Summary
➡ The article discusses concerns about the push for electric vehicles (EVs), questioning why cheaper models aren’t allowed in the U.S. if the goal is to reduce carbon emissions. It criticizes the focus on luxury EVs and the speed they can reach, arguing that if the climate crisis is as severe as claimed, the focus should be on minimalism and affordability. The article also discusses the influence of regulations and government mandates on the auto industry, suggesting that these often favor established companies and hinder newcomers. Lastly, it criticizes politicians for supporting these practices, arguing that they often agree with the fundamentals of the opposing side.
➡ Starting a food truck business isn’t as simple as it seems due to government regulations and costs. These regulations also affect other businesses, forcing them to find ways to cut costs, such as automating jobs or hiring cheap labor. This can lead to job loss and higher prices for consumers. The discussion also touches on the impact of government restrictions on resources and immigration, arguing that these policies can increase costs and limit opportunities.
➡ The text discusses the power of government and its impact on people’s lives, particularly in terms of economic policies and regulations. It highlights how government decisions, such as imposing tariffs and requiring airbags in vehicles, can have unintended consequences. The text also suggests that these decisions are often made without considering the individual’s right to make their own risk and reward judgments. The discussion also touches on historical events like the Civil War, suggesting it was more about economic control than slavery.
➡ The text discusses the lack of empathy and remorse in people who knowingly cause harm to others. It also criticizes the American Recovery Act and the distribution of funds to companies like GM and Proterra. The text further discusses the issue of mandatory safety measures like seatbelts and airbags in vehicles, arguing that they should be a personal choice. Lastly, it criticizes the property tax system, arguing that it prevents true ownership and creates economic insecurity.
➡ The article discusses the unfairness of property taxes, which can force people out of homes they’ve already paid for due to increased property values and tax rates. It mentions a ballot initiative in North Dakota that could potentially eliminate property taxes. The article also criticizes government-run schools, arguing they often fail to provide quality education and parents should have more control over their children’s education. Lastly, it suggests that government interference causes societal friction and resentment.
Transcript
You’ve been nice enough to join me on my show. You’ve been in a battle on X to try to get word out about X, and you’ve been doing some experiments, experiments on things. There’s this debate as to whether or not things are really changing at X, at Twitter X, and whether Elon Musk is playing some sort of false dialectic or anything like that. You want to offer any thoughts on that and what you’ve been trying and what you’ve been experiencing at X yourself, getting word out about your own work? Well, sure, but before I begin with the introduction that you gave me, I feel like I ought to go get my Captain Freedom outfit.
Remember Captain Freedom from the Running Man? Absolutely. Jesse Ventura and Arnold and, and, you know, all these, these action stars that we liked back in the day have turned out to be these sad, tired, old, authoritarian, collectivist people. It’s just, it’s very, very demoralizing. Yeah. And, you know, to find out the truth is always a good thing, isn’t it? Yeah, it really is. And like I said, you know, in the chat with Tom, you know, being able to sort of burn away all that, that fluff and so on, and, and, you know, it’s a process that we go through in many cases in various times in our lives.
But it has been quite a, quite a crucible, I think, to discover the people who are true to truth and try to remain true, even though, you know, there’s so many different things that pop up. And sometimes people can stumble and we have different opinions on certain things, but you try to be as honest with people as possible. And those guys, unfortunately, they’ve been pulled aside. I think, you know, maybe in conversation, if someone were to speak with Jeff, Jesse Ventura, you know, they might say, oh, I guess I had the wrong impression about what you did or what you’re doing.
And so on. But, yeah, you know, we assess it as it goes, I guess. I think Elon Musk is proving to be kind of a younger iteration of that, and we’re finding out the truth about him sooner rather than later. I’ll preface what I’m going to say with regard to my personal situation by taking note of the fact that when Brazil threatened him, initially he pushed back a little bit, but then he caved in because he wants the money. At the end of the day, he wants to maximize his revenue stream. So he has acceded to these thugs in Brazil who have told him essentially that if they tell him to censor the account of anybody, the decree only applied to one particular person, I think, or a handful of people.
I think there were four or five political figures in Brazil that the authoritarian regime doesn’t like and wants to prevent from expressing themselves publicly on X. Well, he kowtowed to that. So what makes anybody think that he’s not going to do the same thing here? Now I’ll segue from that to here. He does do that here in the first place. If you don’t pay him a fee every month, you’re put into kind of an alleyway of free speech where most of what you post isn’t seen. And it’s kind of like, you know, back in the print newspaper days, and I have a background in print newspaper, it would be like expecting people to pay the newspaper to publish their letter to the editor.
But it’s even more egregious than that because in my case, for example, in the case of people like Naomi Wolf, who’s another person who’s in my predicament and Rappaport is another one who’s had the same situation happen. John Rapoport? Sure. Yeah. You know, we’re literally providing content to X. You know, it’s not as though we’re just posting one sentence page, little comments. We’re actually providing content and we’re being expected to pay him to put the content on his platform so that he can make advertising revenue off of our content. And then this applies to everybody who happens to be on X.
