Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: In this episode, we consider the extent to which America's extreme and increasingly sticky concentration of wealth in its billionaire class may be dangerous or present problems for its economic and its political systems. And in part two, we'll take a look at the concept of freedom of speech, like real freedom of speech as it exists in the United States. In light of the story of Alexey in Russia, who recently died and dealt with issues of speaking out against the authorities in Russia.
Hello.
Welcome to the call it like I see it podcast. I'm James Keys, and riding shotgun with me is a man who, when it's time to make a move, he is always ready with a plan. Tone ogon Lana. Tone. Are you ready to show the people how you stay?
[00:01:03] Speaker B: Always.
[00:01:04] Speaker A: All right, now, before we get started, if you enjoy the show, I ask that you please hit subscribe, like on YouTube or whatever podcast platform you get this on. And that really helps us out as far as getting this, spreading this out, and getting the word out to more people.
Now we're recording this on February 27, 2023. Antone we recently saw an item which pointed out that in 2023, inherited wealth of billionaires exceeded the earned wealth, so to speak, of billionaires, which was notable from their numbers. It's not something that this particular entity had been tracking a long time, but something that was particularly notable in light of the amount of wealth transfer that it does reflect. So what was your reaction to seeing this? And really, what about it did you find particularly notable?
[00:01:52] Speaker B: It's very interesting to me, I think, as someone who deals from a professional standpoint in the areas of wealth, financial planning, so on and so forth.
And also just as an american entrepreneur, the idea of building and creating wealth is always something that's not far from our minds.
I think that it was an interesting thing, 2023, just to stay the kind of main stat, and the main point of that article was to bring to light the idea that 2023 was the first year that we had more billionaires created in the United States through inheritance and not through actual the people themselves creating that wealth through their own entrepreneurial endeavors or investments and things like that. So I think what it represents, which is interesting, is just kind of, I think reconfirms, because I don't think this is the first sign of this kind of history somewhat repeating itself, but it reconfirms this idea that we're back to a certain type of imbalance in wealth in our country that we haven't seen since the gilded Age, roughly about 120 years ago or so. And so that stick out.
[00:03:08] Speaker A: To me, it's the increase in, it's a lot of actual things compounding together, because there's a large increase of the number of billionaires. The average wealth of billionaires is going up. And then how these billionaires are getting their money is trending away from them earning it and trending towards. And I guess there was a threshold, them just inheriting it. And to me, I see this as a payoff. This is like the hard work. People have talked about it kind of on the fringes, and I say fringes, not to say that people haven't made a good point, but just saying that this isn't necessarily what you'll get from mainstream conversations, but just the concerted and ongoing effort that's been made to take apart kind of the new Deal economic order that existed post World War II and existed really up until.
Up until the. When it started to be taken apart. And that new Deal order did a lot to restrict the concentration of wealth and to make sure that this isn't to say that you just redistribute wealth for the purpose of redistributing it, but just to make sure that the spoils created by society were distributed in what was considered to be a more fair way across the society. And the belief being that not just to do that out of the goodness out of your heart, but that protects and that strengthens things like market economies. Because when you have monopolies, for example, the concentration of market power in one entity, which distorts and pretty much eliminates a free market, in that sense, a competitive market, then you don't get optimal results. It undermines the concept of a market and market being to create competition in order to foster higher quality and lower price, because entities are competing against each other. So when you have one person with imbalanced power, it destroys that. And then also from a political standpoint, when you have actors that can wield due to economic, the dudes that are economic strength can wield an exorbitant amount of power relative to everyone else. It's supposed to be everybody has one vote, then that distorts the political piece. So it was a concerted effort in the 1940s, 1930s, I should say, to make sure that this type of thing wasn't happening. And then basically since 1970s, 1980s, there's been concerted effort to make it all happen again. And so it seems like it's working. Basically.
This stuff didn't happen by accident, basically. And we've seen from time to time, people talk about the estate tax or the top tax bracket of top earners and so forth, or what income goes into that capital gains and all that stuff. And so all of that stuff is honestly fights about this stuff that a lot of us aren't really picking up on. But some people are paying a lot of attention to because they have a lot at stake.
[00:06:05] Speaker B: Yeah, well, money and power, like to find each other.
Those with, like you said, a lot at stake will take it very serious to lobby the government and our legal system and the financial system to slowly, over time, get rid of the guardrails that you'd mentioned that were implemented after not only the kind of gilded age period, but, yeah, the excesses of the gilded age that partially. I mean, we also had just a lot of this stuff, like we've talked in recent years. A lot of that was a reaction to just the 100 years prior of the industrial age and this new way of societies kind of forming, getting out of the old days of the monarchies and all that stuff and feudalism in Europe. So this is kind of a long arc of continued. How are big societies going to organize each other in a way that obviously the wealth class that likes to keep power and money and keep that concentrated. Yeah, let me just finish this though, verse.
[00:07:13] Speaker A: I want you to go, but I want to throw one thing in for you to go on. It's two competing worldviews that we see in that you see the worldview of like the oligarchy, and then you see the worldview of more of a representative democracy type of thing where people, where all men have a vote or all people have a vote and everybody can participate in the spoils of society and also in the leadership of society versus the few. Those that control all the resources get to have the spoils and they get to control the actual leadership. But go ahead. I just wanted to throw that at you while you were.
