, love that if
(11:24):
we headed down that path, went further down that path,
because why he would have been the only game in town,
only game in town. And again so thought, but we're
richer at this point in time. Oh, the production was
more efficient. We eliminate wasteful duplication and work and products
and destructive competition. That's the robber barons wanted. Uh huh.
(11:49):
Williams And writes Lenin did not dream up the idea
of society as one big factory on his own. American
capitalists got there before him. Donald Trump doesn't know, let's
be honest, he on you really think he knows how
a factory operates, department store operates, and quite frankly, you
(12:14):
know the amount of people that work on Wall Street
private equity. Again, some of these so called wizards are
smart that he has working in his administration. You know,
Fox News pundits. You think that they get it. You
think that those you know, even the people the pundits
(12:35):
out there and they start talking about the economy. It's embarrassing,
quite frankly, they don't they don't know, they don't know
what they don't know. But they claim to know how
the world works, how a business works. Again, I've railed
about this for a long time. When it comes to
professors and so called experts out there, their theories, They've
never done it. They never signed the front of a check,
(12:58):
never had to go out to build anything, anything, market anything.
The Again, these these are the people that are around
Donald Trump. Yeah, he's he understands. I mean again, he
sold products in Macy's again, the department store. Do you
remember the the Donald Trump Donald Trump close that they
(13:20):
had there got discontinued. One way to describe it is
Gordon Gecko meets Liberaci. Let's just leave it at that. Anyway,
this is this is Trump's version of a quasi monarchical Leninism.
(13:45):
It's one big Macy's and Donald Trump is leading the parade.
And I'm going to quote Donald Trump directly. Here, we
are a department store, and we set the price. I
meet with the companies and then I said what I
consider to be a fair price, and they can pay it,
or they don't have to pay it. They don't have
(14:07):
to do business with the United States. But I set
a tariff on countries. What I'm doing is I will,
at a certain point in the not two distant future,
I will set a fair price of tariffs for different countries.
These are countries. Some of them have made hundreds of
billions of dollars, and some of them have made just
a lot of money. Very few of them have made nothing.
(14:30):
Because the United States was being ripped off by every
almost every country in the world, in the entire world.
So I will set a price. And when I set
the price, and I will set it fairly according to
the statistics and according to everything else. I am this
giant store. It's a giant, beautiful store, and everybody wants
(14:54):
to go shopping there, and on behalf of the American people.
I own the store, and I set prices, and I'll say,
if you want a shop here, this is what you
have to pay. End quote. Okay, so we got a
(15:17):
United States giant department store run by a guy who
has no clue on how a department store works. Williamson writes,
this is funny. If you ask the President what the
US balance of trade with u or Tria is should
(15:38):
should be, and if you then explained to him that
unlike Nambia, Okay or Tree is a country, he'll give
you an answer, dumb answer. But the problem won't be
that the answer goes off in one direction or another,
but that he and people like him actually think that
(16:00):
there is an answer. Again, what do I mean by that?
What it's going to be an answer? I've spoke about
this several weeks ago. We talked about I pencil and
the beauty of the free market. Okay, he thinks that
there's an answer to this, and it's his job, or
the federal government's job, to provide one and actually act
(16:25):
on it, and that the President of the United States
can somehow determine, according to the statistics and everything else,
what it should be. I when asked, when I asked
what the what the United States should be getting and
(16:45):
reciprocal from Canada, he didn't have a clue. He said,
friendship said friendship according to everything else. That's what he said,
statistics and according to everything else. Just take a grocery store,
(17:07):
Williamson gives us example, and this is math. Okay, play
a little math game here. The grocery store has anywhere
between forty to fifty thousand unique products. If you want
to determine what the correct price of each product should be,
even within a fairly narrow range, and how much product
(17:27):
should be stocked relative to current inventory, again within a
fairly narrow range. Throw in a few other important variables,
and then consider all the possible permutations. You end up
with a number of possible distributions expressed by a number
that has about two hundred thousand digits. Now, if you
(17:50):
took one second to consider each possibility, because of course
you are the great central planner. You run the store,
and you're so smart you can consider every option, it
would take you more time to run the numbers for
a single suburban grocery store than has passed since the
(18:10):
Big Bang. All the time in the world wouldn't be enough.
So you think Trump is going to figure out what
the price of imported bananas should be from country X
(18:31):
relative to country Why, because of course he knows all
and sees all. You think that, right, Okay, this is
this is classic. This is what we are, Donald Trump.
This is classic socialism. Classic socialism or nationalism, they're basically
(18:59):
the same thing. Nationalized industries are socialized industries. Socialized industries
are nationalized industries. Nationalized medicine is socialized medicine. That's Jonah
Goldberg wrote that Barack Obama, Barack Obama's economic views that
we railed against were explicitly nationalists. Trump's view of a
(19:26):
man he can sit there at a desk and he's
going to be able to move chess pieces on a board.
That's what socialism is all about. You know. The joke
is that the tyrants in Moscow back in the day,
(19:46):
they you know, they had a committee, you know that
they had they had a committee of experts that would
they would see what was necessary to manage the economy
according to their iientific principles. Trump thinks he can do
it all buy him, so he didn't need a committee. Okay,
(20:10):
this is funny because I'm a big money Python fan,
and I also he talks about you know, high explode
to surf them, which I've called over the years of
called you know, highway to hell road to serf them
highway to help. This is uh money, Python's version of
Trump's policies. These policies are going to make it more
(20:34):
expensive to buy Christmas presents for my kids. Will maybe
your kids don't need so many presents, But wasn't your
plan supposed to make us all rich? It will think
of all the money you'll save when you can't afford
to buy anything. Okay, That's that's what we're dealing with
(21:00):
right now. And again, I don't know where the there's
no Conservative Republican Party. I mean, you got you know,
rand Paul Thomas Massey. Most of the other Republicans are
running and hiding the ones that would uh, you know,
chied and make fun of the Russians and their five
year plans and the Chinese and their various different plans
(21:23):
from wheat production. And again now they're all, you know,
they're bending the knee. They're bending the knee to uh
Comrade Trump. They're not because because Trump knows Williams and writes,
Trump knows Comrade Trump knows where the Hallmark Channel should
(21:45):
be filming its next Christmas theme rom com and what
percentage of sub components for the flux capacitors should be
manufactured in Canada. You know it's not it's not Mala Harris,
not a cackling socialist. It's not Adam Smith. It's not
(22:07):
Milton Friedman. This is not Ronald Reagan. Congratulations, we're socialists.
Watchdog on Wall Street dot com
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