They are mining your data to sell ads. So they’re making money off of you and they’re expecting you to pay for the privilege. It is a grift on par with his EV grift. So there’s that. Then there’s the really subtle way they just shunt the wrong thankful comments. They don’t outright ban you usually. You know, you have to really do something blatant for that to happen. You’ll think that you’ve posted something, you know, it’ll, it’ll show. The problem is nobody sees it. Right. And I have been trying to document this on a day to day basis.
Yeah, I was curious about that. I don’t know how you, how you have gone about that and I was fascinated because I know this has been a multi week project of yours, right? Yeah. Well, it’s fairly easy. I’ve got a significant number of followers and traffic. So on a day when, let’s use the analogy of a water spigot, when they turn the spigot on and people can see what I’ve posted, I’ll typically get 20 plus comments or replies to what I posted within a 12 hour period. Then the spigot will turn off and you know, for the next 12 to 24 hours, sometimes even longer than that.
Literally nothing. That’s not natural, that’s not organic. Because I’m posting the same amount of material pretty much every day. I’m kind of a workaholic. I do a lot of stuff every single day. So I’m posting links and things on X. So it ought to be consistent. It does not make sense that all these people who are following me and who will typically respond to something that I’ve posted on say a Tuesday would not respond at all on a Wednesday to similar things. It just doesn’t make any sense. So I’ve tried to take screenshots when I get up in the morning of what’s happened overnight or in the past 12 hours to show people, okay, look, yesterday I had 18 or 19 or 20 responses to something and now here it is 12 hours later or 24 hours later and there’s nothing, zero.
How can that be? Yeah, so you know, that’s what they’re doing. And it’s, there’s a good analogy here. I think they, you know, they are the federal government, These bureaucratic apparatchiks are smart enough not to outlaw cars with engines because there might be pushback from that. It’s too blatant, it’s too obvious. So rather than outlaw them, what they do is they out regulate them. They enact these regulations that effectively serve to push them off the road because you can’t comply with them. Not realistically, not economic. Right. So you know, okay, well, sure, you could, you know, Harris even said it the other day, you know, oh, we’re not trying to, we’re not trying to suppress people’s opportunity to buy a gas engine car if they want to.
Well, yeah, you are. You’re forcing the manufacturers to not make them anymore in favor of either pure electric cars or hybrid cars, which are the only vehicles that can comply with these regulations. And that’s how they do it. And it’s really, it’s very insidious because most people do not understand how the regulatory apparat works. You know, and we were talking about fascism before and I didn’t even bring up, you know, the economic definition of fascism is the nominative and name only ownership of private property or business with the mixing of government and corporate interest together as Muslini Mussolini loves so much.
So that’s exactly it. Whether it’s the EPA or OSHA or it’s the state of California dictating to car companies because they have such a large pool of customers there, the car companies will fall in line. These types of things, they literally are taking away people’s opportunities to see variations, to be able to freely associate with people and to for themselves. Yeah. And the adversarial relationship that once existed, say between the carmakers and the government, that’s gone away. You know, fascism more finally is when the corporate structures literally embed themselves with the government and effectively they are the same entity.
You know, they are serving each other’s interests. And that’s what’s happened. The car companies and I’ve been witness to this, I’ve been doing this for 30 years now. And back when I started out in the 90s, they would push back when the regulatory apparat would propose something, airbags for example. When that first came out, I was witness to this. First person they brought in, engineers, they tried to talk to the federal regulators at NHTSA and they said, look, it’s not just about the money. These things are not perfect and they’re going to hurt some people and they’re probably going to kill some people.
And you should take that into consideration before you pass a mandate or a requirement that every new car has this. They stopped doing that. Now they actually anticipate mandates. In fact they will propose things be put into cars because they can make more money. It’s rent seeking grift. It’s, I was just going to say you’ve inspired me because just yesterday I saw a report on how the carbon capture so called industry, which is at this point unregulated, they claim is asking for, for the federal government to regulate it out of their great magnanimous nature which everybody knows is rent seeking because they are established and they want these regulations and impositions to block other people from coming into already something that is a totally ginned up, non market oriented field of endeavor that shouldn’t even exist in the first place.
Yep. Here’s another good example. You know, we are presented with this notion, this hysterical notion that we face an existential crisis on account of the climate changing. And the climate is changing, they tell us, because of gas engine vehicles. So we’ve got to get people into electric cars. That’s what they tell us. Existential crisis. Right. Serious business if we take that premise. Hmm. Well, if that’s the case, then why don’t they allow these extremely low cost electric vehicles that are manufactured by the Chinese and other companies that you can pick up for 8,000 bucks equivalent in China into the United States? It’s an existential crisis, isn’t it? Don’t you want more people in these EVs? Wouldn’t you want more affordable EVs instead? What’s being forced on people is this grift of these $50,000 plus high end, high performance luxury EVs.
They almost all tout how quick they are, right? I mean, every time you encounter somebody who’s an EV advocate, they’ll tell you, my EV can get to 60 in 3.9 seconds or whatever it is. Wait a minute. If it’s an existential crisis, if the planet is going to like fall apart, we’re all going to die. What are you worried about? How quickly this thing goes from zero to 60? It should be minimalism. It shouldn’t be anything more than the bare necessity of what it takes to get from A to B. Exactly. You got to pare down that use of carbon.