[00:07:47] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think what we've seen in that arc is the idea of finance, especially starting in the 18 hundreds, outpacing kind of the strength of actual, just pure brute force. So for know, a guy like Genghis Khan could go across Asia and central Europe with a lot of brute force, with better warriors, the guys on the horseback that could shoot arrows back to front and all that stuff, and that he could overwhelm his opponents through dominating them by force. And what we've had in the last 200 years with kind of financial engineering, fractional banking, all that people have begun and this kind of, even from a nation state, we could even refer to things like economic hitman, this idea that through economics, we can dominate the landscape, not just through brute force. And I think to your point about these have been topics on the fringe of our discussions as societies. And again, to your point, not fringe like crazy, but just that not a lot of us are paying attention because these are boring things. Right. It's not exciting to talk about financial regulations. It's not exciting to talk about tax codes and how money is kind of confiscated from people and pushed back up into the system to things like public schools and fire departments and roads and bridges, particularly things that just adding real.
[00:09:15] Speaker A: Quick, particularly because a lot of these are chess moves. They're not like people see, the first, the checkers move, like, oh, you raise the tax, then the government collects this much money. But actually. Or you lower the tax, the government collects this much money. That's the first order of the effect. But a lot of these regulations have several orders of effect. And the most interesting things, actually are two or three steps away from the initial, whatever the government did with the tax rate or something like that.
[00:09:42] Speaker B: Yeah. And the other thing, too is just the marketing and how we use language, right? Like the idea of an estate tax sounds different than when you say a death tax, right?
It's a little simplistic, but it works, right? I mean, we have how many Americans? And there's some interesting stats. I mean, one is I wanted to share before we keep moving too far, is Forbes had the amount of billionaires in 1987 at 140, and in 2023, that number was 2640. So when I did the math, that's an 18 times increase in 36 years. But if you look at the wealth of the bottom half of Americans, which is about 125,000,000 Americans, it has gone up about three times in that period of time. So that, to me, is where the stats bear out. Where, yeah, the rising tide does lift boats over time, but it's an uneven tide. Clearly, those are the top.
[00:10:42] Speaker A: It's not even close. And that's why I always phrase it like, how is society going to distribute the wins, so to speak? And so are we going to distribute the wins in a more egalitarian way? Like, we're all contributing to it to varying degrees. And so are those wins going to be distributed across the board, or is it going to be one person gets 1000% of the spoils and another person gets 2%? And so how are we going or two times?
It's a fundamental question as far as how, to the point you made on how you want to organize society, because these types of things really play into the downstream effects on how society sees itself. And the other thing I'll point out with this, because you mentioned the state tax and I mentioned it well, I do want to go into that because that's actually, if you're talking about specifically the idea of, okay, there are more billionaires being created by inheriting money than earning money. The primary mechanism on a first order, on a first type of the first step is the estate tax. And the estate tax exists in the United States. There's been a lot of machinations with it over the past 20 years and a lot of 25 years and a lot of arguing over it because there were some vested interests, a few thousand people primarily that had been working to try to eliminate it or get rid or reduce it and so forth. But that's the primary defense against vast accumulations of dynastic wealth. But the worldview piece I want to get into just briefly before we go there is just the idea of the concept of forever winners. And I think a lot of people don't really contemplate this in terms of there is a discomfort with the idea of progressive income tax. And it's like, okay, well, we don't want to punish people for doing well, or estate tax, hey, you did well over the course of your life. We don't want to punish people. But what I think is missed a lot of times with that is that the type of system that we have, this market economy system, you don't get to be a forever winner in the same way that in sports, for example, you don't get to be the champion. And then if you win the championship in 2024, you're not just the champion forever after that, you got to go back the next year and fight again to try to win it again. And so the way these systems have to work, there has to be perpetual competition. That's what you need for a market system. So if you're a market person, if you're a free market person, a free enterprise person, then you need to defend and protect the idea of perpetual competition, which means that just because somebody wins this round in business doesn't mean that they get to stay the winner Forever.
That's why you'll have a measure of progressive income tax. Win. You win. You win. Okay. All right. We got to bring you back down, and then you got to go win some more. Or the estate tax. You did a great job throughout your life. Hey, excellent. Great job. But we got to bring this down some. We're not taking it all as we as a society, but you can't start from here. You have to go back and start winning again if you want to stay on that winner ledger. And I think that that concept is one, it's not presented to people in that way a lot of times where it's just like, oh, okay, well, once you win, you should just be able to sit on your laurels and say, hey, I won. And so this is all over with. And it's like, well, no perpetual competition is built in to the system that we say that we want as far as markets. If you don't want that, then, yeah, we can look at a feudal or system or an oligarch type system, and those are the systems where you have forever winners. But what we find in what history has shown is those aren't the types of areas where you have the innovation like we do in the United States, where improvements are constantly coming, because what we're leveraging with those are the idea of capital and accumulated capital, but also the perpetual competition.
Yeah.