You can’t enjoy a faster ride. In fact, you should just get sails, sit on skateboards and go with the wind. Even that you have to cut the trees, that we got to just walk and don’t even wear shoes, just go naked. Everything’s fine. It’s much better that way. And you remind me, Eric, or speaking with Eric Peters of ericpetersautos.com Follow him at X Libertarian Car G I’m Gardner Goldsmith filling in for David Knight. Eric Peters, a great regular guest in the David Knight show. And. And of course you can find my show and Eric is often there as well.
And that is Liberty conspiracy. At 6pm Monday through Friday. Go to Rumble and Rockford and all that stuff. But I should mention, Eric, this will show you just seeing the politicians when they’re appearing with the unions, when they’re going to the automobile companies. It’s this weird, bifurcated, almost cyclical thing where that right there you’re seeing fascism in action on video right in front of your eyes because they’re catering to the unions or the car companies at the same time that they’re leveraging off of regulations that have already been imposed and the regulatory state, which already is there and has been there for so long, that can continue to come down and hurt them or play favorites.
So we have an example of the so called freedom guy, J.D. vance. And this is a great example of where in one area MRCTV and I had differing opinions. They I had a piece about Kamala Harris and her EV bus adoration and how the Democrat Party ended up getting a boost cyclically coming back from an EV bus maker. Not Proterra, a different one that gave they got money from the feds and then the head of that company gave money to the Democrat Party. So that was part of the article. But I said, you know, if you think that this is just Democrats, you’re wrong.
Because J.D. vance, when he was in Michigan about seven days ago, actually appeared and told people he didn’t like what the Biden administration was doing about EVs. It was terrible. What they were doing, this EV stuff. And then the reason he gave that it was terrible was because they weren’t giving more money for EV development in Detroit. Right. So you know, he’s just going to be adding to the fascism. And you just say, well, first of all, you’re if on the most basic level you’re supposed to be swearing an oath to the Constitution, where in the world in article 8 million are you finding that as something you are enumerated to do? And then we could get into the deeper philosophy that Lysander Spooner said.
Even if you have a group of people 200 years ago who signed a piece of paper that says we who take these offices will have authority over other people, that doesn’t make it legitimate. Right. There’s no, there’s no authority over other people that a group of people can sign for themselves. It doesn’t work that way. One of the most exasperating aspects of this to me, and I’m going to segue into something Trump said, is that they pretend on the right to oppose the left, but they agree with the left on the fundamentals. And so how do you contest the left when you yourself have already agreed with it? Here’s the example that I’ll bring forward.
A couple of weeks ago, Trump was talking about how if he’s elected, he’s going to do something about the high cost of car insurance. He’s going to, he’s going to buy Fiat, he’s going to issue some kind of price controls. He’s going to say, you know, they have to lower them by 50% or whatever. So he doesn’t question, well, why is the government in the first place forcing people to buy a product or service, any product or service. That’s the problem. If you can’t say no to anything, it’s going to cost you more at the end of the day.
You know, the reason that say you can still buy a three or four dollar cup of coffee, and I know that’s pretty ridiculous too, is because you’re free to not buy it. You know, can you imagine if there were a mandate that you had to buy a cup of coffee? And not only that, there were only say two or three places that you could go to buy coffee. What do you say? And Eric, I should bring up also then there are the hidden mandates. Even you bring up something like a cup of coffee. As James Bovard wrote in the book the Fair Trade Fraud, if you look at all the hidden mandates on even the people trying to bring you coffee or milk or cheese or women’s brassieres, they’ve got tariffs against French brassieres and textiles.
So behind all, many of the things that are actually on the shelves, are inter, interlopers deciding for you that no, you know what, if you wanted to buy that other thing, your freedom of choice is now going to be penalized. We’re deciding, as I mentioned through tariffs what is essential and what is non essential, which is a form of fascism. You are playing up certain types of endeavors for your friends, the domestic friends, whether they’re the union members or people who think that the native jobs have to be protected and you’re taking away someone’s choice. It’s insane.
Well, there’s a, there’s a really simple childish thing that has been imparted to kids now for generation, generations, so that they equate when they hear that word fascism. What they think of are jack booted stormtroopers marching in review before Hitler. They don’t understand the economics of fascism. You mentioned what you said earlier, what you mentioned earlier about Mussolini, the inventor of modern fascism and the symbols of fascism which go back to ancient Rome. Very, very few people, I doubt one out of 100 people would be able to tell you what the fascies are, what the word fascism itself means or the fact that they’re on the Lincoln Memorial.
Correct. Yeah, that fascist himself. And you know, with regard to these costs, you know, it’s if people have no idea. One of the reasons we’re so impoverished is because you have to get permission to transact business. There’s a middleman between you and your potential customer. For example, dawn and I have thought about the idea of having a little food truck, you know, because we live in a rural area, so people have to drive very far to get things. And we thought, you know, wow, people would probably like to have, you know, like a little food truck that has some Chinese food, let’s say, just some basic things, you know, spring rolls and general TSO’s chicken and stuff like that.
But you can’t just get a food truck and, you know, and set it up even on your own property. You know, we couldn’t put it on my land adjacent to the road without the government’s permission and the government’s supervision. And the cost is exorbitant. And then there’s the hassle. I have a friend who is a restaurant owner, and he was constantly being pestered and hassled and made to pay money to some officious little bureaucrat from the county who would visit his restaurant all the time to, you know, check things out. There are no assertions that anybody has been harmed by any of it.
Nobody’s being forced to eat there. Everybody’s happy in terms of, you know, the customers getting what they want, the services being provided. So what’s the problem? But we’ve been so habituated as a culture and a society to thinking that, you know, in order for that to happen, you have to have the government’s permission and you have to have the government supervision, as if entities like the FDA are doing a real fine job of making sure the food supply is safe. And, you know, Eric, I do want to bring up someone over on X brought up a point that actually opens up another dimension to this on the immigration side of it, and that is this.
Gallo writes, they’re red taping us to death and importing cheap labor. And, you know, there is some very strong validity there when we think about what businesses end up having to do when their production costs, whatever the. Whatever the, you know, the means of production are for them, where the government imposes higher and higher costs on, say, importing steel or other things from other countries. And then they have all these regulations that impose things like minimum wage and all these things. Well, of course they’re going to try to find any way they possibly can in their production line to lower costs somehow, some way.
So now when you’ve got a government which itself is artificially counter to what a natural market would be doing bringing people in through the central command and control immigration powers. Now they, they’ve literally got apps that the central government is giving people. They’re housing people in New York City for free, so they’re subsidizing moves in the other direction. So it’s just ridiculous. And I do think that that’s a valid point to bring up. I think that’s a very good point and I’d love to get your thoughts on that. And we have even more great comments from people.
Yeah, well, you know, something that’s related that pops into my mind. You’ve probably heard about McDonald’s and other fast food chains that are trying to automate their stores. Yeah, because it’s, you know, I worked at McDonald’s as a teenager back in the 80s and I made $3.35 an hour because I was a kid and I was doing a really basic entry level job operating the fry machine like Donald Trump did a week ago and handing people their bags of food. It’s not a high skilled job and I’m in no way denigrating it. It was a good work experience.
You learn to show up on time, you learn to be responsible. All of these things are good and healthy. But it’s not supposed to be a career and it’s not supposed to be something that can support a family. But the government has decreed in some states that you have to pay these people what, 15, $20 an hour to operate the fry machine. And you wonder why a Big Mac costs $7. There’s a reason for this. And it gets to the point of unsustainability. It gets to the point where McDonald’s even can no longer make a profit.
When, you know, people go through the drive through and they buy a couple of burgers and some fries for themselves and their kids and it’s 50 bucks, it’s 60 bucks for McDonald’s. So what does McDonald’s do? McDonald’s figures out, well, we just can’t afford to pay these people anymore. It’s not personal. They’re not trying to be mean, they just can’t do it. So they come up with robots. And so now you go into the thing and there’s a kiosk instead of a human being. And the thing that really sucks about that is that teenagers like I was back in the 80s no longer have access to those jobs.
They no longer get that first leg into the workforce, which is unfortunate and tragic, which happens every time when these technocratic busybody people that are the government interpose themselves in the free market. And you know, Eric, one of the things that I do want to make sure that I mention because involved with this, I think, are sometimes people have either what are assumed to be traditional views or they sort of have, again, sort of a normalcy bias towards looking at things in a certain way that have been dictated or massaged by politics. So, for example, if we’re talking about the different resources one needs in the production line for a business or whatever, one of the things that people will say is, well, yeah, you know, if the government is imposing costs on people through minimum wage laws, that will incentivize them to then invest in machinery.
And those, those young people are going to be locked out. And the key thing here is that either way, the consumer is now having to shell out more for what the consumer could have gotten for less in the past, which is one of the key things. And James Bovard’s writing in the Fair Trade Fraud, one of the key things in great 19th century economist Frederick Bastier. What is seen and what is not seen, the opportunity costs that government impositions bring. And the other thing that I’d like to bring up is when in the other direction you get the central government deciding for everybody what their human interaction is going to be, restricting their ability to be able to hire someone who might live in Singapore and be providing a product because they’re putting a tariff on there or literally another human being from coming in to work at his place.
If they’re saying, you know what, we’re going to restrict your pool of resources, we’re going to make it more difficult for you to get steel, what does that do to the price of steel? It goes up. If we’re going to restrict your ability to be able to hire employees, what does that do to the price of the employee line of your production? It’s going to go up. So we go to Mark Krikorian, and many people admire Mark Krikorian from the center for Immigration Studies, but he was utterly wrong. And even Rush Limbaugh said, you know, he was right.
They were both wrong in this case, when back during the W. Bush administration, they were talking about having really strong central authority restrictions on immigration. And Krikorian said, oh, this will be great, and I put it in my book and live free or die, because he said, you know, it will push the businesses to have to invest in new technology. So over the long run that’ll be fine. It’s like, look, why don’t you leave it up to them. Why do you want to increase the cost for their labor force? So that now the consumer will have less money left over because they got to pay more for the thing they could have gotten for less before that money would have been invested in a different business that would have employed another person.