[00:14:18] Speaker B: And I think one of the things that you say forever winners, I wrote down here in my notes, there's also an idea in this country about not creating forever losers. And I think this goes back to the founding of the country. And I thought of this as I was preparing for today, because there's a good piece in one of the Wikipedia things I found, because there was arguments for and against estate taxes. And a lot of the arguments against it came from things like you're saying, know, why should people be punished who built something big and have already paid taxes along their lifetime? Capital gains tax and income tax and all that. And I thought about it where, yeah, you're right about the forever winner would be like the grandchild of someone from the gilded Age, JP Morgan's grandchild or Cornelius Vanderbilt's great grandkids or something like that. But part of the founding of this country was to create a level playing field for each generation. So the idea was relatively, because remember.
[00:15:20] Speaker A: They were looking at Europe, where there were hundreds and hundreds of years of forever winners.
[00:15:24] Speaker B: Yeah. So the idea is that everybody in America can start each generation with a chance, right? So that's one know, allowing people in generations to just sit on wealth creates laziness and certain things that the founding fathers actually wrote about the negative sides of perpetual wealth generation, and then that's for sure.
[00:15:48] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:15:49] Speaker B: Well, yeah, and on the flip side, remember coming out of Europe, right? There were things in England like debtors prison, debts would follow descendants. So the thing is that in America, we're lucky. That's what the idea of probate is in each state where when someone dies, there's a legal process that any debts owed by the deceased need to get paid off first. Everything else goes to the heirs. Now, there's loopholes created to get around all that, which we don't have time to get into. But the idea is just that, yeah, once that debt is paid, if I die with, let's say, just hypothetically, 20,000 in credit card debt, and I had a million dollars cash in the bank, technically, the probate process is supposed to allow that. The debtor gets the 20,000, my family gets 980,000. But my family is not responsible for the debt. My kids don't have to deal with the negative credit effects and all that. So that's why we kind of accept that on the one end, we like that part of as Americans, but we kind of take the rhetoric of the ruling class, in a sense, the really wealthy that want to manipulate us into not seeing the side that perpetual wealth generation, without any interruption, can also long term harm the society.
[00:17:05] Speaker A: Well, yeah, I mean, in another area that we see in our society, where perpetual losing is not a part of it, is bankruptcy. The whole concept of bankruptcy is one of that. You can take a risk, and if it doesn't play out the way you hope, then you're not going to just be subjected to debtors prison or just some kind of purgatory forever. You can get back on your feet, so to speak. And so these things are built in. Again, a lot of times we don't learn, and we're not exposed to the reason for it. But the idea is, you want more activity, not less. And so that's what you risk when you start stacking a lot of money at the top and it never has to come back down, you risk that. And so one of the things that, again, gets directly at this is the idea of an estate tax. And we've seen it pop up from time to time in our discourse, in our political discourse. A lot of times you'll see the Republican Party pushing to either get rid of it or make it so that people pay less, whether that be various mechanisms and so forth. And you'll see the Democratic Party, a lot of times saying that it needs to remain in place, or that trying to preserve it or something. So it has become a partisan issue that people view. Partisan in a partisan frame, not necessarily in a frame. Know, notably, people don't view this in a frame of whether or not how this affects their own pocketbook a lot of times. And that's one of the benefits of making an issue partisan, because obviously, if something like the estate tax was just based on how does it affect my own pocketbook, then the vast majority of Americans would be in favor of it, because the estate tax, as it's set up, affects very few, relatively very few Americans. You're talking about estates that right now, I believe the number you said that you pointed was it's 13 million is the baseline exemption. And then after you get over that, they start looking at the estate tax. So from the standpoint of the estate tax, though, what do you see its present role? And then also what do you take away from how historically it's existing in the United States in terms of maintaining the type of homeostasis that we were talking about previously in an economic, and potentially we haven't gotten there yet, but in the political systems. Yeah.
[00:19:15] Speaker B: No great questions preparing for today. There's some interesting stats I found. So I'll start with kind of the first question about today and then let's get into some history. So as of in 2021, there was, I guess, the most recent year for numbers. 2584 estates in the United States paid federal estate tax. So when you think about that, that is definitely less than one 1000th of 1% of the US population. No, I mean a serious, like, I was thinking, like, wow, that's that little amount of people out of 330,000,000 people or estates paid estate tax. And it shows you like we're talking about. And it kind of confirms the outsized influence that this small group of Americans, plus, I would say there are cohorts, people like me in my industry, that help them manage all this stuff. So I'm not innocent, let me be honest.
But it shows us the outside influence that not only they have in lobbying the government and the legal and financial system, but also those of us who benefit from all the activity around their wealth. And that's something that I'm happy to get into later about the ecosystems and the economies within. Now, our overall system that help promote all this, because family offices, the accounting and legal firms that help people deal with all this.
But if you think about it, I'm just going to quote from the article that we're basing our discussion on today. As I mentioned, the bottom 50% of Americans in terms of wealth is about 125,000,000 people. They collectively owned 1.1 trillion as of January 2023.
It says here in the article that's how much the eight richest people in the US own together, based on current net worth in Forbes so I think that's really the choice.