But you and your central authority, you’re telling people, no, I know better than you. I’m going to prevent your freedom of association from hiring someone. Where does that stop? Can you hire somebody from outside your state? Can you bring somebody in from outside your town? Can you bring in a plumber into your house? Or should you do all the work yourself? It is, it’s, it’s insane. It’s totally ridiculous. It’s not insane. It’s self interested, you know. Yeah, well, good point. Good. In their own interests. And you remember the butterfly effect? You’ve heard the phrase. Yeah. What you just brought up has to do with that.
So when I buy something that costs more, that means that I have less money available to spend on other things and people don’t see that. So if I can’t spend money, let’s say on, oh, I don’t know, something around the house that I might want to hire somebody to do, let’s say some electrical upgrades or something, that work doesn’t get farmed out because I can’t afford to hire that electrician. So that electrician doesn’t get paid, he loses the work, he has less money. So it just, it expands outward forever. Yes, in this cycle of impoverishment and you know, to get back to this whole thing, it really gets my back up the way these putative do gooders because they like to preen and posture and present themselves as the benefactors of humanity.
They’re nothing of the kind. They’re really dark people in my mind. You know, some of them are dumb and maybe they don’t know better, but the smarter ones do. They know what they’re, what the game is. And the game is that they get control and power and they reduce us all. You know, I have this little graphic that I sometimes put up with some of my articles called, yes, Amasa, you know, and it’s kind of a more coarse way of putting what Anne Rand wrote about in a lot of her books, you know, this having a kowtow and be obsequious before these, these people in the government who have power over you and you know, you dare not question or say anything about it because they can make your life hell, they can ruin your business, they can really mess things up.
So you kind of have to. Yes, a mass out. Go along with what you say, you know, you know, it’s. It’s not as though Abe Lincoln freed the slave. Abe. Abe Lincoln enslaved us all, is ultimately what it comes down to. Yes. Boy, these are great points. And of course. And again, I’ll mention, you know, not to. To focus on tariffs too much during our conversation, but I do want to bring up. We often hear the line that people say Thomas Jefferson balanced the budget and only relied on tariffs, not the excise tax inside the United States.
They didn’t have an income tax during Jefferson. And he said no man. No man saw the tax. The tax man. Well, yes, people. A lot of people saw the tax man. If you were an importer, you saw the tax man. And the fact that some people who bought the stuff from the importers who had to pay the tariffs and then had to increase their prices meant that they indirectly saw the tax man. They didn’t see him directly, but they paid the tax. So this is an utter canard. And you bring up the Civil War. That was the main driver for the reason why the south wanted to get away from the north.
Because they were dominating the Congress and they were forcing such high tariffs on things that the south could use as imports. They were trying to drive the south to buy the northeastern products rather than get them from France or Italy or England. Yep. As Tom DiLorenzo, who I think is one of the best writers on this topic, has explained. Lincoln even offered, you know, to come to any kind of compromise provided that the south would not depart from the Union because it was about the money. It had nothing to do with the slavery. That was the boogeyman.
That was the moralizing boogeyman that they came up with and which has managed to perpetuate itself to this very day. The northern industrial interests that control the federal government were crippling the south economically. That’s the bottom line. That’s what it was all about. Yeah, yeah. And De Lorenzo’s books, the Real Lincoln and Lincoln Unmasked are phenomenal. And of course, his book, How Capitalism Saved America is also just spot on. Talking about, as you and I have discussed before, the thousands of miles of private, really pl. Privately run roads. People say, who will build the roads? The idea of the toll.
Toll. The toll bridges, toll house cookies, and the idea that you’re not going to take land through eminent domain. If somebody wants to build a road, they have to approach you and freely ask you if you will take money for the land. And businesses had incentives to Try to set up their own roads and manage them. Well, this is great, Eric. Let’s talk about what’s going on over at Eric Peters autos.com and feel free to mention anything else if you want to remind people. Again, let’s talk about X. We can get your X feed out there.
It’s at its libertariancarg. I flashed up on the screen. I mean, the team here, the team here flashed up on the screen one of your latest articles, something else about airbags. And I love the picture. It reminds me of the old days when I would be with my friends, the leeches, because they used to fix up Volkswagen Bugs. And you know, this, the stick shift would be there, the engine was open behind us, and you’d get in here, it’d just be a shell like a dune buggy. And I love that airbag. Tell us about this article just published yesterday at Eric Peters Autos.
Well, it kind of, it kind of dovetails on what we’ve been talking about in the sense that it’s another example of these interpositions by these busybodies who make cost, value, risk, reward judgments for us arrogantly. You know, they decide whether something is good for us, and never mind that there might be some bad aspects to it. In their judgment, the overall goodness of it justifies imposing costs and risks on everybody. That’s just the way it is. You know, the kind of arrogance that’s behind that is something that I find difficult to understand. And you probably do, too.
You know, I think people, adults ought to be free to form their own judgments about risks and reward and cost and benefit, because after all, they’re the ones who pay for both of those things, you know, at the end of the day. And I think it’s presumptive and evil to take that choice away from somebody because effectively you’re saying, well, I don’t. I’m going to just, I’m going to do this thing and make you do it. And if you get hurt, well, too bad. I’ve decided so to get into this airbag thing. You know, the federal government has been requiring airbags and new vehicles since the 90s.