Eight people, 125,000,000 Americans have the same net worth as eight. Let's be fair and maybe say eight families, right?
But the point I'm really making is that it's not a right or wrong right. This goes back to sapiens when we did the show on that book that there's no human rights in nature. We got to decide, it's about our culture as Americans. How do we want to split this all up?
[00:21:34] Speaker A: It's a worldview. Or how do you organize large societies? As you started our conversation with, I want to organize back to you before.
[00:21:41] Speaker B: We go into history, but I just want to finish on this one with this current stat of the now, when thinking about just from a math perspective. So if 2584 estates is less than 1% of the sorry, less than one 1000th of a percent of the US population, I took a look at, well, how much does the federal treasury bring in every year, specifically through the estate tax? It's averaged in the last decade or two, around two to 3% a year. So I just thought, okay, so if you're looking for revenue right now, our budget deficit is almost 2 trillion. We bring in 4.44 trillion, and we spend about 6.18 trillion. So again, tweaking little things, we got zero, zero, 1% of the population, which is adding two to 3% annually to revenue. If you boost that up to zero, zero two, maybe we get another 5% of revenue coming in without having to hit the majority of Americans with a greater income tax, sales tax, property tax, all the other taxes that, like you said, the majority of the country experiences.
But I want to kick it back to you for the history part.
[00:22:52] Speaker A: Well, I want a general reaction as well, though, and the piece that to me, and it ultimately does go to the question of, like whether you support the estate tax, whether you oppose the estate tax. I think it has to be emphasized that this is not a question of, or this, I should say, what it is. This is a question of how you want to organize a large society and what values do you want to promote in the society. And so what it happens to be, essentially, is that. And this is. I broke it down before. If you value things like markets, market economies, like representative democracies or aka republics that are based on elected officials, then the estate tax is a piece of that. And it's been observed over the history of the United States. If you don't have mechanisms like progressive income tax or estate tax, then what ends up happening is that you can't maintain those systems. You can't maintain those market systems. You can't maintain those representative democracies. So what we're talking about a lot of times with the estate tax is the preservation.
A lot of people think, and you just talked about the estate tax from the point of a government raising revenue. But I think the bigger issue is the estate tax is a mechanism of the preservation of the system that we have set up. Now, if you want to change the system, if you want to go to a different system, one where, hey, regular people, working people, don't worry about how the country is being run, just let the oligarchs handle it, then that's the type of situation, we go that direction. And, yeah, the estate tax is unnecessary at that point because we've decided to just let the landlords, so to speak, in a feudal way, just run everything and we'll just live on the land or be owned with the land, so to speak, and go for it. But if you think there should be some level of self determination in each generation and each person, there should be the ability to go start a business and be able to do so in a way where you're not immediately swallowed up by whatever industries are that large businesses are already there. Or if you think that the people should have a role in choosing their leadership with free and fair elections and actually be able to get information on what's actually happening, not just being told what people want them to know, then these are the type of things we have to do to prevent the extreme concentration of wealth and the extreme concentration of power. And so to me, when I look at the estate tax, it's that balancing that we're trying to strike. You don't want to just take everything from somebody when they die. You like to create some type of incentive structure to accumulate, to continue to win. We want to create an incentive for that. But at the same time, the balance has to be struck where we're not going to a society where you have the forever winner, and so therefore, Michael Jordan's kids are just our NBA champions now as well, because he won. So that's not the way that we have a system that's based on people as opposed to assets, so to speak. But I know you're chomping at the bit. Get into the history.
[00:25:48] Speaker B: So from a historical standpoint, I was intrigued because you made me realize somewhere I can find an island and create that country for myself, where Michael Jordan's kids are also champions.
[00:25:59] Speaker A: Yeah, they're the champions. They inherited it. No.
[00:26:02] Speaker B: And I think it's just, before we get into the history part, it's just, again, I think you reiterate why this is dangerous for what we would consider stable societies, because I think a lot.
[00:26:12] Speaker A: Of people, which is the society they miss, we like, we say that we like markets. We say that we like republics. Well, these are the types of things that have been put in place by founding fathers who experienced the other side. This is the stuff they were like, hey, these are the things we got to watch out for. So let's address these types of things.
[00:26:30] Speaker B: And the reason on the why is because what they found at those times is that once generational wealth is concentrated after several generations.
And the article alluded to this, too, about just modern Americans as well. They found, because this is more about just human personalities. The first generation is usually connected to society because they created the wealth. So they probably came out of either poverty or middle class, and they dealt with everybody. And think about the way the wealth.
[00:26:59] Speaker A: A lot of time you have to have your hand in the pulse of.
[00:27:02] Speaker B: Society and think about just for us all here in America, right? We know that the children of billionaires and 100 millionaires generally are not going to public school. So they aren't as exposed to those of us in society. Regular folks, people with up and down financial situations. They're in a cocoon with people like them. So after two or three generations of that, they're more concentrated emotionally in protecting their wealth and seeing those outside their bubble as somehow a threat to their wealth. So that's when you get conversations in the United States, like people like Bernie Sanders, who might say, we need universal health care. Some people will say he's actually a communist for that, whereas the definition of communism and european style, kind of just having some safety nets, are two different things. So I think that's important to understand in terms of what you're saying.
Why would these guys be on here talking about allowing estates to just accumulate without any mechanism, like you say, to kind of spread that wealth back into society over time in every generation, at least a portion of it, to your point, not all of it. I think that's why. And then if we go back into the history, I mean, the founding fathers pretty much gave us this, right? I mean, they understood that to have a society that stays within some sort of equilibrium that doesn't get too top heavy and kind of top over on itself, like the european monarchies were doing at the time, by the late 17 hundreds, they not only needed to have things like the beautiful things they gave us, like the constitution, the Bill of rights, and also this concept of co equal branches of government. So they structured that that way. But they also understood, and this is something I'll ask you to chime in on. Not only things like the taxes. We did have what's called a stamp tax in 1797 as a way to collect revenue after the death of one generation between another, but also the idea, like corporations back in the founding of the country, weren't to be in perpetuity for certain reasons. So that's where I'll throw back to you for that enlightenment.
[00:29:17] Speaker A: Well, yeah. Well, I was going to take it a little bit of a different direction, because I do want to keep us moving. And I wanted to point out, and this is something that is worth saying during this time. Now, granted, yes, to your point, at the finding of the country, and it's a different world than it was then, but it was understood that, for example, corporations wouldn't be perpetual. The suspicion against mass accumulations of wealth and mass accumulations of power were present, as you point out, because their perspective, their context was one that came from seeing what was happening in Europe, where you had hundreds and hundreds of years of dynastic wealth accumulated, and how that created stagnant societies didn't lead to innovation and so forth. And the places where you had more dynasysm was where you had more activity happening and where you had innovation and things like that, whether it be places you look at places, know, like the Netherlands or something like that, and then England, taking a lot of cues from there. But where I wanted to go with this is just kind of another structural point that I think is very important in understanding generally what we're talking about here, is that the market system that we have and capitalism, which I look at what we're talking about here, is a defense of capitalism in order for capitalism to continue to keep moving. A lot of times, I think it's misunderstood in the fact that capitalism, the purpose of capitalism, the way it works, is that you invest capital, and then you attract money to that capital, essentially by selling goods and stuff. You invest in something, and then from that, you're supposed to get more back than your capital. That's why you invested the original capital as you get a return on investment. And so that's money rising up through the system. And money rising up through the system creates economic activity that is good for everyone. The issue that you run into with capitalism, which has been observed, I mean, this is great depression stuff. This has been observed several times throughout the history of capitalism, basically, is that you need places where capital will continue to rise to the top. Always, over the course of time, every investment doesn't hit but enough hit that capital rises to the top. If you do not have a mechanism to get some of that capital, it doesn't have to be all of it, but some of that capital to get back down at the bottom so that it can rise back up to the top, then the system will break down. The economic system will break down because again, all of the economic activity is happening during, you call this the velocity of money, while the money rises from the bottom to the top. That's all the jobs that people are working. Everybody's taking a piece of the money as it goes back up, and then it gets to the top. And then if it stays there, you start drying up. And what we see in America right now, actually, what this has lended itself to because we don't have a good. Right now, our mechanism to push money back down to the bottom has been lacking for the last, let's say, 40 years, is America has just been borrowing money. And we borrow money. We borrow as a nation, we borrow money, we increase our national debt from whatever it be, 2 trillion to 30 trillion over the course of that time. And the reason being is that we keep allowing the money to accumulate at the top, then the only mechanism to put more money in at the bottom so the economic system can keep going is to borrow it. And I know you had something on that I do want to move, but I wanted to throw it to you on just, I know you had some numbers that stood out to you as far as the borrowing piece. And essentially the people who say we have a deficit problem, which I agree, a debt problem, a deficit being each year, how much we're in the red, versus a debt problem, which is the cumulative amount, they're all right. But the concern, the issue that we have is that we need that right now in order to keep our economy rolling, keep this system running where we have money flowing up through the system. If we want to correct that, what we have to do is stop having so much money stick at the top.
[00:33:09] Speaker B: Laughing because you're confirming why no one likes to pay attention to this topic.
[00:33:13] Speaker A: No, for sure, but I did want to.
[00:33:16] Speaker B: It's appreciated.
[00:33:19] Speaker A: If anybody's made it, I know that they deserve that piece of information.
[00:33:22] Speaker B: We're not going to be on the algorithms with this topic on this week. Yeah, no one's looking to step up.
[00:33:27] Speaker A: Just real quick, if you got a minute on it, do you see a way that to make Americans care about this kind of thing? Or are we literally like. The problem we run into is that the people who care about this are the people who have hundreds of thousands or millions or billions at stake and everybody else, the other 50% who combine for 1 trillion of wealth. This doesn't affect them in terms of a first order directly. And so it's much more fun to pay attention to books to burn or books to ban in schools or to sex scandals or whatever. That stuff is much more interesting than this, to our detriment for this show. So is there a way, I was.
[00:34:07] Speaker B: Going to say, besides the billionaires and 100 millionaires who have it in their interest to lobby the government to not include these? There are a few people on the fringe like us that for some reason find us interesting, but we don't have the power to do anything except talk on the microphone about it.