And the thing with airbags is, well, one of the things is it like any apparatus, and it’s not just airbags, it’s a system. People have to understand that it’s not just the bag. There’s an inflator, there’s wiring, there’s sensors, all these things that go out throughout the car. Well, like any other mechanical electrical system, eventually over time, they deteriorate Parts stop working, things stop, fail. They fail, and then they don’t work. And with airbags, that can be a big problem. The thing might just explode in your face. That’s happened. Or it might not work at all.
A few years ago, I was pulling through one of the owner’s manuals for one of the new cars that I test drive, and it said in the back that the airbag system should be replaced after 12 years because of safety, safety considerations. And that’s true because the system becomes unreliable the older it gets. You’ve got a lot of vehicles on the road that are now in daily service that are 15, 20 years old because cars are pretty reliable now that essentially have these airbags in them that are unsafe. And this goes beyond the defective airbags that everybody has heard about that involve millions and millions of vehicles that have been manufactured over the past 20 years.
Well, if the federal safety apparatus so very concerned about our safety, why don’t they do something about that? And they don’t, of course, because it’s situational, it’s arbitrary, and they’re not really concerned about safety. What they’re concerned about is their authority. Really good example during this Takata airbag fiasco that’s still ongoing because there’s so many vehicles with these defective airbags that it’s going to take years to get them through the dealerships to get the old airbags taken out and get new ones put in these things. It’s a matter of throughput and flow. Well, the government concedes that these airbags are dangerous and defective.
They’ve said so publicly. They still will not permit people who are waiting for a dealer to give them an appointment. That might take six months, a year. Who knows how long it’s going to take? They won’t even permit them to have a temporary off switch or disable the system for the period of time that it takes to get the car in to get the airbag replaced. Why is that we’re so very concerned about our safety. That’s maniacal. That’s like when Lady Dole was pushing these things onto people and then. And they were, you know, breaking the necks of little kids who were in the front seat.
Yes, exactly. And the. To get back when we talked about this, when I first came on with you, the engineers told that to these people at the. At the regulatory app route. They said, look, you’re, You’re. They were insisting the regulatory app route was telling the automakers that you have to make the airbags deploy with a certain force that assumes an adult male in the seat. And they came back and said, well, you know, not everybody’s an adult male of a certain stature. There are old people who are frail, there are kids, there are women who are small stature, small bones.
And you know, if this bag deploys with the force that might be necessary to cushion a 200 pound man and the person in the seat is 120 pounds, you know, you could result that that could could, you know, could break their neck or smash their facial bones. And it has and it did. They don’t care. They don’t care. Keep in mind these are the same people who pushed the safe and effective drugs on people. And they knew it. They knew it before anything happened. They had their own internal studies. They knew about the myocarditis, they knew about the Bell’s palsy, they knew about all these things.
They don’t care. And if there’s a working definition of a psychopath, that’s, that’s it, isn’t it? Somebody who’s conscious and knowing that what they’re trying to make you do is going to hurt you possibly. And they don’t care. There’s no empathy, there’s no, there’s no remorse, there’s no guilt. That’s right. And it gets even worse oftentimes as we see with Proterra. And I brought it up, Jennifer Granholm and how she was governor of Michigan and then during the Obama administration they had the so called American Recovery act, utterly unconstitutional and morally handing out billions of dollars.
GM got, you know, millions and millions of dollars and billions of dollars actually. And she was able to get 6 million broken off for this company Protero when she was governor and then when she left the governorship they brought her on their board. Then they gave her stock options when she left the board and she cashed those in a few weeks before they declared bankruptcy and she made three, three million bucks almost. Yeah, I mean they’re dirty rotten scoundrels but they’re not funny, you know, in the way that the movie was so true. And you, you bring up a very important practical point here.
I’d love to show this from the website, everybody, our guest is Eric peters. Go to ericpetersautos.com Follow him on X if you get the opportunity. Open up a tab, check him out, come right back, do it after the show, whatever you can. Here in the David Knight program he is libertariancarg. But you bring this up, you say it would probably cost at least $3,000 to have the driver and front passenger airbags and all related components replaced, the truck is maybe worth $4,000. This is why so many otherwise mechanically sound older vehicles like my truck are declared total losses after an accident that results in the deployment of the airbags, even though the vehicle is, or rather would be otherwise reparable.
But the airbags must be replaced because if not, the vehicle isn’t legal to operate on the government’s roads. Just incredible. Yeah, it’s just. And you know, again, it’s like the seat belt. You say to yourself, who am I harming outside of this vehicle if I don’t do this inside the vehicle? No one. No one. No one. Why are you telling me that? You are. You are. Now, just the very thought of telling me what to do peacefully in my car is a thought of aggression. So stop it. Well, what they, what they come back with, and I’m sure you’ve heard this, society will pay.