But no, I do think so. It's very interesting. To your point and the points we've been making, we should all have a concern, and I want to say this too, not because wealthy people are bad people or because they shouldn't have wealth and all that. And in fairness to the exponential number of billionaires created, this is all coming off the heels of a generation, literally 21 years of lower than normal interest rates that created multiple asset bubbles and the longest bull market in us history, in the stock market. So it's understandable that wealth has risen.
[00:35:01] Speaker A: I thought everything was bad right now, man. What are you talking about?
We need to make America great.
[00:35:06] Speaker B: I'm on the wrong show.
[00:35:07] Speaker A: Yeah, talking about, man, things are terrible right now. It couldn't be the longest.
[00:35:12] Speaker B: That's actually an interesting thing, because if the system were healthy in terms of our political class, I wouldn't be saying that over this record last 20 years of bull markets and all that, that the estate tax exemption was allowed to go from 675,000 to 13.6 million over that time. We should be as a nation. That's what could help the deficit and say, okay, well, if we have this exponential growth in wealth, especially at the top tier, then if we collect some of that back and put it back in the treasury, we won't have a $35 trillion deficit. And I recognize that. And we'll have a healthier wars in the Middle east for 20 years and all that stuff while we're cutting taxes. So there's a lot of decisions that have been made collectively by us as voters, by voting people into office who then did the biding of people who are a lot wealthier than most of us watching this. But to get to your question about where do we go from here? So I felt like the article alluded to something, I think that's really important for us as Americans.
And I'll quote here, because it says, rather than becoming disillusioned with the idea of fairness, growing inequality. Like, if we see the inequality continue to grow, might lead people believing more strongly that society is fair. And I realized, because there's a lot of people that think of the darwinism thing, like, oh, well, you either sink or swim in our society, blah, blah, blah.
And that theory goes that inequality is so great that it needs similarly great justification. This goes back to the way our minds work as humans. Remember, we talked about this in totally separate conversations.
[00:36:50] Speaker A: So do you see a solution to this, though?
[00:36:53] Speaker B: It's interesting, because where they're going with it is that we will tend to manipulate our minds to believe that this explosion of billionaires doesn't necessarily reflect as much of an imbalance in society, or maybe their ability to manipulate. Like, we've talked about governments and the legal and financial system to their advantage, it represents that they worked harder and the rest of us didn't. And I think that we are at risk for potentially making that a permanent thing. Because remember, like we talked about, the Europeans didn't look at the Africans as inferior until it became in the interest of the capital markets during slavery. And we've lived with that for hundreds of years, culturally. Yeah, and this could be something similar, too.
[00:37:41] Speaker A: And I think the living memory piece is what that's the key phrase, is that there were generations of Americans who saw a more egalitarian system, a system where society did well. And the spoils of society, of coming from society doing well, were broadly shared amongst everyone.
The society doing well didn't lead to the greatest explosion of billionaires ever. It led to the creation of the largest middle class ever.
But there were still rich people. There were still rich people, but it was that everybody was going up. And so instead, you had the largest middle class being created, in addition to the wealthy people getting wealthy. And so once people that have seen that start not exiting society, so to speak, then you run into this situation like you're talking about, where everybody looks around it like that's just the way it is. They don't appreciate the subtle things that are done, as far as whether it's lowering the top tax bracket, which was a big deal, or whether it be playing with the estate tax, or all the little subtle things that were done to balance the system I would say imbalance, but to balance the system and to bias the system towards large accumulations of wealth. And so they think that's the natural way for it to be. But that's more of a point to say that there's an urgency now that we can get to the point where people start thinking that this is just the only way that things could ever be. There is no other alternative than the people in the capitalist class, so to speak, of the billionaire class taking all the spoils and leaving everybody else to fight over the other thing. I think that the answer to the question, though, is the most simple answer and the least fulfilling answer, so to speak. And that is that over the past, however many years, let's say 40, 50 years, you've just seen money have a greater influence in the fourth estate, media, in private ownership of media, and that will then present information in ways that benefits the few, as opposed to. From a societal standpoint, you'll see that. And then also the concentration and the ability to use greater concentrations of wealth directly in the political system. So the ability to influence and inform people from the perspective from media, corporations that are owned by the billionaire class, so to speak, that's something that we see now. And then also things like Citizen United, Citizens United, the Supreme Court decision that, you know, the corporation is a person and can do what they want to do from, I guess, everything but vote or go to jail. Corporation can't go to jail. Things like that. So I would say a corporation is not a person, but sounds like I.
[00:40:20] Speaker B: Want to turn myself into a corporation, then, hey, go to jail. I got freedom of speech. This is awesome.
[00:40:25] Speaker A: Freedom of speech. Yeah. Political.
[00:40:27] Speaker B: And I get a lower tax individual.
[00:40:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:40:30] Speaker B: Wait a second. I got a new joke. So they got this transgender thing now, the last decade, where people kind of not sure, and they call themselves they. What if I became, like, a transhuman to a corporation?
[00:40:41] Speaker A: I think you might be on to something, man.