Of course, that’s a hypothetical asserted harm in the first place. That hasn’t actually happened. But it’s also completely arbitrary. What about the potbelly cop who’s arteriosclerotic, who pulls you over to issue you a ticket for not wearing your seatbelt? What about the costs he’s going to impose on society when he finally keels over from a heart attack? Yeah, yeah, absolutely arbitrary. They tell me I have to wear a helmet when I ride my motorcycle, but it’s okay if I wear a T shirt and shorts and flip flops. And it’s amazing because private insurance, and if you actually were free to get private health insurance or car insurance, they offer incentives to people.
You don’t have to take it if you don’t want it. You might pay a little more if you’re a smoking, skydiving, you know, heroin user. And you might pay less if you’re, you know, exercise and eat well and that sort of stuff. Or if you’re a safe driver, they’ll incentivize that. But once they collectivize everything and give you the we all pay canard, you get England, where literally they’re telling people, you know what, you’re obese. So we’re going to put you on the waiting list for elective surgery. You smoke. We’re going to put you on the waiting list for elective surgery, even though you have the money to pay, even though you’re in intense pain, even though we don’t know the circumstances of your life.
It’s all collectivist now. It’s the national health system. And God forbid anybody ever speak against the nhs, Right? Yeah. And it takes away agency. You know, it’s insufferable to know that even if you yourself are responsible. For example, I don’t cause accidents. I’ve had no claims filed against me in 30 years. I’m a good driver. So why am I responsible for an accident that some other person who I don’t even know has that causes the insurance company to jack up my premiums that I can’t say no to? Oh, great. And this is across the spectrum, I believe it’s very important that each of us be able to reap both the rewards and the responsibilities for our own actions.
So if I choose to drive my car without a seatbelt, let’s say, and I get into an accident and I’m badly injured because I didn’t wear my seatbelt, that’s my problem. That is not your problem. And of course, one of the major things is before they collectivize a particular insurance system, they did this with health insurance. They’ll say, well look at these health insurance companies. They’re cherry picking, they’re charging some people more who are higher risks, like duh, that’s because they’re higher risk. But then they want it put into the government sphere. And I literally have Tom Brokaw on had an audio recording of him when he was on Meet the Press with Doris Kearns.
I plagiarized, but I’m blaming other people. Goodwin, when they were on there and they said, he said, well, you know, government’s going to have to pick and choose. We’re going to have to make decisions. So they excoriate the private business and you don’t have to do business with them for incentivizing better behavior and charging more for reckless behavior. But then when it becomes the government system, well, you know, we’re going to have to make decisions here. They engage in the exact activity that they slam the private people for doing. But now it’s imposed on everybody and we’re all paying for it’s imposed and it’s indirect.
With regard to private transactions, for example, before Obamacare came along, a healthy guy, if he wanted to, could buy a very high deductible catastrophic care policy because he didn’t need any regular medical care. And maybe it would be nice to know that, okay, in case, let’s say I get into a really bad car accident or I have a heart attack, some random unforeseen event, I’ll be covered for that. But everything else I’m just going to pay out of pocket. And that was very affordable after Obamacare Like I have to, if I were to get my. I’m a self employed person.
If I were to get a policy through this government rigmarole system, I have to pay for idiot things that I have no need for like substance abuse counseling and treatment. I don’t abuse substances. I don’t need maternity care. I’m a man and I don’t have any kids. I don’t need maternity care, you know, so. And that’s why the cost is so exorbitant and that’s why I just continue to not have it and you know, just take care of myself. And if I have to pay for anything, I pay for it out of pocket. Absolutely. We have a number of, of comments.
I just want to the team here. We’ve got over on X we’ve got restaurant Portugal says we’re under occupation, a de facto government, a fake one. So people need permission to do everything because we’re under military rule. And then they have the little correction there. Yeah. And also we’ve got this here Cold Wind Digital Bingo. They don’t care and profit. The politicians will work with anybody they can to make profit. Also in Rockfin, I want to thank everybody for being there. And Octo Spook says I would have Abraham Lincoln as governor of Minnesota. He’d actually probably be an improvement over Tim Walls.
And I want to thank also we had a, a monthly subscriber, a new add on from Michelle Obama over in Michigan on Rumble in the Fruit Stripe gum colors of Rumble. Just great. I really appreciate you joining up and helping out the David Knight show that way. Eric, you’ve got a really good piece over on your site and let’s round things off with this. This is the latest one. I mean literally just came out. I think maybe just before while I was on the worst. Yeah, the worst tax. Tell us about this. Yeah, well, you know, in our circles, conservative libertarian circles, people often excoriate the income tax and I’m no fan of the income tax at all, but I think the property tax is worse.
And what do I mean by that? Well, the property tax precludes the possibility of ownership of practically anything other than perhaps the clothes on your back. You know, we are allowed the fiction that we own our homes, but we don’t. Even if you’ve paid off the lender, you paid off the mortgage company, you’re still obliged to pay what amounts to rent in perpetuity to your local government. That’s what the property taxes. And it has the effect of rendering you economically insecure because you constantly have to generate income in order to pay the taxes for the most part, unless you’re lucky enough to be so affluent that you have enough savings to cover those taxes for the rest of your natural life, which most people simply don’t.