[00:40:43] Speaker B: Yeah. All right. I got to figure that out.
[00:40:44] Speaker A: Better get your lobbying hat on. I told you I'll be a they.
[00:40:48] Speaker B: Different kind of they. But, yeah, I'll be a corporate entity.
[00:40:51] Speaker A: Identify as a corporate entity.
[00:40:53] Speaker B: I think like a terminator. Because I can't be a human.
That'll be next show.
[00:40:59] Speaker A: Follow the money, basically is the answer. Like, you got to at least do more. And again, this is not, like, the natural order way. Things have to be. These are decisions that were made, whether it be decisions on antitrust and ownership, decisions on the responsibilities of media, decisions on court, decisions on the corporate personhood, and corporate donations and stuff. So those are the types of things we have to look at. And I don't know that Americans rank and file will ultimately care about this stuff, but people who do recognize the threat will have to participate in the system.
[00:41:31] Speaker B: You know who recognized it, and I know you want to move. The founding fathers recognize it because Americans, it'll be an issue when Americans are on the street with pitchforks because that's.
[00:41:40] Speaker A: Kind of what they had to fight a war. And so the goal would be to not have to fight a war. Or the people who realized it also were the people after the Great Depression, but they had to go through the Great Depression. And so it'll eventually happen, and it'll just be a matter of how much pain do we have to experience? And so right now, we're kind of on the forefront saying, hey, if we can kind of get this under control, we don't necessarily go out and have to go through the depths, but we do want to get out of this topic. We'll catch you on the next topic after the break.
All, all right, our second topic today, we recently saw that Alexey Navalny died. Many believe he was killed, but he died in a gulag in Siberia, in Russia. He was in custody because for what many say was basically speaking out against the government in Russia. And we wanted to comment on that, but also just in the context of the United States and the concept of free speech, which is often thrown around. And right now, even the US Supreme Court is dealing with a case where the question of free speech and government restriction of speech on social media versus the social media companies restrictions on speech and whether that constitutes the government acting or whatever. So just the concept of free speech and how that's built into our country, something we may take for granted, something we may misunderstood. But just your reaction to Navalny and what happened with him and then also in the context of what our principle and concept of free speech is in the United States.
[00:43:03] Speaker B: Yeah, I think we're probably, at this point a little late to the party. We're not going to be the first people talking about Navalny's death. But I do think, like, I've seen just many other pundits and read in articles and things, I think this is very symbolic. I've heard comparisons to Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, you know, leaders of the last hundred years or within living memory for many who tried to bring justice to the people of their nation against an authoritarian regime or at least an authoritarian system, if we say, let's say Jim Crow in the United States. So, yeah, it's one of those. And I think it's glaring just because of this continued type of activity that appears to come from the russian government in terms of the fate of its political opponents and foes. And in contrast to, for example, how we deal with political dissent and know politicians in the United States deal with political foes. So I do think it's relevant, and it appears to be just another notch on the belt of a long arc of this direction by the current government.
[00:44:30] Speaker A: Yeah, well said. I mean, like you said, this has been discussed extensively. Looking at it from the lens of Russia, I was actually more interested in the lens of the United States, because oftentimes we see, I think the concept of freedom of speech in the United States, at least amongst rank and file Americans, is.
I don't know that it's understood completely. It's definitely taken for granted. And I say that because you'll see people citing free speech or complaining about free speech if they get, let's say, banned from Twitter or something like that. That's not what Navalny went through.
His issue wasn't that he got banned from social media or that he lost the job, like he was working somewhere, and then he came out and spoke against the government, and then he lost his job, or he protested something and lost his job, like, this man was imprisoned and lost his life for speaking out. And the concept of freedom of speech, at its core, deals with that. It deals with the ability to speak out against the government.
One of the key things about free speech is that you don't need freedom of speech to say things that are acceptable or popular or the current kind of status quo. If Navalny was saying, the russian government is great, and I just want to do anything to support the russian government, they never tell lies, he wouldn't need freedom of speech. He can say that as much as he wants, because that's the message that that regime wants out. The issue was that he was saying things that the regime did not want out. And they don't have the concept of freedom of speech to where you're allowed to say that stuff without criminal penalties and criminal, without being put in jail, locked up, all that kind of stuff. So in the United States, that's what we have. You don't see someone standing up against the government with words saying, hey, I disagree with what the government's saying, or the government's not telling you the truth and dealing with that by going to jail. And so that's what the freedom of speech is, that we have. And that's what we need to value. The concept that there should be no repercussions for anything anyone says, no commercial repercussions, no benefits that a private company may give people that could take away to me is preposterous. And it's an insult to the people who know, whether be Navali or other people who have spoken out against regimes and then paid for it with their life, or in the case of Mandela, just losing 30 years of their life or whatever. So to me, I think that's what we have to take example or use examples of this in the real world and have an appreciation for what we have here in the United States when it comes to something like free speech.
[00:47:08] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think that's well said. One thing that kills me is I went and looked at the first Amendment as a good reminder of how fortunate we are. But that's what I mean. It's interesting. These moments know it really hurts me to see in the United States, like, you're alluding to this false equivalency that not only some Americans don't understand, like, you're well put. The concept of freedom of speech is really to protect us from the government coming down on us if we were to dissent.