So it’s really vicious. It precludes the thing that probably in my opinion would define a free person and a free society more than anything, which is to have a freehold, to have your piece of land, your home, that’s yours once you paid for it, you know what I’m saying? Once you’ve done that, even if you lost your job, even if there were an economic downturn, well, you’ve got your house, you know, and that, that’s a very nice feeling to know. I’ve got a place to live, my family has got a roof over its head, we can get by.
But what they’re doing with this is just constantly bleeding people. And I think one of the most egregious aspects of it, you know, people who bought a house say 30 years ago and they, let’s say they bought a house for $120,000 30 years ago and they figure, well, we can afford $120,000 house. Well, fast forward 20 or 30 years and now the county says your house is worth half a million dollars. Right. And you know, they’re going to tax them on that and they haven’t got the budget for it and now they’re older, so they’re literally driving people out of their homes, out of homes that they have paid for.
It’s beyond despicable that this thing exists. There is some good news though, and that’s what the article is about. In North Dakota there’s a ballot initiative that will give the voters the opportunity to get rid of the property tax. Now whether it passes or not, we’re going to find out. But I think it’s wonderful that that’s on the ballot a state. It sets a great precedent and it gets people talking and thinking and you know, I hope that that spreads and we’ll see. That would be great in North Dakota. And you know, philosophically it really is just a modern form of serfdom.
Your property is not your own. And they use all these excuses. And you have part of this in your piece about the government run schools. They somehow take it as an offense if you say, you know, I’d like to be left alone. Why don’t you leave me alone and stop coming up with all these so called justifications and spurious rationales that tell me I have to pay. You say you must pay rent so that the government can school other people’s kids on the hypothesis that you obtain some vague benefit thereby. Never mind that these government schools regularly fail to school these other people’s kids who graduate from government schools, both enumerate and illiterate, as well as ignorant, their cognitive capabilities crippled by rote memorization and obedience training.
Yes, all hail the government school. Right? It’s true. It would be less egregious if they actually turned out literate, numerate, cognitively competent people. But they don’t. And everybody knows this. And the principle of it is still the same. They’re still forcing you to do it. And of course, that predicate of the force is what opens the door to the lack of practical capacity for it to do a good job, because they always have the ability to take your cash and to take your property if you won’t pay. Everything’s inverted. Everything’s inverted, too. You know, if a parent is concerned about the education of their child, well, you empower that parent by having that parent be responsible for their child and finding and paying for tutors and teachers and so on, which they then have some control over because they’re paying for.
It turns out that the kid, the person who they hired to teach their kid math is incompetent. They can fire that person. Good luck firing the math teacher at the government school who’s incompetent and can’t teach your kid to add and subtract. And they don’t even. You know what’s interesting as well, Eric? Because competency, quality. Those are all assessments we need to make and then express our opinions and satisfaction through our own choice over our own money. The minute somebody decides for you how your money is being spent, they’ve taken away your volition to show what you think is quality, Eric.
I know. I wanted to get into before I have a Biden moment and Forget it. Yeah. And it is this. I think it’s a philosophical thing and I think it’s really worth considering. All of this stuff has a very insidious effect in that it makes us kind of enemies of each other or suspicious of each other. If you take away the government interpositions and we’re free to make our own choices and free to not do business with people that we don’t want to do business with all of a sudden. We don’t dislike our neighbors in the same way that we do now.
When I drive down the road and I see a Harris Waltz thing in front of one of my neighbor’s Houses. I get annoyed because I think they’re saying that they want to take more of my money and they want to exert more control over my lives. If we didn’t have that element in it, I might not like them. I might not invite them over for, you know, for a meal or to have a beer with me, but live and let live. They do their thing, I do mine, and, you know, we’re not at friction, at odds with each other.
But the reason our society has become so frictious and the reason everybody’s so angry and upset is because everybody is using the state in one way or another to, you know, to fleece people. And if you’re not doing that, you’re trying to protect yourself from being fleeced. Absolutely. You know, I’ve mentioned it a couple times this week on Liberty Conspiracy. As Frederick Bastier said, the state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live off of everyone else. And it just causes dissension and, and argumentation and anger. And yeah, I see those signs from various people and I say, oh, you’re putting a sign in your yard that says you’re a predator.
You want to. You want to mess with, right? Yeah. Eric. Oh, this is. Yeah, yeah, I can’t wait to get you back on Liberty Conspiracy. That’ll be great. And thank you for joining me on this Friday edition of the David Knight show. And I really appreciate it, Eric. You are, of course, one of the great scholars out there and practically every day you’re on the road checking these things out and fighting for freedom. So thanks, brother. I appreciate you having me on. Always a good time. Oh, absolutely. We’re going to give you our going away as we get ready to round off the program with, of course, the Star Trek Mind Melt to say farewell.
Thanks, Eric. We’ll talk to you soon. The Common Man. They created Common Core to dumb down our children. They created common pasts to track and control us. Their commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing and the communist future. They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary. But each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God. That is what we have in common. That is what they want to take away. Their most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation. They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us.
It’s time to turn that around and expose what they want to hide. Please share the information and links you’ll find@thedavidknightshow.com thank you for listening. Thank you for sharing. If you can’t support us financially, please keep us in your prayers. Thedavidknightshow.com
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