Remember, the freedom of speech goes many ways, right? A corporation has the freedom to say they don't want certain customers if they're not behaving in a way that is conducive to the environment. So just like, if I'm in a bar and I drink a bit, too, you know, James, I've joked with you about binge watching cops and Karen videos. A lot of them, if you just go look at them, are people that just drank too much at an airport or bar, and they're rowdy. And the patron of the owner of the establishment is just telling the cops, I can't have this person here. They're just disrupting the environment, and they have a right to not let that person in. So to your point on social media, if you own a private company and you have people on your platform that are saying things that are against your standards and that have been in writing, that people clicked on when they signed the terms of agreement, you have a right to ban them. That doesn't mean the government has a right to treat political dissidents like they do in Russia. And I think that's where, to me, the false equivalence is very dangerous here in the United States because we have people know from a former president who's aspiring to be president again, to people in the Congress and the Senate who say that people who stormed the Capitol on January 6 are the same as Alexi Navalne. They forget to mention that those people broke the law, trespassed and broke windows. They didn't just sit there and peacefully assemble like they did in the morning of January 6 on the ellipse when former president.
[00:49:12] Speaker A: Yeah, the people that were just out talking stuff aren't the ones that are getting criminal penalties. It's the people that vandalized and broke in and then started committing other crimes. And that's actually, see, to me now, one thing, that there is a difference between being someone who speaks out against the government and also committing crimes versus someone who speaks out against the government and then the government trying to find something to charge you with or trumping up something to try to charge you with. And that can be a distinction that can be a thin line sometimes that it's hard to distinguish from the outside. But some of that, we just have to use common sense. Like if someone is going around and committing crimes unrelated to them speaking out against the government, then a lot of times we can surmise that, okay, well, maybe this person is a criminal who also happens to be speaking out against the government. Speaking out against the government doesn't mean that your other criminal activity is acceptable. You still can be. The government can grab you for that other criminal activity. But the idea or the act of speaking out against the government itself can't be made a crime. Or in the United States, an example of the government coming down against someone for exercising political speech, disagreeing with the government. The most recent example of that actually would be the government of Florida and Ron DeSantis deciding to try to make Disney's life very unpleasant, using regulations, doing all types of machinations to retaliate against Disney because they didn't like that Disney made their displeasure known of some of the things that the government of Florida was doing. That's the kind of protection that freedom of speech is supposed to give.
Think now. An issue that's before the US Supreme Court right now is a pretty interesting as well. I'm not going to bore you from a legal context, but just basically the issue there is that the state of Florida and also Texas created laws saying that the social media companies have to, are not allowed to ban people because they say things that violate their terms and conditions. And what's interesting about that is that the question before the Supreme Court is that, well, can the government make companies allow people to do whatever speech they want on their platform? And so that's yet to be decided. That's an issue that we're about to see. It appears as if it's going to be something. Again, the government needs to stay out of it altogether. If a private company wants to say, you can do this, and these are the terms of conditions of using my establishment, you have to wear pants or you can't say this, you can't say crazy stuff here. You can't insult these people, which, of course, I don't think anybody would say that if a restaurant instituted that type of policy that, oh, no, you got to let these people in that go around insulting people everywhere they go. I don't know that people would have the same reaction. But nonetheless, this is an issue that's still evolving in the United States, and we're still asking different questions in terms of what's allowed and what's not in their freedom of speech. But again, something like this, beyond noting it and saying, okay, yes, it's unfortunate, it's terrible what happened to this guy. It's also a time to reflect and look back at what we have in our country and to appreciate it and maybe to understand it a little better and understand what makes it special and make sure that we deny the false equivalency and protect it.
[00:52:21] Speaker B: Yeah, and I'm glad you landed there because that's where I want to keep going, is really the false equivalency. You're right. We don't appreciate. Think about it. We have entire economic ecosystems in this country that are built on dissent of the government. I mean, I'm a boater in south Florida. If you go underwater here in south Florida, there's a million flags that say f. Biden, let's go, Brandon. All that stuff. And I'm not saying that because I'm upset about it. I'm just saying that there's no flag you're going to find flying publicly in Russia saying, f. Putin.
The ability I don't like, if someone burns the american flag, I'll find that offensive. But the Supreme Court said that we have a right to dissent in America. Burning the flag is part of free speech. So that's the thing that comes along with being in a free country, is that we got to accept that. We got to deal with things that we might not like. A lot of people have an issue with transgender people having freedom of speech or blacks or gays, whoever. Right.
[00:53:20] Speaker A: But everyone gets broadly. A lot of people have a problem with people exercising free speech when they don't agree with what the person is saying. And that blows the whole point, which is the whole point.
So I think we can wrap from there. We appreciate everybody, for joining us on this episode of call. Like I see it. Subscribe to the podcast, rate it, review it, tell us what you think. Send it to a friend. Until next time, I'm James Keys, and.
[00:53:41] Speaker B: I am a corporation today.
[00:53:43] Speaker A: All right, we'll talk you next time.
I'm.
